Why can't science explain the meaning of life??....
Answers
Can science explain the meaning of life in general and the importance of my existence in particular? ... Science can't "find" the meaning of life because the "meaning of life" is not a well defined concept.
Does humanity exist to serve some ultimate, transcendent purpose? Conventional scientific wisdom gives the answer as a definitive no. This is the answer provided in this recent New York Times piece ‘The universe doesn’t care about your purpose’, for example, and also by physicist Lawrence Krauss in his latest book. According to Krauss, the fact that we evolved on this planet is just a “cosmic accident”, and people who believe otherwise are probably suffering from some kind of religious delusion.
I don’t think this view of life is necessarily correct, however, even though my worldview is entirely naturalistic and I usually do agree with conventional scientific wisdom. As I
explain in this article I published recently in the journal Complexity, I know of one possible mechanism by which life could, in fact, be endowed with a natural purpose. To understand this mechanism, it’s necessary to understand how natural selection works.
How biological natural selection creates 'purpose'
In biological selection, genes are selected to enable their own replication. Their ability to self-replicate, in turn, depends on how well they can encode traits—adaptations—which permit organisms to out-reproduce other members of their own species. The purpose (that is, function) of these adaptations is to solve complex problems (like seeing, digesting, mating, and thinking), and so they tend to be highly complex themselves. Improbable complexity is, in fact, the hallmark of natural selection, and the fundamental way in which we recognize that a trait actually is an adaptation (as opposed to being the by-product of an adaptation, or the result of random genetic ‘noise’).
Because improbable complexity is the hallmark of selection, organisms are the most improbably complex—that is, the least entropic—known things in the universe. Entropy is the degree of disorder in a physical system, and tends to increase in all such systems (that’s a basic law of physics known as the second law of thermodynamics). Entropy’s tendency to increase is the reason why, as Yeats said, "things fall apart": your new car or new suit, for example, tends to get more beat up rather than more pristine as times goes by. Because adaptations generated by natural selection are extraordinarily complex, they have extraordinarily low entropy, and selection is in fact the most powerful natural anti-entropic process known to science.
Biological natural selection explains how adaptations can have purpose (again, in the sense of function; for example, the purpose/function of an eye is to see), and why organisms can behave purposefully. It does not explain, however, how life in general could have any transcendent purpose, above and beyond the
genetically-encoded interests of organisms themselves. That would require a higher-order explanation, and the Complexity paper presents what I regard as the most promising alternative of this sort. It’s an idea based on Lee Smolin’s theory of cosmological natural selection, which he first proposed in 1992 and presented most fully in his book The Life of the Cosmos.