Quote of the Week
(November 17, 2025)

[Biologist Sean] Carroll’s whole approach raises one other concern, perhaps the most fundamental of all. All form seems to be essentially qualitative. And this has to do with the fact that to apprehend an appearance is to grasp at least part of its meaning. We see directly, perceptually — not only through technical analysis — what constitutes it a this rather than a that, a redwood rather than a willow, a squirrel rather than a chipmunk, a virtuous act rather than a dastardly one. When we try to capture such differences in words, we always slip into a qualitative language — for example, the language of art — even if we immediately obscure that language behind the terminology of mechanism.

This brings us to the underlying difficulty that Carroll (and biologists generally) run up against. Their physical world has, in the style of nineteenth-century classical physics, finally been reduced to inert, mindless, and therefore qualityless, particles. These particles can have nothing to do with the reality of inherently qualitative form. And so, in order to make sense of Carroll’s non-explanatory explanations, readers must superimpose upon his toolbox language whatever pictures of form they have gained from his illustrations. And then, as I have already pointed out, all they have is form related to form. But this form — true form — qualitative as it inevitably is, remains wholly disconnected from Carroll’s tools, switches, and networks. There is, from the standpoint of contemporary science, no bridge from a mechanistic to a qualitative understanding. The only bridge we have runs in the reverse direction: we make what sense we can of those switches and networks by viewing them in terms of meaningful and purposeful form, not the other way around. There is nothing about a set of switches and networks as such that causally explains the purposes to which they are put – nothing that explains their formal and meaningful patterns of activity.

(from Chapter 11, “Why We Cannot Explain the Form of Organisms”, in Organisms and Their Evolution — Agency and Meaning in the Drama of Life)

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