The Keys to This Book

We begin with a vignette drawn from a single activity of just one from among the millions of species with whom we share the earth. This description is taken from the biologist, novelist, and science philosopher, E. L. Grant Watson, who in turn is compactly summarizing observations by one of the world’s great entomologists, who lived during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries:

And so (focusing on the wasp’s offspring) we picture in our imaginations a minuscule creature, with the nascent intelligence of an insect newly hatched from its egg, immediately setting out upon a journey by descending an almost invisible, yet reliably strong thread spun by itself — all because it needs a bite of food. And it then quickly retreats back up the thread (a remarkable physical feat) because its existence is threatened by larvae far more massive than itself.

That word “because” — due to the cause of — is central to a science concerned with the causes of things. But the usage here, referring to a creature’s need and its effort to preserve its own existence, is as far removed from the word’s preferred scientific employment as the little drama of the potter wasp’s performance is from the events of the nonliving world. Purely physical stuff is not characterized by need, effort, or a drive toward self-preservation.

The seemingly irreducible difference between living beings and inanimate phenomena is not something many scientific students of life are fond of. That is why they have invested heavily in an abstract evolutionary drama of nearly miraculous character in order to explain the difference away. As Lila Gatlin, a prominent biochemist, mathematician, and shaper of evolutionary theory in the twentieth century, once acknowledged, “The words ‘natural selection’ play a role in the vocabulary of the evolutionary biologist similar to the word ‘god’ in ordinary language” (quoted in Oyama 2000, p. 31). In effect (as we will see in later chapters), the organism’s living wisdom was transferred to an omnipotent “force” of evolution, where it could be kept safely out of sight, obscured behind an elaborate technical and mechanistic terminology.

The story of the potter wasp will strike most people as truly amazing. What is not so often realized is that we can discover more or less the same improbable story in all biological activity once it is investigated deeply enough. Oddly, however, scientists who are trying to interest the general public in the findings of science, do not all that often relate such stories — not, at least, with a proper acknowledgement of how inexplicable they are in terms of our current science. It is more likely that we will find in the scientific literature celebrations of the logic of natural selection and how it is supposed to explain everything about life.

An aim of this book is to recapture the drama of life in the place where it actually occurs — in organisms themselves — and to lay bare as clearly as possible the failure of the reigning evolutionary theory to explain the special qualities of that drama. This will be a matter of showing that, in a primary sense, the life of organisms explains evolution, rather than being explained by it.

Meanwhile, all may agree that our wonder at the potter wasp’s behavior is perfectly natural. And we can rightly be confident of the further marvels we would encounter if we looked into the wasp’s mating and reproductive processes, or inquired how it perceives a world and effectively navigates the features of that world. Or how it searches out prey for its young. Or how its body gains and sustains its staggeringly intricate and complex physical form, all the way down to the pattern of its molecular interactions.

We find ourselves woven into a fabric of earthly life so diverse and luxuriant and nearly incomprehensible in its wondrous displays that we cannot survey or even imagine a billionth part of it. But then, too, there is this: the wasp’s capacities, like those of countless other creatures, seem in some regards wholly routine, familiar, and even human-like to us. In fact, they so powerfully remind us of our own skills and intelligence that we are continually tempted to project our own sort of experience onto other organisms.

On one hand, no scientist would — or should — say, with anything like the human meaning and feeling of the words, “The potter wasp takes great care to make thoughtful provision for its young”. On the other hand, we can hardly avoid our scientific responsibility to ask, “How is it that the performance of the potter wasp so forcibly reminds us of what, in our own evolutionary development, has become ‘taking great care to make thoughtful provision for our young’? Could the two kinds of behavior arise from wholly disparate roots in the history of life on earth, despite appearances?”

Perhaps the best place to start answering that question is with a resolve not to compromise any side of the truth merely because we are philosophically uncomfortable with its apparent implications. In particular, we ought not to twist our understanding out of shape due to a historically conditioned revulsion against anything like a purposive dimension to life processes. Nor should we be unwilling to acknowledge the ways in which all organisms behave as more or less centered agents in the world. Nor again ought we to respect any presumed rule in biology that says, with blatant self-contradiction, “Some human traits appearing in our evolutionary history are unnatural and cannot be referred to in a properly ‘naturalized’ science”.

Oddly, those who most eagerly remind us that “humans belong to the animal kingdom” often seem the ones most reluctant to embrace the flip side of this truth: all animals have arisen within the same drama of evolving life that, we now know, also happened to be in the business of producing humans. If we want to say that humans share in the nature of all animals, how can we then turn around and ignore the obvious implication that all animals share something of the nature of humans?

Here I would like to summarize, ever so briefly, certain themes suggesting what sort of book you are reading:

Theme #1: Narrative
Meaningful life stories are the primary subject matter of biology.

Every organism (I am now speaking primarily of animals) is weaving a life story — or, perhaps better, is actively participating, or caught up, in a life story, a meaningful narrative. The description of the potter wasp above is one episode in one such story. These stories are future-oriented in a manner roughly analogous to a biographical or historical narrative. That’s why so much of biology concerns the development of organisms — a word no one would use in the same sense for geological strata or clouds. Biological narratives depict the meaningful activity through which organisms progressively express and realize their own potentials.

We may often think of these narratives as thoroughly intentional, task-centered (end-directed), and carefully planned. This is highly problematic, since organisms do not, in the human sense, plan their actions. Nevertheless, there is something unavoidable in this usage. Organisms are not wholly other than humans. We do witness in every organism a striking coordination of diverse means in the service of its own needs and interests — a coordination that is generally contextualized within a larger community of beings and interests.

The animal’s capacity for story-like, “directive” activity (see the definitional hints below) is simply what we observe. It’s an objective capacity, and it remains there for us to observe regardless of whether an organism is self-aware and highly individuated — regardless of whether it subjectively conceives intentions for itself in a human-like fashion. The bare fact of something like intention is written all over the potter wasp’s behavior. If our scientific understanding teaches us to avoid the all too natural but wrongheaded idea of a “goal” being “aimed at”, this should not scare us away from recognizing the full sense of the wasp’s performance in its own evident terms, or prevent us from acknowledging the playing out before our eyes of a remarkably apt wisdom — a wisdom we can hardly understand as anything other than a present, moment-by-moment activity of some form of consciousness.³

In Chapter 25 we will look at the distinction between possessing one’s intentions in the rather free and conscious way we humans do (when we are fully awake), and being possessed by them, which seems to be the potter wasp’s case. These are very different conditions, and the difference is one we might want to think about. After all, we ourselves can sometimes become aware of meanings and intentions that once lay far below (or above?) our conscious willing and planning, and that therefore possessed us more than the other way around.

Much of what I have just said requires us to acknowledge the organism — and particularly every animal — as a focal agent, a being capable of inhabiting its own story, and a being whose causal activity is locally centered and distinct from the more general regularities we observe in the inanimate world. At the same time, every organism is interwoven with that inanimate surround, whose substance and lawfulness it makes into a means for its own self-expression.

Theme #2: Interiority
Every animal’s life narrative is an outward expression of interior meaning.

It may be that when humans communicate, there is nothing (apart from certain instances of spoken and written language) more richly and specifically informative than the expressions of the human face. Much of our life is shaped and guided by the facial expressions all around us. What these expressions tell us, however, cannot be reduced to the physical-causal terms of facial musculature, skeleton, and flesh. That which bears the expression is indeed outward, material, and physically lawful. But what is expressed is, we can reasonably say, interior. Sadness, pensiveness, elation, doubt, anger, vexation, impatience, uncertainty, satisfaction — these possess, at least in part, a non-spatial character. Or again: while the material embodiment of what is expressed is both real and spatial, what is expressed through the outward manifestation is real but not spatial. So the word “interior” is problematic; it typically suggests a spatial relation, whereas I am using it to suggest something like “not out there in a sense-perceptible or spatially locatable sense”.

We look through and by means of faces as material manifestations in order to see the interior meanings they are expressing. It is much the same as with spoken words, whose interior meanings are not revealed so long as we are noticing the words only as sense-perceptible sounds. We must “hear through” the sounds so as to grasp their immaterial and interior meaning.

But it is not just humans. All living performance expresses one or another form of interiority. In our own case: if I walk to the corner store in order to buy a gift for a grandchild, what I am doing can never be captured by what we think of as a purely physical description of the movement of my legs and arms, vocal apparatus, and so on. So, too, with an animal engaged in anything we would call “behavior”. The meaning of the behavior — whether a courtship ritual, or burial of food, or tracking of a scent, or flight, or digging of a burrow — can never be described in strictly physical terms (if such strict terms are ever possible).

Further, as I try to suggest throughout this book, even our descriptions of cellular and molecular “behavior” refuse to be altogether cleansed of interiority. When we look at cellular goings-on, we can always recognize a meaning or an end — what a biological activity is about (for example, synthesis of a protein, or extraction of usable energy from a substance) — and our biological inquiries are guided by this meaning. Meaning itself is never spatial or sense-perceptible, even if spatial structures are required for giving material expression to meaning.

A dramatic fact about contemporary biology is that biologists seem to have a horror of interiority, or the non-spatial and non-sense-perceptible. Given that the life of animals is through and through an interior business, this horror is not only perplexing, but also devastating for the prospects of a truly biological science.

Theme #3: Holism
The meaningful, narrative character of life demands its own, holistic style of understanding and explanation.

If the organism’s life, its biological existence, takes narrative form, then our characterization of its life — contrary to conventional notions of explanation — must also take a narrative form. And since a biological narrative, as opposed to a physical or chemical description, is always the expression of (probably multiple) interiors, the narrative must be presented from the interior point of view.

It could hardly be clearer that the elements of a story, like the elements of an organism’s life, can never be considered adequately in isolation from each other. Nothing is absolutely distinct from everything else. The end of a really great novel will be illuminated by its beginning, and the beginning by the end. This interwovenness of the interior narrative amounts to a kind of holism, and in this respect might far more appropriately be compared to sketching a human portrait that captures the true being of someone than to analyzing a machine into discrete parts and causal relations.

However, it is clear that we cannot have holism without also applying the remarkable analytical skills that we humans have so fruitfully gained. It is hard even to conceive how one might sketch an organic whole without having a lucid and detailed awareness of its parts. The need is to hold together the complementary movements of thought — the synthetic (holistic) and the analytical.

When we pursue a one-sided method of reductive analysis, we analyze things into discrete parts, then analyze the parts into sub-parts, and so on. Presumably the process stops at some significant bottom. But what if, having arrived at that bottom, we still have not stopped to characterize anything for itself? If our analytical descent hasn’t led us to anything of which we can say, “I now know what that sort of thing is” instead of “Let’s also divide this thing up”, where would the significance of the entire process lie?

If there is to be a counter-movement to analysis, it depends on things revealing something about themselves, so that we can do more than merely refer them to still other, smaller things. So long as we merely say, “This thing consists of such-and-such other things”, and the other things, rather than being characterized in their own terms, are said to be constituted by still other uncharacterized things, we do not have any this or that at all. If nothing “speaks” to us of its own character — if all we have are words that are our own, bare, meaningless labels for a mute whole and its mute parts — then we have no hope of scientific understanding.

And something like this appears to have happened. Instead of landing at the end of our analysis in bedrock, supportive, and knowable territory, we have actually found ourselves in an alien place, where we can say virtually nothing from experience and observation about what is “really there”. Particle physicists have an interesting story to tell biologists about the perplexities encountered at the bottom — so “interesting”, in fact, that the effort to describe relevant phenomena in meaningful words is often considered disreputable in physics. As the physicist Robert March put it:

We should never have expected words born in the familiar world readily accessible to our senses, such as particle and wave, to perfectly describe the microcosm. The electron is what it is, and if the words we use to describe it seem full of paradox, so much the worse for those words. The equations have it pinned down neatly (March 1977, p. 235).

Unfortunately, equations alone do not give us a material world, but only a realm of discarnate thought.

The interesting thing, however, is to notice how our science rises above such emptiness. We do say meaningful things in science, and this is because the meaningful counter-movement to analysis is inescapable — although generally not noticed for what it is. After all, in order to analyze a whole into parts, we must start with an already recognized whole, and then we must recognize each part as a significant part — as a meaningful whole in its own right. This recognition of wholes, however unconscious it tends to be, is fully qualitative, contrary to our usual ideas of science (Chapter 24), and it requires a movement of understanding that runs contrary to analysis.

The synthetic, or holistic, counter-movement to analysis is implicit in the biologist’s frequent reference to the “context-dependence” of biological processes (Chapter 6). The problem is that the implication here — the implication that there is a kind of influence or causation running from a collective, complex whole toward its parts — has drawn little reflection and has had little effect on the underlying assumptions of biologists. “Context” is one of the most common words used by geneticists and molecular biologists. But it seems that no one is much interested in asking what the term actually means.

“Holism”, by contrast — and despite its being hardly separable conceptually from “context-dependence” — has become a kind of “devil word” in biology, a fact ironically coexisting with a refusal to consider the issues implicit in current, context-centered biological language.

In this book “holism” will simply be taken for granted from the beginning. But, unlike “context-dependence” in the existing literature, the meaning of “holism” will be consciously and explicitly drawn out as we go along.

Theme #4: Blindsight
A kind of blindsight is evident in much of biology.

Living narratives, as observed, for example, in all animals, are in fact recognized within biology. For example, they provide the structure for research projects. These typically have to do with how an organism accomplishes this or that function, or task, such as obtaining food, or maintaining bodily temperature at an acceptable level, or, in the case of many cells, achieving cell division. (Rocks and streams do not have tasks.) But something rather like a taboo seems to require biologists to ignore all this in their scientific explanations. They are allowed to discuss only physical “mechanisms” that make no inherent reference to — and therefore do not explain — the task-nature of the problems that prompted biological inquiry in the first place.

In fact, most biologists speak in many contexts as if they were unaware of what they actually know about the organism’s end-directed activity. This is understandable: it is easy to see how the cognitive dissonance between what they intuitively know of organic agency and what the taboo allows them to say (or think) in their biological explanations might prove intolerable if brought fully to mind.

This might bring to our minds the curious and well-known phenomenon called “blindsight”. It works like this. Suppose there is a certain life-sized statue on the floor of a museum I am exploring. If, for some reason, I suffer from blindsight about the statue and am asked about it, I might truthfully reply, “What statue? I don’t see anything there.” But then, in wandering about the room, I am observed always to walk carefully around the statue rather than bump into it. Clearly, in some sense I do see it, even while remaining consciously unaware of (and even denying) what I see.

My suggestion, then, is that something analogous to this phenomenon works powerfully within biology today. Biologists carefully walk around the fact of the animal’s narrative agency, even while every biological (as opposed to physical and chemical) question they ask affirms their knowledge of this agency. One result is that much about the true character of animals (and organisms generally) comes through in the biological sciences despite the biologist’s explicit denials. Bringing attention to the great mass of obscured truth already “seen”, if only blindsightedly, is a lot of what this book is about.

But another result of blindsight is that, so far as explicit theory and philosophy are concerned, biology suffers from the deepest possible distortions. We end up with living processes theoretically stripped of their life — this despite the fact that we ourselves know this life more directly and intimately than we know anything about the non-living world.

What is needed, according to the late Harvard geneticist, Richard Lewontin, is for biologists “to take seriously what we already know to be true” (Lewontin 2000, p. 113).

Agency. Humans are agents — we possess agency, because we possess an awareness of our world and can act in it. We help to create the situations in which we live, instead of merely being determined by them. The cells of our bodies clearly can participate in our agency by giving expression to it, as when we move our limbs intentionally. But we would never say of those cells as such that they possess awareness or agency, as opposed to moving with an agency not fully their own. This is suggestive of the kinds of distinction we must make between ourselves and other organisms, all the way down to single-celled organisms.

I know of no reason not to believe that, just as the intention of a human individual can play through trillions of cells, so also, though perhaps in a somewhat different manner, an intention can play through a collection of bacteria in a bacterial film (evident, for example, in “quorum sensing”), as well as through the members of a termite colony, or any species at all so far as its members share a common way of being — and indeed in human society in ways of which we are scarcely conscious.

See also Intention/Intentional below.

Archetype. The archetypal idea of an organism is its dynamic, adaptive, evolving way of inhabiting, and remaining true to, its type.

Atoms/Molecules. You will find comments here and there in this book suggesting something about the unreality of atoms and molecules. The effort is to emphasize that in the submicroscopic realm we are dealing with theoretical constructs that do not have the reality required by an empirical science — the reality of sense-perceptible experience. The problems arise, as physicists well know, when we endow certain constructs such as wave or particle with imagery derived from our experience of the material world. Then we are dealing with invented unrealities, and these tend to mock us when we try to make sense of our experiments.

I attempt to show in Chapter 24 that we have little choice but to assume that the reality the world possesses is a reality appearing, and only appearing, in all the possible forms of experience. To make any other assumption is to speak ignorantly — to talk about what cannot be known from experience. The nice thing is that when we do start with the assumption that reality is objective appearance, it begins to justify itself in our understanding with gratifying fullness.

Blindsight. See Theme #4 above.

Directive. E. S. Russell, a marine biologist and proponent of “organismal biology” during the first half of the twentieth century, adopted the word “directive”, as in the title of his wonderful book, The Directiveness of Organic Activities (Russell 1945). He chose this less familiar word in order to encourage in his readers an awareness of the distinctions between human end-directed activity and the activity of animals. I will, in part, follow suit, although I will also freely use “directed” or “end-directed” in the conviction that we need to cultivate, not only an awareness of the differences between humans and animals, but also of the connections.

Biological activity is directed in the immediate sense of the word — directed in the way the development of a squid or fox or ape is directed from the zygote toward the adult form, and will take extraordinary steps to achieve that form in the event of a disturbance. This remains true even though the process is not at all consciously directed in the manner of our own willed activity. For that matter, neither is our human movement from zygote to adult form consciously directed by ourselves. See also “telos-realizing” below.

Holism. See Theme #3 above.

Integral unity of the organism. When I use something more or less like this phrase, I intend it as an active concept in Aristotle’s sense of “being at work staying itself” (in Joe Sachs’ translation of Aristotle’s entelecheia — Sachs 1998, p. 245). Through this activity, the parts of an organism arise within a differentiating whole; they are not assembled together as pre-existing building blocks in order to make a whole. The integral unity is actively there from the start, and is not at any point imposed from outside. It is a unity because each part reflects — or participates in and remains consistent with — the nature of the whole from which it arose.

Intention/intentional. I try to use these words as far as possible in their routine, day-to-day meaning. We recognize intentions by observing the guiding principles and meanings at work in an activity. It needs noting, however, that we humans can intentionally do something not only through careful planning, but also unconsciously, as when we notice a traffic irregularity while driving a car and engaging in conversation, despite the fact that we were paying no conscious attention to the road. It is much the same when we ride a bicycle while quite unconscious of any intention to remain upright and balanced on the bike. So, as in a number of these notes on words, we need to observe a caution: we should never ascribe our own sort of consciousness to other organisms, who seem to function quite well by means of intentions that do not originate in (their own) consciously willed activity.

But in all cases I take such intentions to be functions of mind. The difficult question regarding organisms is “Whose mind?” Whose mind accounts for the archetype, or shared way of being, among the members of a species? And I did say difficult question. Not all questions currently facing us in biology have obvious answers. But it seems to me important for biologists to notice that, in all organic performance, we are, in one way or another, looking at the activity of mind as well as body. Even in some of our human activity we can recognize a kind of unconscious, collective “supra-mind”, not fully our own, taking hold of us in a crowd, as in a football stadium.

Interiority. See Theme #2 above.

Material. Accessible through our senses.

Material/physical/materialist. I speak broadly of “the material world” as the world we routinely experience, the world we live and move in. “Material” and “physical” might be taken as rough synonyms, but I preferentially use “material” when speaking about the sensible world as we actually know it, and I use “physical” when emphasizing the habits of thought that come to the fore when, as materialists, we are thinking theoretically about the nature of the world and trying to conceive it purely in terms of physical entities and processes conceived as mindless and having nothing to do with our own interiority. So I might say on one hand that the organism adapts to its material environment, but, on the other hand, that we are commonly thought to live in a world subject only to physical laws. But there is no strict line between these terms, and doubtless no full consistency in my usage.

Problems arise because the idea of the “strictly physical” is incoherent: physical laws are ideal and conceptual, not mindless in the sense of “physical” usually taken for granted. My use of the word is a bit schizoid, since I may use it in the materialistic sense (“inanimate, mind-independent”), especially when trying to represent a materialistic point of view; or I may use it in a more neutral fashion as a synonym for “material” (“sense-perceptible”).

Please note that whatever is sense-perceptible — whatever is available as a content of science — has an irreducibly interior character. It’s only reality for us is as a content of consciousness. And we have good reason for saying that this appearing to consciousness reflects the material world’s essential nature. See Chapter 24, “How the World Lends Itself to Our Knowing”.

Meaning. All coherent descriptive content is meaningful, a fact already implicit in the word “coherent”. (“Coherent” in common usage just means “hanging together in a meaningful way”.) Meaning seems to us problematic only because we have materialist mindsets as a cultural inheritance, and because meaning is so thoroughly inescapable, like a fish’s watery environment, that we have a hard time stepping back and seeing it for what it is. The sea of meaning is that from which we are born and in terms of which we continue to live and finally die. We cannot do anything or say anything or pursue any science without the doing, saying, or pursuing being an expression of meaning.

Some people have a very difficult time with any use of the word “meaning” in a scientific context. It’s worth setting this difficulty alongside the simple fact that the only things we know about the world are meanings. Meaninglessness would not yield itself to knowing articulation, as in science.

And so meaning can hardly be questioned. The effort to question or define it — or just point to it — assumes that the person being addressed already possesses a working understanding of meaning, such as the meaning of a pointing finger. Acting out meanings is pretty much the only thing we do with our lives. The same thing is true of organisms generally, all the way down to one-celled creatures — except that they lack the capacity for conscious awareness of the meanings at work in their lives. The interesting questions have to do with the different meanings at work in different kinds of organism.

The fact that we are dealing with the fundamental basis of life when we use this term is hardly a reason to avoid it in biology. The (always unsuccessful) effort of avoidance is perhaps the central pathology of contemporary biological thought and practice. In a thousand ways the taboo against any suggestion of meaningfulness makes a fool of scientists and nonsense of their language.

Narrative. See Theme #1 above.

Telos-realizing. Telos (“end”) is often taken to refer to final causation — to the end we humans are aiming at when we formulate plans. But, consistent with the Greek term, it may be more useful to take the “end” as a matter of self-realization, which is the “being at work remaining oneself” referred to under “Integral unity of the organism” above. Or, we might say, “being oneself ever differently”. It’s a matter of bringing what one is to ever fuller and ever different expression — taking always a further (new) step in expressing one’s own nature. Only in the human case does this involve a creative awareness whereby an action becomes intimately our own.

Regarding the ideas conveyed by “end”, “self-realization”, and “holism”, we have this incisive comment by the philosopher Ronald Brady: An organism’s biological development “does not proceed towards [a] whole, but rather expresses it” (Brady 1987). It is, however, hard to find words that capture the meaningful coordination of processes in the achievement of a certain result without seeming to imply an external goal. The alert reader will need to make an inner adjustment whenever encountering language that sounds external-goal-directed.

See also the word “directive” above.

But while the themes and underlying convictions shaping the character of the book lie far outside mainstream thinking, I offer no new or revolutionary findings in biology or evolutionary theory — and would lack the qualifications for doing so even if that were my inclination. Instead, I merely ask: What would biology and evolutionary theory look like if we overcame our blindsight and reckoned with the stories of organisms as we actually observed them? Can we allow ourselves to see with restored vision?

And so there will be no occasion for readers to ask, “Where is all the new evidence?” The evidence supporting my contentions here — as I try to show chapter by chapter — amounts to just about everything biologists have already recognized as truth, however much they might prefer not to acknowledge the gifts of their own insight. This is why you will not find me straining toward the fringes of biology, but rather citing, with very few exceptions, one fully accredited researcher and theorist after another. The case for a thoroughly disruptive re-thinking of organisms and their evolution has long been staring us in the face.

A second note is not unrelated to the first. Throughout this book I have, to a degree, tuned my vocabulary to the more complex animals with which we are most familiar, although the language could readily be adjusted to reflect the intelligent life processes in bacteria, plants, and other groups. Many will say that this is to ignore what are by far the most abundant creatures on earth. Perhaps so. But I am convinced that, contrary to the usual intuitions, the “higher” organisms are key to understanding the “lower”, not the reverse.

This is true in the indisputable sense that the kind of understanding we are looking for emerges only in humans, so that we are the only organisms capable of understanding other beings in a scientific manner. But I believe it is also true in the sense that those organisms more fully manifesting the potentials of life do in fact more fully manifest the potentials of life.

At the same time, we have no reason to think that the intelligence working through the material limitations of, say, bacteria is a “lower” or less capable intelligence than that which is at work in ourselves — or that the intelligence at work in our own cells is lower than what works in our conscious minds. Actually, our cellular intelligence quite evidently far transcends our conscious capacities. We can say this without doubting that the arrival of a self-aware sort of consciousness is a pivotal development in the evolution of life. It’s just that we have no grounds for arrogance regarding our current conscious achievements. These achievements are, in the overall context of life on earth, humble indeed!

Notes

1. Figure 1.1 credit: Rama Warrier (CC BY-SA 4.0).

2. Figure 1.2 credit: Pollinator (CC BY-SA 3.0)

3. It is so easy to forget that the implanted “wisdom” — a wisdom from the past — that we ascribe to an unconscious machine always has its origin in a prior, conscious, designing activity of a person. And the playing out of that wisdom in the machine is radically different from its direct playing out in whatever sort of consciousness acts now in a living being. Organisms are not designed machines. This truth is underscored time and again in the following chapters. The machine-understanding of organisms, which so much of current biological thinking shares with so much of intelligent design theory, needs to be overcome.

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Steve Talbott :: The Keys to This Book