The Pronoun War: A Ceasefire Proposal

The war has gone on long enough; it is time to reach an agreement. No one gets everything they want; some territory must be conceded on both sides. I propose that male writers (or speakers) use “he” and female writers (or speakers) use “she”. Each party has their pronoun rights: they get to use whatever pronoun suits them best. No one infringes on these rights by insisting on cross-gender uniformity. Everyone has pronoun autonomy, a safe pronoun space in which to work. There is no pronoun harassment. There is no downside. No one’s pronoun freedom has been taken away from them. There is total pronoun tolerance. Everyone has his (you see!) pronoun truth. Females say “she” and males say “he”—everybody’s happy. The sentences are less cumbersome. There is no agonizing about what to say. It’s simple, intuitive, and equitable. We have pronoun diversity and pronoun uniformity. It’s like gender-specific bathrooms: you use yours and I’ll use mine—no mixing. I am not offended if you seem to be assuming that everyone is a woman, because I know you are being practical not prejudiced. I hope you feel the same way about me. It’s all about pronoun pride: we are each proud of our gender, so we use our pronouns to reflect that pride. Both “he” and “she” are lovely little words and should be kept on in their present roles; now we are according equal power to both (no pronoun power imbalance). Actually, I feel a bit envious of the “she” wielders, because they have a new verbal device to play with—a kind of linguistic revolution. They get to say “she” all the time and thereby give it to the man. They take back their power and pack it into a short sharp word. Not just ships are “she” but people too. It will be fun to write, “Whenever a brain surgeon is tired, she takes a nap”, or “She who laughs last laughs longest”. Not even “she or he” but the brutally succinct “she”. It’s slightly longer than “he” too, as if to indicate higher status. Perhaps the old male chauvinism will be removed by this innovation, or at any rate lessened. For my part, I think the new policy will take the pressure off writers—there will be no risk of accusations of pronoun delinquency, pronoun illiteracy. The anxious writer should be happy—he can rest assured he is offending nobody.

On Reading

I am going to tackle a question that has baffled our finest minds: why reading is so pleasurable. Plato, Aristotle, Hume, Kant, Wittgenstein, your uncle Tony—all these have ignored, or avoided, the question. Too hard, I guess. But this leaves us with a rich field for startling discovery—who will be the first to unlock the secret of reading enjoyment? Food, sex, television—these are not difficult to understand: but reading! Why would anyone want to spend hours, days, years, lifetimes with their sore eyes pointed at little black squiggles? Logan Pearsall Smith once remarked, “People say that life is the thing, but I prefer reading”. We can all sympathize with that sentiment, but why do we like reading so much? As soon as I discovered reading, I couldn’t not do it—I did it for hours on end. It was just so enjoyable! Who would want to go out and live when you could stay at home and read? Surely, this is a puzzle of the highest moment—why reading is so deeply pleasurable. It is hard to believe that it is such a recent human invention—how did people pass the time when there was no reading to be done? How many people do you know who can read but choose not to? They may read junk, but they read: they sit there cradling a text of some sort, happy as a toad in the sun (beach reading is a favorite pastime). If it didn’t make our eyes so tired, would we ever stop?

Reading isn’t like looking at pictures: pictures are nice to look at; the eye revels in them (the colors, the shapes). We are not going to find the secret to reading hedonism in the marks that constitute a text—no one would willingly stare at those for hours unless they meant something. If you can’t read, you take no pleasure in gazing at writing. Is it some kind of sublimation or substitution, as if text and sex are somehow connected? Doubtful: writing per se is not like pornography or a Picasso nude. It’s just not sexy. Nor is it anything like a good meal: you don’t put the book in your mouth and chew on it; it doesn’t fill your belly. The sensation of reading is nothing like sexual or gustatory sensation; it’s hardly a sensation at all. We do better to think of the Vulcan mind-meld: the joining of two separate minds into a new unity. This suggestion is agreeably banal: in reading, your mind is connected to the mind of the author—you eavesdrop on his or her thoughts and feelings. We speak of mind-reading, and reading is a type of mind-reading. But this idea needs some refinement, because there are other ways of gaining access to the mind of the other—talking to them, watching how they behave, checking out their brain activity. Why is reading so connecting? Why, in particular, is looking better than listening? No doubt it is partly due to the fact that vision is our best sense: we love to look. Thus, in reading, we get to look into someone else’s mind, instead of hearing what he or she has to say. We can go at our own pace, directing our eyes as we see fit, instead of trying to keep up with someone’s speech. But it’s not just looking that appeals; it’s what we are looking at—those magic squiggles. For, in truth, we look throughthose squiggles not at them; they disappear from our field of view (we usually have no recollection of font type or print size). Thus, we have the illusion (or is it veridical?) of seeing another mind in action, not just inferring it from proxy stimuli. It is the very attenuation of print that fosters this impression; it doesn’t leap out at us, demanding our attention. We have sterility of the stimulus: thin and colorless as it is, it allows us to bypass it—while the other’s mind stands before our inner eye. We imagine that mind on the basis of the humble and vanishing marks inscribed on the page; we don’t have to contend visually with another’s body, standing there like a block of marble or meat. We experience non-bodily other-mind access, where the medium does not get in the way of the message. The author’s thought is right there, hovering before the mind, just as it is, or approximating to this state. The body has been sidelined, bracketed.

This connects with the loneliness question. Books, notoriously, are felt as a relief from loneliness. Books are our friends (that’s exactly how I used to feel about Dr Doolittle books). You don’t have to go out, knock on somebody’s door, and ask them if they want to come out and play; you just stay put and open up a book. Suddenly, you are no longer alone but in the presence of another conscious soul (maybe long dead). Hello! You know you will have a good time together, snugly ensconced by the fire. Many a child (adult too) has had little social contact aside from books—properly, their authors. So, our love of reading has everything to do with social interaction (Vulcan mind-melds), but mediated in a particular way. The book is our ideal friend, there for the opening, never failing to turn up. Immediately we are looking into the author’s mind, as if by magic. But there is another aspect to this mind-mind nexus: not only do we become acquainted with the author’s mind; we come to know our own mind too. The book works on the reader’s mind, activating it, stimulating it, so that his own mind heaves into view. The author has carefully arranged his words so that they can find their way into the reader’s mind, and as they do so they elicit whatever is already in that mind. Two minds are thus present together in the reader’s consciousness: the author’s mind and the reader’s mind. Self-knowledge is the result, as well as knowledge of other things. Reading is self-exploration (the kind Logan Pearsall Smith evidently preferred). Reading is like getting on a train and taking a leisurely trip through the countryside of your mind, accompanied by the author, but without needing to get on an actual train. Where your mind ends and the author’s mind begins may not be clear; a strange kind of merging takes place. In the reading mind-meld, mental borders are blurred.

Let’s try to say something profound—it’s worth a try anyway. Life is about movement, going from A to B. Movement is pleasurable—it had better be, because there is going to be a lot of it. But movement has its downside: it is fatiguing, potentially dangerous, and often boring. It would be nice to move without moving. Here is where reading comes in: it is motionless movement. In reading, we go on trips that don’t require us to travel through physical space. We get the pleasure without the pain. Reading is a lazy activity—little muscular energy is expended. But it is also an activity. We experience the pleasure of activity without its costs. Our eyes take a trip down the page, shifting smoothly from left to right, but our limbs are out of action–while our mind wanders far and wide. This is pleasurable. The reader is a lazy hedonist—no need to hunt for food or seek out mates or even walk down the street. There is pleasure to be had just by sitting still and moving your eyes a bit. What’s not to like? This is fortunate for the cause of literacy: imagine if reading were as strenuous as cross-country running or as difficult as calculus. You wouldn’t get many readers; people would prefer illiteracy. But luckily, reading is pleasurable, convenient, and relatively cheap. There is not much about it that rankles or harms. Reading is the healthiest of hedonisms.[1]

[1] Reading definitely discourages me from traveling. If I didn’t have reading, I would travel more. But reading takes the place of traveling: I can go to places without going to places. Places have their problems, and going to them is strewn with obstacles. The reading trip, however, is stress-free and inexpensive—plus I can sleep in my own bed. The travel book is really the epitome of what reading is all about: the pleasures of travel without the pains. Some people like the literal travel book (Sights and Sounds of Beirut), while some prefer the intellectual travel book—as it might be, Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. Nabokov’s very readable Lolita is a travel book in so many senses—geographical, moral, sensory, intellectual, linguistic, comical, artistic. It’s all about strange lands. Travel, they say, broadens the mind; but reading breaks its bonds. In reading, we encounter the truly foreign.

On the Origin of Heavenly Bodies

The main thesis of Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species is that species evolve from other species. They arise from natural variations found within a given species that are selected for or against. They do not arise spontaneously and independently, or by dint of divine or extraterrestrial intervention. One species derives from another species, going back indefinitely (but finitely). The process is mindless and purposeless, a matter of natural law and physical mechanisms (mutation and natural selection). The intermediate forms may be missing, but they once existed; the transition was gradual not abrupt, and certainly not magical. The existence of a range of animal species is thus scientifically intelligible not inexplicable. But Darwin does not apply this perspective to the existence of heavenly bodies—planets, moons, stars, meteors, galaxies, galaxy clusters. Asked what their origin is, Darwin ventures no answer, no doubt because not much was known about it in those days. Yet the questions are remarkably similar: what is the origin of these enigmatic entities, these astronomical natural kinds, these celestial species? Do they arise spontaneously and independent of each other, by divine action or alien super-scientist, or do they derive from earlier entities of the same basic type by intelligible means? The answer, as we now know, is that they arise in the latter way: moons arise (or can arise) from planets, planets arise out of free-floating debris from stars and other objects, stars arise from condensed dust clouds, galaxies arise from stars, galaxy clusters arise from galaxies. The mechanism is the law of gravity, condensing bits of matter into other bits of matter, sometimes producing extremely hot and dense objects. These things are dependent for their existence on other similar things and develop from them over time; they were not created separately. For example, the earth was caused to exist by antecedent chunks of matter swirling around in space, not by God ab initio. No intelligence went into its creation, as no intelligence went into the creation of animal species. It would therefore be possible to write a book about heavenly bodies just like Darwin’s book about animal species; indeed, a single book could naturally cover both topics. The questions and answers are much the same (though clearly not identical). The book could be called On the Origin of Natural Kinds, and it could include animals and plants, stars and planets, rocks and minerals, chemical elements and geological formations. It would be a book of cosmic history, its main thesis being that stuff comes from other stuff of the same basic kind by explicable natural processes. The universe obeys a law of homogeneous gestation—like from like, going back in time to some primordial event (the big bang, the origin of all life). We might even say that Darwin discovered this mode of explanation, applicable to a wide variety of natural objects, though he didn’t himself extend it beyond the biological sphere. He worked out the Special Theory of Generativity, applying it to the specific case of life forms; but he didn’t propose a General Theory of Generativity, applying it to the universe as a whole. But he could have, he could have. He could have offered a theory of all species (kinds, sorts): animal, celestial, geological, chemical, physical, even mental—every existing natural kind. Each of these would no doubt introduce different mechanisms of progression (e.g., nuclear fusion), but the general form of the theory would be common to multiple areas. Then he would truly be a towering figure in the history of science—he would have explained the lot.

Or would he? For surely there are some existing entities that are not explicable in the manner suggested—those that are created by intelligent minds. These include works of art, items of technology, buildings, and social systems. In each of these areas there is an indispensable role for intentional creation by intelligent agents—artists, scientists, architects, political theorists. In these cases, it would be quite wrong to postulate mindless creation—we can all see that such entities are brought into being with the aid of an intelligent mind. Here we all believe in “Intelligent Design” and “Creationism”. We all think that the Mona Lisa was created by a certain mind at a certain time—not by mere physical laws (as if the paint just happened to come together in these ways). But this is not necessarily so—the means of gestation might not be so obvious. Imagine a planet on which all manner of artifacts abound but their creators have all disappeared for some reason (a pandemic, say). You might observe these objects and wonder how they came to be (you just beamed down to the planet’s surface). Some of the more rigidly Darwinian members of the landing party might insist that it must be by some sort of non-intelligent process, because no one has ever seen the putative creators; but of course, this is simply because they have all disappeared since they did their creative work. Here the Darwinian style of explanation would be completely mistaken—some watches are made by watchmakers! The correct theory (enunciated by a spindly character named Spock) is precisely that the erstwhile creators have been wiped off the face of the planet without leaving a trace: that is the only logical explanation, given the similarity to our own artifacts. A book called On the Origin of Works of Art contending that all such works result from mere physical laws, with no intelligent creator in sight, would not meet with much acceptance. In point of fact, Darwin’s own title is somewhat misleading, since some species are the result of Intelligent Design—e.g., those dog breeds we see around us all the time. Species differences can and do arise by virtue of choice and forethought; in fact, a whole planet could be so populated. It is just that most species do not actually arise in this way on planet earth. There is nothing necessary or a priori about any of this. It’s just empirical science. Darwin’s theory could have been wrong, but actually it isn’t.

Minds present an interesting case. What is their origin? The answer is that minds also come from other minds, as things actually are, though not comprehensively so. For there is such a thing as learning. Animal minds, like animal bodies, result from mutation and natural selection—the minds that survive are the minds that serve the genes best. The human mind derives from the ape mind, going back to the first minds on Earth; it isn’t as if each species has a mind that exists without reliance on prior minds. The basic structure of the human mind derives from the structure of earlier minds, modified in the usual ways. A book called On the Origin of Mindswould be very similar to Darwin’s book: later minds descend from earlier minds; they don’t arise spontaneously and independent of other minds. With this exception: minds can be changed in the course of an individual life by the process we call learning. Not all knowledge arises by genetically copying ancestors’ minds; some of it arises by intentional action, e.g., by the scientific method. But it is equally true that not all aspects of the body derive from earlier bodies, since a given species might have characteristics not found in any earlier species—such as geographical location or freedom from certain diseases. Species don’t always stay in the same place as their progenitors, or always suffer from the same diseases. Not everything about a species reflects its origin in the species it came from; some comes from the currently obtaining environment—like learning. In any case, none of this requires any relaxation of the basic principle that minds (and species) owe their origin to other minds (species) and not to creative acts by supposed deities or super-scientists. Intelligence is not created by intelligence in the style of Creationism, but by the same processes that produce bodies.[1]

The steady state theory of the universe gave way to the dynamic big-bang theory. The immutable species theory gave way to the dynamic evolutionary theory. The universe started life as a cloud of dust and developed into a differentiated assembly of natural kinds of celestial object in the fullness of time; the former seems an unpromising foundation for the latter, but gravitational attraction is a powerful force. Life on earth started as a sea of uniform bacteria and developed into a differentiated assembly of animal species in the fullness of time; the former seems like an unpromising foundation for the latter, but natural selection is a powerful force. The history of planets is written into their structure. The history of species is written into their structure. At no point do we need to introduce a form of guiding intelligence to explain these transitions and end-points. The analogies between the two areas are clear and instructive. Astronomy did what biology had already done: replace one historical world-view with another. It is curious that these links are not explicitly drawn: Darwinian biology is a special case of evolutionary cosmology, viewed broadly. Gradual evolution from one thing to another, not sudden creation from nothing—lawfully related causal sequence, not non-natural fixity. Natural history, not supernatural non-history. Darwin in effect anticipated modern cosmology, but didn’t draw the connection. No discredit in that, but historically interesting. He also said nothing about the destiny of species—what their future will be as opposed to their past. But we can easily fill that gap (with due allowance made for the uncertainties of the future): the future will resemble the past, though it will not go on forever. Species will keep arising from other species by the mechanisms that have operated hitherto (God will not suddenly pop into the picture, smiling and winking). Extinctions will continue to happen. We can anticipate that more species will result from intelligent intervention (or stupid intervention), as we seek to improve the human condition—e.g., meaty-tasting plant life. Who knows what will happen with AI. Stars will continue to be minted, then fizzle out and die. Entropy will have its way with the universe. The Sun will eventually grow cold. Life and the physical universe are everchanging things not static givens. That is one of the great lessons of Darwin’s great book: nature is not a timeless immutable; things come and go (dinosaurs, stars). The physical universe is more like life than we thought, more changeable, less carved in stone; and life is more like the physical universe than we thought, more mechanical, less anthropic. Their origin stories have much the same plot.[2]

[1] That is not to say that we know how this is done (we don’t). I find it a rather chastening thought that my mind owes its existence to the minds of countless ancestor minds, some none too brilliant. My mind genes carry the trace of mind genes stretching back to our aquatic days.

[2] A problem that particularly exercised Darwin is what might be called the “dispersal problem”: if species derive from an ancestor species, how come they are often found at a considerable distance from their origins? The answer, he suggested, is that forces of nature carry organisms far and wide—the wind, tides, birds. A similar problem arises in cosmology: if packets of matter come from other packets of matter, why are they so widely dispersed? Shouldn’t the packets be closer together? The answer is that forces of nature drive them apart, notably the explosive force of the big bang—hence cosmic expansion. The universe is a natural wanderer, as are animals. Things are born from other things, then they wander, then they die—that’s the basic story.

A New Law of Biology

I believe I have discovered a new law of biology. I call it “the law of differential adaptation”. It is fairly easily derivable from established principles, but I have not seen it enunciated before. It strikes me as illuminating. We begin by making a distinction: between the animate environment and the inanimate environment. A given organism is adapted to both, and there is a history to these adaptations. The animate environment consists of all the impinging life forms that an organism is subject to, particularly predators, rivals, and diseases. The organism has defenses against these life-threatening factors—ways of surviving in their presence. These ways include things like legs, antlers, and immune systems—for running, fighting, and disease avoidance. The inanimate environment consists of all the non-biological factors that govern an organism’s life: space, time, matter, gravity, climate, oceans, mountains, volcanos, rocks. This is the physical environment as opposed to the biological (and psychological) environment. Now, these two environments show a marked difference: one evolves slowly, if at all, while the other evolves quickly (relatively speaking). The physical make-up of the planet is pretty stable over time, give or take the odd ice age, meteor impact, or volcanic eruption. Once a species is adapted to it its work is done: it doesn’t change, so the organism doesn’t need to. When there is a large change, extinction is likely, because not adapted to. But generally speaking, the rate of adaptive change is slow and equilibrium is readily achieved (judged by evolutionary time). For all intents and purposes, when a species becomes adapted to space, time, and solid objects it has done all the adapting it needs to do—because these things don’t change. They are physical universals (consider the Sun). But it is different with the biological environment—it keeps changing. It evolves rapidly and unpredictably: the biological world evolves differently from the physical world. It does so because of the action of mutation and natural selection. Consider the arms race between predators and prey: each evolves in response to the other—the faster the prey, the faster the predator needs to be, and vice versa. Thus, there has been a lot of change in the biological world since organic evolution began—species come and go, natural selection never ceases, there is a continual biological interaction spurring change. It should now be clear, then, what the new law says: every organism is a locus of slow and fast adaptation—to the fixed physical environment and the changing biological environment. Evolution is double track—a slow track and a fast track. Some characteristics of the environment have been constant over evolutionary time while others have varied. Adaptation to solidity has remained the same but adaptation to predators and pathogens has varied. There has been trait stability and trait plasticity. Two different evolutionary processes have been at work, according as the organism interacts with a constant physical environment and a constantly changing biological environment. For example, lung design hasn’t changed much because the atmosphere is a physical constant, relatively speaking, but escape strategies have evolved quite a bit in response to predator prowess. Just to be concrete, let’s say the rate of adaptation to these two categories is a hundred times faster for the one than the other. Little evolutionary adaptation to the physical environment and much evolutionary adaptation to the biological environment. Natural selection by the biological environment is a hundred times greater than natural selection by the physical environment. The former triggers a lot of adaptive change, the latter not so much. Hence, differential adaptation.[1]

This distinction helps deal with a puzzle: why is it that organisms die a lot from predators and pathogens but not much from purely physical accidents? Have they lagged behind in respect of the former but not the latter, adaptively speaking? How often do fish die from lack of water as opposed to the predatory actions of other organisms? How often do birds die from midair collisions as opposed to wily predators? How often do land-dwelling creatures die from falling off a cliff as opposed to catching a fatal disease? They all seem very good at avoiding physical accidents but not so good at avoiding their biological enemies—rather maladaptive at this. Why can’t they do better? The answer is that the enemy keeps getting one step ahead of them by means of natural biological change, while they struggle to keep up (e.g., viruses). The lion gets faster and more agile just when the antelope begins to outrun it. An animal can be extremely well adapted to avoiding an earlier iteration of a predator, but now it is faced with a new and improved model. It seems as if it has been lazy in the adaptive department, but really it has been working hard to keep up. The appearance of ineptitude is deceptive: actually, the animal is more adapted (fine-tuned) to the biological environment than the physical environment—it is just that the physical environment is relatively static. Adaptations to it are more primitive than in the biological case. The most advanced technology is deployed in the case of adaptation to the biological world; it just looks as if the animal is ineffective in this domain. Thus, animals die of disease more often than from falling over, because the laws of physics stay fixed while microbes keep changing.[2] The physical world is a steady target, but the biological world is a constantly moving target. The pace of evolutionary change would be much less if organisms only had to adapt to the physical environment. But the biological environment is much more dynamic, changeable, challenging to old ways. It is misleading to talk of adaptive change in relation to “the environment” because really the mechanisms at work are quite different for the two cases: there is physically driven adaptation and biologically driven adaptation. The genes for the former have been around a lot longer than the genes for the latter. It is the difference between the tried and true and the continually updated.

Consider the genetic book of the dead, or the phenotypic movie of the past—that is, the records within the organism of its evolutionary history. Some of these recordings depict an unvarying static history but some depict a frantic history full of rapid change. Four limbs have been around forever, but not the peacock’s tail or the owl’s eyesight. Breathing is as old as the hills, but not antler-locking. The movie would be monotonous when it comes to moving on four legs, but it would become action-packed when dealing with predator-prey interactions. Peace is less eventful than arms races. Animals have more to fear from other animals than from rocks and cliffs. The battle for survival is fought more against other animals than chunks of the inanimate world. Thus, there is a deep difference between coexisting with the physical world and coexisting with the biological world—a quantitative difference. The quantity of adaptation to the biological world is much greater (a hundred times greater, let’s suppose) than the quantity of adaptation to the physical world. The biological world acts to accelerate the rate of adaptive change; the physical world tends to produce a constant state of motion (rest). Once the organism is up and running in a physical environment, it doesn’t have any real motive for upgrading its abilities; but an organism that exists in a world of other organisms (predators, rivals, pathogens, parasites) is playing a different kind of game altogether—it has to keep changing or else it is in danger of being done in by other organisms.[3] Hence the law of differential adaptation.

Permit me to talk briefly about the not-so-brief history of the universe. Cosmologists speak of the evolution of the universe, and the word is not out of place. This evolution is slow by any standards, driven by the unvarying laws of physics (mainly gravity). But in one tiny corner of the universe (as far as we know) it has undergone a remarkably rapid evolution—I mean life on earth. Suddenly life began and developed rapidly, by means of mutation and natural selection. New types of entity came into existence overnight (i.e., several millions of years). Then evolution began to pick up the pace big-time: living things started to interact with each other in myriad ways. In a fraction of a second whole species evolved, only to lapse as rapidly into extinction. In the blink of an eye dinosaurs came and went. So, there were three stages of cosmic evolution: first, the physical evolution of the universe; then, its evolution into life on earth; and then, the co-evolution of living things. Evolution accelerated over this time period (14 billion years) achieving speed-of-light evolution in the last billion or so years. There have been three epochs of cosmic evolution, two of them concerning life. I have been suggesting that we carve up organic evolution into two periods or types, corresponding to organism-inanimate evolution and organism-animate evolution. So, there ought to be a further law: the law of differential evolution. This law states that the rate of evolution varies according to whether it is purely physical, organic-physical, or organic-organic. Physical evolution is slow, organic-physical evolution is fast, and organic-organic evolution is super-fast. Evolution in general thus falls into three phases that can be usefully distinguished; it is more fine-grained than we might have supposed. There are varieties of evolution. In fact, evolution evolves in that its nature changes over time. The early post-big-bang phase was relatively primitive and sluggish; the initial life-on-earth phase was more advanced and a lot slicker; the most recent phase really got into its stride and produced cosmic marvels not seen before (lions, humans, etc.). These are the natural kinds of process into which the overall cosmic evolutionary process divides—the evolution of the entire universe, from the very large to the very small. Call it three-fold evolution. We might be in for a fourth phase before too long, as our machines start to evolve on their own account. Then we might get within-a-lifetime revolutions, as machines beget machines.[4]

[1] Consider so-called artificial selection, say of dog breeds. The biological environment of dogs (initially wolves) includes human dog breeders; they have caused an enormous amount of variation in dogs. The changes, genetic and phenotypic, have been extremely rapid. But the changes wrought by the physical environment of dogs have been minimal to non-existent, because it hasn’t changed, or very minimally. The difference between the two sorts of adaptation is conspicuous.

[2] Imagine if gravity were to change its force from time to time: animals would have a devil of a time adapting to its fluctuations and would no doubt die from it (and hence not reproduce) with greater frequency than now. That would be the physical equivalent of predator transformation: stronger gravity, faster predator.

[3] If the physical world evolved by something analogous to mutation and natural selection, then the difference would disappear, or be reduced. For then, it would embed a mechanism of change that lifts it above physical law, causing it to change its nature over time (of course, this is physically impossible). The biological world is inherently a lot more changeable than the physical world because of this mechanism.

[4] Obviously, AI will be crucial: it might start designing and making machines and organisms hitherto undreamt of, capable of producing yet other machines and organisms. Then we will need a fourth evolutionary category—true artificial selection (machines being not part of the biological world). The pace of this evolution might be measured in seconds not millennia and decades—as machines turn out new machines at a dizzying rate.