As I sat in the kitchen one evening, a stray ping-pong ball fell off the counter and onto our tile floor. Ginger, a large black cat with white chest and white paws, leaped from the seat beside me onto the floor. She started whacking the ball off the wall and chasing its random rebounds. Eventually she began striking the ball at such an angle that it consistently came back to her. I tried to retrieve both ball and cat, only to be rebuffed with a disapproving meow. The game itself was obviously her passion of the moment. I was awestruck by her skill and tenacity, like a tennis pro sharpening volleys against a gymnasium wall.

Ginger’s game reminded me of a famous experiment with kittens. Two batches of kittens are raised in the dark and then exposed to light in different ways. One group is allowed to coordinate its visual, olfactory and touch experiences as it moves through the environment; the others are carried around in baskets as they experience the same illuminated environment. Once released on its own, the first group thrives. The second group, however, acts almost as though it were blind, continually bumping into objects.

A cat’s knowledge of the world is inseparable from its interactions with that world.

Cats that engage their world develop the skills and the knowledge to survive in it. What is true for cats is true for human beings in spades. Modern neurology suggests that the brain, far from being a passive receptor of material that is out there, very much depends on our interaction with the world, much of which subsists below the level of conscious awareness. This raises an important question. If knowing the world is also dependent on feedback loops of varying speeds and intensities with a world we continually alter, can our knowledge ever be final? Can the nature that we know be fully predictable?

I have little doubt that both my cat and I evolved from more primitive beings. Neither of us would exist were it not for a long series of developments. But to acknowledge that neither of us would have existed without our primitive predecessors is not to argue that either of us had to be or that if we could somehow go back to historical square one and push the play button, Ginger and wall ball would once again emerge.

The hardest forms of the hard sciences, going back to Newton, assumed that if we knew all the initial conditions, rewound to those conditions, and let the tape play forward again, we would see the same results. The arrow of time could move in either direction.

Can we understand evolution in such terms? For the higher organisms, sex selection and mutation can produce differences among individual members of a species. Environmental factors then lead to a process of natural selection with those best adapted managing to survive.

Mutations and environmental constraints are great black boxes and both interact in complex ways. Some evolutionary biologists themselves now understand evolution as a path that might have taken other directions. Science may be able to predict circumstances in which mutations are more likely. It may be able to spell out limits beyond which particular mutations are unlikely to go in any instant. “Tiger, tiger, burning bright” is unlikely to become Tiger Woods overnight. But will the course of evolution ever be fully predictable?

I am skeptical that matter – even inanimate matter – is so cooperative as to allow itself to be fully trapped by laws with the rigidity of Hammurabi’s Code. Nor do I think that Ginger or I or our distant ancestors were intelligently designed or created de novo by God. Any designer who assures the buoyancy of the human head with sinuses that serve primarily to culture infections should be sued for malpractice.

The Roman poet Lucretius suggested that atoms in the void descend in smooth and predictable patterns most of the time, but from time to time they swerve in unpredictable ways. Human beings can and must work to comprehend and clarify the regularities, but disruptions there will be. We best attune ourselves to the possibility. They will bring death, but also rare and unexpected beauty so we must still the futile urge to curse our God or our fate. Life itself is the gift of these moments of matter’s unpredictability

When our pets, let alone our family and close friends die, it leaves a hole in our very being. Some seek compensation through their faith in an inscrutable yet presumptively omniscient God. Others look to a faith that science may one day fully understand and predict the course of life. From my perspective, Ginger is neither designed nor the product of mechanistic laws. Her skillful wall ball is a gift of an ever-bounteous nature. I strive to cultivate an appreciation for her spontaneous games and spunky behavior. By comparison, heaven’s eternal bliss might be quite boring.

John Buell is a political economist who lives in Southwest Harbor. Readers may contact him at jbuell@acadia.net.