Quote of the Week
(March 31, 2025)

Efforts at reductionism — efforts to reduce biological meaning to the terms of physical lawfulness — never make any progress. Yes, we have dramatically extended our tracing of physical lawfulness in the cell. But, for all the flood of physical data today, the needs, interests, tasks, intentions, and meanings of the organism never become less necessary for structuring our understanding.

What actually tends to happen, however, is not particularly helpful. Once the clarification of physically lawful processes reaches a certain point, the biologist’s deeply ingrained habit of ignoring all questions of meaning leads to the conviction that nothing remains to be understood. And this occurs despite the continuing use, “right under the biologist’s nose”, of a vocabulary of life and meaning well designed to bridge (and conceal) the gap between lawfulness and adequate understanding. (See, for example, the discussion in Chapter 2 of the different vocabularies applied to living and dead dogs.)

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

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