Quote of the Week
(July 7, 2025)

It is important to get clear about the nature of causation in biology. It differs from the problem of causation in the physical sciences. Organisms manifest a fluid, integral, harmonizing sort of causation that is more like a play of the multi-dimensional reasons for things than a set of one-dimensional mechanical interactions. It is more like the rich interplay of meaning in an unfolding poem than a rigid syntax or logic.

And yet, despite all this, biologists seem fixated on the “fundamental issue” of distinguishing clear-cut cause from clear-cut effect in the usual physical sense. That’s why we hear statements to the effect that “despite intensive studies of genome organization in the past decade, a fundamental issue remains regarding genomic interactions and genome organization as a cause or a consequence of gene expression. This problem is also pertinent to RNAs, which may have regulatory functions in transcription rather than being simply products of transcription” (Li and Fu 2019).

Unfortunately, there is little if any effort to elucidate just what hangs upon this “fundamental issue” — or what might be the implications of the fact that the issue appears irresolvable so long as we insist upon unambiguous physical causation as the basis for biological understanding.

(from Chapter 9, “A Mess of Causes”, in Organisms and Their Evolution — Agency and Meaning in the Drama of Life)

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