PEther Godfrey-Smith is the scuba diving philosopher who took octopus off the menu for many readers of his best-selling book, Other minds. He looked at the distinctive intelligence of cephalopods, rescuing this myth-laden eight-limbed creature from the more frequent setting of a seafood salad and recasting it as an underwater hero of perception and understanding.
After this literary success with 2020 Metazoa (the word means multicellular animal), Godfrey-Smith is about to publish the final part of his trilogy on the roots of intelligence, Living on Earth: Life, Consciousness, and the Creation of the Natural World.
It’s another wide-ranging book that floats back and forth across a multitude of disciplines, including philosophy, neurology, biology, chemistry, natural history, and geology, as it explores how the various manifestations of life over billions of years have dramatically affected the planet.
Godfrey-Smith begins with the “Great Oxygenation,” about 2.4 billion years ago, when cyanobacteria—something like the components of green algae often seen in lakes and ponds—became Earth’s first photosynthesizers, taking the water and energy of the sun and releasing oxygen. in the atmosphere. This process gradually increased oxygen levels until the chemical environment was one that could support life forms with brains and muscles.
It is this arrival of oxygenic photosynthesis, Godfrey-Smith says in a video call from his home in Sydney, that he has come to see as the most remarkable stage of evolution.
“You can imagine a situation in which life arises and has some effect on a planet, but remains a relatively small part of the scene,” he says. “But oxygenic photosynthesis made life a major player on Earth. It not only changed the living world, but changed the mineral composition and geological processes of the Earth.”
The only evolutionary development that is remotely comparable in its impact is, of course, us, humanity. We now live in the Anthropocene, a geological epoch marked by human effects on climate, landscape, ecosystems and biodiversity.
Among other things, Godfrey-Smith’s book is an unusual philosophical study of what he calls “a history of organisms as causes rather than evolutionary products.” Because evolution by natural selection is a random process leading to unpredictable developments, there is a tendency to see each new species of life it produces as an effect, a result, a product of nature.
Godfrey-Smith is more intrigued by the other side of the coin, the way in which these life forms shape the environment and landscape around them—in the most basic sense, plant life can redirect the paths of rivers, which then reshape the topography of the land. He traces how different organisms—plants, animals, bacteria—came to depend on each other through coevolution, or what he calls complementarity.
It is a dynamic story of action, but part of that action is the creation of minds that in turn determine other actions. As he writes: “Deliberate human action continues and extends a long tradition of organisms transforming nature.”
The problem, in modern terms, is that there is increasing evidence that deliberate human actions – such as the production of plastics, deforestation and the burning of carbon fuels – are destroying nature, destroying ecosystems and leading to the extinction of many species.
It’s a predicament that has led some environmentalists to argue that the planet would be better off without humanity. Does Godfrey-Smith agree?
He looks up at his ceiling and offers a long silence. Finally, he says: “To some extent. I don’t discount it.”
He seems uncomfortable with heartfelt answers, wanting to consider the full meaning of a question before answering. He does not rush to judgement, but instead tries to place issues of human influence within contexts – and, in evolutionary terms, that context can be very large indeed.
At some point, he notes, when the photosynthetic cycle runs its course, as it inevitably will, then extinction awaits us all. However, this is a long way off, and there are many opportunities for further animal suffering at the hands of humanity.
“If I thought we weren’t going to start doing better,” he says, “and the idea that the malicious side of our agency was dominating all the other sides, that would be a serious point of concern. And in that scenario, I don’t think the argument that it would be better if humanity went sooner rather than later is a crazy argument.”
Doing better, in Godfrey-Smith’s mind, most urgently comes down to what he calls “the welfare arguments involving factory farming.” Human dominance can be measured in many ways, but one crude but revealing metric is biomass, the total weight of a given species or organism. Humans reach nine times the biomass of wild animals. And the livestock we keep makes up “more than 10 times the biomass of wild animals and birds,” Godfrey-Smith writes.
The land required for this cattle is eating up vast areas of jungle and is almost certainly unsustainable, but it is the manner in which the cattle are treated that is the moral focus of Godfrey-Smith’s philosophical arguments.
The book that really opened up philosophy to the issue of animal rights was Peter Singer’s Animal Liberation, which Godfrey-Smith cites as a major influence. However, Singer was arguing from a utilitarian basis, drawing on the work of Jeremy Bentham. A different argument comes from a Kantian perspective, through the work of American philosopher Christine Korsgaard. The main issue here is not so much the suffering as the fact that humans impose control and ignore the preferences of animals.
Godfrey-Smith seeks to shift the argument a bit by introducing the idea of ”a life worth living”, which is a “life that is better than no life at all”. To do this, he uses a reincarnation thought experiment that asks who, in exchange for an afterlife, would want to return to, say, a factory farm pig, early removed from its mother and placed in a crowded and stressful isolation for the rest. of his short life?
The easy answer to that is no one in their right mind.
The excesses of factory farming are something Godfrey-Smith believes we can address without much cost to humanity, economically or nutritionally. It would also reaffirm his faith in the human project of allowing farmed animals a worthwhile life.
“It would feel good to be back as a cow on a humane farm,” he writes.
However, humans are animals, so to speak, to many animals, not just farmed ones. Is everyone involved in this reincarnation test?
He says he recently signed a statement saying that research now shows that the category of animals that experience pain and aversive experience is much larger than previously thought, including arthropods—among them crustaceans and insects—as well as cephalopods.
“One thing that bothered me,” says Godfrey-Smith, “is that most of the animals that fall into this new category of a reasonable possibility of sentience we can make peace with. But we can’t make peace with insects. Human interest and insects are often strongly opposed – mosquitoes being the obvious example.”
Godfrey-Smith, it turns out, is far from absolutist. He is not vegan or vegetarian, although he has tried both. For him, what matters most is the way in which the animal is able to live and then HOW is killed, not the fact that he is killed.
“I think death sometimes has a very powerful rhetorical role in these discussions, given that death is inevitable for everyone,” he says.
He has little problem with sustainable, wild, caught seafood. So does that mean he eats octopus, which lives freely, is not endangered and can be killed humanely.
“I’m not myself,” he says, “but I think that’s a sentimental response.”
For such an evidence-based thinker, it’s a slightly surprising, if somewhat reassuring, answer.
orAs much as Godfrey-Smith sees death as the inevitable end point of life, he nevertheless takes a look at the question of immortality, a concept that increasingly appears in the fantasies of tech billionaires and futurists. In this version of life, there is a form of digitization where we become effective simulations of life—some theorists, such as Nick Bostrom, have speculated that we are already simulations.
Thinking about living forever, or at least for a few million years, Godfrey-Smith quotes the philosopher Thomas Nagel, who wrote of death as “a great curse”. “[G]despite the simple choice between living for another week and dying for five minutes, I would always choose to live for another week: and according to one version of mathematical induction, I would be happy to live forever,” Nagel wrote.
It is a version of a life that is always better than no life at all.
Godfrey-Smith, who doubts that such a development will occur in the foreseeable future, has practical and philosophical reservations about this argument, including what role, if any, a cohesive “self” would play. for such an unimaginably long period of time.
But if there were almost zero environmental cost to an infinitely extended life, and human flourishing would otherwise be under threat, he “might look at the idea of turnover and termination differently.” He asks me what I think of the question and I say that I cannot separate the meaning of life from the inevitability of death, the latter cannot but define our meaning and give meaning to the former.
He does not agree. Or rather, it has a distinctively different and perhaps more subtle look to it all. It is the coming and going of life and death that he sees as an essential part of Earth’s history. As he writes: “I identify with that process, including turnover and renewal, the influx of new arrivals that then leave and make room for more.”
Godfrey-Smith ends his book where it all began, both this trilogy and life itself: at sea. It’s been an incredible journey from bacteria to writing books. This philosopher, who quotes that of David Attenborough Life on Earth (whose title echoes his book) and that of John Rawls A theory of justice as essential influences, has done much to improve our thinking about what that evolution has involved.
Is he, then, of the opinion that this is an experience that has been repeated elsewhere in the universe?
He is encouraged by the fact that life arose early in the planet’s history, and not after “a great stretch of death,” which he thinks suggests an increased chance of life forming on unknown planets.
“My point,” he says, “is that life is not rare, but complex life is rare.”
It’s fair to say that, in this case, it really is an educated guess.
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Living on Earth: Life, Consciousness, and the Creation of the Natural World by Peter Godfrey-Smith is published by William Collins (£22). To support Guardian AND watchdog order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Shipping charges may apply