Specialization Poses Its Own Limits
The article discussing the views of biologist Stephen Jay Gould (“The Cosmic Lottery,” Nov. 28) portrays man’s existence as a mere happenstance. Gould displays the point of view characterized by the weakness of specialists in general: studying a part of the whole and extrapolating a conception of the whole based on an intensive, detailed knowledge of the part studied.
The article refers to two other recent books, “Chaos”, and “A Brief History of Time.” These books develop some important concepts that, taken together, provide some important supplements to Gould’s point of view.
Our universe has not always existed, having had a beginning with the beginning of time, space, and matter 15 billion years ago. Since this beginning, we have progressed from apparently simple and homogeneous “chaos” to the ever more complex and orderly. The universe at its initial creation had the capacity and propensity to so evolve, just as the apparent formlessness of water vapor has the capacity and propensity to form complex snowflakes.
If a scientist studied only a single snowflake in his career, he might conclude that the pattern of the snowflake is a matter of chance; analogously, a scientist focusing on the emergence of a single species, e.g., Homo sapiens, might conclude that the emergence of this species was, likewise, a matter of pure chance. But both the specialist in the formation of a single snowflake and of the single species would be failing to perceive that a process of progressive evolution is at work in the formation of both.
The emergence of the ever-more-complex, observable today, which has arisen from preceding stages of lesser complexity, is a process involving a 15-billion-year-long chain of interactions of the elements that were produced at the instant of initial creation. Scientists today acknowledge that the capability for the formation of today’s orderly universe, including all living and non-living, was a capability existing from the universe’s beginning. Man can reap joy from bearing witness to this orderliness and contributing to it as a participant in the process of ongoing creation.
By this view, man is not a fortuitous accident; rather, he is himself a creation that can find joy and purpose in his existence.
IRVING LAWRENCE SELK
Los Angeles
