(Note: the blue horizontal menu bar directly above lists the subsections of "Evolution According to Contemporary Science." Beginning with "How Has Life Evolved?," be sure to read each of these subsections before moving on to the next primary section, "Evil, Ethics, and Human Values in an Evolving World.")

The Significance of Consciousness

Without millions of years of suffering and death of all sorts, including our own, our consciousness could therefore not exist. But is this consciousness just another of DNA's devices for mindlessly making more DNA, and devoid of any larger importance? Not necessarily. DNA itself is only a means to an end, only a storage medium, like a computer disk, that cells themselves invented to preserve their most useful evolutionary innovations. What is truly fundamental, and potentially immortal, is the information that DNA encodes. As we have learned from the rise of computer viruses, which (unlike DNA molecules or real viruses) are not material objects, pure information can use matter and energy to propagate itself. DNA is just one of information's ways of making more information—i.e., more copies of itself, even improved ones thanks to natural selection.

Then what is to prevent evolution from pioneering new ways to create and preserve information—new operating systems and storage media, in other words, like those that make our computers obsolete every few years? It has done so in the past. For example, the evolution of sex provided a quantum leap in the generation of genetic variety. Later, the evolution of culture allowed invention and exchange of adaptive information to occur far faster than was possible by genetic means. But culture is an artifact of precisely those brains which seemed a moment ago to be no more than collections of expendable somatic cells.

Such radical flip-flops in the functions and relative adaptive values of traits seem to be the usual way in which evolutionary novelties arise. A set of gill supports that aids in breathing and filter-feeding in a primitive jawless fish takes on a subsidiary function supporting the margins of the nearby mouth. Eventually it is transformed into jaws, setting subsequent vertebrate evolution onto an entirely different, predatory track. Eons later, the bones forming a reptile's jaw joint happen to lie so close to the eardrum that they fortuitously help conduct sound waves to the ear. When an overhaul of the chewing mechanism renders these bones superfluous as parts of the jaws, they are opportunistically drafted into full-time service as components of the new, improved mammalian hearing system. And so on. What begins as a minor, subsidiary structure or function regularly ends up as the dominant feature of a new flowering of evolutionary success, with the most far-reaching consequences.

There is, then, nothing strange in somatic cells having found a way to reproduce information that is even more efficient than that of the germ cells. In humans, this new somatic-based, "cultural" adaptive mechanism quickly overshadowed in importance the genetic mechanisms of evolution. As a result, the somatic (in this case brain) cells responsible for this new, non-DNA-based mechanism of information storage and transmission can be seen to be more than mere "vehicles of DNA." The self-conscious intelligence and culture they create can accordingly be seen, even in purely Darwinian terms, as a major evolutionary breakthrough.