Quote of the Week
(July 22, 2024)

I suspect that, with continuing observation and faithful description, the “problem” of order and wisdom (thought-fullness) in cells will more and more fade into nothingness. It is indeed only the effort at reductionism that creates the problem. Cease that effort, and all we have left is the routine scientific task of accurate conceptualization and description. Physicists, after arriving at concepts of law, force, field, and all the rest, do not often complain, “Those are not material things; how can we possibly deal with them?” They simply continue investigating, describing, and thinking until an overall, coherent picture is formed. That is what making sense of the world means.

It would be strange if the initially surprising discovery of living and coherent order in the cell persisted as a problem; another name for the discovery of order is, after all, “science”. I suppose that the unexpectedness of at least some forms of order has been part of the scientist’s experience all along. But when we live with it long enough, the unexpected becomes expected. In the end, it simply further strengthens our inalienable sense that we live in a world of coherent meaning.

But this happy ending will not be fully realized in biology until we acknowledge that there are many different ways phenomena can add up to a coherent picture in this cosmos of ours. A sloth is not a lion, ice is not water vapor, and an animal is not a rock. Reductively forcing one sort of coherence into the mold of another by intellectual violence is never the answer.

(from Chapter 8, “The Mystery of an Unexpected Coherence”, in Organisms and Their Evolution — Agency and Meaning in the Drama of Life)

— See all quotes to date