Discussing the moral implications of the worldview offered by the new Science, the New Physics in particular, will be the business of my next two chapters. I will present a moral code and an argument for it that is not as all-encompassing as Hegel’s, but is more useful. The theory of morality presented in the remainder of this book offers some firm principles by which we can design/inform our actions.

                                  

   

         Karl Popper with Cyril Hoschl (1994) (credit: Arnošt Pasler, via Wikimedia Commons)

This new theory will not satisfy the demands of the most exacting philosophers, such as, for example, Karl Popper and his disciples.¹ Popper loved the physical sciences and considered them to be models of what Science should be, but he found Biology disappointing because he felt its foundational theory, the Theory of Evolution, could not be tested in neat, clear ways to see whether it could be falsified. (He wrote off the social sciences pretty much completely.)

Popper argued only theories that can be tested in ways that risk their being falsified can be called Science. For example, he was deeply impressed by the Theory of Relativity, because it could be tested definitively. If it had failed to predict Eddington’s observations of the stars visible during a solar eclipse, the theory would have been viewed as a failure. But it succeeded brilliantly, and Einstein’s international reputation soared.

Biology is not that neat. The Theory of Evolution can be tested only in ways that make it seem more likely to be true. In his early work, Popper did not even want to call Biology a science. But gradually, over years, he came to concede that some theories which only make probabilistic, Bayesian kinds of predictions rather than neat, causally linked ones can still be rigorous enough to be called Science. The psychological theories of Adler and the historical ones of Marx were not Science, in his view. But he came to see that the Theory of Evolution was.² 

The model of human cultural evolution offered in this book is just a corollary of the Theory of Evolution. It can describe for us generally how we should proceed if we wish to maximize our odds of surviving. It can't tell us exactly where we will be in a hundred years. Our best path into the future, we will have to adjust as the challenges arise. It has always been so.  

We accept now that the history of life does not proceed by a chain of cause-and-effect steps. Instead, life proceeds forward like a river, with many branches and tributaries connecting to the main channel. The difference is that life branches out in the direction of its flow and it flows uphill. It flows against the gradient of entropy, opportunistically searching for new niches in which some new species or new ways of life may take root, adapt, and flourish. This is a better metaphor for describing how life moves across time.

Whether a given species will still be around further on in the history of the world is dependent on many factors such as changing climates, mutation rates of other species (especially those that are its food, its predators, or its competition), etc. But an unrelenting drive to live, grow, adapt, and spread is the trait which makes a living thing "living". 

In keeping with this picture, human societies, driven by their cultural codes, also press forward, seeking out and exploiting opportunities to grow. A human society's future path can't be neatly described in the way that the path of a particle in a field can. But the general, energetic forward push of life is a given for all life forms. Living things push out into the space about them, adapt, and flourish or else die out. We humans, with our culture-driven way of evolving, therefore, are destined for space travel and colonizing new planets. It's what we're built for, and there is no reason why we can't do it as a whole species.

The entire living system occupying this planet keeps expanding relentlessly, as is shown by the fact that the amount of biomass on our planet has been increasing since life began here about three billion years ago. The human branch of this system will be the one that takes life as we know it - carbon-based, solar energy-absorbing, oxygen-cycling - to other worlds ...if we can solve us. If we can neutralize our inclination toward war, in other words. 

So now let's return to our main project. The model of human cultural evolution presented in the rest of this book will not satisfy Popper’s most rigorous early demands, but it will do what we need it to do. The new model of what human moral values should be will give us principles that will enable us to see where the better odds of surviving over the long term lie.

The best insights of three fields of study will now be combined to build a new code of right and wrong. These three fields of study are: the physical sciences, the life sciences, and a new model of human cultural evolution. The goal will be a new moral code, one that all reasonable people can buy into simply because they can see that it makes sense.

Notes

1. Karl Popper, “Science: Conjectures and Refutations,” in Martin Curd and J.A. Cover, Philosophy of Science: The Central Issues (New York, NY: W.W. Norton and Co., 1998).

2. Mark Isaak, ed., Index to Creationist Claims, The Talk Origins Archive, 2005. http://www.talkorigins.org/indexcc/CA/CA211_1.html.