How To Be An Agnostic
resists seeing a weak kind of necessity in evolution, and believes
strongly in radical contingency.
But Conway Morris’s evolutionary argument is powerful. He
believes that when it comes to understanding the mental char-
acteristics of organisms – not only primates but further down
the ladder of psychological complexity too – contemporary
science has run up against a brick wall. It has no capacity what-
soever to explain mental phenomena that begins with the cog-
nition of sensations, moves to consciousness, and in the case of
humans, and possibly a handful of other animals, ends up with
self-consciousness. He’s quite open to the possibility that some
higher animals have a kind of culture too. He wonders whether
the singing of whales is such an ‘artful’ exploration. It’s all
highly speculative, of course: he knows that. But not unreason-
able, given what is emerging about the individual nature of the
music different whales produce, and the way it develops. If you
accept evolutionary convergence, it might even be expected:
why shouldn’t the music of different species be similar, in the
way that their camera eyes are too? To put it another way, and
to stay with that one example, people are drawn to whale music
since in some basic way it is like human music.
If you accept that, then you might be inclined to make a
Platonic turn. This would suggest that evolution can be thought
of not only as a bottom-up process of adaptation to physical
environments, but as a top-down process that, in effect, leads to
the discovery of non-material realities. Using the music example
again: both whale and human music could be thought of as
refl ections of a kind of ‘cosmic music’. Or to put it a different
way, evolution is a kind of search engine, powered by Darwinian
mechanisms. The human mind is the best search engine that has
emerged so far, to our knowledge at least. In a further striking
analogy, Conway Morris has likened the brain to a radio antenna,
seeking, as it were, aesthetic and spiritual ‘signals’.
Once you get going along these lines, why stop there? For as
our mental life is personal, and the mental life of other animals
shows signs of being personal too, then maybe that is merely