Why do amoebas move away from stuff they don’t like?

Well der. Because the amoebas that didn’t, are no longer with us. Only the ones that went, ‘urrggh, that bit of seawater’s a bit too warm!’ and ‘Niiccce…algae!’ survived to reproduce.

So let’s say I’m an amoeba (I am, actually, at times very close to being an amoeba). How exactly do I develop the ability, to make a ‘choice’? I mean, somebody’s got to go first. Does the fact that I – Amoeba A – happen to live in a place where amoebas like me happily divide and multiply, and Amoeba B’s misfortune is to live over a sterile volcanic vent – necessarily result in my descendants evolving an ability to distinguish between the two? Why not take the passive path of the pebble, which really doesn’t mind?

Amoebae mutate and reproduces; pebbles don’t. But it still puzzles me: what drives living thing to want to survive? Did the coding come first – that first random change in DNA that allowed an organism to respond in some way to its environment – or did the preference – for existing as opposed to not existing? And if it was the coding, then why – ever – the preference? As the behaviourists used to say, what you want is irrelevant for all practical purposes: it’s what you do that matters. So why aren’t we all automatons?

Darwinists would say, of course it was the coding. First some amoeba randomly developed the ability to move a little bit, and then the ones that happened to move towards nice things or away from nasty things, survived to reproduce, etc etc, and eventually you get, at the pinnacle of evolution, cats – creatures driven by obscure desires and unfathomable purpose!

But what if the desire to live drives the coding, and not the other way around? Thomas Nagle in Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature Is Almost Certainly False argues something similar, when he says (paraphrased by the New Yorker) that the mental side of existence must somehow have been present in creation from the very start. There is something, Nagle says, that it is like to be an amoeba.

And maybe that’s why they move away from stuff they don’t like.

Next, your life as fiction – and while I’m on the subject of fiction, I just wanted to give a shout-out for Orna Ross’s After the Rising, free (but only till 7 October), free to download at the Selective Bookworm I was in two minds about promoting this book. On the one hand, it’s a great historical fiction read on the Irish Civil War of the 1920s, a gripping insight into the passions and bitter divisions of the period and the lasting effect of the conflict on the lives of people who weren’t even born when it ended. On the other hand,, Orna Ross has a publicity manager!! Who amongst us hard-scrabbling indie authors can dream of a publicity manager! Deeply envious, but I’d definitely recommend it. Or you can pick something else while you’re there, including F.L.Rose’s (that’s me) The Point of Us).