Quote of the Week
(April 21, 2025)

We have arrived at a simple truth: the biologist’s sense of threatening mystery (or “mysticism”) when confronted with the intentional, purposive, and meaningfully expressive aspects of an organism’s life typically arises from the unshakable conviction that there needs to be an essentially inanimate explanation of animate beings. As an insistence, this is mere dogma. The requirement of science is that we open-mindedly describe every aspect of every phenomenon in its own terms. It does not require a lot of reflection to see, for example, that organic processes of development and self-realization do not have strictly physical descriptions. Inanimate objects do not persistently and directively engage in efforts to develop and realize themselves.

But this does not mean we are headed toward some kind of mystical conception of the organism. As we will see increasingly in coming chapters, the different aspects of the organism (including the more-than-physical — ideal or archetypal — aspects) require only what all science requires: description in terms that are faithful to the phenomena themselves. To describe the marvelous living coherence of molecular processes in an organism’s cells is no more mystical than to describe the very different but just as marvelous coherence of the laws of physics. It merely requires a willingness to embrace what we see, rather than recoil from it.

(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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