How Might Novelty and Direction Be Produced?
Central to the debate concerning biological origins are the questions of the source of novelty and the source of direction. Such questions can form a second level of our “taxonomic hierarchy,” as illustrated in Figure 5. Materialists, as well as deists and theists, differ on these questions. If true randomness is characteristic of the movement of atomic particles, such “stochastic” events may add novelty, and even provide direction. If the cosmos is truly deterministic, all events and structures were implicit in the nature of the origin, although many of these events may look random to our limited viewpoint. The most popular viewpoint is a hybrid one, considering novelty to be due to random events (mutation) and direction to be locally deterministic (natural selection). Full deism may be divided into the same groups as materialism. If the cosmos is deterministic, then all the events were programmed at creation to unroll in time. Both novelty and direction would be fixed by the initial
