I Found a Loophole in Biology…Optimism.

This is my personal story, the story of how I found a point of view called epistolution, what it does for me, and what I hope it will do for you. I hope to convince you in this essay that this unlikely-sounding statement is true:

The mainstream theory of biology contains a loophole in it. Life is not the result of a series of random accidents, but rather the intrinsic efforts of all living cells to improve morality.

I want to convince you of this because it is a profound source of hope for the ecology of our world. It sounds too good to be true, but you will have to read all the way through this essay to try to find out what conceptual mistake I am making. If you find it, write to me immediately, because none of my readers have found it yet, and I would like to know about it.

Four years ago, my life really fell apart. I was in my late thirties, and although none of my problems came out of the blue, they slammed into me all at once with a force that almost killed me. Two years before that, in 2016, I was running my own farm-to-table local meat business with ten employees. I was newly married with a child on the way, in good shape from having run a marathon in 2014. I was a little overweight but it didn’t show much because I am fairly tall. I had two degrees from Yale. From a distance, I seemed to be on top of the world.

Quickly, like dissolving sand, this enviable position in life changed. My business, which had scaled up but never found good product-market fit, became financially unsustainable. I closed it down, only to be sued publicly in federal court by two investors who believed, despite all the evidence I provided, that I had stolen from them. All my time and resources were then sucked into defending myself from false accusations with lawyers. I was at the brink of bankruptcy for two years. The stress accumulated quickly, keeping me up nights, rupturing my marriage. My wife asked for a divorce. It looked for a time as if I would not be able to retain any custody of our daughter. The thought of being unable to be a present father for our little girl was unbearable.

I had developed a heart arrhythmia, and my blood pressure gradually climbed to a peak that was life-threatening. The blood pressure medicine my doctor gave me prevented me from being able to exercise and stay fit. I gained more weight. A short while after this, I was diagnosed with a fast-spreading form of cancer. In the midst of this crisis, during divorce proceedings, lawsuits, medical problems, my sweet old german shepherd mutt dog died. I was suffering, and lonely. I felt unable to turn to my friends or family for help. They seemed to be overwhelmed enough in their own lives, and my failures stressed them out even more. It was a terrible time.

In times of difficulty and crisis, we all dig deep for sources of hope. If you are like me, you try to ground your optimistic belief in the future in realistic facts. You know that you need optimism to pick up your burden and carry it further. But you can’t accept nonsense. You don’t just look around for the nicest story anyone is telling on any website; you search high and low for ideas that are grounded in truth. In our modern society, the reliable sources of truth are usually in the form of scientific ideas. Science is what we rely on when it really matters. When we want to prevent airplanes from crashing or when we need to replace faulty heart valves, we don’t go to an astrologist, we go to someone who is trained in the most current science. We look to science to reassure us that truth exists, and it will save us.

The funny thing about science is that it is not a set of beliefs at all. It is a set of hypotheses. Hypotheses are falsifiable. They are provisional. They are not really true. Everyone in science expects that the notions we have today about how things really work will be overturned soon when we learn more. It’s not that they are totally wrong, it’s just that deeper theories always emerge that explain things even better. We have to reimagine everything to get to a deeper level of factual detail. For example, we thought that Newton’s laws in physics would always be with us because they were so useful. In fact we used them to fly to the moon. But we discovered in the early twentieth century that none of Newton’s concepts were quite right, that in fact matter is governed by Bohr and Planck’s quantum mechanics, and gravity is governed by Einstein’s relativity. In day-to-day calculations, Newton’s laws are fine, but if you want a deeper explanation of the truth, you have to use the newer theories. And even these theories, all physicists understand, will be overturned one day.

In my troubled state, I began to think through the entire problem of life in a new way. I was dissatisfied with the story I had been told, in general, about everything. It had led me to disaster! My life, which was supposed to be great, was suddenly a nightmare. Which of my assumptions were wrong? Which of the theories I had relied on was false?

I was suddenly much more interested in the open questions in science than the certainties. It seemed obvious to me, at that point, that everything I had believed about the world was untrustworthy and needed re-examination. I combed through the literature on chronic disease for months, day and night, trying to understand why people in our society increasingly have obesity, cancer, autoimmune, mental, and cardiovascular problems. I tried to understand morality; disturbed by the inability to convince my investors that I had not cheated them, I wondered how two people could read similar facts and come to opposite conclusions. Their actions seemed evil to me, and mine to them. But why would a group of cells like ourselves have moral feelings at all?

The point of view I discovered through these efforts that I call “epistolution” is an idea that is hard to grasp because it reverses two very basic assumptions we have about the world. Evolution is the study of how we came to be. Epistemology is the study of how we came to know. Epistolution reverses these two ideas. I will try to describe it much better below, but the normal view is that knowing is for being. I discovered that there is a loophole in our scientific theories of biology that allows for the opposite possibility. Being is for knowing.

The loophole I discovered is a way of answering one of the open questions of our current scientific worldview. When I discovered it it gave me a tremendous source of hope, a new way of thinking that integrated a lot of the puzzles that I had about the world, including religious ones. I realized as I grasped it that our current scientific worldview is a source of profound long-term pessimism, so much so that many of us have a hard time imagining that the rational theories could be anything other than pessimistic about the human future. If you are like me, when you feel that something is forcing you to be pessimistic, you tend to avoid that thing. When I found that there was a possible new scientific paradigm that was optimistic, I was gradually relieved of a subtle, but deep feeling of dread that I had been carrying for a long time.

This is strange, but I was an apocalypse-prepper even as a kid. Since I was a teenager I had thought of technological change as a sort of runaway train, changing our world faster than we could cope with it. I was a nerdy, sentimental kid, and I loved the outdoors and hated computers. I realized in early adolescence the geometric curve of technology, that it changes faster and faster over time. My concern was that humans cannot change faster and faster. I was worried, beginning at age thirteen, that our society would not be able to adjust to technology fast enough, and the result would be a catastrophe of some sort.

That was in the nineties. Now this point of view has become more and more common. You can see it in the movies we watch, where the world often ends violently, limps along in disarray, or devolves into a totalitarian dystopia. You can hear it in the way we discuss climate change and the disruption of ecosystems. You can feel it in the hysterical voices on the political news channels. You can see it in the angry, trivial arguments we are having as a society about issues that have very little practical consequence, but hold great symbolic importance for one side or the other.

I hope this means that as a society, we are ready for a new explanation. I hope this means the time is ripe for optimism.

The route I came to the epistolution discovery would not be a good way to show it you, because I learned a lot about the intricacies of diabetes, calorie restriction, and circadian rhythm that would not be interesting reading. So I am hoping to take another approach, and show it to you through evolutionary biology, which is a little more intuitive. My sincere hope is that I can bring you to the sort of epiphany I was able to find, but without all the personal suffering. I believe that all of us are searching for answers, often to questions we are not even aware that we have. I don’t think of epistolution as a final answer, but as a new opening that allows us to believe that we are not necessarily headed for an environmental or social apocalypse. It allows us to believe not that life is part of a divine plan, but at least that it is a result of an unstoppable mechanism for moral improvement.

The conventional view is that our lineage evolved for a long time, and then at some time near the end, we became knowledgeable and intelligent. Just as the lineage of birds evolved for a long time…first they looked like sea slugs, then like fish, then like small dinosaurs, then they began to use their weird skin appendages to glide down from trees, and then, at the end, they were in “full feather” as the sort of colorful flying birds we know today. Peregrine falcons swooping at breakneck speed seem to be the pinnacle of a certain sort of progress. In the same way, we imagine that intelligence is our superpower as humans. At first we were dumb creatures that could not think, like bacteria and worms and legged lungfish, and then we began to look like badgers and then like monkeys and then like ape-men with spears. During this ascent we became gradually better able to think, and then at the end we burst into the “full feather” of cognition as an upright ape that could speak, sing, make abacuses, plant improved strains of tobacco, and design pokemon avatars.

This way of thinking about evolution is natural and intuitive, but scientists have been cautioning us for a long time not to do this. When I was in high school I remember a very grave discussion in science class at a boarding school in Vermont about how I was not to think of evolution as a form of progress, because it was the result of random accidents. What my serious and bearded young teacher Erik was trying to say was that the predominant theory in biology at that time (and now) was that the only source of novelty in evolution was through random mutations in DNA. This meant that the only reason a small dinosaur turned into a peregrine falcon was because there was a blueprint inside the dinosaur, written into the DNA, that occasionally got corrupted while it was being replicated, and occasionally, randomly, these corruptions turned out to help the animal survive and reproduce. So the only reason why the falcon ended up flying high and fast was just that accidents conspired to drive it to behave that way, and the world happened to have a niche for a flying predator like that. There was no teleology, or purpose, or cosmic meaning to any of this.

Erik assumed, as some biologists even now assume, that there was no way to admit that anything but accident could drive evolution, because to do this would seem to admit that there is a supreme being directing things. This is unacceptable not because it is an impossible scientific premise, but because it seems to be beyond the sort of theory that can be tested and proven wrong by observations. Theories are not disallowed in science just because they are “supernatural.” Every new theory is “supernatural” from the point of view of the older theory simply because it makes a new set of claims about Nature. But a theory about Nature that does not make testable predictions is off-limits, because there is no way to rationally improve it or criticize it or falsify it. That is what the idea of a supreme being seems to be, and if that is required to admit that evolution is not entirely accidental, then most scientists are not buying it.

Most people, scientists included, cannot find much existential solace in the idea of life being the result of an accumulation of random accidents written into our DNA. DNA, for one thing, is a very tiny thing inside us, not the sort of big, warm, strong and gentle thing that can protect us from harm. It is not vast or profound or supportive. It is just a little intricate molecule that looks like a twisted scaly ladder. The fact that it is a molecule that is shaped by the struggles and wars of survival of our distant ancestors might make it even less comforting. Ancestors are remote, solemn, and dark. They are mysterious and they are dead. They are not with us in the present moment to help or guide us. They are far from us, and mostly unknown.

These forbidding elements of the scientific explanation make it inevitable that our existential longings keep turning up, and driving us into the arms of less rational theories. Many unscrupulous Christian preachers and fanatics across the world of every faith have challenged evolution through Darwinian natural selection. They propose ideas that are nonsensical combinations of what we actually trust (science) and what solemn traditions say. These “creation science” type theories are neither comforting nor profound, because they simply lie about the facts in order to avoid contradicting the authority of traditional scriptures. This is convincing fewer and fewer people these days, for good reason.

But still even good scientists have to turn, in their off-hours, to some other form of spiritual solace, because random accidents in DNA just isn’t an underpinning for any sort of belief in a redemptive future for humanity. The vast majority of species that have ever existed on earth are extinct now. They were accidentally extinguished from the earth because of these same random accidents that are supposed to have resulted in our accidental survival. There is no rational reason to believe, on these grounds, that we are anything but a fluke. So most of us just kinda step back and say, “Well we don’t know everything, and maybe there is a larger purpose out there somehow that we have not discovered.” This seems like a cheap dodge, but in fact I believe it is the best sort of wisdom.

Here is why: Fewer and fewer biologists actually accept the notion that DNA is a blueprint or code for life anymore, or that the only source of novelty is random mutation. Natural selection is unassailable, but there has always been spirited argument about the sources of variation and the mechanisms of heredity. If life began as a simple packet of DNA, like a virus, the genes-first view of life would be an inescapable conclusion. But instead of just a DNA packet, in every case of reproduction a whole cell is involved. A cell is bigger than DNA by a factor of 10,000. This means if the DNA molecule were the size of a basketball, the human cell it came from would be the size of Central Park. Even viruses require hijacking a whole cell in order to reproduce.

In the past thirty years, we have discovered many examples of heritable change in organisms that are not written in their DNA. These are called “epigenetics,” on the one hand, and “behavior” on the other. Epigenetics works like this: A cell has machinery that works to express some genes at certain times and silence others. This is essential, because there are roughly 30,000 genes in the human genome, and the number of unique ways 30,000 units can be combined is far larger than the number of atoms in the entire universe. So the cell has to provide the mechanism that selects the right genes to build just the right proteins when it needs them. You might call this an “interpretation” of the genome. In large organisms like us, this process is what allows one zygote to divide into many hundreds of cell types that remain distinct, like blood cells, neurons, bone cells, and so on. Most of these changes are wiped away before reproduction, but a few of them of a certain sort can remain and be inherited by the offspring. So for example sometimes if a female fruit fly is exposed to high heat, its offspring inherit a new set of interpretive mechanisms for many generations afterward, changing the way the same genes are used in the cell. When these changes are helpful to survival or reproduction, they might be passed on indefinitely.

Many animals also pass on traits through the way they interact with their offspring and the situation in which they raise them. If a mother dolphin learns a new way of hunting fish and passes it down to her offspring by hunting with them, this also does not involve changes in DNA. It only involves her hunting fish with them for long enough that some of her changes in hunting strategy get recreated by her daughters when they teach their daughters to hunt. So, this sort of thing can and does pass along for generation after generation, even in animals like birds or rats.

These examples might seem arcane, and not related to the point. But they are right at the core of the problem because neither of these forms of evolutionary change are random. They are functional changes instructed by the conditions of life. The organisms are reacting to their environments by changing their bodies and their habits, and these changes are being passed down. This does not mean that traditional Christian scriptures make any more sense, but it does mean that the worldview that the grave, bearded Erik, my high school teacher, taught me is certainly wrong. The actual situation is much more interesting.

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Let’s clearly state what is not being challenged here. All traits have a genetic basis. If you have the certain gene that causes sickle cell anemia, for example, it still means that you have a disadvantage in your ability to remain healthy. It is also not in dispute that random changes in DNA do happen, and these random changes certainly can affect the offspring that inherit them. A faulty mutation in just one critical gene can occasionally be fatal, or cause a condition like cystic fibrosis. This process definitely leads to evolution through natural selection. The basic principle of natural selection is almost a tautology, which is why it was independently discovered by Alfred Russell Wallace at the same time that Charles Darwin was writing about it privately in his notebooks before he published The Origin of Species. It comes from an observation originally derived from Thomas Malthus’ distasteful essay about the multiplication of poor people in Britain. Most organisms have far more offspring than the earth can support, so many of them die without reproducing. Since the offspring are variable, the ones that leave descendants also tend to leave their traits, thereby affecting evolution. This is why it is clear that random genetic mutation is certainly one cause of evolutionary change.

All traits have a genetic basis, but if epigenetic “interpretations” and also behaviors can be passed along, then random mutation of DNA could not be the only source of change. It is only one among several. And this is the key: The other sources are not random at all, but biased towards functions that improve survival and reproduction. This is an essential difference. Random change is one thing, and change directed at functional improvement is totally different. It is different not just on an intellectual level but on a spiritual level. It is so different that this scientific result has been hard to talk about among scientists, because without another explanation it seems to imply some sort of spiritual force.

If these heritable changes in gene interpretation and behavior were random, it would be impossible to explain why they were not driving the species that allowed them to extinction. These changes would be like a game of “telephone,” where the interpretation after several repetitions drifts wildly in erratic directions from the initial message. Lineages that did this would soon be dysfunctional and would perish.

It has long been a running argument in biology why mathematical models of evolution through random genetic mutation kept conflicting with the fossil record. These were the subject of famous conflicts between Richard Dawkins and Steven Jay Gould. Analysis of fossils showed long periods when life forms stayed the same, followed by short bursts of rapid evolution. Instead of a long slow accumulation of random accidents, the fossil record told a story of life’s rapid recovery from ecological crisis. Some biologists resolved this by arguing that evolution is using not only selection, but instruction from the environment to direct change. This conclusion is now widespread among biologists, but its consequences are still not well-developed. Few outside a narrow group of scientists have even thought much about what this really means.

When Darwinism was invented by Wallace and Darwin, nobody knew about genes or about how inheritance worked. But they knew that something carried the information to the next generation, because it is obvious that complex functions have accumulated in life forms. They assumed the instructions for how to achieve it had to be stored somewhere specific. When scientists in the early twentieth century discovered complex heritable particles in the cell nucleus, the metaphor of the genome as a code was invented to answer the question of how this information was stored and transmitted. This was called the Modern Synthesis. But this never made complete sense, and epigenetics has finally nailed the coffin on this idea. The whole cell transmits information, and the mother often transmits information as well. It should have been obvious that everything could not be determined by the genetic sequences, but it was tempting, as the information age took off, to think of an organism as a sort of computer, and the genome as a code of instructions.

If they are not just in the genome, where are all the instructions stored? Well the genome is a library of templates for making essential proteins, so some of it is definitely in these sequences. But as we mentioned earlier, something else has to interpret the genome to make the right proteins at the right time. This “something else” is much harder to pinpoint.

There are loops of causation in the cell that run from one gene to another. Some genes, called “transcription factors,” basically tell other genes to turn off and on. But these loops involve many other molecules and mechanisms. There are methyl groups that sit on the genome like halfbacks, blocking access from RNA so that some proteins aren’t expressed. There is chromatin, long molecules that direct traffic this way and that like traffic cops. And these loops of causation involve the internal structures of the cell: the membranes, the cytoplasm, the organelles, and many other factors.

The fact is, the loops that determine gene expression actually involve the whole universe. This sounds crazy at first, but think about it for a moment. When you go into a donut shop, first you smell the donuts, then your mouth begins to water, then you reach into your pocket for money, then you eat the donuts. All of these biological actions involve proteins being expressed a certain way from the genetic material in your cells, including your neurons. So, if things like donuts and donut shops are in the loop influencing gene expression, then they are, in a sense, part of the “instructions.” And of course in order to determine what put the donut shop in your neighborhood, you have to reference many other more distant things, including the economy of your area, the means of transportation, the sunlight from the sun that grew the wheat in the donuts, the origins of the soil in the wheat field, the composition of the atmosphere, the safe distance we are from other stars and planets, and so on. Once you have broken out into the world around you, there is no set of particles anywhere that is not affected by the set of particles outside of it.

The whole world contributes to interpreting your genome. This weird version of holism is obvious if you think about it. The difference between life and machines is that life varies a lot depending on the circumstances. But it doesn’t vary randomly, it varies systematically in an adaptive way. When it gets hot, we sweat and move into the shade. When it gets cold, we shiver and huddle together to keep warm. This is true of all living beings. This is what biologists technically term “developmental and behavioral plasticity.” Maintaining homeostasis requires a tremendous amount of variation. Machines operate based on strict instructions, but life forms are very flexible. Any programmer can tell you that a computer code will not compile if there is even one wrong character. If you add an extra comma or curly bracket, you can make the whole system crash. But life adjusts.

Now that we know that all this variation can be heritable, we know that it is not just driven by accidental changes in DNA. Instead, this variation is driving the organism to adapt, and then the organism is passing on this adaptive change to its offspring. This provides the background conditions in which random mutations of DNA are happening. This idea was popularized among biologists by the slogan, “genes are followers.” This idea, called “genetic assimilation” was actually discovered in the 1950s by a scientist named C.H. Waddington, but it has now gained broader acceptance.

This possibility has been accepted, but its implications have not yet been absorbed. The beauty of the simple genes-first view of life is that it imagined a blind search was taking place at the level of the genome. Through random genetic mutations, organisms were blindly trying out different forms of life, and the ones that gained reproductive advantage spread. This was a very tidy explanation for complexity. As long as the genome was the only source of instructions, it made great sense.

But this tidy story is now irrevocably spoiled. If the changes at the level of the organism can be inherited, then they must be biased in favor of function to prevent the game of “telephone” from sending the lineage into extinction. This means that in addition to the blind search at the level of the genome, there must be a blind search at the level of the organism during its development. This is a really subtle concept, and it is hard to imagine, because it relies on a mechanism that we can’t envision because we haven’t yet entirely discovered it. But even though it is a hard idea to imagine or accept, it rationally must be true.

There is a blind search happening at the level of the organism during development. Let me unpack this a bit to try to make it more clear.

Natural selection picks between organisms between generations, destroying maladaptive forms and allowing better adapted ones to reproduce. It is like a filter that every generation of creatures has to make it through in order to pass on its traits. But natural selection does not apply to development. It only applies to the selective events of death. The genome does not change at all during development, only the epigenetic interpretations change.

A blind search retains some forms and discards others. But how could the environment be picking certain forms of your body and discarding other ones? In order for function to accumulate during development (without divine intervention) this must be happening, but we don’t know how. If it were not happening we would have to admit some sort of intelligent force in the outer universe that is forcing your body into a more functional condition. This is the only other way the whole universe could be contributing to your gene expression patterns.

This blind search at the organism level would require that an organism be composed of some smaller unit that can be filtered. In order for a blind search to happen, something has to be discarded and something else retained. But what is this “something?” It can’t be our molecules. The molecules that we are made of do not “know” anything, they are just temporary replacements that we derive from our food and water and air. They are interchangeable. They stay in us for a whole and then they leave, and other molecules of the same sort take their place. It also could not be individual cells, because they are likewise disposable. Skin cells fall off, other cells are chomped up and excreted as substances into the bloodstream. None of your cells lasts your whole life, if you live to be elderly. The only things that really remain with us, in a physical sense, are processes.

Maturana and Varela, a famous team of biological theorists, once wrote that life was a circular phenomenon. We breathe in and out over and over, our whole lives. Our tiny mitochondria, many thousands per cell, create little energy packets and then destroy them over and over. Our lungs breathe in and then breathe out. Our hearts beat on a regular rhythm. Our brains sleep and wake, over and over. Our bladders swell and then expel liquid, our colons empty and fill, our livers build up glycogen and then send it into our bloodstream. Our neurons fire and then recharge, many billions at a time, every second of every day of our lives. Even lifespan itself can be seen as an extended oscillation, since the operation of our cells fails to regenerate on a predictable schedule. There are some who die young, but none who die beyond age 140. Our rhythms extend even to the grave.

What can we be sure of? We can be sure that a living being is some sort of chemical reaction. Everything on earth is made of chemicals, and reacting is what chemicals do. So this is certain. But this situation requires some sort of division among the chemical reactions that are intertwined among the body systems of every organism. What are the units of the blind search? Whatever they are, they must be present in every organism because every organism interprets DNA. Michael Levin, a very creative contemporary biologist, likes to say that if you think of a human adult, and then just wind the clock back day by day until that being is a blastocyst, you never encounter any moment when the process of interpreting DNA changes from one method to another. To imagine then that single-celled life uses one principle of cognition to stay alive and multicellular life uses another is at the very least not very parsimonious. The problem of picking the right proteins to express never changes, only the size of the group of cells that is doing the picking.

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When I discovered this problem, I was already convinced that circadian rhythm had a lot to do with chronic disease. Diet and exercise, the conventional explanation for why we are increasingly sick from chronic diseases, never worked very well for me. These are certainly important, but by itself they just can’t be the whole story. Not only was I growing sicker while steadily exercising and eating in a very healthy pattern, but I could not help but think about all the other people who were trying so hard to do so as well, and failing. As I fermented yet another jar of vegetables, and ran another six miles each day, I watched as my cholesterol reports grew more and more shocking. In a typical American city, the average person is fifty pounds overweight, and the most affected are a hundred or more pounds overweight. How many of these people are unaware that diet and exercise influence health?

A century ago, when obesity was rare and conditions like autism, peanut allergy, and celiac disease were almost unheard of, this notion was not widely accepted at all. Hard labor was considered unhealthy, especially for women. Unhealthy people know that diet and exercise could help them, but their metabolic cravings force them to disregard this information. In order for diet and exercise to be a good explanation, we would have to discount the efforts of all these earnest people who are trying to use it to recover their health, but failing. To me, the main explanation for our disturbing changes in health patterns was more likely to be something we were consuming much more of each decade, but were totally unaware that it was harmful. Artificial light after dark, disrupting our circadian system, fits this description quite well.

It is not well known that there is a tiny group of cells in a part of our brains called the SCN that serves as a master clock for our entire body. This group of cells is extremely sensitive to light, especially light at the blue end of the spectrum. When these cells are activated, there are subsidiary clocks in all the organ systems and the gut that synchronize to them. When you wake up, your temperature rises, you have to pee, your bowels begin to move, your heartbeat increases. All of this is coordinated by the SCN. Even the trillions of microbes in your gut set their own internal rhythms by your master rhythms. We evolved on the African continent where the shortest night was never less than nine hours, and there was no physical process ever, in the four and a half billion years of our evolution, which could ever brighten that night any more than a full moon. Artificial light can brighten it many thousands of times more than the moon. And many of us, all over the developed world, now brighten that nighttime without a second thought.

We know that an organism is an extended chemical reaction, and oscillators are like clocks that drive the whole body. If you think of an oscillator as a chemical reaction that runs in a circle, over and over, it seems that definition could cover many functions. The question for me then became, “What in an organism is not an oscillator of some kind?” It occurred to me that if you thought of an organism as a group of large, slow oscillations that were driven by smaller oscillations, this point of view could explain the blind search. The unit of selection could be the oscillator. Some oscillations are strengthened by the environment, and some are destroyed by it. This was a very deep and satisfactory answer for me. It might explain the power of habit, addiction, optical illusion, beauty, even the placebo effect.

I had discovered a mechanism that might result in a blind search for function. This would mean that the struggles of life, the efforts every living creature is making just to stay alive, are not just random results, but are adding up to something. It would give these struggles meaning.

An oscillation, I imagined, could be a unit that is either triggered or not triggered by the environment. This matches the pattern of environmental influence called Lamarckism, the idea that organisms are changed by use and disuse. Use or disuse is the most intuitive driver of plasticity. We all recognize that when we pump iron at the gym our muscles get bigger and our bones get stronger. Without any use, the same muscles and bones atrophy and shrink and eventually they fail entirely. The same is true of our neural connections, but the process can happen in seconds. If someone tells you a phone number, you can repeat it to yourself many times and sometimes remember it for years. If you never repeat the number, you forget it within a few moments.

This process of adjustment to use and disuse must be related to sleep, and to dreaming. These have not only evolved all across the animal world on land but also in the sea, even in complex life as far from us on the evolutionary tree as mollusks. Octopuses and cuttlefish sleep and dream. What other explanation is there for sleep, where our damaged structures and processes are repaired in a holistic, all-encompassing mode of existence in which we are completely paralyzed and helpless for eight hours a day? If there is not a whole-body damage and repair cycle, why can’t sleep happen one cell at a time? Someone could argue that these processes are simply emergent high-level effects that only happen when organisms are sufficiently complex, but then they would be saying that there is not only one logic by which the environment controls gene expression, but multiple such logics.

The idea of an organism inheriting instructions from use and disuse actually has a long history in biology. In Darwin’s era, all biologists believed it, including Darwin, who mentioned it twelve times in The Origin of Species. The phenomenon of “inheritance of acquired characteristics” is called Lamarckism in honor of Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, a French biologist who lived near the turn of the nineteenth century. Lamarckism was ridiculed during the heyday of the genes-first view during the mid-twentieth century by some who pointed to the fact that much of the epigenetic marking in cells is stripped away in the case of large organisms. This was called the “Weissmann barrier” after August Weissmann, a scientist who supposedly disproved this form of inheritance by amputating the tails of mother mice. When the babies were born with tails, he declared victory.

Of course this is gross overinterpretation. Even Lamarck never argued that all acquired characteristics were inherited, including mutilations of tails. He wasn’t a fool. He was a great biologist of the early nineteenth century, who knew nothing about genes just as Darwin knew absolutely nothing about genes. In fact Darwin postulated that there were objects that moved through the bloodstream that he called “gemmules,” which, he proposed, were doing what we would now describe as epigenetic marking. Jean-Baptiste Lamarck was the man who first convincingly described evolution from the fossil record and who coined the term “biology.” He was a great scientist. He argued that some functional changes that were acquired during life could be inherited, and that this could be among the sources of evolutionary novelty. Both of these points are completely consistent with our current facts. The problem is that this falsifies our current best explanation for life.

At this point I gradually realized, over the course of several months, that I was onto something very significant. My discovery was not a discovery like the work of most scientists, accompanied by any new facts or laboratory data. Mine was just the discovery of a new point of view, a new way of interpreting facts that are well-known. I thought of it as a streak of ore that should be mined, to see what it turned up. Whatever it was, I couldn’t let it go. I began combing the scientific literature for similar points of view. I found Maturana and Varela, the architects of a theory of life called “autopoiesis.” I found Denis Noble, the founder of systems biology and the “third way” of evolution. I found James Shapiro, who wrote about different forms of natural genetic engineering by the cell. I looked into James Lovelock’s Gaia hypothesis. I found Barbara McClintock, who discovered “jumping genes” in maize. A disproportionate number of the most imaginative, awake biologists in recent history seem to be women. I read Eva Jablonka and Marion Lamb, who described the four dimensions of evolution: genetic, epigenetic, behavioral, and symbolic. I read about Lynn Margulis and her controversial but now well-accepted idea of “symbiogenesis.” A change of perspective at this deep level about the fundamentals of life was bound to have many far-reaching consequences.

This new point of view would provide a new explanation not only for epigenetic inheritance but for all knowledge. Organisms know as they live, but also store knowledge in the genetic and symbolic libraries outside themselves. Both of these forms of knowledge can be spread; both genes and memes are contagious. The intelligent choices we each make as a living being would no longer be the result of random accidents, but rather of a mechanism that was intrinsic to the operation of every cell in our bodies. And this would apply not only to ourselves as clever apes, but to every form of life on earth. Everything would be involved in an intelligent search for better solutions, even the tiny microbes whose problem-space is just a few microns across. This is when I came up with the name “epistolution,” to describe the unity of how we came to know and how we came to be. This captures the idea pretty well I hope. Learning and intelligence are inseparable from staying alive. Being is for knowing.

It seems odd to discuss gene expression, epigenetic interpretation, oscillation, metabolism, cognition, intelligence, and behavior almost interchangeably as drivers of evolution as I have done so far in this essay. It seems aphoristic, sloppy, inaccurate, even unscientific. These different things are not often spoken of together. They belong to different university departments. Those who study these subjects have PhDs from different schools and apply for different grants and write in different journals. But they are inseparable. They cannot be studied independently, because they are just descriptions of the same thing at different levels. They are just different descriptions of the process of life.

….

For me the biggest impact of this new point of view was a new vision of morality. Until I read David Deutsch’s The Beginning of Infinity it never quite crystallized for me that the world we live in today is much different morally than it was in the past. I don’t mean that nothing bad happens, or that no one is evil. I mean that what is considered evil has expanded, and what is considered to be good has contracted to a much more exacting standard. We are holding each other to higher standards than ever before. Wars of aggression, slavery, subjugation of women, homophobia, animal cruelty, child labor, religious fanaticism, — -these problems are not gone. But at least now they are seen as problems to be solved, rather than being considered good.

Many people are not really aware that there has been moral progress; many don’t think such a thing is possible. But consider the worst behavior of any single powerful person in the world today, perhaps Trump, Bezos, or Musk, whichever is your favorite contemporary villain. Now contrast his awful behavior with the comportment of the most powerful man around the turn of the sixteenth century, the Aztec emperor. With the full support of his people, he conducted human sacrifices regularly to unforgiving gods, took young women away from their families as tribute to be emprisoned for his exclusive rape, and led great armies of young men on bloody wars of conquest to bludgeon enemy soldiers to death with stone clubs, torture them in creative ways, rape their wives and starve them into submission. Not entirely dissimilar behavior was common in China, in Europe, in West Africa, and in the Middle East. In evolutionary time, 500 years is the blink of an eye. Our moral behavior as a species has changed beyond recognition.

Deutsch was the first to make me think that this change might be the result of our species applying effort to solving the problems of life, technologically and scientifically. With my new view, now I saw this as a biological result of cellular behavior. Cells can perceive context, therefore we can perceive context, therefore we can invent better solutions through creativity.

We tend to think of morality as sets of rules that we should follow, rules that can be universally applied equally to all. Immanuel Kant argued that treating others as one wants to be treated was a “categorical imperative.” But the inclination to think of others as equal to oneself is a recent historical phenomenon in the West, and there is no evidence that any other animals have it. How could this type of abstract thinking have emerged suddenly from a biological system with no precursors in other animals? And if it did so, why would it be so profoundly strong as to deeply affect everything we do and feel to the point of driving us to suicide if we feel we have been immoral? This made no sense to me. In my view, everything we do as a biological organism must have some similarity to what other organisms do. All organisms on earth are, in a sense, our distant cousins. They have all been evolving exactly the same amount of time we have, they have just taken different paths.

I was stuck on the example of pigs. When I was in high school I adopted a potbellied pig as a pet named “Mr. T.” Although his mother was black, he was a grumpy white pig with a mohawk of large bristles and a grumbling squeaky voice. I took him to college with me and he lived in the dorm, sleeping under my bed. He was at least one pig who was very dear to me as a pet. In college I also worked on a farm, and one of my less-comfortable jobs was butchering the farm-grown hogs after feeding them slop. Later, in my career as a sustainable agriculture entrepreneur, I actually owned a slaughterhouse for locally grown livestock, and we had a program designed to pay trappers for the pork from feral hogs to attempt to eradicate them as an invasive species. Inside of a decade I myself had lived three very different moral relations to the same type of animal.

I thought about the relation between humans and pigs a lot, and sometimes my thoughts took a bizarre turn. Pigs are very sensitive and intelligent, and can be highly sociable. I recalled that one macabre translation of a Polynesian word for human flesh is “long pig.” I puzzled over how in the different contexts of my own life, the same animal could be a beloved pet, a source of healthy protein, or the target of an extermination campaign. Especially I wondered how my own intuitions never rebelled at the thought, and how the same friends and family could have been equally amused and supportive at my different treatment of pigs in the different circumstances. No one ever confronted me and said I should not be slaughtering local farm-raised pigs because I had once had a pet pig as a companion. No one ever confronted me with the immorality of eradicating invasive feral pigs; they knew I cared deeply about ecology. And yet the eyes of those crouched feral pigs, shining as they huddled in the catch pen, frightened out of their wits, haunt me a little bit to this day. In retrospect, I can imagine their feelings. I can empathize with them. Maybe because of Mr. T, my grumpy fat buddy who used to eat cigarettes out of the ashtray on the smoking porch, I can feel their humanity.

If morality is profoundly changed by context, it must also be part of the adaptive process for organisms. It must be part of the biological changes that make our behavior and our gene interpretation match our surroundings. I began to read a lot of Confucian theory, where morality is seen not as universal rules, but as a fixed set of obligations to specific individuals based on hierarchical relationships. In my religious tradition in Mississippi, Christian writings about Jesus deal with absolutes and abstract relationships. The Bible says, “In Christ there is no Jew nor Greek.” My American tradition of ideals is soaked in equalitarian language. Thomas Jefferson wrote that it was “self-evident” that “all men are created equal.” But Confucius’ writings from imperial China are more practical. They recognize that proper treatment of others means discriminating between them based on their status in one’s life. Mentally intact people don’t treat random strangers the same as their family. That is a nice romantic fantasy, but in practice it would be pathological. Confucius made no claims like that. He dealt with the specific rules about how to be a brother or father or son or citizen or governor. His writings are context-specific. This seemed to me to be a much more realistic way to view our moral obligations.

I thought about my angry investors. When my start-up livestock business model was in trouble, I thought it was obvious that the responsible thing to do was to try to pivot to another source of profit, despite all the personal difficulty this entailed. This was what business coaches and advisors would counsel. I changed the business to focus on wild boar sausage, and these two aggrieved investors would later use this in their lawsuit claims as evidence that I had misrepresented my intentions and cheated them. The same action can be seen as highly good or highly evil, depending on the context and one’s other assumptions. These two people, shocked that our venture had failed, assumed that I was trying to hurt them, and that the failure was not avoidable but somehow deliberate.

There is a set of very interesting thought experiments in ethics called the “trolley problems.” The basic setup is that there is a trolley rolling along, five people are tied to the track, and you can flip a lever to set it off on another empty track to save their lives. So far so good. But now the interesting part is all the changes you can make to the scenario. Suppose the sidetrack has one person tied to it? Is it still ok to pull the lever? Suppose that one person was your child? Suppose the only way to stop the trolley is to push a fat man off a footbridge, so that he lands on the track and stops the train? As you might suppose, even though the number of lives saved (5), and the number of deaths (1) are the same in these latter scenarios, people have very different intuitions about what the right choice may be.

What is the difference between killing a random stranger to save five random strangers, and killing your own child to kill five random strangers? Any parent can tell you the difference is night and day. Let’s put this question in a more extreme way. How many faraway strangers, on the other side of the world, would you passively accept being routinely tortured to death to save your own child, who sleeps in the bed with you at night, from being tortured to death right before your eyes? The true answer in this case is not three to one, or five to one, or even a million to one. If you are a parent you can testify that the true answer is all of them. You would accept the extermination of the entire human race on the other side of the world if it saved your child from torture. You would feel guilty if you could not accept this holocaust. And this is true for every mentally normal parent anywhere.

I think this more extreme version of the question, as well as the darkly amusing version with the fat man on the footbridge, tells something very deep about morality. Morality is a hierarchy of relationships. It is based not on abstract concepts but on physical and emotional proximity. Pushing a fat man is somehow worse than flipping a switch that kills a fat man. I think of our moral relationships now as a big pyramid composed of all the beings we are aware of in the universe. Some are very high, even above ourselves, like our young children. Some are further down. Some are so far down that they barely register. Their status isn’t based on their ability to suffer, or their intelligence. Different beings, like dogs or pigs or horses, can easily rise in the pyramidal structure by becoming more emotionally and physically close to us.

I now think of morality as a system of alliances. We make moral tradeoffs based on our actual relationships, which are developed by our bodies. A nearby ally with great potential promise to help us and other allies, like a young child, is of paramount importance. A nearby threat to our allies, like a child molester, is likewise highly significant. But further away people who don’t affect our alliances very much don’t register very much for our moral system. We can easily sleep at night after spending far more on our dogs than the cost of saving some faraway children from malaria by purchasing them bednets through a nonprofit, for example. Our moral system is a bodily system. It is a projection of our possible alliances into the future and a weighted judgment about other beings based on these.

Each alliance has different regulations. These are deals worked out with others based on the context, not based on the universal humanity of the other party. This is why a pig can be a friend in one context, a meal in another, and vermin in a third. Just like people, pigs can be a reliable emotional ally in times of trouble, or a form of livestock that we care for in exchange for meat and lard, or as a threat to the local balance of the ecosystem an enemy to be engaged in combat. The American guys in black camo who hunt feral hogs with night vision scopes and automatic rifles may be a bit over-the-top, but they are not outside the bounds of normal human morality, and neither are the military warriors from around the world who fight terrorism by attacking various armed groups in the Middle East. They are defending important alliances. The details are all contextual, so like the premises of my lawsuit they are easy to argue about, but these conflicts are natural when morality stems from bodies. Everyone inhabits a different body.

…

I sent in my first peer-reviewed paper on epistolution to a tiny journal in the subset of the computer science community that studies artificial general intelligence. I assumed very naively that among the group of brilliant people who write and publish on artificial general intelligence would see it, like I saw it, as an explanation for morality. When I got back the results of peer-review, I was shocked. I was not surprised that an unaffiliated submission from a former entrepreneur was heavily criticized. That I expected. But it was successful! The paper was accepted. I was surprised because although they accepted the paper for publication, they clearly had not understood what it was about. All three reviews referenced other work in cognitive science that dealt with the feedback processes between organisms and the environment, but the work they referenced was all from the bottom-up cybernetics-style perspective. They had missed the point.

It was clear that I had not gotten the basic idea across. I felt like shouting, “The whole world interprets the genome! Oscillators are a possible model for moral intelligence in all organisms!” As I spent more time preparing for the conference and talking to friends and colleagues, I realized I was in for a very hard struggle to communicate. I was eager to hear if I was making a mistake, but no one refuted me, they just misunderstood. No one could see the problem I was trying to solve, and as a result, no one could understand the solution. When I mentioned the consequences of the solution, I often lost them forever. People looked at me like I was a total nut. I was crestfallen. I had always seen myself as a good communicator.

I realized then the danger of focusing too intensely on a problem for too long. You can see it more clearly than anyone else, and you can’t remember quite how you saw it before in order to explain yourself to the uninitiated. My family listened in bafflement. My friends each indulged me for about three conversations and then gave up one by one. Groups I found online argued with me for a while and then went silent. Twitter was a black hole of nonsense. Professors, if they returned my emails, only gave my ideas a quick skim before shooting back a polite, but diffident reply. Further emails nearly always went unanswered. A few dear people kept engaging me intellectually off and on for months, but it became painfully obvious to me that what I thought was a brilliant insight that could change the world was, for virtually everyone I communicated with, completely inaccessible.

This inability to talk about my epiphany was suffocating. I felt like I was sealed inside an airtight container. This was important! I thought. This could help people! I started going on long walks and runs several times a day. I told my three-year-old daughter all about it as we played in the park during the pandemic. I wrote essay after essay and posted them on my website. Eventually there were over a hundred versions. I wrote a 250-page book and posted it on my website. If I could not even get my friends and family to read or understand anything I wrote, how could I expect publication, publicity, success, impact?

I had long since adopted a strict circadian rhythm in my own personal habits. I worked out in the morning, and started doing Sachin Panda’s method of time-restricted eating. I slept regularly nine hours each night.I read with a candle, or with a lantern after dark. My health had fully recovered after a couple of years of intermittent fasting, meditation, and sleeping. My blood pressure and cholesterol normalized, my weight stabilized forty pounds lighter, and my atrial fibrillation had disappeared. The cancer diagnosis turned out to be false.

My career, which by then involved selling open-source voting machines, took me on long drives across the state of Mississippi. I listened to biology podcasts, but I mostly gave myself solace by listening to music. Although I was active, surrounded by friends, and no longer threatened by cancer, I became a bit isolated from everyone in the world. I felt like a man in a bubble. A religious convert always has a church, but I had only a theory, a website, and no fellow devotees. But optimism, I told myself. I have optimism, and the world needs it. I can give it to them, somehow, if I just persist. I thought about all the people out there whose lives are subtly drained of meaning by the assumption that life is underpinned by mere random accident, and never sums to anything worth having faith in. I felt then that the burden of the obligation to communicate was a burden worth carrying. It became a sort of spiritual quest. I began to promise myself never to give up unless someone proved to me that epistolution was impossible.

In the event of presenting my paper at the conference, I more or less gave up on the idea of anyone taking the paper very seriously. As I predicted, they were all engaged in mental gymnastics about very abstruse mathematical concepts that I could not fathom at all. I’m not entirely sure many of them were really following each other, either, although there were many clearly brilliant attendees. 7000 peer-reviewed papers are now published every day in the scientific world. How many of these are read carefully by anyone? How many of them present truly new ideas? I took the stage and pulled a prank. I told the audience about the concept, and then I told them I would prove that their cellular behavior was determined by the environment. I turned on a loudspeaker with a great Chubby Checker song and started juggling on stage. The crowd erupted in a spontaneous dance party. It was a blast.

A year ago, I began to study computer programming in the hopes of developing a digital prototype of oscillators that can use their interaction with their environment to self-organize based on the Lamarckian principle of use and disuse. I used some of my saved money from the voting machine job to hire a software developer to help me. He is a friendly guy named Hector, a young Colombian who works for Google and does freelance projects like this on the side. We have made significant headway, but I am no computer engineer, and progress is slow. Without funding, without collaborators, the project is hard to really accelerate. The problem is still communication. I have applied for grants, but so far the applications have been turned away without followup questions.

At this point I have been carrying epistolution around with me day and night for three and half years. I am healthy, happy, and productive. But I am uncertain about the future. For myself, I can see a possibly difficult road still ahead. I cannot stop working on this problem, although I have tried. It is simply too important, for all of us. I cannot unsee the problem, or the solution, or the consequences. For this reason when I ask myself the question, “Will the future world be one where epistolution is unknown, or will it be discovered and become an important part of the intellectual journey of science?” I can’t help but always answer this in the affirmative. The results from epigenetics and animal behavior are not going away. The impossibility of the genes-first view is not going away. Biologists move closer to my epiphany every year. For a career biologist, raising highly unconventional proposals can be a risky career move, but epistolution becomes less of a leap with every year that goes by. None of them has yet crossed the brink that I crossed in 2019, but more and more of them are getting to the edge of it. And they are writing about their journeys. And those stories are spreading.

Last year, Michael Levin at Tufts wrote a long theoretical paper called “Technological Approach to Mind Everywhere” that detailed his new view that all cells are intelligent. He works on organisms called planaria which have brains and nervous systems, but nevertheless regenerate from cutting like plants. In a sense, because they do not rely on sexual reproduction but instead divide by amputation, individual planaria are millions of years old. They do not really age, in the sense we understand it. Without changing their genes, Levin is able to manipulate the intercellular bioelectricity by managing the gap junctions between cells with chemicals to control their process of regeneration. In other words, he shows how the world controls gene expression by changing their world from above. He can make planaria that regrow a head on either end of their bodies, or a tail on either end of their bodies. The offspring of these planaria then inherit this strange new form indefinitely. These results are completely at odds with the genes-first view of life. Levin has been invited recently onto artificial intelligence podcasts to discuss his results and propound his explanations of life. He is getting very close to epistolution, though he has not fully articulated it yet. Levin has been an occasional correspondent with me.

My aspiration for this theory is that it is taken by others and repeated and improved and elaborated, and then one day, like all scientific theories, it will be refuted. I believe that this will happen sooner or later. We cannot keep understanding more about life without changing our fundamental view of the role of genes. It is impossible. Eventually bold people will begin to take these steps and others will follow. What makes the journey so harrowing is that epistolution is simply too good to be true. It is very hard to accept that we are on a ride that is taking us higher and higher, and we are not headed for a crash at some point soon. This defies our intuitions, and flies in the face of all the assumptions of our cultural era. Smart people simply don’t admit to thinking like that right now. It is even more weird to imagine that that ride upward is driven by our very nature, by our metabolic processes, and not by our political or technological decisions. And that all the little things, the bacteria, the viruses, the worms and plankton and squid and fish and glow-bugs and ants, are all in this thing with us somehow. In a sense, epistolution removes control from us in a scary way. In the traditional religious version of holism, there was a surrender to God. Epistolution requires a similar surrender, but it is surrender to a faceless Universe or multiverse. It is big, and warm and comforting, but it is still dark like the ocean, moving mysteriously, and infinitely vast. We still have to muster faith from out of an abyss, where we float in communion with death. But now, there is a rational underpinning for this faith. To me, that makes all the difference.

I don’t have a pig anymore, or even a dog. But I do have friends, and I have a beautiful young daughter full of jokes and delight, and I have optimism. I wonder how the scientific world will look to her when she is my age; how it will look to all of us. I wonder what moral progress will transform us into, what it will give us. I am trusting now that this exponential curve of invention, creativity, and growth is a good thing, a sustainable thing, even an ecologically benign thing. I trust that we are learning to cooperate with other forms of life and preserve them not simply out of ignorance or forced necessity, as we sometimes have in the past, but out of the conscious awareness of their importance as living beings with intrinsic value. There is a small but growing cohort of people that believe that the epistolution point of view is important, even redemptive.

I’d like to ask: will you join us now?