PGodfrey-Smith is the scuba diving philosopher who took octopus off the menu for many readers of his best-selling book, Other thoughts. It looked at the distinctive intelligence of cephalopods, rescuing this myth-ridden eight-legged animal from its most frequent environment of a seafood salad and recasting it as a subaquatic hero of perception and understanding.
Following up that literary success with 2020s Metazoa (the word means multicellular animals), Godfrey-Smith is about to publish the final part of his trilogy on the roots of intelligence, Life on Earth: Life, Consciousness and the Making of the Natural World.
This is another wide-ranging book that swims 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 have dramatically affected the planet over billions of years.
Godfrey-Smith starts with “the Big Oxygen”, about 2.4 billion years ago, when cyanobacteria – something like the components of the green algae often seen on lakes and ponds – became Earth’s first photosynthesizers, turning water and took the sun’s energy and released oxygen. the atmosphere inside. This process gradually increased oxygen levels until the chemical environment was one that could support life forms with brains and muscles.
It is this advent of oxygenic photosynthesis, says Godfrey-Smith on a video call from his home in Sydney, that he considered 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, it changed the mineral composition and geological processes of the Earth.”
Of course, the only evolutionary development remotely comparable in its impact is us, humanity. We are now living in the Anthropocene, a geological period characterized 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 that leads to unpredictable developments, there is a tendency to see each new species of life it produces as an effect, an outcome, a product of nature.
Godfrey-Smith is more intrigued by the other side of the coin, the way these life forms shape the environment and the landscape around them – in the most basic sense, plant life can redirect the paths of rivers, which then reshape the topography. of the ground. He follows how various organisms – plants, animals, bacteria – have become dependent on each other through co-evolution or what he calls complementarity.
It is a dynamic story of action, but part of that action is the creation of thoughts 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, cutting down forests and burning 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 looked at his ceiling and offered a long silence. Finally he says: “To some extent. I don’t discount it.”
He seems uncomfortable with pat answers, wanting to consider the full meaning of a question before responding. He does not rush to judgement, but rather 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 photosynthesis cycle runs its course, as it inevitably will, extinction awaits us all. However, that is a long time away, and there is plenty of opportunity 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 dominated all other sides, that would be a serious point of concern. And in that scenario, I think not 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 boils down to what he calls the “welfare arguments involving factory farming”. Human dominance can be measured in many ways, but one crude yet revealing measure is biomass, the total weight of a given species or organism. Humans are nine times the biomass of wild animals. And the livestock we raise makes up “more than 10 times the biomass of wild animals and birds”, writes Godfrey-Smith.
The land required for these livestock eats up large areas of the jungle and is almost certainly unsustainable, but it is the way the livestock 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 argued on a utilitarian basis, drawing on the work of Jeremy Bentham. Another argument comes from a Kantian perspective, via the work of American philosopher Christine Korsgaard. The key issue here is not so much the suffering, as the fact that humans impose control and ignore the preferences of animals.
Godfrey-Smith attempts to shift the argument slightly by introducing the idea of ”a life worth living”, which is a “life that is better than no life”. To do this, he uses a reincarnation thought experiment that asks who, in the bargain for further life, would want to come back as, say, a factory farm pig, removed from its mother early and in overcrowded, stressful confinement for the rest placed. of his short life?
The easy answer to that is nobody is in their right mind.
The excesses of factory farming are something Godfrey-Smith believes we can address without too much cost to humanity, economically or in terms of nutrition. It would also reaffirm his faith in the human project by allowing farm animals a valuable life.
“I would feel good to be back as a cow on a human farm,” he writes.
Yet humans are, as it were, dear to many animals, not just to those that are farmed. Is everyone included 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 disgust is much larger than previously thought, including arthropods – including crustaceans and insects – as well as cephalopods.
“One thing that bothered me,” says Godfrey-Smith, “is that most of the animals that enter this new category have a reasonable chance of feeling that we can come to terms with. But we cannot make peace with the insects. Human interest and insects are often very strongly opposed – mosquitoes are the obvious example.”
Godfrey-Smith, it seems, is far from an absolutist. He is neither vegan nor vegetarian, although he tried both. What is most important to him is the way in which the animal can live and then how it is killed, not the fact that it is killed.
“I think sometimes death has too powerful a rhetorical role in these discussions, since death is inevitable for everyone,” he says.
He has little problem with sustainable, wild, caught seafood. So this means that he eats octopus, which lives freely, is not in danger and can be killed humanely.
“I don’t do it myself,” he says, “but I think it’s a sentimental response.”
For such an evidence-based thinker, this is a slightly surprising, if somehow reassuring, answer.
AAs Godfrey-Smith sees death as the inevitable end of life, he nevertheless looks at the question of immortality, a concept that increasingly features in the fantasies of tech billionaires and futurists. In this version of life there is some form of digitization, whereby we become effective simulations of life – some theorists, such as e.g. Nick Bostromspeculated that we are already simulations.
When Godfrey-Smith considers living forever, or at least for a few million years, he quotes the philosopher Thomas Nagel, who wrote of death as “a great curse”. “[G]”if given the simple choice between living another week and dying in five minutes, I would always choose to live another week: and by a version of mathematical induction I would be happy to live forever,” Nagel said. writing.
It is a version of a life that is always better than no life.
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 coherent “self” would play over such an unimaginably long period of time.
But if there was an almost zero environmental cost to an indefinitely extended life, and human flourishing would otherwise be at risk, he would “see the idea of turnover and ends differently”. He asks me what I think of the question, and I say I cannot separate the meaning of life from the inevitability of death, the latter cannot but determine our understanding and give meaning to the former.
He disagrees. Or rather, he has a distinctly different and perhaps more subtle take on it all. It is the coming and going of life and death that he sees as an essential part of the earth’s history. As he writes: “I identify with that process, including turnover and renewal, the flow of new arrivals that then leave and leave room for more.”
Godfrey-Smith ends his book back where it all began, both this trilogy and life itself: in the sea. It has been an extraordinary journey from bacteria to writing books. This philosopher, citing David Attenborough’s Life on earth (whose title echoes his book) and John Rawls’s A Theory of Justice as major influences, have done much to improve our thinking about what that evolution entailed.
So does he believe that this is experience that came back elsewhere in the universe?
He is encouraged by the fact that life arose early in the planet’s history, rather than after “a great deal of death,” which he thinks indicates a greater chance of life taking shape on unknown planets.
“My guess,” 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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Life on Earth: Life, Consciousness and the Making of the Natural World by Peter Godfrey-Smith is published by William Collins (£22). Around the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
