Quote of the Week
(June 23, 2025)

The powerful compulsion to identify decisive causes, even at the expense of painfully self-contradictory language, strongly suggests that a one-sided and unrealizable ideal of biological explanation is at work. Under its influence we aim to discover a physical lawfulness reflecting, above all, our experience with machines — a lawfulness of precise, unambiguous control, where one thing can be said, without unwelcome qualification, to make another thing happen.

Think of a machine. Having conceived what we want it to do, we design it to be a closed system whose intended functioning is more or less immune to contextual interference. And we try to do much the same in many scientific demonstrations. For example, we can create a vacuum in a chamber, and then release a leaf from the top of the chamber. It falls like a stone.

Of course, leaves in nature often travel upward. But the experiment in the chamber enables us to observe the singular and lawful play of gravity, without any disturbing “interference” from the resistance or movement of air. We can then — and only then — say that gravity appears to make the leaf fall, just as the simple laws governing the gears and springs of a mechanical watch make the watch perform as a reliable keeper of time.

But when the biologist tries to see an animal in the same mechanistic light, as a closed system without interfering factors, the attempt fails miserably. This is because, for the animal, contextual interference is the whole point. As the meaning of its activity shifts from moment to moment, so, too, does the contextual significance of all the details of its life. For example, when a deer is grazing in a meadow, its glimpse of a vaguely canine form in the distance changes the meaning of everything from the flowers and grass the deer was eating, to its own internal digestive processes, to the expression of its genes. This happens, not because the distant form is exerting some strange physical force upon the deer, but because that form becomes part of a now suddenly shifted pattern of meaning.

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

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