This post is an excerpt from the upcoming book: The Knowing Universe.
Phenotypes engage in what Darwin termed a struggle for
existence and their success in this struggle provides evidence that updates
their species’ genomic model. In part, the phenotype is an experiment whose
purpose is to provide evidence for the evolutionary process, evidence that increases the species' knowledge in its struggle for existence.
Some might consider that this inferential view of life reduces
the role of phenotypes to that of disposable or mortal experimental probes,
that our purpose as a phenotype is merely the testing and selection of genetic
knowledge. This view suggests that the purpose
of life is to evolve a nearly timeless and immortal repository of knowledge concerning
increasingly powerful strategies for life’s existence and phenotypes exist
merely to provide experimental evidence as grist for this mill of evolving
knowledge.
It may be difficult for us to accept a diminished role for
phenotypes. After all, for centuries before the existence of genetics was even
known, the phenotype was biology’s sole focus of study. More personally, we
identify with the phenotypic aspect of our lives. We experience ourselves and
our short mortal lives as phenotypes as we strut and fret our hour upon the stage.
We are actors following scripts, and those scripts completely define us.
A timeless and endlessly creative bard wrote those scripts, and surely the bard’s
role is more admirable than is the actor’s.
It is difficult to accept that all our strutting and
fretting may be mainly in vain, that any lasting influence or meaning is
unlikely. This bleak view offers us little consolation in our brief, perhaps
even disposable, phenotypic roles. We might gain some solace if we shift our focus from our mortal
phenotypes to the more nearly immortal aspects of ourselves, our generalized
genotypes in the form of our genomes, learned neural models and cultural knowledge.
While it is true that those aspects of our generalized
genotypes marking us as unique individuals are nearly as mortal as our phenotypes,
some may prove meaningful for the future. Regardless of our contribution, it is
our generalized genotypes that directly connect us to a more nearly immortal
chain of being. In this context, we assume a cosmic identity within an eternally
evolving nature, or as Spinoza and Einstein saw it, a perpetually evolving God.
On the other hand, the purpose of our timeless genetic
knowledge is to achieve existence, and existence is the realm of the phenotype.
In this view, the purpose of life is to discover phenotypes that can exist. For
ourselves, our life as a generalized phenotype motivates us to take part in the
cutting edge of evolution and to create novel forms that may have a continued
existence. These activities may include having children and participating in
the cultural and social issues of our time.
The present is our time, as phenotypic players, to strut our
stuff on the stage of existence. It is our turn to bring to life, one more
time, that dead, musty knowledge stored in timeless genotypes. We are the
growing green shoots of evolution; we revive that dead knowledge and give it a
dynamic new interpretation. We play our role in a reinvigorated drama of
exploration into the unformed and unknown future, perhaps even leaving behind
some novel ad-libs for the inspiration of future players.
Perhaps a middle ground in deciding the relative merits of our
identities, either as generalized genotypes or generalized phenotypes, is in
order; we must consider that both are but two sides of the same coin. They are two
elements of an inferential system, and their synergies may provide a more suitable
context for understanding our existence than either element alone. Perhaps a more
balanced identity for us is that of an inferential system as it endorses both our short-term strutting and fretting and our longer-term role in the evolution of knowledge.
