Quote of the Week
(September 8, 2025)

Of course, researchers have traced, in wound healing, all sorts of molecular syntheses, movements, and interactions. We can be sure that everything in the entire picture proceeds lawfully, and in this very constricted sense every local event looks necessary. And yet we can find no combination of physical laws capable of “enforcing” the proper form of all the different parts of the body of this or that animal. In the case of a wound, there is no purely physical necessity to achieve the “proper” form in the face of wildly variable conditions.

In other words, the mere fact of physical lawfulness does not explain the coordination of events along an extended timeline in the narrative of healing, from infliction of the wound to the final restoration of normalcy. Nor does it explain the narrative of RNA splicing, from the occurrence of an RNA molecule in need of reconfiguration, to the final product of those scores or hundreds of participating molecular “surgeons.” We can watch the molecules performing in a way that gives expression to the overall sense, or meaning, of the activity, but we do not have even the barest beginnings of a purely physical explanation for their commitment to that meaning.

(from Chapter 10, “What Is the Problem of Form?”, in Organisms and Their Evolution — Agency and Meaning in the Drama of Life)

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