Quotes of the Week
The following texts have been used as “Quote of the Week” on the
web page at https://bwo.life. For general
browsing, it is probably advisable to read from the bottom of the file
upward, due to the way the quotes have been selected. Starting January 2,
2023, the quotes have been drawn from the freely available online book,
“Organisms and Their Evolution — Agency and
Meaning in the Drama of Life.
December 9, 2024
[On likening organisms to cybernetic machines:]
Surely it is difficult to find much commonality between the transformation
of a single zygotic cell into a mature eagle, on one hand, and the
“development” of a cruise missile, on the other. If, before venturing upon
its flight, the missile were to “mature” from a single transistor (or
circuit board) into the totality of a functioning, deadly efficient
vehicle; and if, during its flight, all its physical constituents were
metabolizing and metamorphosing as an essential part of the overall
operation; and if, instead of a single goal, there were a massively
interwoven and nearly infinite collection of goals governing each of
the missile’s “organs”, each “cell”, the entire missile as a whole, and
all its environmental relations — well, as you can see, taking the
comparison with living beings seriously could get silly fast.
(from Chapter 10, “What is the Problem of Form?”, in
Organisms and
Their Evolution — Agency and Meaning in the Drama of Life)
December 2, 2024
In the summer of 2011 a team of researchers at Tufts University produced a
startling, time-lapse video of a developing tadpole embryo. Due to the
use of special dyes reporting the electric potentials across cell
membranes, areas of the embryonic surface successively lit up brightly and
then went dark. For a few seconds of the time-lapse film (representing the
events of several hours), the featureless part of the embryo that would
eventually become the animal’s head flashed the image of a tadpole face.
But no actual face had yet developed. Nevertheless, the electrical pattern
did “signal” where key elements of the tadpole’s face, such as its eyes,
would eventually appear. Regional changes in electric potential, these
scientists concluded, “regulate expression of genes involved in
craniofacial development”.
According to Michael Levin, head of the laboratory where the tadpole
research was performed, “Ion flows and the resulting [membrane voltage]
changes are components of long-range conversations that orchestrate
cellular activities during embryonic development, regeneration, and …
tumor suppression”. He adds that “bioelectric cues are increasingly being
found to be an important regulator of cell behavior”, controlling the
proliferation and death of cells, their migration and orientation, and
their differentiation into different cell types ...
Levin’s team quickly went on to manipulate the distribution of membrane
voltages in developing embryos so as to provoke the generation of eyes in
decidedly unexpected places — for example, on the back and tail, and even
in the gut, of a frog embryo. The results were fragmentary and rather
chaotic — the ectopic (“out of place”) eyes were partial or deformed — but
the result was nevertheless as startling as it was monstrous.
(from Chapter 10, “What is the Problem of Form?”, in
Organisms and
Their Evolution — Agency and Meaning in the Drama of Life)
November 25, 2024
[Regarding various healing processes:] Of course, researchers have traced
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)
November 18, 2024
Here is a description offered by English biologist Brian Ford:
“Surgery is war. It is impossible to envisage the sheer complexity of what
happens within a surgical wound. It is a microscopical scene of
devastation. Muscle cells have been crudely crushed, nerves ripped
asunder; the scalpel blade has slashed and separated close communities of
tissues, rupturing long-established networks of blood vessels. After the
operation, broken and cut tissues are crushed together by the surgeon’s
crude clamps. There is no circulation of blood or lymph across the suture.
“Yet within seconds of the assault, the single cells are stirred into
action. They use unimaginable senses to detect what has happened and start
to respond. Stem cells specialize to become the spiky-looking cells of the
stratum spinosum [one of the lower layers of the epidermis]; the shattered
capillaries are meticulously repaired, new cells form layers of smooth
muscle in the blood-vessel walls and neat endothelium; nerve fibres extend
towards the site of the suture to restore the tactile senses …
“These phenomena require individual cells to work out what they need to
do. And the ingenious restoration of the blood-vessel network reveals that
there is an over-arching sense of the structure of the whole area in which
this remarkable repair takes place. So too does the restoration of the
skin. Cells that carry out the repair are subtly coordinated so that the
skin surface, the contour of which they cannot surely detect, is restored
in a form that is close to perfect.”
(from Chapter 10, “What is the Problem of Form?”, in
Organisms and
Their Evolution — Agency and Meaning in the Drama of Life)
November 11, 2024
During development, the lens of an amphibian eye derives from the outer
layer of cells in the developing head, at the point where an outgrowth of
the brain comes into contact with the epidermal cells. But if an already
developed lens is removed from one of these animals, something truly
remarkable happens: a new lens forms from the upper edge of the iris, a
structure that has nothing to do with lens formation in normal
development. The procedure runs like this (Gilbert 1994, p. 40):
1. Cells from the upper part of the iris — cells that have already reached
an endpoint of differentiation — begin multiplying;
2. these multiplying cells then proceed to dedifferentiate — that is, to
lose their specialized character, including the pigmentation that gives
the iris its color;
3. the newly multiplied, iris-derived cells migrate so as to form a globe
of dedifferentiated tissue in the proper location for a lens; and finally,
4. they start producing the differentiated products of lens cells,
including crystallin proteins, and are thereby transformed into
transparent lens cells — all in the nuanced spatial pattern required for
the formation of a proper lens.
And so, lacking the usual resources and the usual context for formation of
a lens, the animal follows an altogether novel path toward the restoration
of normal form and function.
(from Chapter 10, “What is the Problem of Form?”, in
Organisms and
Their Evolution — Agency and Meaning in the Drama of Life)
October 28, 2024
[Regarding cascades of gene expression, such as the sequential expression
of the various genes that have been said to “determine” left-right
asymmetry of the vertebrate body:] The normal expectation would be that if
one blocks or changes the expression of earlier genes in the sequence, the
disorder should accumulate and be magnified, perhaps explosively, in
downstream gene expression, since proper cues for the later steps are
missing. But
Surprisingly, this is not actually what occurs: each subsequent step has
fewer errors than the previous step, suggesting that the classic linear
pathway picture is importantly incomplete. Embryos recognize
transcriptional deviations from the correct pattern and repair them over
time … The existence of corrective pathways in embryogenesis and
regeneration raises profound questions about the nearly ubiquitous stories
our textbooks and “models” tell about the molecular explanations for
specific events (Levin 2020).
All this may remind us of E. S. Russell’s remark that in biology “the
end-state is more constant than the method of reaching it”. We also see
here the principle that cell biologist Paul Weiss enunciated so clearly at
mid-twentieth century, when he pointed out that the whole “is
infinitely less variant from moment to moment than are the momentary
activities of its parts”. At the lowest level of biological activity,
molecules in the watery medium of a cell have degrees of freedom
(possibilities of movement and interaction) that would spell utter chaos
at higher levels if it were not for the fact that the lower-level activity
is “disciplined” from above.
(from Chapter 10, “What is the Problem of Form?”, in
Organisms and
Their Evolution — Agency and Meaning in the Drama of Life)
October 21, 2024
It is well known that amphibians such as frogs and salamanders have a
remarkable ability to regenerate severed limbs. What may not be so
commonly realized is that, if you graft the tail bud of a salamander onto
the flank of a frog tadpole at the place where a limb would normally form
— and also near the time when metamorphosis of the tadpole into a frog
will occur — the grafted organ first grows into a salamander-like tail,
and then, in some cases, more or less completely transforms into a limb,
albeit a dysfunctional one. Among other changes, the tip of the tail turns
into a set of fingers.
The experiment can remind us how biologists commonly try to learn about
life by severely disrupting it. But the current point is that, in this
particular experiment, the transformation of the tail into an approximate
limb cannot be the result of local causes, since the local environment of
the fingers-to-be is a tail, not a limb. The power of transformation is,
in a puzzling manner, holistic. The part is caught up within the whole and
moves toward its new identity based, not merely on local determinants, but
also on the form and character of a whole that is not yet physically all
there.
(from Chapter 10, “What is the Problem of Form?”, in
Organisms and
Their Evolution — Agency and Meaning in the Drama of Life)
October 14, 2024
When a cell enters into mitosis, just about every detail of its physiology
and chemistry takes on an altered meaning in light of the changing
narrative context. Everything is now heading toward a different outcome.
Molecules that had been participating in one set of interactions (and
could easily still do so in purely physical terms) now enter into very
different intermolecular relations. Similarly with a cell experiencing
heat shock, oxygen deprivation or other stress, a cell coming into contact
with new neighbors, or a cell proceeding along a path of embryonic
differentiation.
Certainly we can still identify unambiguous causes in the organism. It is
always possible to narrow the conditions of our experiments so severely
that a consistent “causal arrow” for a particular interaction emerges
under those conditions. But the whole point of life’s adaptability
is to seek (or help create) altered conditions according to present
needs and interests. This is why there can be no fixed syntax, no
mechanical constancy of relations among the parts. The organism is forever
abandoning the coordinating principles of its old context in favor of a
new and ever-changing meaning. Its story is always evolving.
The nature of causation in biology differs from the problem of causation
in the physical sciences. Organisms manifest a fluid, integral,
harmonizing sort of causation that is more like a play of the
multi-dimensional reasons for things than a set of one-dimensional
mechanical interactions. It is more like the rich interplay of meaning in
an unfolding poem than a rigid syntax or logic.
(from Chapter 9, “A Mess of Causes”, in
Organisms and
Their Evolution — Agency and Meaning in the Drama of Life)
October 7, 2024
When a deer is grazing in a meadow, its glimpse of a vaguely canine form
in the distance changes the meaning of everything from the flowers and
grass the deer was eating, to its own internal digestive processes, to the
expression of its genes. This happens, not because the distant form is
exerting some strange physical force upon the deer, but because that form
becomes part of a now suddenly shifted pattern of meaning.
(from Chapter 9, “A Mess of Causes”, in
Organisms and
Their Evolution — Agency and Meaning in the Drama of Life)
September 30, 2024
Think of a machine. Having conceived what we want it to do, we design it
to be a closed system whose intended functioning is more or less immune to
contextual interference. And we try to do much the same in many scientific
demonstrations. For example, we can create a vacuum in a chamber, and then
release a leaf from the top of the chamber. It falls like a stone.
Of course, leaves in nature often travel upward. But the experiment in the
chamber enables us to observe the singular and lawful play of gravity,
without any disturbing “interference” from the resistance or movement of
air. We can then — and only then — say that gravity appears to make the
leaf fall, just as the simple laws governing the gears and springs of a
mechanical watch make the watch perform as a reliable keeper of time.
But when the biologist tries to see an animal in the same mechanistic
light, as a closed system without interfering factors, the attempt fails
miserably. This is because, for the animal, contextual interference is
the whole point. As the meaning of its activity shifts from moment to
moment, so, too, does the contextual significance of all the details of
its life.
(from Chapter 9, “A Mess of Causes”, in
Organisms and
Their Evolution — Agency and Meaning in the Drama of Life)
September 23, 2024
Messages [within cells] are not physically discrete, and they do not fly
back and forth as elements of a predefined cellular logic. They move as
dynamically sculptured, interwoven patterns of force and energy. Their
meanings are mimed or gestured — neither translated into, nor reduced to,
a kind of expressionless Morse code, nor impelled along precisely incised
channels like computer instructions. And what holds them together amid the
ceaseless flow and crosstalk and molecular transformation of the cellular
plasm is the unity of meaning that is the whole cell and whole organism ...
The powerful compulsion to identify decisive causes, even at the expense
of painfully self-contradictory language, strongly suggests that a
one-sided and unrealizable ideal of biological explanation is at work.
Under its influence we aim to discover a physical lawfulness reflecting,
above all, our experience with machines — a lawfulness of precise,
unambiguous control, where one thing can be said, without unwelcome
qualification, to make another thing happen.
(from Chapter 9, “A Mess of Causes”, in
Organisms and
Their Evolution — Agency and Meaning in the Drama of Life)
September 16, 2024
Signaling pathways help to maintain a coherence of meaning within and
between cells. Take, for example, the work by a team of molecular
biologists at the Free University of Brussels. They investigated how
signaling pathways interact or “crosstalk” with each other. Tabulating the
cross-signalings between just four such pathways yielded what they called
a “horror graph”, and quickly it began to look as though “everything does
everything to everything”, much like the way any given term in a
meaningful text can modify the meanings of many other terms. Other
researchers speak of a “collaborative” process that can be “pictured as a
table around which decision-makers debate a question and respond
collectively to information put to them”.
Even considering a single membrane receptor bound by a hormonal or other
signal, you can find yourself looking, conservatively, at a billion
possible states, depending on how that receptor is modified by its
interactions with other molecules. Despite previous belief, there is no
simple binary rule distinguishing deactivated receptors from those
activated by some combination of signals in a particular context. “The
activated receptor looks less like a machine and more like a … probability
cloud of an almost infinite number of possible states, each of which may
differ in its biological activity”.
(from Chapter 9, “A Mess of Causes”, in
Organisms and
Their Evolution — Agency and Meaning in the Drama of Life)
September 2, 2024
Should we expect, say, that a “master regulator” of digestion exists?
Would it be the stomach? The small intestine? The large intestine? The
pancreas? The liver and gall bladder? The metabolism taking place in every
cell? The brain that sends various coordinating nervous signals to
different organs? The mouth that initiates everything? We would certainly
look more to the stomach than, say, to the heart, but the fact remains
that the organism as a whole is the closest thing we have to a “master
regulator”. What we see in the separate, “mechanistic” clocks and
regulators of circadian rhythms is simply the functioning of those rhythms
in the most recognizable or most focal places. But they merely put on more
obvious display the rhythmic functioning of the entire body.
(from Chapter 9, “A Mess of Causes”, in
Organisms and
Their Evolution — Agency and Meaning in the Drama of Life)
August 12, 2024
What we’re gaining from all this research is a wonderful portrait of the
organism as a rhythmic being. Investigators have not found controlling
mechanisms that single-handedly establish or govern the circadian rhythms
of the organism, but rather are discovering how those rhythms come to
expression at every level and in every precinct of the organism — perhaps
more centrally here and more peripherally there, but altogether in a
single, organism-wide harmony that is also linked to environmental
rhythms. There is no sensible way, as a scientist, to speak of particular
mechanisms that explain this harmony. Instead, every isolated
“mechanism” is found to be a reflection of the harmony, and we
thereby gain further, detailed understanding of how the whole organism
functions as a being in time.
(from Chapter 9, “A Mess of Causes”, in
Organisms and
Their Evolution — Agency and Meaning in the Drama of Life)
August 5, 2024
What we see, that is, once we start following out all the interactions at
a molecular level, is not some mechanism dictating the fate or
controlling an activity of the organism. Rather, we observe an
organism-wide, narrative coherence — a functional, end-directed,
story-like coherence that we cannot elucidate in terms of strictly
physical interactions that make no reference to the meaning of
events. Only so far as they are caught up in and sensitive to this
functional story do the individual molecular players find their proper
roles.
The misrepresentation of this organic and rational coherence in favor of
supposed controlling mechanisms is not an innocent inattention to
language; it is a fundamental misrepresentation of reality at the central
point where we are challenged to understand the character of living
things.
(from Chapter 9, “A Mess of Causes”, in
Organisms and
Their Evolution — Agency and Meaning in the Drama of Life)
July 29, 2024
By now every biologist knows how regulatory processes extend outward
without limit, connecting in one way or another with virtually every
aspect of the cell. But this only underscores the undisciplined
terminological confusion continuing to corrupt molecular biological
description today. When key regulators are in turn regulated, and
controllers have their fates underwritten or redirected by other players,
where within the web of mutual interaction can we single out a
master controller capable of dictating cellular fates? And
if we can’t, what are reputable scientists doing when they claim to have
identified such a controller, or, rather, various such controllers?
(from Chapter 9, “A Mess of Causes”, in
Organisms and
Their Evolution — Agency and Meaning in the Drama of Life)
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 form 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)
July 15, 2024
It would help if we could get clear about the fact that there are two
profound, and profoundly different, descriptive challenges posed by a
cell’s impressively coherent activities. One has to do with the underlying
physical and chemical processes. The other concerns the coordination of
those processes as an expression of the organism’s needs and interests,
intentions and meanings — its entire qualitative way of being. Severe
confusions arise when we say that science must concern itself only with
the first challenge, while assuming that the second one, if it can even
legitimately be referred to, is automatically taken care of by our answer
to the first ...
Is the entire matter really so vexing? The mystery of the unexpected
coherence that molecular biologists confront, for example, in RNA splicing
and DNA damage repair is, from a perfectly reasonable point of view,
neither a mystery nor unexpected. The problem arises only at the moment
when we unreasonably demand that an organism’s living performances be
explained in an inanimate manner. Then, and only then, do we find it
difficult to make sense of things.
(from Chapter 8, “The Mystery of an Unexpected Coherence”, in
Organisms and
Their Evolution — Agency and Meaning in the Drama of Life)
July 8, 2024
The problem of what it actually means to say, “Molecules accomplish
the work of splicing and DNA reconstruction” presents us with one of those
vast blanks in scientific understanding that are easily papered over today
with informational generalities and convenient pictures of tiny machines
busily, and in a “mechanistically” respectable fashion, carrying on the
work of a cellular factory.
We already heard about the essential problem from cell biologist Paul
Weiss, who spoke about the many degrees of freedom possessed by the cell’s
constituents in their watery medium, and about how these degrees of
freedom are so remarkably constrained and disciplined toward the
expression of biological order at higher levels of observation. The
University of Massachusetts geneticist, Job Dekker, was apparently nodding
toward the same problem when he asked: “How do cells ensure that genes
only respond to the right regulatory elements while ignoring the hundreds
of thousands of others?”
It’s a good and obvious question. An editor of Science amplified it
this way: “If you think air traffic controllers have a tough job guiding
planes into major airports or across a crowded continental airspace,
consider the challenge facing a human cell trying to position its
proteins”. A given cell, he noted, may make more than 10,000 different
proteins under any particular set of conditions, and it typically contains
more than a billion individual protein molecules at any one time.
“Somehow, a cell must get all its proteins to their correct destinations —
and equally important, keep these molecules out of the wrong places”.
(from Chapter 8, “The Mystery of an Unexpected Coherence”, in
Organisms and
Their Evolution — Agency and Meaning in the Drama of Life)
July 1, 2024
The work on Deinococcus radiodurans [a bacterium whose proteins can
stitch back together a genome that has been shattered into countless
fragments; see Quote of the Week immediately below] can remind us that the
activity of an organism always reflects something like an immanent “sense
of the whole”. Surely the protein molecules in this bacterium do not
“know” what their “goal” should be in dealing with all those disordered
snippets of DNA. But if the overall living context (Chapter 6) remains
sufficiently intact, then the mysterious power of self-realization that we
have been gently stalking in these several chapters — the power sustaining
the coherent storyline of a life — continues to assert itself. The
narrative, whatever its unexpected twists and turns, remains unbroken. If
parts can be more fully constituted from their shattered fragments, it is
because a functioning whole, with its innate intelligence, was already
there.
The information we conceive as statically encoded in DNA is a kind of
bland abstraction from the living intelligence at work in cellular
processes. When we occupy ourselves one-sidedly with genocentric
information, it is (to employ a rough analogy) as if we elevated a
notebook containing selected words, phrases, definitions, and grammatical
hints to a pinnacle high above Moby Dick or Faust or War and Peace,
worshipping the former as “information” while ignoring the informed and
meaningful activity through which inert words and phrases are woven into
soul-stirring tales.
A phrase-book or dictionary can be an essential resource, but it is the
organism (Deinococcus radiodurans in the case we have been
considering) that uses the dictionary to weave its own story — and even
reconstructs the dictionary when the pages fall into a disorganized heap
on the floor.
(from Chapter 8, “The Mystery of an Unexpected Coherence”, in
Organisms and
Their Evolution — Agency and Meaning in the Drama of Life)
June 24, 2024
A dose of ionizing radiation equal to 10 grays (a measure of absorbed
radiation) is lethal to the human body. Most bacteria cannot survive 200
grays. But then there is the bacterium known as Deinococcus
radiodurans: it can endure over 17,000 grays and do quite well, thank
you. Never mind that its genome is thoroughly shattered by the assault.
D. radiodurans employs a number of strategies for preserving its
rather commonplace “proteome”, or total inventory of proteins. These
strategies include (1) preventing the oxidative damage that results from
radiation, a goal it achieves in good part by means of an especially rich
supply of antioxidants; (2) eliminating, before they can cause mischief,
any proteins that do get damaged, while recycling their constituents; (3)
scavenging amino acids and peptides (protein constituents) from the local
environment, a capability that, together with the recycling, supports (4)
newly synthesizing any proteins that need replenishing.
According to Anita Krisko and Miroslav Radman, researchers at the
Mediterranean Institute for Life Sciences who have been studying D.
radiodurans, “biological responses to genomic insults depend primarily
on the integrity of the proteome ... This conclusion is the consequence of
the fact that dedicated proteins repair DNA, and not vice versa”.
Moreover, “this paradigm is fundamental in its obviousness (no living cell
can function correctly with an oxidized proteome) and, if it is true, must
be universal, that is, hold also for human cells”.
(from Chapter 8, “The Mystery of an Unexpected Coherence”, in
Organisms and
Their Evolution — Agency and Meaning in the Drama of Life)
June 17, 2024
The idea of narrative coherence, like the related idea of a governing
context, is a mystery for all attempts at purely physical explanation.
This is why even the explicit acknowledgment of an organism’s striving
for life — central as it may be for evolutionary theory — is
discouraged whenever biologists are describing organisms themselves. It
sounds too much as if one were invoking inner, or soul, qualities rather
than material causes — acknowledging a being rather than a thing. And it
is true that our physical laws as such, however combined, nowhere touch
the idea of striving.
(from Chapter 8, “The Mystery of an Unexpected Coherence”, in
Organisms and
Their Evolution — Agency and Meaning in the Drama of Life)
June 10, 2024
We hear that the epigenome involves a “re-wiring of transcription factor
circuits”, as if there were some fixed and standard genetic wiring scheme
waiting to be rewired. But — as if biology as a discipline were somehow
“of two minds” about such things — the authors of this remark healthily
refer to the rewiring as “context-dependent” and “dynamic”. So the
terminology appears to be impossibly conflicted. If in fact the governing
context is always to some degree fluid, dynamic, and shifting, where do we
ever see anything remotely analogous to wires constraining all the
relevant molecules to go where they need to go, and to do so in the right
time, in the right quantities, and with the right molecular partners?
The picture of a wired cell may sound conveniently causal, but it makes no
sense. Biologists are sooner or later going to have to decide which half
of their descriptive language they are going to side with. Meanwhile,
those of us trying to decipher what “epigenetics” really means can
usefully remind ourselves that the deeper issue has to do with the overall
terms of the description ultimately decided upon, not with particular
“epigenetic” insights that are too easily assimilated to traditional,
machine-based understanding.
Nothing is merely genetic. Every so-called genetic activity is an
expression of its entire context, and therefore is altogether epigenetic.
Genetics cannot be abstracted from the rest of the organism. So we can
safely say, “All genetics is epigenetics”.
(from Chapter 7, “Epigenetics: A Brief Introduction”, in
Organisms and
Their Evolution — Agency and Meaning in the Drama of Life)
May 20, 2024
The word epigenetics may usefully remind us that what is “on top
of” DNA is nothing less than the functioning organism as a whole. But a
word that threatens to encompass just about everything begins to lose its
value as a special term. And this in turn suggests that we could just as
well retire the word “epigenetics” and get on with describing how
organisms carry out their organically integrated lives — express their own
character — in part by constraining their genes to serve that character ...
Genes as self-sufficient or definitive First Causes simply don’t exist.
They never did have a reasonable place in our conceptualization of living
beings — something that early twentieth-century critics of gene theory
clearly saw (Russell 1930). Every organic process, including every genetic
process, is an expression of the life of the whole cell and whole
organism. In other words, the only genetics we have is epigenetics.
(from Chapter 7, “Epigenetics: A Brief Introduction”, in
Organisms and
Their Evolution — Agency and Meaning in the Drama of Life)
May 13, 2024
The Human Genome Project and its successors surprised many by revealing an
unexpectedly low number of human genes relative to many other organisms —
roughly the same number, for example, as in the simple,
one-millimeter-long, transparent roundworm, Caenorhabditis elegans.
Many began to ask: If genes really do account for the organism in all its
complexity, how can it be that a primitive worm boasts as many genes as we
do? "As far as protein-coding genes are concerned", wrote Ulrich Technau,
a developmental biologist from the University of Vienna, "the repertoire
of a sea anemone … is almost as complex as that of a human"
A further revelation only compounded the difficulty: our own genome was
found to have a great deal in common with that of many animals. According
to the usual way of measuring things, we were said, for example, to share
about 98.5% of our genome with
chimpanzees. A good deal of verbal hand-wringing and chest-beating ensued.
How could we hold our heads up with high-browed, post-simian dignity when,
as the New Scientist reported in 2003, “chimps are human”? If the
DNA of the two species is more or less the same, and if, as nearly
everyone seemed to believe, DNA is destiny, what remained to make us
special? Such was the fretting on the human side, anyway. To be truthful,
the chimps didn’t seem much interested.
(from Chapter 7, “Epigenetics: A Brief Introduction”, in
Organisms and
Their Evolution — Agency and Meaning in the Drama of Life)
May 6, 2024
It is hard to understand how a single genomic “blueprint” — or any other
way of construing a fixed genetic sequence — could by itself provide the
definitive causal basis for the hundreds of radically distinct ways of
living exemplied by the many and varied cell types in our bodies? If the
supposed blueprint in our genome is compatible with cell types as
different from each other as remotely related species, do we have
compelling grounds for thinking that this genome single-handedly
determines any one type of cell, or organ, let alone all of them together?
(from Chapter 7, “Epigenetics: A Brief Introduction”, in
Organisms and
Their Evolution — Agency and Meaning in the Drama of Life)
April 29, 2024
You and I harbor trillions of “sub-creatures” in our bodies. I am not
referring to the microorganisms in our guts, but rather the cells we
consider our own — the constituents of our muscles and brains, our livers
and bones, our lenses and retinas. Each of these cells, embedded in its
supportive environment, sustains a dauntingly complex and unique way of
life. If (which is impossible) we had first discovered such cells
floating singly in a pool of water and had observed them through a
microscope, we would have judged them to be distantly related organisms.
Phenotypically (that is, in visible form and function) one cell type in
the human body can differ from another as much as an amoeba differs from a
paramecium.
All the cells in the human body have descended from a single cell (zygote)
with a single genome. And just as hundreds of different cell types have
arisen from that one zygote, so, too, have the multicellular, intricately
organized entities we know as lung, heart, eye, kidney, and pancreas,
along with all our other organs. Supremely interdependent as these are,
each is nevertheless a functioning organic world of altogether distinctive
character.
For the past century these facts of development have been thought to
present a (largely ignored) problem for the gene-centered view of life.
The developmental biologist Frank Lillie, who had directed the prestigious
Marine Biological Laboratory at Woods Hole, Massachusetts, and would go on
to become president of the National Academy of Sciences, remarked in 1927
on the contrast between “genes which remain the same throughout the life
history” of an organism, and a developmental process that “never stands
still from germ to old age”. In his view, “those who desire to make
genetics the basis of physiology of development will have to explain how
an unchanging complex can direct the course of an ordered developmental
stream”.
(from Chapter 7, “Epigenetics: A Brief Introduction”, in
Organisms and
Their Evolution — Agency and Meaning in the Drama of Life)
April 15, 2024
Whenever we speak of beings rather than things, we necessarily turn to a
language of directed intention (respond, develop,
adapt, regulate, and so on); a normative and aesthetically
colored language (everything relating to health and disease,
order and disorder, rhythm and dysrhythmia,
harmony and disharmony, error and error
correction); and a language of wholeness (context,
coordination, integration, organization).
Not surprisingly, then, the biologist finds herself directly invoking the
language of meaning in terms such as message, information,
communication, and signal. But, again, she usually tries to
do so in a mathematized, de-meaned manner intended to conceal the
inwardness of the organism. Yet her recourse to the ubiquitous idea of
context is a dead giveaway: if the word does not signify an ideational,
aesthetic, and directive coherence, it refers to nothing living at all.
Things just “being there” without expressing an active ideational unity —
things without a role in a story that matters — do not make a living
context.
(from Chapter 6, “Context: Dare We Call It Holism?”, in
Organisms and
Their Evolution — Agency and Meaning in the Drama of Life)
April 8, 2024
Let’s not forget: when we say that what happens in a cell is
“context-dependent”, we are talking about a watery expanse populated by
untold billions of molecules in unsurveyable variety. The need is for just
the right combinations of molecules to do just the right things “in the
moment” — and to do them in light of the overall state of the entire
cell within its particular tissue. Is this cell just now committing
itself to cellular division? Then what these molecules here and those
molecules over there must do is now being radically redefined. Their new
“assignments” depend not only on their location in the cell, but also on
their necessary functional participation in lengthy, complex, temporal
sequences of interaction that require the choreographing of countless
other molecules as well.
Something is always going on contextually, and all the molecular
interactions, taken together, must reflect whatever that something happens
to be — must reflect the meaning of the encompassing narrative.
(from Chapter 6, “Context: Dare We Call It Holism?”, in
Organisms and
Their Evolution — Agency and Meaning in the Drama of Life)
April 1, 2024
Curiously, “holism” has almost become a dirty word in biology. It commonly
signifies loose thinking, vagueness, obscurantism, and perhaps even an
unfortunate tendency toward mysticism. I say “curiously” because the fact
is that biologists speak incessantly about holism. You might almost think
they were, in recent years, becoming fanatical about it. It’s just that
they prefer to honor holism under the more acceptable slogan, “context
matters”. This latter idea occurs like a mantra in the contemporary
technical literature, so that it would be hard to find any physiological
or behavioral process that is not routinely (and rightly) said to be
“context-dependent” or “context-specific”.
Strangely, despite their almost universal employment of the pregnant term
“context”, biologists rarely if ever bother to define it or to examine the
meanings implicit in their use of it. Intentionally or otherwise, this
protects them from an unwelcome meaning. For the word can hardly mean
anything at all if it is not a close synonym for “larger whole”. The
frequent appeal to context as a decisive determining factor, then, looks
rather like an under-the-table invocation of the unmentionable concept of
holism. It allows biologists to import the seemingly inescapable idea of
the causal whole into their descriptions and theorizing, while outwardly
pursuing a style of explanation that pretends to disdain holism in favor
of purely physical analysis into parts.
(from Chapter 6, “Context: Dare We Call It Holism?”, in
Organisms and
Their Evolution — Agency and Meaning in the Drama of Life)
March 25, 2024
[Amid the “drowning thermal noise” of the cell] it’s as if there were an
active, coordinating agency subsuming all the part-processes and
disciplining their separate variabilities so that they remain informed by,
and caught up in, the greater unity. The coordination, the ordering, the
continual overcoming of otherwise disordering impacts from the environment
so as to retain for the whole a particular character or organized way of
being, expressively unique and different from other creatures — this is
the “more” of the organism that cannot be had from the mere summing of
discrete, causal parts.
So the center holds, and this ordering center — this whole that is more
than the sum of its parts — cannot itself be just one or some of those
parts it is holding together. When the organism dies, the parts are all
still there, but the whole is not.
(from Chapter 6, “Context: Dare We Call It Holism?”, in
Organisms and
Their Evolution — Agency and Meaning in the Drama of Life)
March 4, 2024
[Regarding the preeminent cell biologist, Paul Weiss, whose work extended
from the 1920s into the 1970s, when he was awarded the National Medal of
Science by President Jimmy Carter:] As a life-long observer of cells and
tissues, Weiss pointed out something obvious, simple, and yet
revolutionary for today’s biology. When we examine the form and physiology
of an organism, we see how “certain definite rules of order apply to the
dynamics of the whole system ... reflected [for example] in the orderliness
of the overall architectural design, which cannot be explained in terms of
any underlying orderliness of the constituents”.
That is, despite the countless processes going on in the “heaving and
churning” interior of the cell, and despite the fact that each process
might be expected to “go its own way” according to the myriad factors
impinging on it from all directions, the actual result is quite different.
Rather than becoming progressively disordered in their mutual relations
(as indeed happens after death, when the whole dissolves into separate
fragments), the processes come together in a larger unity. The behavior
of the whole “is infinitely less variant from moment to moment than are
the momentary activities of its parts”.
We might say that a given type of cell (or tissue, or organ, or organism)
insists upon maintaining its own recognizable identity with “unreasonable”
tenacity, given the untethered freedom, in purely physical terms, of its
molecular constituents as they make their way through a watery medium ...
Tuning in to this basic picture — if we could really take it seriously —
might change just about everything in biology.
(from Chapter 6, “Context: Dare We Call It Holism?”, in
Organisms and
Their Evolution — Agency and Meaning in the Drama of Life)
February 26, 2024
Harvard biologist Richard Lewontin once described how you can excise the
developing limb bud from an amphibian embryo, shake the cells loose from
each other, allow them to reaggregate into a random lump, and then replace
the lump in the embryo. A normal leg develops. Somehow the form of the
limb as a whole is the ruling factor, redefining the parts according to
the larger pattern. Lewontin went on to remark:
“Unlike a machine whose totality is created by the juxtaposition of bits
and pieces with different functions and properties, the bits and pieces of
a developing organism seem to come into existence as a consequence of
their spatial position at critical moments in the embryo’s development“.
A developing organism, Lewontin adds, “is like a language whose elements ...
take unique meaning from their context”.
(from Chapter 6, “Context: Dare We Call It Holism?”, in
Organisms and
Their Evolution — Agency and Meaning in the Drama of Life)
February 19, 2024
[Researches studying damaged hair follicle niches where stem cells had
been destroyed found that]
“hair follicle stem cells are dispensable for regeneration, and that
epithelial cells, which do not normally participate in hair growth,
re-populate the lost stem-cell compartment and sustain hair regeneration”
— provided, however, that “the overall integrity of the niche is
maintained” ... Distant epithelial cells flow toward the
damaged compartment and go through a transformation of identity enabling
them to replace the lost cells. As the authors summarize it, “The overall
structure and function of the tissue is maintained because cells are
capable of adopting new fates as dictated by their new niche
microenvironment”.
Clearly, the different elements of the hair follicle niche are not rigidly
fixed entities. Rather, their changing forms and relationships are
choreographed by the larger environment. So the goings-on in the hair
follicle niche illustrate very well how the context helps to “decide” what
sorts of elements it will have, how they will be formed and transformed,
and how they will come into mutual relationship. Nothing could be further
from the common picture of an organism being constructed, bottom-up, from
an available collection of well-defined building blocks capable of
determining outcomes. It appears, rather, that the desirable outcome
determines the “building blocks”.
(from Chapter 6, “Context: Dare We Call It Holism?”, in
Organisms and
Their Evolution — Agency and Meaning in the Drama of Life)
February 12, 2024
Where the physicist may prefer unambiguous, isolated, and
well-defined “point” causes, the biologist never has such causes to
theorize about. A biological whole is never absolute, and never perfectly
definable as distinct from its environment. Further, its actions are
always multivalent, and they interpenetrate one another, like the
meanings of events in a story
The wonderfully insightful, twentieth-century botanist, Agnes Arber,
captured well the polar tension between organic wholeness, on one hand,
and contextual embeddedness, on the other:
“The biological explanation of a phenomenon is the discovery of its own
intrinsic place in a nexus of relations, extending indefinitely in all
directions. To explain it is to see it simultaneously in its full
individuality (as a whole in itself), and in its subordinate position (as
one element in a larger whole)”.
(from Chapter 6, “Context: Dare We Call It Holism?”, in
Organisms and
Their Evolution — Agency and Meaning in the Drama of Life)
February 5, 2024
The centrality of living wholes within biology seems beyond argument.
These have not been “put together” or built by an external agency. They
are never the results of a physical activity that starts with
non-wholes. Biology gives us nothing but beings that have never existed
except as wholes possessing the formative powers that enable them to pass
through further stages of physical development.
The one-celled zygote is already a functioning whole. It does not gain
further cells through the addition of “building blocks” assembled by an
engineer or designer, but rather through an internal power of
reorganization and subdivision in which the entire organism participates.
All the parts are orchestrated in a unified performance that yields
(through division of existing cells) new cells, and particular kinds of
cells, just where they are needed. The orchestrating power of the whole
can hardly be determined by the particular parts it in this way brings
into being and orchestrates.
(from Chapter 6, “Context: Dare We Call It Holism?”, in
Organisms and
Their Evolution — Agency and Meaning in the Drama of Life)
January 29, 2024
DNA, RNA, and proteins are being reconceived as “biological soft matter”,
subject to continually changing form so that molecular performances become
more like improvised dances than automatic lock-and-key mechanical
interactions. “Disordered” or “unstructured” sequences in proteins are now
seen as decisive for coordinated activities throughout the cell, from gene
regulation to signaling across membranes.
Still more dramatically, molecular biologists have in recent years become
almost transfixed by the novel importance of phase transitions — for
example, the forming and dissolving of distinctive, membraneless droplets
within the fluid cell, whereby specialized and localized functional
capacities are maintained despite the rapid passage of molecules in and
out of the droplets.
And perhaps most important of all is the nascent recognition — which still
hasn’t taken widespread hold in biology — that the amazing functional
plasticity of water may be key to just about everything that goes on in a
cell.
(from Chapter 5, “Our Bodies Are Formed Streams”, in
Organisms and
Their Evolution — Agency and Meaning in the Drama of Life)
January 22, 2024
The high era of molecular biology that followed upon discovery of “the”
structure of the double helix was indeed the Age of Simplicity. We can be
thankful that the feverish enchantment of fixed code and crystal is now giving
way to an increasing recognition of movement, flow, dynamically flexible
interaction, and the continual transfiguration of form — prime narrative
elements in the organism’s story.
(from Chapter 5, “Our Bodies Are Formed Streams”, in
Organisms and
Their Evolution — Agency and Meaning in the Drama of Life)
January 15, 2024
Structural biologists Mark Gerstein and Michael Levitt have remarked,
“When scientists publish models of biological molecules in journals, they
usually draw their models in bright colors and place them against a plain,
black background. We now know that the background in which these molecules
exist — water — is just as important as they are”.
That was 25 years ago. More recently, Nature columnist Philip Ball
has reflected on the situation this way: “Why should we place so much
emphasis, for example, on determining crystal structures of proteins and
relatively little on a deep understanding of the [water-related] forces
... that hold that structure together and that enable it to change and
flex so that the molecule can do its job?”
(from Chapter 5, “Our Bodies Are Formed Streams”, in
Organisms and
Their Evolution — Agency and Meaning in the Drama of Life)
January 1, 2024
Structural biologists Mark Gerstein and Michael Levitt (the latter a 2013
Nobel laureate in chemistry) wrote a 1998 article in Scientific
American entitled “Simulating Water and the Molecules of Life”. In it
they mentioned how early efforts to develop a computer simulation of a DNA
molecule failed; the molecule (in the simulation) almost immediately broke
up. But when they included water molecules in the simulation, it proved
successful. “Subsequent simulations of DNA in water have revealed that
water molecules are able to interact with nearly every part of DNA’s
double helix, including the base pairs that constitute the genetic code”.
(from Chapter 5, “Our Bodies Are Formed Streams”, in
Organisms and
Their Evolution — Agency and Meaning in the Drama of Life)
December 25, 2023
I have long thought that some day water will be seen as the single most
fundamental, “information-rich” physical constituent of life, and that
revelations in this regard will outweigh in significance even those
concerning the structure of the double helix. Not many biologists today
would countenance such a suggestion, and I am not going to mount a serious
defense of it here, if only for lack of ability. Time will decide the
matter soon enough. But I was particularly pleased to find that the widely
read and respected Nature columnist, Philip Ball, once entitled a
piece, “Water as a Biomolecule”. In it he wrote:
“Water is not simply ‘life’s solvent’, but rather an active matrix that
engages and interacts with biomolecules in complex, subtle and essential
ways ... Water needs to be regarded as a protean, fuzzily delineated
biomolecule in its own right”.
(from Chapter 5, “Our Bodies Are Formed Streams”, in
Organisms and
Their Evolution — Agency and Meaning in the Drama of Life)
December 11, 2023
Part of the picture [of the cell] that has recently come into focus has to
do with the phases of matter and the transitions between these phases.
(Think, for example, of the solid, liquid, and gaseous phases of water, or
of solutions and gels — matter in different states.) For example, it’s
possible for well-defined droplets of one kind of liquid to occur within a
different liquid, like oil droplets in water.
We now know that molecular complexes containing both RNA and protein often
gather together to form distinctive RNA-protein liquids that separate out
as droplets within the larger cytoplasmic medium. Like liquids in general,
these droplets tend toward a round shape, can coalesce or divide, can wet
surfaces such as membranes, and can flow. The concentration of particular
molecules may be much greater in the droplets than in the surrounding
fluid, conferring specific and efficient functions upon the assemblies. ...
When things happen in the cell, phase transitions often play
decisive roles, as a University of Colorado group discovered when looking
at phase transitions in a roundworm. According to the researchers, these
transitions “are controlled with surprising precision in early
development, leading to starkly different supramolecular states” with
altered organization and dynamics. “Reversible interactions among
thousands of [these phase-separated] complexes”, the authors found,
account for “large-scale organization of gene expression pathways in the
cytoplasm”.
(from Chapter 5, “Our Bodies Are Formed Streams”, in
Organisms and
Their Evolution — Agency and Meaning in the Drama of Life)
December 4, 2023
It has become increasingly clear in recent years that, quite apart from
its cytoskeleton and membrane-bound organelles, the fluid cytoplasm in each
cell is elaborately and “invisibly” organized. Various macromolecular
complexes and other molecules, in more or less defined mixes, congregate
in specific locations and sustain a collective identity, despite being
unbounded by any sort of membrane. Here we’re looking at significant
structure, or organization, without even a pretense of mechanically rigid
form. How do cells manage that?
The problem was framed this way by Anthony Hyman from the Max Planck
Institute of Molecular Cell Biology and Genetics in Dresden, Germany, and
Clifford Brangwynne from the Department of Chemical and Biological
Engineering at Princeton University:
“Non-membrane-bound macromolecular assemblies found throughout the
cytoplasm and nucleoplasm ... consist of large numbers of interacting
macromolecular complexes and act as reaction centers or storage
compartments ... We have little idea how these compartments are organized.
What are the rules that ensure that defined sets of proteins cluster in
the same place in the cytoplasm?”
Even more puzzling, a “compartment” can maintain its functional
(purposive) identity despite the rapid exchange of its contents with the
surrounding cytoplasm. Hyman and Brangwynne ask: “Fast turnover rates of
complexes in compartments can be found throughout the cell. How do these
remain as coherent structures when their components completely turn over
so quickly?”
(from Chapter 5, “Our Bodies Are Formed Streams”, in
Organisms and
Their Evolution — Agency and Meaning in the Drama of Life)
November 27, 2023
[Regarding the decisive realization in contemporary molecular biological
research that many proteins do not, as previously thought, have a fixed,
functional structure, but rather have a “molten” or “intrinsically
disordered” structure enabling them to play diverse and dynamic roles in
the biochemistry of cells:] But the troubling question arises: if
unstructured proteins, or unstructured regions in proteins, are not
“pre-fitted” for particular interactions — if, in their “molten” state,
they have boundless possibilities for interacting with other molecules and
even for reversing their effects — how do these proteins “know” what to do
at any one place and time? Or, as one pair of researchers put it, “How is
the logic of molecular specificity encoded in the promiscuous interactions
of intrinsically disordered proteins?”
(from Chapter 5, “Our Bodies Are Formed Streams”, in
Organisms and
Their Evolution — Agency and Meaning in the Drama of Life)
November 20, 2023
A team of biochemists from Duke and Stanford Universities point out how
inadequate is our knowledge of the action of biomolecules when all we have
is a frozen structure of the sort commonly reported in the literature. “In
reality”, they say, “all macromolecules dynamically alternate between
conformational states [that is, between three-dimensional folded shapes]
to carry out their biological functions”:
“Decades ago, it was realized that the structures of biomolecules are
better described as ‘screaming and kicking’, constantly undergoing motions
on timescales spanning twelve orders of magnitude, from picoseconds
[trillionths of a second] to seconds”.
Why, after all, should we ever have expected our physiology to be less a
matter of gesturings than is our life as a whole?
(from Chapter 5, “Our Bodies Are Formed Streams”, in
Organisms and
Their Evolution — Agency and Meaning in the Drama of Life)
November 13, 2023
Hannah Landecker, a professor of both genetics and sociology at UCLA,
having looked at the impact of recent, highly sophisticated cellular
imaging techniques on our understanding, has written: “The depicted cell
seems a kind of endlessly dynamic molecular sea, where even those
‘structures’ elaborated by a century of biochemical analysis are
constantly being broken down and resynthesized.” And she adds: “It is not
so much that the structures begin to move, but movements — for example in
the assembly and self-organization of the cytoskeleton — begin to
constitute structure”.
(from Chapter 5, “Our Bodies Are Formed Streams”, in
Organisms and
Their Evolution — Agency and Meaning in the Drama of Life)
November 6, 2023
One might easily think that the real essence and solid foundation of our
lives was from the beginning rigidly established inside the first cells of
our bodies. There we find DNA macromolecules that, in a ceaseless flood of
images, are presented to us as crystalline forms in the shape of a
spiraling ladder — a ladder whose countless rungs constitute the fateful
stairway of our lives. So, too, with the proteins and protein complexes of
our bodies: we have been told for decades that they fold precisely into
wondrously efficient molecular machines whose all-important
functions are predestined by the DNA sequence.
The trouble is, biological researches of the last few decades have not
merely hinted at an altogether different story; they have (albeit
sometimes to deaf ears) been trumpeting it aloud as a theme with a
thousand variations. Even the supposedly “solid” structures and molecular
complexes in our cells — including the ones we have imagined as strict
determinants of our lives — are caught up in functionally significant
movement that the structures themselves can hardly have originated.
Nowhere are we looking either at a static sculpture or at controlling
molecules responsible for the sculpting. In an article in Nature
following the completion of the Human Genome Project, Helen Pearson
interviewed many geneticists in order to assemble the emerging picture of
DNA. One research group, she reported, has shown that the molecule is made
“to gyrate like a demonic dancer”. Others point out how chromosomes “form
fleeting liaisons with proteins, jiggle around impatiently and shoot out
exploratory arms”. Phrases such as “endless acrobatics”, “subcellular
waltz”, and DNA that “twirls in time and space” are strewn through the
article. “The word ‘static’ is disappearing from our vocabulary”, remarks
cell biologist and geneticist Tom Misteli, a Distinguished Investigator at
the National Cancer Institute in Bethesda, Maryland.
Everywhere we look, shifting form and movement show themselves to be the
“substance” of biological activity. The physiological narratives of our
lives play out in gestural dramas that explain the origin and significance
of structures rather than being explained by those structures.
(from Chapter 5, “Our Bodies Are Formed Streams”, in
Organisms and
Their Evolution — Agency and Meaning in the Drama of Life)
October 30, 2023
In this materialist era, we like our reality hard and our truths
weighty and rock solid. We may accept that there are states
of matter less substantial than rocks, but in our imaginations we turn
even fluids and gases into collections of tiny particles.
Similarly, in our reconstructions of physiological processes, material
structures come first, and only then can movement, flow, and
meaningful activity somehow occur.
How, after all, can there be movement without things to do the
moving? (It’s easy to forget that energy, fields, and forces are not
things!) Ask someone to describe the circulatory system, and you will very
likely hear a great deal about the heart, arteries, veins, capillaries,
red blood cells, and all the rest, but little or nothing about the endless
subtleties of circulatory movement through which, for example, the
structured heart first comes into being.
Yet there is no escaping the fact that we begin our lives in a thoroughly
fluid and plastic condition. Only with time do relatively solid and
enduring structures precipitate out as tentatively formed “islands” within
the streaming rivers of cells that shape the life of the early embryo. As
adults, we are still about seventy percent water.
(from Chapter 5, “Our Bodies Are Formed Streams”, in
Organisms and
Their Evolution — Agency and Meaning in the Drama of Life)
October 23, 2023
The dynamics of [the cell’s holistic performance] are a long way from the
clean, informational logic commonly associated with genes. Lenny Moss, a
molecular biologist who transformed himself into one of our most
insightful philosophers of biology, had this to say about the relation
between cellular membranes and genes:
“The membranous system of the cell, the backbone of cellular
compartmentalization, is the necessary presupposition of its own renewal
and replication. Cellular organization in general and membrane-mediated
compartmentalization in particular are constitutive of the biological
‘meaning’ of any newly synthesized protein (and thus gene), which is
either properly targeted within the context of cellular
compartmentalization or quickly condemned to rapid destruction (or
cellular ‘mischief’). At the level of the empirical materiality of real
cells, genes ‘show up’ as indeterminate resources ... If cellular
organization is ever lost, neither ‘all the king’s horses and all the
king’s men’ nor any amount of DNA could put it back together again”.
(from Chapter 4, “The Sensitive, Dynamic Cell”, in
Organisms and Their Evolution — Agency and
Meaning in the Drama of Life)
October 16, 2023
In an integral, organic whole, we can assume the “viewpoint” of many parts
in such a way as to make each one momentarily seem to be the
coordinating “master” element. This is why the cytoskeleton, just as much
as our genes, might appear to explain everything that goes on. With
wonderful sensitivity it “feels out” the surfaces of the cell and all its
organelles. The balance of forces maintained by the fibers shapes the
cell, dynamically positions the organelles, and both guides and helps to
power the critical movement of the cell within its environment. As we have
seen, the cytoskeleton likewise plays a key role in moving substances to
their functional locations within the cell. And it is a decisively
important regulator of gene activity.
And yet, this does not make the cytoskeleton a master regulator. The truth
is simply that, to one degree or another, each part of an organic whole
bears that whole within itself — is informed by, and expresses, the whole.
The idea of a master regulator arises only when we insist on viewing a
specific part in isolation from the whole so as to identify single, local,
and unambiguous causal interactions. We then say that this part
makes certain things happen. The fact that the part is itself made
to happen by the very things it supposedly accounts for then tends to be
ignored. We lose sight of the fluidity and physical indeterminism of the
living context — an indeterminism whose meaning and coherence become
visible only when we allow particular physical causes to “disappear” into
the unifying narratives, or stories, of the organism’s life. In much the
same way, we experience physical sounds and gestures disappearing into the
meaning of the speech we hear.
(from Chapter 4, “The Sensitive, Dynamic Cell”, in
Organisms and Their Evolution — Agency and
Meaning in the Drama of Life)
October 9, 2023
[Regarding the filamentary networks within cells comprising the
cytoskeleton:]
Neither the cytoskeleton’s moment-by-moment dynamics nor the coherent and
intelligible aspect of its activity can be ascribed to “instructions” from
genes — or even to the physical laws bearing on cytoskeletal proteins. As
the matter was summarized by Franklin Harold, an emeritus professor of
biochemistry and molecular biology at Colorado State University, “One
cannot predict the form or function of these complex [cytoskeletal]
ensembles from the characteristics of their component proteins”. And yet,
Harold went on, “When seen in the context of the parent cell the
arrangement of the molecules becomes quite comprehensible”. He then raised
the obvious question: “How is the cytoskeleton itself so fashioned that
its operations accord with the cell’s overall ‘plan’ and generate its
particular morphology time after time?”
(from Chapter 4, “The Sensitive, Dynamic Cell”, in
Organisms and Their Evolution — Agency and
Meaning in the Drama of Life)
October 2, 2023
It would be well to remind ourselves that, whatever else it may be, an
organism is a physical being. Its doings are always in one way or another
physical doings. This may seem a strange point to need emphasizing
at a time when science is wedded to materialism. And yet, for the better
part of the past century problems relating to the material coordination of
biological activity were largely ignored while biologists stared,
transfixed, into the cell nucleus. If they concentrated hard enough, they
could begin to hear the siren call of a de-materialized, one-dimensional,
informational view of life.
The idea of a genetic code and program proved compelling,
even though the program was never found and the supposedly fixed code was
continually rewritten by the cell in every phase of its activity. So long
as one lay under the spell woven by notions of causally effective
information and code, problems of material causation somehow disappeared
from view, or seemed unimportant.
Surely, even if they are not the decisive causes usually imagined, genes
do connect in some manner with the features they were thought
one-sidedly to explain. But this just as surely means they must connect
physically and meaningfully, via movements and transformations of
substance testifying to an underlying narrative — not merely logically,
through the genetic encoding of an imagined program. And what we saw
earlier (in Chapter 3) about the significant movements and gesturings of
chromosomes is only the beginning of the story.
(from Chapter 4, “The Sensitive, Dynamic Cell”, in
Organisms and Their Evolution — Agency and
Meaning in the Drama of Life)
September 11, 2023
Throughout a good part of the twentieth century, cell biologists battled
over the question, “Which exerts greater control over the life of the cell
— the cell nucleus or the cytoplasm?”. From mid-century onward, however,
the badge of imperial authority was, by enthusiastic consensus, awarded to
the nucleus, and especially to the genes and DNA within it. “Genes make
proteins, and proteins make us” — this has been the governing motto,
despite both halves of the statement being false.
The question for our own day is, “Why would anyone think — as the majority
of biologists still do — that any part of a cell must possess executive
control over all the other parts?”
(from Chapter 4, “The Sensitive, Dynamic Cell”, in
Organisms and Their Evolution — Agency and
Meaning in the Drama of Life)
September 4, 2023
Writing about the striking capability of a topisomerase [enzyme] to untie
a DNA knot by cutting through the double helix and later putting it back
together again — all without disturbing the critical continuity of the
original chemical structure — James Wang, the
Harvard University molecular biologist who discovered the first
topoisomerase, remarked:
“When we think a bit more about it, such a feat is absolutely amazing. An
enzyme molecule, like a very nearsighted person, can sense only a small region
of the much larger DNA to which it is bound, surely not an entire DNA
[molecule]. How can the enzyme manage to make the correct moves, such as to
untie a knot rather than make the knot even more tangled? How could a
nearsighted enzyme sense whether a particular move is desirable or undesirable
for the final outcome?”
(from Chapter 3, “What Brings Our Genome Alive”, in
Organisms and Their Evolution — Agency and
Meaning in the Drama of Life)
August 28, 2023
The fixation upon an abstract, neatly identifiable, genetic sequence
has served well the compulsion among biologists to find precise,
unambiguous, logically clean, and satisfyingly deterministic causal
explanations. Nevertheless, what’s been happening in rapidly intensifying
fashion over the past couple of decades, has been a forced retreat from
explanations of this sort. To cite a few key words and phrases from the
contemporary literature: everything turns out to be mind-numbingly
complex, which means, in part, that context makes all the
difference. We are forced to try to understand how regulatory
networks, intricate feedback loops, and the frequent
difficulty of distinguishing causes from effects bear upon our
biological understanding. Ultimately, we seem to be driven toward
systems biology, an easily degraded term that many seem to prefer
over the embarrassment (and richer meaning) of holistic biology.
What is not generally realized, however, is that this retreat from
simplistic “causal mechanisms” suggests a movement toward a kind of
explanation biologists have not yet come to terms with ... How might we
make sense of the vast coordination of trillions of molecular events in
the interest of a larger picture that is subject to continual change, as
when a cell initiates the transition leading toward cell division?
(from Chapter 3, “What Brings Our Genome Alive”, in
Organisms and Their Evolution — Agency and
Meaning in the Drama of Life)
August 21, 2023
Yes, the use of terms such as “dance” and “choreography” in molecular
biology is rather distinctive. Some might call it eccentric. But this
particular eccentricity has for some time now been creeping into the
conventional technical literature. We have already heard of “genomic
origami”, an idea that has almost become a cliché. And we have also been
told: “The statement, ‘genomes exist in space and time in the cell
nucleus’ is a trivial one, but one that has long been ignored in our
studies of gene function” — this according to two leaders of the current
work: Job Dekker, head of a bioinformatics lab studying the spatial
organization of genomes at the University of Massachusetts Medical School,
and Tom Misteli, a research director at the National Cancer Institute.
Recent investigations, they say, have taught us that “gene expression is
not merely controlled by the information contained in the DNA sequence”,
but also by the “higher-order organization of chromosomes” and “long-range
interactions in the context of nuclear architecture” ...
It looks very much as if the chromosome, along with everything else in the
cell, is itself a manifestation of life, not a logic or mechanism
explaining life. This performance cannot be captured with an abstract
code. Gene regulation is defined less by static elements of logic than by
the quality and force of its various gestures. Brought into movement by
its surroundings, the chromosome becomes an expression of a larger context
of living activity.
(from Chapter 3, “What Brings Our Genome Alive”, in
Organisms and Their Evolution — Agency and
Meaning in the Drama of Life)
August 7, 2023
We have scarcely begun to look at the dynamic aspects of the cell nucleus.
Not only do chromosomes fold, loop, coil, and twist rather like a nest of
snakes, but they engage in decisive and changing electrical interactions;
they relocate from here to there within the nucleus, partly in order to
associate with dynamically assembled collections of molecules important
for regulating gene expression; and they are influenced by pushes and
pulls from the fibers of the extra-nuclear cytoskeleton.
Or again, DNA is said to “breathe” in rhythmical movements as it tightens
and relaxes its embrace of the histone core particles mentioned earlier.
And again, it breathes in a different sort of rhythm as the two strands of
the double helix alternately separate and reunite at particular loci. And
yet again, there are many profoundly significant structural novelties to
which DNA lends itself, beyond the double helix. All this and much more is
the cell’s way of evoking the genetic performance that it needs — a
performance that expresses the cell’s own life and that of the organism as
a whole.
And so, when researchers refer to the “choreography” of the cell nucleus
and the “dance” of chromosomes, as they sometimes do, their language is
closer to being literal than many have imagined. If the organism is to
survive, chromosomal movements must be well-shaped responses to
sensitively discerned needs — all in harmony with innumerable dance
partners, and all resulting in every gene being expressed or not according
to the meaning of the larger drama. We can hardly help asking: If such
choreography is how the organism lives and performs at the molecular
level, what does this mean for the nature of molecular biological
explanation?
(from Chapter 3, “What Brings Our Genome Alive”, in
Organisms and Their Evolution — Agency and
Meaning in the Drama of Life)
July 31, 2023
Picture the situation concretely. Every bodily activity or condition
presents its own requirements for gene expression. Whether you are running
or sleeping, starving or feasting, rousing yourself to action or calming
down, suffering a flesh wound or recovering from pneumonia — in all cases
the body and many of its different cells have specific, almost
incomprehensibly complex and changing requirements for differential
expression of thousands of genes. And one thing (among countless others)
bearing on this differential expression in all its fine detail is the
coiling and uncoiling of chromosomes.
With so much concerted movement going on (including the looping we heard
about earlier) how does the cell keep all those “twenty four miles of
string in the tennis ball” from getting hopelessly tangled? We do at least
know some of the players addressing the problem. For example, there are
complex protein enzymes called topoisomerases, which the cell employs to
help manage the spatial organization of chromosomes. Demonstrating a
spatial insight and dexterity that might amaze those of us who have
struggled to sort out tangled masses of thread, these enzymes manage to
make just the right local cuts to the strands in order to relieve strain,
allow necessary movement of individual genes or regions of the chromosome
and prevent a hopeless mass of knots.
Some topoisomerases cut just one strand of the double helix, allow it to
wind or unwind around the other strand, and then reconnect the severed
ends. This alters the supercoiling of the DNA. Other topoisomerases can
undo knots by cutting both strands, passing a loop of the chromosome
through the gap thus created, and then sealing the gap again.
Imagine trying this with miles of string wrapped around millions of
minuscule beads compacted into a few cubic inches of space, with the
string all the while looping and squirming like a nest of snakes in order
to bring all the right loci together so as to achieve the tasks of the
moment. (And how are these tasks “known”?) I don’t think anyone would
claim to have the faintest idea how this is actually managed in a
meaningful, overall, contextual sense, although great and fruitful efforts
have been made to analyze the local forces and “mechanisms” at play in
isolated reactions.
(from Chapter 3, “What Brings Our Genome Alive”, in
Organisms and Their Evolution — Agency and
Meaning in the Drama of Life)
July 24, 2023
We have so far hardly done more than hint at the true dynamism that
enlivens our genetic heritage. The general picture of complex,
three-dimensional organization has certainly galvanized molecular
biologists. John Rinn, director of the Rinn Lab at Harvard, has said of
the nuclear space and its chromosomal drama, “It’s genomic origami ...
It’s the shape that you fold [the genome] into that matters”. According
to the authors of another paper, “A loop that turns a gene on in one cell
type might disappear in another. A domain may move from subcompartment to
subcompartment as its flavor changes. No two cell types [have their
chromosomes] folded alike. Folding drives function.” And Suhas Rao, the
paper’s lead author and a researcher at Baylor College of Medicine’s
Center for Genome Architecture, remarked:
“A loop is the fundamental fold in the cell’s toolbox. We found that the
formation and dissolution of DNA loops inside the nucleus enables
different cells to create an almost endless array of distinct
three-dimensional folds and, in so doing, accomplish an extraordinary
variety of functions”.
Every overall configuration (involving many factors we have not yet
considered) represents a unique balance between constrained and liberated
expression of our total complement of 21,000 genes. Moreover, new
features of chromosome spatial and dynamic organization continue to be
elucidated on a regular basis, and there appears to be no limit to the
variety and scale of these features.
Think about all this dynamic form and movement for a while, and you may
find yourself asking, along with me: What possible mechanism could ensure
the coherence of all this movement and gesturing in relation to all
the requirements of the trillions of cells in your or my body, or the
tissues and organs into which those cells are organized, as we go about
our endlessly varying activities under endlessly varying conditions?
(from Chapter 3, “What Brings Our Genome Alive”, in
Organisms and Their Evolution — Agency and
Meaning in the Drama of Life)
July 17, 2023
Regarding our theory of evolution: If, in reality, every organism’s
existence is a live, moment-by-moment, improvisational storytelling — a
creative and adaptive, irreversible narrative that is always progressing
coherently and contextually from challenge to response and adaptation,
from initiative to outcome, from nascence to renascence, from immaturity
through maturity to regeneration — then an evolutionary theory rooted in
notions of random variation and mindlessness is a theory hanging upon a
great question mark. “The answer to the question of what status teleology
[‘end-directedness’] should have in biology” — so the influential
biologist and philosopher Francisco Varela came to see at the end of his
life — determines “the character of our whole theory of animate nature”.
(from Chapter 2, “The Organism’s Story”, in
Organisms and Their Evolution — Agency and
Meaning in the Drama of Life)
July 10, 2023
An organism is not, most essentially, its body. After all, its body at one
time is never materially identical to its body at a different time. It is,
rather, a unique power of activity. Its body is first of all a result of
this activity, while also developing into a further vehicle for it.
Organisms, in other words, are doings rather than beings.
Or, as the student of holistic thinking, Henri Bortoft, has put it, they
are “doings that be”, not “beings that do”.
So it is not that an organism’s material being determines its doings (as
is broadly assumed throughout the biological sciences); rather, its doings
are what constitute it as a material being. This means that it is never
wholly present to our observation in any outward or material sense. The
organism’s essential power to act cannot itself be a visible product of
its activity.
The preeminence of activity in relation to physical substance and
structure would, if taken seriously, give us an altogether new science of
life. For example, it might have saved us from an entire century of badly
misdirected thinking about DNA and genes. It might also have spared
biologists the crude materialism that many physicists long ago gained the
freedom to question.
(from Chapter 2, “The Organism’s Story”, in
Organisms and Their Evolution — Agency and
Meaning in the Drama of Life)
July 3, 2023
If the organism’s life is an unfolding story, then we might well take the
essence of that life to be the storytelling itself, not the
particular embodiment of the story at any frozen instant. Organisms, as
philosopher Hans Jonas has written, “are individuals whose being is their
own doing ... they are committed to keeping up this being by ever renewed
acts of it.” Their identity is “not the inert one of a permanent
substratum, but the self-created one of continuous performance”.
(from Chapter 2, “The Organism’s Story”, in
Organisms and Their Evolution — Agency and
Meaning in the Drama of Life)
June 26, 2023
I offer no specific hypotheses to explain the existence of [the
organism’s] intentional agency and story narration. I only note that the
fact of the narrative is immediately demonstrable in every
organism. There may be huge differences in the nature of the stories that
can be told by different kinds of organism, but from the molecular level
on up there are always elements of story that we do not find in inanimate
things. The narrative of meaningful activity undertaken and accomplished
is there to be seen, and is characterized as such, if only inadvertently,
in every paragraph of biological description.
Moreover, our recognition of intelligent and intentional activity does not
require us to understand its source. Looking at the pages of a book, we
have no difficulty distinguishing written marks from deposits of lint and
dust, even if we know nothing about the origin of the marks. We can
declare a functioning machine to be engaged in a purposive operation,
whether or not we have any clue about the engineers who built a
mechanistic reflection of their own purposes into it. And if we find live,
intelligent performances by organisms, we don’t have to know how, or from
where, the intelligence gets its foothold before we accept the testimony
of our eyes and understanding.
Neither should we expect the stories to be predictable — no more than we
expect the ending of a half-read novel to be predictable. We can, however,
expect the ending to make sense, and even to throw light on
everything that went before. The story will hold together in a way
that unstoried physical events do not.
(from Chapter 2, “The Organism’s Story”, in
Organisms and Their Evolution — Agency and
Meaning in the Drama of Life)
June 12, 2023
The “end” being approached in an organism’s story is not some particular,
discrete accomplishment, distinct from the means of getting there, but
rather the wholeness and perfection of the entire narrative movement from
“here” to “there”. Assessing this end is much the same as if we were
assessing the meaning of a novel: knowing the ending in isolation would
have little significance compared to knowing the larger story of which, so
we often feel, it is a necessary and proper part.
Note well, then, that when speaking of the organism’s story, we need make
no reference to the consciously directed performances of human beings,
even though our performances certainly exhibit a narrative character in
the sense meant here. When I refer to living activity as “end-directed”,
I am not suggesting the formulation of a conscious goal that is “aimed
at”. I mean, rather, something like this:
The organism’s life is a continual playing forward of meanings within
meaningful contexts. There is a certain directedness to any such play
of meaning (as when birds build a nest), but it need not be the
directedness of human plan fulfillment.
The directedness of a temporally unfolding play of meaning implies no
narrow goal and no conscious planning. But every such play of meaning
does have a certain directedness to it. Think of the greatest poems or
novels, where nothing is calculated in order to reach the
conclusion, but the movement is nevertheless from the beginning to the
end, not the reverse. This movement simply expresses the progressive
deepening of a meaningful and coherent unity — more like a dance than
pursuit of a fixed and predefined goal. And the dance looks ever more
improvisational as organisms ascend in the scale of complexity.
(from Chapter 2, “The Organism’s Story”, in
Organisms and Their Evolution — Agency and
Meaning in the Drama of Life)
June 5, 2023
The fact of purposive activity; the obvious play of an active agency; the
coordination of diverse means toward the realization of countless
interwoven and relatively stable ends; the undeniable evidence that
animals perceive a world, interpreting and responding to perceptions
according to their own way of life; and the coherence of all this activity
in a governing unity — this tells us that every organism is narrating a
meaningful life story. This is not something that a rock, say, loosened by
ice and tumbling down the steep slope of a mountain ravine, does in
anything like the same manner. The pattern of physical events in the
organism is raised by its peculiar sort of coherence toward something like
a biography whose “logic” unfolds on an entirely different level from the
logic of inanimate physical causation. When we tell a story, the narrative
threads convey the meanings of a life — for example, motives, needs, and
intentions — and these are never a matter of mere physical cause and
consequence.
So when I speak of the organism’s wise and knowing agency, or its
purposive striving, I refer, among other things, to its capacity to
weave, out of the resources of its own life, the kind of biological
narrative we routinely observe, with its orchestration of physical
events in the service of the organism’s own meanings.
(from Chapter 2, “The Organism’s Story”, in
Organisms and Their Evolution — Agency and
Meaning in the Drama of Life)
May 29, 2023
No one will bristle upon hearing that “this cell is preparing to divide”.
But we would certainly bristle if we heard that “Mars is preparing to make
another journey around the sun”, or “the nebula has ceased its effort
after forming the solar system”. A planet moves according to universal
laws acting in an unchanging manner. There is no point in its journey when
an act is initiated or concluded, but only the playing out of the
immediately preceding forces. There is in this sense nothing new to
explain. Biological explanation, by contrast, always involves something
new, an element of initiative, a response to circumstances not fully
necessitated by the preceding play of physical and chemical processes.
(from Chapter 2, “The Organism’s Story”, in
Organisms and Their Evolution — Agency and
Meaning in the Drama of Life)
May 22, 2023
Think of a living dog, then of its decomposing corpse ... No biologist who
had been studying the behavior of the living dog will concern
herself with the corpse’s “behavior”. Nor will she refer to certain
physical changes in the corpse as reflexes, just as she will never
mention the corpse’s responses to stimuli, or the
functions of its organs, or the processes of development being
undergone by the decomposing tissues.
Virtually the same collection of molecules exists in the canine cells
during the moments immediately before and after death. But after the
fateful transition no one will any longer think of genes as being
regulated, nor will anyone refer to normal or proper
chromosome functioning. No molecules will be said to guide other
molecules to specific targets, and no molecules will be carrying
signals, which is just as well because there will be no structures
recognizing signals. Code, information, and
communication, in their biological sense, will have disappeared from
the scientist’s vocabulary.
The corpse will not produce errors in chromosome replication or in
any other processes, and neither will it attempt error
correction or the repair of damaged parts. More generally,
the ideas of injury and healing will be absent. No structures
will inherit features from parent structures in the way that
daughter cells inherit traits or tendencies from their parent cells, and
no one will cite the plasticity or context-dependence of the
corpse’s adaptation to its environment.
The language highlighted here is clearly a language of
more-than-physical meaning. When investigators do their best to ignore
these additional layers of meaning — for example, when they present their
findings as if they were merely elucidating physical and chemical
interactions — then they are contradicting just about all their own
biological descriptions.
(from Chapter 2, “The Organism’s Story”, in
Organisms and Their Evolution — Agency and
Meaning in the Drama of Life)
May 15, 2023
When an animal responds to a physical stimulus, its response is not in any
strict way physically enforced, or directly caused, by the stimulus.
Rather, the animal “reads” the meaning of the situation in light of its
own concerns, including its needs and interests, and then alters that
meaning by responding to it. If the animal is physically moved by a
stimulus, as when a rolling stone bumps into a leg, we don’t consider the
movement to be the organism’s own act. It is not a response, but
merely a physically caused result.
As a useful picture of this, we need only consider how the negligible
force producing an image on the retina — say, the image of a charging lion
— can set the entire mass of a quarter-ton wildebeest into thundering
motion. The impelling force comes from within, so that the movement seems
to originate within the animal itself in a way that we do not see in
inanimate objects.
The wildebeest is not forcibly moved by a physical impact, but rather
perceives something. Further, its perception is at the same time an
interpretation of its surroundings from its own point of view and
in light of its own world of meaning. The “lawfulness” at issue here, such
as it is, is far from being universal. It differs radically from one
living being to another, so that the retinal image of a charging lion
means a very different thing to the wildebeest from what it means to
another lion or to a vulture circling overhead. And it produces an
altogether different response in these cases.
(from Chapter 2, “The Organism’s Story”, in
Organisms and Their Evolution — Agency and
Meaning in the Drama of Life)
May 8, 2023
Organisms are agents; they do things. The difference between a
motionless rock, on one hand, and a motionless cat on the other is that
the cat is not merely motionless; it is resting, or perhaps
preparing to pounce. When it ceases doing things, it is no longer alive.
Whereas a rock may be moved according to universal laws, the cat is
self-moved; the needs and interests according to which it moves are
not the universal laws of its surroundings. In our routine experience we
take self-motivated activity to be definitive of living things. If an
object moves unexpectedly — without an evident external cause — we
immediately begin testing the assumption that it is living.
(from Chapter 2, “The Organism’s Story”, in
Organisms and Their Evolution — Agency and
Meaning in the Drama of Life)
May 1, 2023
My larger argument in this book will be that the biologist’s conscious
commitment to purely physical and chemical descriptions — which is to say,
her conscious refusal of much that she actually knows — has devastating
effects upon many fields of biological understanding, and particularly
evolutionary theory. It hardly needs emphasizing that if organisms really
are purposive beings — if the fact of purposive activity is not an
illusion — then a biological science so repulsed by the idea of purpose
that its practitioners must avert their eyes at the very mention of it …
well, it appears that these practitioners must feel threatened at a place
they consider foundational. And with some justification, for to admit what
they actually know about organisms would be to turn upside down and inside
out much of the science to which they have committed their lives.
(from Chapter 2, “The Organism’s Story”, in
Organisms and Their Evolution — Agency and
Meaning in the Drama of Life)
April 24, 2023
A double and conflicted stance toward end-directedness — believing and not
believing, acknowledging and explaining away — constitutes, you could
almost say, the warp and woof of biology itself. Look for “purpose” in the
index of any biological textbook, and you will almost certainly be
disappointed. That term, along with others such as “meaning” and “value”,
is effectively banned. There is something like a taboo against it.
Yet, in striking self-contradiction, those textbooks are themselves
structured according to the purposive activities and meaningful tasks of
organisms. Biologists are always working to narrate goal-directed
achievements. How is DNA replicated? How do cells divide? How does
metabolism supply energy for living activity? How are circadian rhythms
established and maintained? How do animals arrive at the evolutionary
strategies or games or arms races through which they try to eat and avoid
being eaten?
Such questions are endless, and their defining role is reflected on every
page of every textbook on development, physiology, behavior, or evolution.
A research question is biological, as opposed to physical or
chemical, only when it is posed in one way or another by the organism’s
purposive, future-oriented activity. The puzzle is that, having been
aroused by such purposive questions, biologists look for answers rooted in
the assumption that organisms have no purposes. The reigning conviction is
that explanations of physical and chemical means effectively remove
any need to deal scientifically with the ends that alone could have
prompted our search for means in the first place.
(from Chapter 2, “The Organism’s Story”, in
Organisms and Their Evolution — Agency and
Meaning in the Drama of Life)
April 17, 2023
There is a strange reluctance among biologists to acknowledge fully the
purposiveness of living beings that is there for all to see. The
philosopher of science, Karl Popper, said that “The fear of using
teleological terms reminds me of the Victorian fear of speaking about
sex”. Popper may have had in mind a famous remark by his friend and
twentieth-century British evolutionary theorist, J. B. S. Haldane, who
once quipped that “Teleology is like a mistress to a biologist; he cannot
live without her but he’s unwilling to be seen with her in public”.
We find this same unwilling yet unshakable conviction of purposiveness at
the foundations of evolutionary theory. The theory, we are often told, is
supposed to explain away the organism’s purposes — “naturalize” them, as
those who claim to speak for nature like to say. But at the same time the
theory is itself said to be grounded solidly in the fact that organisms,
unlike rocks, thunderstorms, and solar systems, struggle to survive and
reproduce. If they did not spend their entire lives striving toward an
end, or telos, in this way, natural selection of the fittest
organisms (those best qualified to survive and reproduce) could not occur.
So it is not at all clear how selection is supposed to explain the origin
of such end-directed behavior.
(from Chapter 2, “The Organism’s Story”, in
Organisms and Their Evolution — Agency and
Meaning in the Drama of Life)
April 10, 2023
We have no reason to think that the intelligence working through the
material limitations of, say, bacteria is a “lower” or less capable
intelligence than that which is at work in ourselves — or that the
intelligence at work in our cells is lower than what works in our
conscious minds. Actually, our cellular intelligence quite evidently far
transcends our conscious capacities. We can say this without doubting that
the arrival of a self-aware sort of consciousness is a pivotal development
in the evolution of life. It’s just that we have no grounds for arrogance
regarding our current conscious achievements. These achievements are, in
the overall context of life on earth, humble indeed!
(from Chapter 1, “The Keys to This Book”, of
Organisms and Their Evolution — Agency and
Meaning in the Drama of Life)
April 3, 2023
In this book I offer no new or revolutionary findings in biology or
evolutionary theory — and would lack the qualifications for doing so even
if that were my inclination. Instead, I merely ask: What would biology and
evolutionary theory look like if we overcame our blindsight and reckoned
with the stories of organisms as we actually observed them? Can we allow
ourselves to see with restored vision?
And so there will be no occasion for readers to ask, “Where is all the new
evidence?” The evidence supporting my contentions here — as I try to show
chapter by chapter — amounts to just about everything biologists have
already recognized as truth, however much they might prefer not to
acknowledge the gifts of their own insight. This is why you will not find
me straining toward the fringes of biology, but rather citing, with very
few exceptions, one fully accredited researcher and theorist after
another. The case for a thoroughly disruptive re-thinking of organisms and
their evolution has long been staring us in the face.
(from Chapter 1, “The Keys to This Book”, of
Organisms and Their Evolution — Agency and
Meaning in the Drama of Life)
March 13, 2023
Some people have a very difficult time with any use of the word “meaning”
in a scientific context. It’s worth setting this difficulty alongside the
simple fact that the only things we know about the world are
meanings. The idea that we are dealing with genuine meaning, not
meaninglessness, is already implicit in the word “know”. Meaninglessness
would not yield itself to knowing articulation, as in science. Meaning
cannot be questioned. The effort to question or define it — or just point
to it — assumes that the person being addressed already possesses a
working understanding of meaning, such as the meaning of a pointing
finger. Acting out meanings is pretty much the only thing we do with our
lives. The same thing is true of organisms generally, all the way down to
one-celled creatures — except that they lack the capacity for conscious
awareness of the meanings at work in their lives. The interesting question
has to do with the different meanings at work in different kinds of
organism.
(from Chapter 1, “The Keys to This Book”, of
Organisms and Their Evolution — Agency and
Meaning in the Drama of Life)
March 6, 2023
[Regarding the “integral unity of the organism”:] I use something like
this phrase often, and intend it as an active concept in Aristotle’s sense
of “being at work staying itself” (in Joe Sachs’ translation of
Aristotle’s entelecheia). Through this activity, the parts of an
organism arise from and are differentiated from out of a whole, not
assembled as pre-existing entities in order to build a whole. The integral
unity is actively there from the start, and is not at any point imposed
from outside. It is a unity because each part reflects — or participates
in and remains consistent with — the nature of the whole from which it
arose.
(from Chapter 1, “The Keys to This Book”, of
Organisms and Their Evolution — Agency and
Meaning in the Drama of Life)
February 27, 2023
Humans are agents — we possess agency, because we possess an awareness of
our world and can act in it. We help to create the situations in which we
live, instead of merely being determined by them. The cells of our bodies
clearly can participate in our agency by giving expression to it, as when
we move our limbs intentionally. But we would never say of those cells as
such that they possess awareness or agency, as opposed to moving with an
agency not fully their own. This is suggestive of the kinds of distinction
we must make between ourselves and, say, single-celled organisms.
(from Chapter 1, “The Keys to This Book”, of
Organisms and Their Evolution — Agency and
Meaning in the Drama of Life)
February 20, 2023
Biology today suffers from the deepest possible distortions. We end up
with living processes theoretically stripped of their life — this
despite the fact that we ourselves know this life more directly and
intimately than we know anything about the non-living world.
(from Chapter 1, “The Keys to This Book”, of
Organisms and Their Evolution — Agency and
Meaning in the Drama of Life)
February 6, 2023
In order to analyze a whole into parts, we must first have recognized each
part as significant — as a meaningful whole in its own right. This
recognition of wholes, however unconscious it tends to be, is fully
qualitative, contrary to our usual ideas of science, and it requires a
movement of understanding that runs contrary to analysis.
The synthetic, or holistic, counter-movement to analysis is implicit in
the biologist’s frequent reference to the “context-dependence” of
biological processes. The problem is that the implication here — the
implication that there is a kind of influence or causation running from a
collective, complex whole toward its parts — has drawn little reflection
and has had little effect on the underlying assumptions of biologists.
“Context” is one of the most common words used by geneticists and
molecular biologists. But it seems that no one is at all interested in
asking what the term means and implies.
In this manner, “holism” — despite its being hardly separable conceptually
from “context” — has become a kind of “devil word” in biology, a fact
ironically coexisting with a refusal to consider the issues implicit in
current, context-centered biological language. In this book “holism” —
like the the biologist’s more acceptable and virtually equivalent
“context-dependence” — will simply be taken for granted from the
beginning. But, unlike “context-dependence”, its meaning will be
consciously and explicitly drawn out as we go along.
(from Chapter 1, “The Keys to This Book”, of
Organisms and Their Evolution — Agency and
Meaning in the Drama of Life)
January 30, 2023
If the organism’s life, its biological existence, takes narrative
form, then our explanation of its life — contrary to conventional notions
of explanation — must also take a narrative form. And since a genuine,
living narrative is always a playing out of interior meanings, the
explanation must be framed in terms of those meanings.
It could hardly be clearer that the elements of a story, like the elements
of an organism’s life, can never be considered adequately in isolation
from each other. Nothing is absolutely distinct from everything else. The
end of a really great novel will be illuminated by its beginning, and the
beginning by the end. This interwovenness of the narrative amounts to a
kind of holism, and in this respect might far more appropriately be
compared to sketching a portrait than to analyzing a machine into discrete
parts and causal relations.
However, it is clear that we cannot have holism without also applying the
remarkable analytical skills that we humans have so fruitfully gained. It
is hard even to conceive how one might sketch an organic whole without
having a lucid and detailed awareness of its parts. The need is to hold
together the two movements of thought — the synthetic (holistic) and the
analytical.
(from Chapter 1, “The Keys to This Book”, of
Organisms and Their Evolution — Agency and
Meaning in the Drama of Life)
January 23, 2023
Even our descriptions of cellular and molecular “behavior” refuse to be
altogether cleansed of interiority. We can always recognize a meaning —
what a biological activity is about (synthesis of a protein, or extraction
of usable energy from a substance) — when we look at cellular goings-on,
and our biological inquiries are guided by this meaning. Meaning itself is
never spatial or sense-perceptible, even if spatial structures are
required for giving material expression to meaning.
A dramatic fact about contemporary biology is that biologists seem to have
a horror of interiority, or the non-spatial and non-sense-perceptible.
Given that the life of animals is through and through an interior
business, this horror is not only perplexing, but also devastating for the
prospects of a truly biological science.
(from Chapter 1, “The Keys to This Book”, of
Organisms and Their Evolution — Agency and
Meaning in the Drama of Life)
January 16, 2023
On one hand, no scientist would — or should — say, with anything like the
human meaning and feeling of the words, “The potter wasp takes great care
to make thoughtful provision for its young”. On the other hand, we can
hardly avoid our scientific responsibility to ask, “How is it that the
performance of the potter wasp so forcibly reminds us of what, in our own
evolutionary development, has become ‘taking great care to make thoughtful
provision for our young’? Do the two kinds of behavior arise from wholly
disparate roots in the history of life on earth, despite appearances?”
Perhaps the best place to start answering that question is with a resolve
not to compromise any side of the truth merely because we are
philosophically uncomfortable with its apparent implications. In
particular, we ought not to twist our understanding out of shape due to a
historically conditioned revulsion against anything like a purposive
dimension to life processes. Nor should we be unwilling to acknowledge the
ways in which all organisms behave as more or less centered agents in the
world. Nor again ought we to respect any presumed rule in biology that
says, “Some human traits are unnatural and cannot be referred to in a
properly ‘naturalized’ science”.
Oddly, those who most eagerly remind us that “humans belong to the animal
kingdom” often seem the ones most reluctant to embrace the flip side of
this truth: all animals have arisen within the same drama of evolving life
that, we now know, also happened to be in the business of producing
humans. If we want to say that humans share in the nature of all animals,
how can we then turn around and ignore the obvious implication that all
animals share something of the nature of humans?
(from Chapter 1, “The Keys to This Book”, of
Organisms and Their Evolution — Agency and
Meaning in the Drama of Life)
January 9, 2023
This difference between living and nonliving is not one that many
scientific students of life are fond of. That is why they have invented an
abstract evolutionary drama of miraculous character in order to explain
the difference away. As Lila Gatlin, a prominent biochemist,
mathematician, and shaper of evolutionary theory in the twentieth century,
once acknowledged, “The words ‘natural selection’ play a role in the
vocabulary of the evolutionary biologist similar to the word ‘god’ in
ordinary language”. In effect, the organism’s living wisdom was
transferred to an omnipotent “force” of evolution, where it could be kept
safely out of sight, obscured behind an elaborate technical and
mechanistic terminology.
An aim of this book is to recapture the drama of life in the place where
it actually occurs — in organisms themselves — and to lay bare as clearly
as possible the failure of the reigning evolutionary theory to explain the
special qualities of that drama. This will be a matter of showing that, in
a primary sense, the life of organisms explains evolution, rather than
being explained by it.
(from Chapter 1, “The Keys to This Book”, of
Organisms and Their Evolution — Agency and
Meaning in the Drama of Life)
January 2, 2023
I do not expect my efforts here to be adequate. But I do hope they may be
of some use to those sympathetic readers seeking a new vantage point upon
biology — one that, even if at first it presents an unfamiliar and
perplexing landscape, at least does not require us to deny the living
experience of all creatures, including ourselves.
(from the preface to the online book,
Organisms and Their Evolution — Agency and
Meaning in the Drama of Life)
December 19, 2022
Follow any collection of molecules carrying out their appointed task in
the organism — for example, the great variety of molecules whose
coordinated activity accomplishes the surgically precise operation
required for DNA repair or RNA alternative splicing — and, if you try to
think the process merely in terms of physical forces, you will find
yourself exclaiming, “They can’t do that! Where is the coordination
of it all coming from?”
(from “From Bodily Wisdom
to the Knowing Self, Part 3: Where Do Intelligence and Wisdom Reside?”)
December 12, 2022
I have been emphasizing that the organism is a becoming. This fact makes
a lie of the overly emphatic conviction that we learn who we are through
a study of evolution. Evolution tells us a great deal — but only about
our past. It doesn’t tell us about the potentials of our becoming in the
present. When we learn that such-and-such a trait of lower animals is
recognizable in ourselves in some form, this knowledge immediately
changes our relation to that trait. It opens up a space of freedom to do
work and act consciously where previously, rather as with the monarch
butterlies migrating south, nature was simply acting through us. “The
truth will make you free”. Those who delight in pointing out our “lower
nature” are actually assisting us — presumably to their great
disappointment, should they become aware of it — toward the realization
of a higher nature.
(from “Who Are You and Who Am I
and Who Are We?”)
December 5, 2022
There is a consensus today that entire organelles of the cell originated
in evolutionary history through a kind of cooperative fusion of distinct
microorganisms, a process requiring an almost unimaginable degree of
intricate coordination among previously independent life processes.
Likewise, hybridization involving distinct species — with a corresponding
merger of genomes — is being found to play an unexpectedly significant
role in evolution. There is also the well-demonstrated reality of lateral
gene transfer, which looks like invalidating the image of an evolutionary
“tree,” especially at the level of simpler organisms: repeated horizontal
exchanges of genetic material between distinct species make large portions
of the tree look more like a complex web.
Then, again, there is good evidence that viruses have played a major role
in contributing to the genomes of more complex organisms, including
mammals. Every human genome is thought to contain several times as much
DNA of viral origin than DNA of all the protein-coding genes combined.
In all this we find organisms bringing their separate, highly coordinated
life processes to bear upon each other in a symbiotic or other interactive
manner that can no more be described as “random” than can, say, the
complex and elaborately orchestrated mating processes we see among
sexually reproducing organisms. "Our standard model of evolution is under
enormous pressure," says John Dupré, philosopher of biology at the
University of Exeter, UK. "We’re clearly going to see evolution as much
more about mergers and collaboration than change within isolated lineages”.
(from “Natural Genome Remodeling”)
November 28, 2022
It’s fine to say, “Our dealing only with what can be quantified is
exactly what leads us from the qualitative world of the subjective
observer to the realities of hard science”. But the phrase “what can be
quantified” has no content except to the degree we can say something
significant about the ”what” we are quantifying. Given a set of
quantities, we have to know what they are quantities of if we are
to understand anything at all about the actually existent world. And the
only way we can know this is by moving in a direction opposite to the one
we took when we abstracted the quantity from its phenomenon. We must
attend to the phenomenon in its own terms, but very little in science
teaches us how to do this.
(from “The Reduction Complex”)
November 21, 2022
Whether in fully conscious thought, or in speaking, or in gesturing, the
human individual is a being of speech in the broadest sense — a being of
meaningful expression, a logos-being (to use an older term). Our bodies
are, at every level of their activity, a gesture; we gesture our life,
speak our life. We live in outward forms expressing an inner content.
Even our listening is simultaneously a gesturing — a gesturing by which we
“speak” in sympathy with the speaker. William Condon, a Boston University
Medical Center professor of psychiatry, pioneered the use of sound films
to micro-analyze human interaction during speaking and listening. He
described as “surprising and unsuspected” the observation that “listeners
move in precise synchrony with the articulatory structure of the speaker’s
speech” — and do so “almost as well as the speaker does”:
This is an incredibly precise and delicate tracking process.
Metaphorically, it is as if the listener’s whole body were dancing in
precise and fluid accompaniment to the speech (Condon 1988).
(from “From Bodily Wisdom
to the Knowing Self, Part 2: Psyche, Soma, and the Unity of Gesture”)
November 14, 2022
If, as I have argued, every molecular process in the organism already
expresses an active and present wisdom, then it makes no sense to view
such processes as bottom-up explanations of how intelligence arises from
the non-intelligent. Nowhere do we find non-intelligence in the organism.
Far better to strive toward a recognition of intelligence as it plays
through all levels of observation and brings them into a unity.
There is little excuse for the largely unquestioned assumption that the
mind, or intelligence, is created by the brain. When we consider the fact
that undeniable and (for us) still barely penetrable intelligence is
already at work in the zygote, evidencing itself in the very processes
through which the future brain will be formed and begin to function, it
begins to look rather quixotic to ask how the brain produces intelligence,
without first inquiring about the intelligence that produces the brain.
(from “From Bodily Wisdom
to the Knowing Self, Part 3: Where Do Intelligence and Wisdom Reside?”)
November 7, 2022
[Regarding the excited “discovery” of intelligence in simple organisms,
plants, slime molds, crows, human infants, and so on:]
We might naturally respond, “What in the world is all the fuss about? Who
could ever have doubted the discovery of intelligence anywhere in the
biological realm?” After all, we never see anything but
intelligence. It’s what biologists are always trying to understand, what
they are forever talking about. No organism — when looked at as a living
performance rather than a dead weight — is ever not displaying
intelligence in every aspect of its being. Whether we speak about
instinct, or adaptive processes, or learning, or communication, or
behavior in general, or the development of form, or circadian rhythms, or
stress responses, or immune responses, or wound healing, or growth
processes, or any other organic function — it is impossible to avoid the
conviction that we are dealing with the expression of an active intelligence.
We all share this conviction, whether we are playing with a pet cat or
trying to shoo away a pesky blackbird diving around our heads during
nesting season, or watching a paramecium through a microscope. We know
that the creature is aiming at something — that is, trying to accomplish
something (or many things at once), enlisting diverse means in the service
of diverse ends, telling a kind of life story. The fact that it fails to
put its meanings, intentions and intelligent capabilities into the words
of a human language is irrelevant to this fundamental and readily
observable fact.
(from “From Bodily Wisdom
to the Knowing Self, Part 3: Where Do Intelligence and Wisdom Reside?”)
October 31, 2022
[Regarding the evolutionary movement toward individuation:] Does the
organism speak, or is it spoken? To what degree does it speak the meaning
of its life from its own center, and to what degree does the world breathe
meaning into and through it?
Every autumn in North America, migrating monarch butterflies travel
southward a couple of thousand miles to a small forest location in Mexico
— a location they have never before come near in their lifetime. It seems
fair to say in this case that they are moved by the call of their
surroundings — surroundings that play into and help define their bodily
instincts from without — more than they are moved by any choice of their
own. But analogs to choice become more vivid among birds and mammals, and
something like true and free choice comes to expression, at least as a
potential, in the human being.
One may be dismayed by the centrifugal and chaotic potentials of the
one-sided contemporary obsession with the individual and his rights. But,
on the other hand, this is the individual who for the first time, standing
firmly on his own ground, can behold the planet as a whole — can feel
himself belonging to humankind in a way that was inconceivable in earlier
eras, can survey the world of nature and become aware of his own
dependence upon it and responsibility for it. As Russian philosopher
Vladimir Solovyov pointed out in The Meaning of Love, the stronger
the independent being of the individual becomes, the greater its capacity
for reunion with other creatures — now in freely spoken love rather than
as the world’s irresistible urging.
(from “Who Are You and Who Am I
and Who Are We?”)
October 24, 2022
Recalling all your experiences of nature, begin to subtract elements from
her, one at a time. Take away the storm, with its thunder, wind, and
lightning, and how much poorer would our own inner world become? (We
would, to begin with, lose a significant portion of the meanings we find
in Shakespeare.) Or take away the arching vault of the sky, replacing it,
say, with a ten-foot ceiling. Would our minds retain the same ability
to form a concept of the transcendent, the exalted, the superior, the
sublime — all those ideas that connote the world’s vertical dimension? Or
banish the willow and pine from your world, or the swan and heron, or the
gurgling stream and powerful ocean wave, or the radiance of sun, moon, and
stars ...
It becomes clear, then, why those who count the world meaningless have,
with some reason, concluded that most human language is meaningless as
well. For our language is the world’s language. But, as the philologist
Owen Barfield pointed out, the converse is also true: if our language is
meaningful — as everyone in fact vividly pronounces it to be every day of
their lives — then the world that bequeaths to us the meanings we speak
must also be meaningful.
(from “How Biologists Lost Sight
of the Meaning of Life”)
October 17, 2022
All, or nearly all, of us have no difficulty reading the smiles of our
spouses, children, and friends as much more than “widenings of the oral
aperture, caused by contractions of the cheek musculature”. Some among us
develop great skill at understanding the entire range of human expression,
learning to commune deeply and sympathetically with the self doing the
expressing. This sort of understanding — as every one of us (scientist or
otherwise) assumes in daily life — is real and objective, even if it is
very unlike our schematic knowledge of machines. It leads to possibilities
of conversation and exchange that are as deep as our understanding.
There is, then, one inescapable fork in the road to understanding, and it
requires something like a yes-or-no commitment from us. We can, on the one
hand, deny our full cognitive potentials, splitting the world's truth down
the middle and refusing to accredit half of it as scientific truth. We
will then be tempted to equate science with technology and with our
ability to manipulate things. But, on the other hand, we can open
ourselves to the possibility that the face of the larger world — a face
every bit as qualitative and expressive in its own way as the human face —
might be read meaningfully and with objective understanding. Then we will
find ourselves in a scientific relation to the world that truly enlarges
our souls even as we move toward the widening horizons of an ever more
ensouled world.
(from “Recognizing Reality”)
October 10, 2022
The organism massively structures, restructures, and regulates its genome
through the intricate remodeling of chromatin (the DNA/protein/RNA complex
comprising our chromosomes), just as it shapes the dynamic,
three-dimensional organization of the cell nucleus, which in turn has a
great deal to do with how genes get expressed. Even regarding the bare
DNA sequence in the narrowest sense, Italian geneticist Vittorio
Sgaramella, after noting the various alterations of the sequence
throughout the cells of our bodies, was led to ask, “Which is our real
genome?” And he adds, “The human genome seems more complex but less
autonomous than originally believed”. Less autonomous because so many
concerted activities of the organism are brought to bear on it.
(from “Natural Genome Remodeling”)
October 3, 2022
To analyze is to cleave and distinguish. We answer the question, "What is
X?" by pointing to the parts Y and Z of which X is composed. That, of
course, raises the question, "What is part Y or Z?" each of which must now
in turn be analyzed. The problem here is that, without a countermovement
foreign to reductionism, one can never stop to consider a thing in its own
terms. The tree resolves into root, branch, and leaf, the leaf into cells,
the cells into organelles, the organelles into biochemicals ... and so on
without end, down to the most remote subatomic entities.
How, without the largely uncredited countermovement, could there possibly
be a satisfactory end? If the part must explain the whole, so that all
understanding must be founded upon analysis, and if this analysis were
ever to stop at some fundamental, unanalyzable thing, then that thing
(upon which the reductionist would erect all else) must, by virtue of its
unanalyzability, stand as an incomprehensible mystery, no more
approachable than divine fiat. At some point, in a spirit opposite to that
of analysis, we have to be able to say in meaningful terms what X
is in its own right — the task we have avoided all the way down. To
accept this task in its full significance would mean a revolution in
science. But, as things stand, the subatomic, almost purely mathematical
and probabilistic extreme of our analysis seems to have carried us as far
as possible from the goal of knowing what it is we are talking
about.
(from “The Reduction Complex”)
September 26, 2022
Spoken words are physical phenomena of sound bearing an inner meaning.
But this sound can be infinitely varied, and all such variation is
meaningful. Elements, some of which we might call “musical” — loudness,
emphasis, rhythm, inflection, timbre, accent, and no doubt many subtleties
that may elude awareness — all contribute to our conscious recognition
when we say, for example, “He’s using that tone of voice again”.
The slightest expressive shift may prove as decisive in its meaning as
changing the word “is” to “is not”.
All these elements are physical performances and at the same time
expressions of an inner meaning, which is only possible because the
physical by its nature is a bearer of meaning. We can distinguish the two
aspects of speech — the physical features of sound and the meaning — but
they are inseparable. And can we not say the same thing of every outward
physical performance of our bodies? What can we do that is not meaningful
gesturing? Our walking may suggest heaviness or lightness (in a
psychological sense), it may be graceful or awkward, purposeful or
ambling, workmanlike or clumsy. If you stamp your foot in any particular
context, you are making a statement. Even if you intentionally move so as
to suggest random, meaningless activity, then your movement will indeed
suggest exactly that intent and meaning ...
There is nothing we can do that is not a gesture — is not a speaking, in
the broad sense of that word. The psychiatrist, the stage director, and,
indeed, every human being as an attentive conversationalist, knows that
the slightest shadow of change flitting across a face carries meaning.
(from “From Bodily Wisdom
to the Knowing Self, Part 2: Psyche, Soma, and the Unity of Gesture”)
September 19, 2022
Looking at [the explosively growing literature about the intelligence of
organisms] from one angle, we might naturally respond, “What in the world
is all the fuss about? Who could ever have doubted the discovery of
intelligence anywhere in the biological realm?” After all, we never see
anything but intelligence. It’s what biologists are always trying
to understand, what they are forever talking about. No organism — when
looked at as a living performance rather than a dead weight — is ever not
displaying intelligence in every aspect of its being. Whether we speak
about instinct, or adaptive processes, or learning, or communication, or
behavior in general, or the development of form, or circadian rhythms, or
stress responses, or immune responses, or wound healing, or growth
processes, or any other organic functions — it is impossible to avoid the
conviction that we are dealing with expressions of an active intelligence.
(from “From Bodily Wisdom
to the Knowing Self, Part 3: Where Do Intelligence and Wisdom Reside?”)
September 12, 2022
The search for intelligence in other organisms often focuses heavily on
skills construed by the investigators as “calculational” or
“computational”. Not surprisingly, these happen to be the skills
emphasized in our own highly mathematized scientific activities and in our
increasingly computerized society. All too often little distinction is
made between the skill and tool use of humans and the activities of
organisms with no scientific sensibilities, none of the internal structure
of computers, and a complete absence of the powers of wakeful abstraction
required for mathematics and computation.
“But certainly”, one might reply, “even if the proposed ‘mechanisms’ at
work in humans, salmon, and slime molds differ greatly, just as a
computer, slide rule, and abacus differ — still, mathematical precision
requires something that we can recognize as calculation, does it not?”
Actually, no. Planets do not calculate their mathematically well-behaved
pathways around the sun. More to the present point: A frightened young
child runs to his mother in the straightest of straight lines. Yet he has
never carried out anything like a proof that the shortest distance between
two points is a straight line. Nor has any collection of cells in his
brain derived such a proof. Nor, in his short life, is he likely even to
have considered the bare fact of the matter. The most we can say is that
the child’s flawless sentient and muscular performance, with its
uncalculated mathematical precision, may suggest something about his
future mathematical potentials.
(from “From Bodily Wisdom
to the Knowing Self, Part 3: Where Do Intelligence and Wisdom Reside?”)
September 5, 2022
How can we speak of “an organism” when there is no strict dividing line
between the organism and its environment? For example, we have more
microbial cells in our body than cells we call our “own”, and we could
not live without them. Do they belong to us, or to our environment?
Yet we are quite capable of distinguishing where we cannot rigorously
divide. Just as the “particle” of the physicist is a center of force
interacting with countless other centers of force — yet is still
distinguishable as this center — so, too, the organism can be
distinguished from its inanimate surround. This doesn’t mean, however,
that the line between the individual organism and its ecological/physical
context is ever precisely definable.
(from “Who Are You and Who Am I
and Who Are We?”)
August 29, 2022
To reconcile ourselves to the full range of meanings we confront in our
encounters with living beings is to transform our understanding of life.
We discover that our highest capacities — our thinking, our formulation of
goals and plans, our strivings and passions, our sense of well-being and
illness — are objectively imaged in our own biological organism right down
to the molecular activity of our cells, as also in the cells of every
other living creature. “Where molecular biology once taught us that life
is more about the interplay of molecules than we might have previously
imagined”, writes biologist and philosopher Lenny Moss, “molecular biology
is now beginning to reveal the extent to which macromolecules, with their
surprisingly flexible and adaptive complex behavior, turn out to be more
life-like than we had previously imagined”.
But it is hardly just a matter of macromolecules. It is the entire dynamic
society of molecules, membranes, and organelles, with all their diverse
conversations coordinated from above, that tells us we are looking at the
logos of life, even at the molecular and cellular level.
The supposed “taking down” we humans endured when we were made cousins of
the apes should actually have been recognized as a rebirth of the old
conviction that we are microcosms of the macrocosm — that Man, as Ralph
Waldo Emerson perceived, “is placed in the centre of beings, and a ray of
relation passes from every other being to him”. We are cousins of
all creatures, for in us the reason displayed in every creature
flashes forth as conscious understanding. And just as, among humans, to be
understood is fully as important as to understand, so, too, our
understanding of ape and honey bee and rainforest is today proving
decisive for their own being. We have arrived at a time when we can say,
consistent with the evolution of a threatened earth: every creature
needs our understanding.
(from “How Biologists Lost Sight
of the Meaning of Life”)
August 22, 2022
I have not been trying to identify some strange or paranormal or
unapproachable reality called a “quality”. We in fact have nothing but
qualities. The question should be turned around and thrown at the
scientist who does his best to ignore qualities: “Give us a scientific
characterization of the physical world that is not qualitative. And
remember that mathematical statements by themselves, as pure
mathematics, are not statements about the physical world”. If you want
obscurantism, just listen to the strange answers you will receive to this
request.
What I have been suggesting is that, in our attempts to apprehend the
world, we have two polar opposite movements of consciousness. With one
gesture we try to take hold of the world's truth, narrowing it down to a
sharp focus for ease of comprehension. With the other we yield ourselves
up to the truth by allowing its expressive fullness to resonate within us
and thereby to shape the entire range of our cognitive faculties — to
shape us — in its likeness.
Both are essential. When the former tries to dominate, as it does in
reductionist science, it becomes a grasping in order to possess and
control. It becomes a demand for certainty and a refusal of ambiguity.
When the two movements are in balance — the taking hold and the offering
of ourselves — we have exchange, conversation, participation in reality.
(from “Recognizing Reality”)
August 15, 2022
With transposons the organism reshapes its genome through elaborately
organized and synchronized processes often affecting considerable
stretches of DNA. But even more striking, the geneticist Henrik Kaessmann
notes, is the recent discovery of protein-coding genes being composed
“from scratch” — that is, from non-protein-coding genomic sequences
altogether unrelated to pre-existing genes or transposable sequences. In a
famous paper the preeminent French biologist, François Jacob (1977), wrote
that the probability for creation of new protein-coding genes de novo
(from scratch) by random processes “is practically zero”. Such creation
was widely thought to be virtually impossible. And yet, Kaessmann goes on,
“recent work has uncovered a number of new protein-coding genes that
apparently arose from previously noncoding (and nonrepetitive) DNA
sequences”.
If we take seriously Jacob’s “practically zero” probability for random,
de novo assembly of functional, protein-coding genes from noncoding
DNA sequences, then, given that such assembly does in fact somehow occur,
the obvious thing to suspect is that the process is not random. Nor does
the scale of the problem, as it is now emerging, look trivial. There is,
we’re told by two biologists working in Germany — one at the Max Planck
Institute for Evolutionary Biology and one at Christian Albrechts
University — “accumulating evidence that de novo evolution of genes
from noncoding sequences could have an important role” in a class of genes
representing “up to one-third of the genes in all genomes” (Tautz and
Domazet-Lošo 2011). The seemingly unbridgeable gap between “practically
zero” and this recent, extraordinary claim invites evolutionary
geneticists to do a lot of soul-searching.
(from “Natural Genome Remodeling”)
August 8, 2022
You might hope that, if only by association, the invocation of science in
a conversation would naturally lead people to relax their grip on
hard-and-fast dogma. You might hope that the thought of science would
inspire them to consider the rich, many-faceted contexts of the topic
under discussion, searching these contexts for new insights — for a deeper
and transformed understanding of the issues at hand.
But, no, the desire for the imprimatur of science becomes little more than
competition for an authoritative word from on high. It is enough to say,
“There is no scientific evidence that...” or “It has been shown
scientifically that...” and the conversation is expected to halt at the
stark dividing line between certainty and nonsense. If you've already
“got” an unarguable truth, why muddy the waters with contextual
complication?
The underlying cognitive gesture we are speaking of also helps to
illuminate our loss of humanity's earlier, participative relation to
knowledge and the world. If we can fix and possess the truth, then clearly
it cannot possess us. By keeping a tenacious grip upon the truth — which
only seems possible so far as, in good Cartesian style, we imagine the
world to exist wholly outside the observing mind rather than in living
conversation with it — we spare ourselves the worry that the truth of the
world might demand something uncomfortable of us. Reality is no longer
something we must follow, no longer a way. Our truth ceases to bring us
into a mutual exchange with the world.
(from “The Reduction Complex”)
August 1, 2022
It’s clear enough that many conditions we might naturally think of as
purely bodily often rise into conscious experience, whether it be the
position, balance, and motion of our bodies and limbs, or the movements of
stomach, heart, or bowels, or physical pain or hunger.
More broadly within the animal world, we find instinctual (“innate”)
behavior. The dance of honeybees; the newly hatched leatherback turtle’s
race toward the ocean; the gaping of young birds being fed by a parent; a
great variety of courtship behaviors; the building of nests, burrows, and
every imaginable sort of habitation or protective barrier — all this and
much more is commonly counted as instinctual and “biologically based”. Yet
it is accomplished with a present and active knowing of some sort.
The organism always responds more or less improvisationally — which is to
say, intelligently — to encountered circumstances.
Even at the molecular and cellular level, biologists routinely employ a
language connoting a psychic element, but without any suggestion of
self-aware consciousness. Indeed, sensing and responding,
communication, information, signal, and
message have become part of the core terminology of biologists and
are sometimes cited as the terms that make biology a science distinct from
physics and chemistry.
The preceding remarks illustrate that there’s a range of consciousness
extending all the way from full awareness down to the bodily-unconscious
where we still require an inward descriptive language — a language at
least partly derived from the psyche. Whatever the nature of the
“unconscious consciousness” at work in cells, instinctual processes, and
pathological complexes, it manifests in directed, intelligent behavior
that shapes much of our lives.
(from “From Bodily Wisdom
to the Knowing Self, Part 2: Psyche, Soma, and the Unity of Gesture”)
July 25, 2022
Migrating animals do not calculate according to the stars or the sun or
magnetic fields; birds and mammals do not count; and infants
do not note the fact that three is greater than two. Actually, we can be
quite sure that infants don’t note facts, period. Facts are just not the
kind of thing they have in their possession. Nor can they carry out
mathematical reasoning — not even the simplest counting. How could they at
an age when they have not yet even learned clearly to delimit one thing
from another? The projection of adult forms of intelligence onto the child
leads only to absurdity. And how much more so when we extend the
projection to animals and plants!
The experiments with plants, animals, and human infants certainly indicate
that some form of understanding is at work. Biologists refer to the wisdom
or intelligence of the organism for good reason. But saying this much is a
long way from saying anything very meaningful about the locus of that
intelligence, or the manner of its operation, or its relation either to
the organism’s own physiological activities or to conscious human
intelligence.
(from “From Bodily Wisdom
to the Knowing Self, Part 3: Where Do Intelligence and Wisdom Reside?”)
July 11, 2022
Whenever biologists refer to context, they are invoking the parallel with
speech, or text. Organic activity is, in fact, always a special kind of
contextualized expression, and “context” is another word for “that which
has the character of a meaningful whole”. Without some
quality of wholeness, it would not be an identifiable context.
The word “meaningful” here points, in part, to an ideational content. A
collection of arbitrarily designated things — a collection lacking a unity
of idea — does not add up to a context. We call a context a “context”
because it has a recognizable and integral character possessing some sort
of ideal unity.
An example. Twenty-two people randomly milling about in a field do not
make an organic context. But when twenty-two people are arrayed against
each other on an American football field, consistently, adaptively, and
innovatively performing according to the aims and choreographic
requirements of a game — then we have a recognizable context. The context
cannot be defined apart from the many ideas making up the aim and the
meaning of the game.
(from “Who Are You and Who Am I
and Who Are We?”)
June 27, 2022
It would be well for biologists to pull back a little from the religious
wars and realize that the truly fundamental problem most people have with
much of the biological and evolutionary literature is rather simple and
needs respectful addressing. We read stories of organisms whose activity,
from the molecular level on up, displays meaningful intricacies and
coherent, eloquent plot lines that never cease to surprise us, far
outshining the highest literary achievements of a Shakespeare or Goethe or
Pushkin.
And then we hear that all this meaningful activity is, somehow,
meaningless or a product of meaninglessness. This, I believe, is the real
issue troubling the majority of the American populace when they are asked
about their belief in evolution. They see one thing and then are told,
more or less directly, that they are really seeing its denial. Yet no one
has ever explained to them how you get meaning from meaninglessness — a
difficult enough task once you realize that we cannot articulate any
knowledge of the world at all except in the language of meaning.
(from “How Biologists Lost Sight
of the Meaning of Life”)
June 20, 2022
[Regarding geneticist Barbara McClintock:]
McClintock’s biographer, Evelyn Fox Keller, tells of the geneticist’s
meeting with a group of graduate and postdoctoral biology students at
Harvard University. The students were responsive to her exhortation that
they “take the time and look”, but they were also troubled. Where does one
get the time to look and to think? “They argued that the new technology of
molecular biology is self-propelling. It doesn’t leave time. There’s
always the next experiment, the next sequencing to do. The pace of current
research seems to preclude such a contemplative stance”.
McClintock went on to tell the students how fortunate she had been for
having worked with a slow technology, a slow organism. Other researchers
disliked corn because you could only grow two crops a year. But she found
that even two crops a year were too many. If she was really to observe her
plants adequately, one crop was all she could handle.
[McClintock’s "slow" attention to the qualitative nuances of individual
corn plants led eventually to discoveries about “jumping genes” among
other things for which, tardily, she was awarded the Nobel Prize.]
(from “Recognizing Reality”)
June 13, 2022
When genomic researcher David Haussler of the University of California,
Santa Cruz, was asked by the journal Cell what has been most
surprising about the human genome, one of the things he cited was
“mounting evidence” that transposons [so-called jumping genes] “play a
critical role” in the turnover and reinvention of regulatory elements in
DNA. And, responding in Science to a report about the work on
jumping genes in mammalian brains, Southern Illinois University
neuroscientist, David King, wrote that the “dismissive dictum, ‘Mutations
are accidents’, has grown obsolete”, adding that protocols for “the
spontaneous, non-accidental production of genetic variation are deeply
embedded in genomic architecture”.
[The movable DNA elements known as “jumping genes” or “transposons”]
exemplify a growing (and, for many biologists, embarrassing) class of
cellular constituents that were initially dismissed as more or less
functionless simply because they didn’t fit into a kind of neat (but now
hopelessly outmoded) digital coding schema linking DNA as Master Cause, to
RNA as precisely programmed mediary, to protein as definitive final
result. Making up a sizable portion of the human genome, transposons are
to this day often referred to as “junk” or “parasitic” elements. Because
they play a particularly prominent (and still barely explored) role in the
germline, one often hears about the germ cell’s “defensive mechanisms” to
protect itself from these highly mobile, “selfish” elements, with their
genome restructuring potentials. How this kind of thinking could go on
for many years without most biologists suspecting a positive role for
transposons as genome remodelers with potentially powerful implications
for evolution is, for me, a great mystery. Certainly transposons, like
everything else in the cell, are subject to intense oversight by their
larger context — and viruses may indeed have played a role in their
origin, as many suppose — but this hardly makes them mere parasites in the
organisms that have so intently taken them up and put them to use.
(from “Natural Genome Remodeling”)
May 30, 2022
The inner act of isolating something so as to grasp it more easily and
precisely and gain power over it is the essential gesture of what I am
calling “the reduction complex”. Grasping is indeed a useful description
of the cognitive activity I am pointing toward. Of course, we must
try to get hold of things in our understanding. But if we are too intense
and one-sided in our will to grasp a thing, then we sever it from its
relationships to everything else, as when we uproot the plant to study it
in the laboratory. This may be helpful in its own way, but requires us to
keep in mind how we have falsified and decontextualized the thing we are
trying to understand.
To know the reality of the plant in truth, we would have to live with it,
experience the conditions of its life, and participate imaginatively as
well as physically in its habitat. We would, in other words, have to
change, adapting ourselves to a different way of being. In this manner
what lives in the form before us also comes to expression within us, and
becomes knowledge. In all this we conform to reality with more than just
our abstracting minds.
Similarly, to know water, we must learn to flow with it, as when we swim.
We must know the water in part as a fish does, by allowing its laws to
come to expression within us as our laws. This is not merely to know about
water in the abstract, but to participate in its way of being. Our aim in
such endeavors is not so much to possess truth as to follow reality and
conform to it, remain true to it.
(from “The Reduction Complex”)
May 23, 2022
There are, of course, biological disciplines where the challenge of the
mindlike is taken up with great seriousness. Cognitive science — bringing
together (at least) psychology, neuroscience, linguistics, artificial
intelligence, philosophy, and anthropology — is a field upon which
advocates of remarkably diverse points of view often joust in free and
bracing intellectual combat. One need only browse the Journal of
Consciousness Studies to witness the creative ferment now attracting so
many researchers.
But how many molecular biologists today would feel the freedom to wonder aloud
whether intention and agency, so difficult to banish from biological
description, might be at least as fundamental to biological understanding
as the local causal interactions we are so expert at fingering?
Why should the consideration of mindfulness, which presents such a vivid
and stimulating conundrum to researchers in a number of respectable
sciences, be absent from what are usually considered the core disciplines
of biology? Perhaps most molecular, cellular, and evolutionary biologists
are prepared to claim — despite their own heavy reliance upon a mentalese
dialect, and despite all those kindred disciplines actively wrestling with
the problem of mind — that the conundrum merely reflects an unusually
persistent confusion that ought to be clarified once for all and dispensed
with.
But if it’s this simple, then why a silence that has all the appearance of
being taboo-enforced? Let the conversation begin!
(from “Let’s
Loosen Up Biological Thinking!”)
May 16, 2022
[As a preface to consideration of the nature of intelligence and
consciousness in non-human organisms:]
There is no doubt that we can be manipulated by psychic contents we are
unaware of — and that we may eventually become aware of them as psychic
contents (thereby gaining at least a degree of freedom with respect to
them). We also have good reason for believing that, the more coercive and
unavailable to us such contents may be, the more deeply and organically we
will discover them to have penetrated our lives. The child systematically
and cruelly abused by a parent may grow into adulthood with, for example,
obsessive anxieties, disturbing thoughts, or compulsive urges that,
however “ridiculous”, prove almost miraculously resistant to conscious
alteration, even over the course of many years of hard work by
extraordinarily intelligent sufferers.
In such cases it is difficult not to believe that the ideational,
emotional, and volitional “complexes” have partly rooted themselves in
some aspect of the growing child’s corporeal being, forming a kind of
psychosomatic organ. And the medical profession’s inability to stabilize
a historically oscillating consensus about the best treatment — it is, of
course, pharmacological … or, no, is it psychological instead? —
testifies to the seemingly inextricable psyche-soma nexus.
(from “From Bodily Wisdom
to the Knowing Self, Part 2: Psyche, Soma, and the Unity of Gesture”)
May 2, 2022
The search for intelligence in other organisms often focuses heavily on
skills construed by the investigators as “calculational” or
“computational”. Not surprisingly, these happen to be the skills
emphasized in our own highly mathematized scientific activities and in our
increasingly computerized society. All too often little distinction is
made between the skill and tool use of humans and the activities of
organisms with no scientific sensibilities, none of the internal structure
of computers, and a complete absence of the powers of wakeful abstraction
required for mathematics and computation.
“But certainly”, one might reply, “even if the proposed ‘mechanisms’ at
work in humans, salmon, and slime molds differ greatly, just as a
computer, slide rule, and abacus differ — still, mathematical precision
requires something that we can recognize as calculation, does it
not?”
Actually, no. Planets do not calculate their mathematically well-behaved
pathways around the sun. More to the present point: A frightened young
child runs to his mother in the straightest of straight lines. Yet he has
never carried out anything like a proof that the shortest distance between
two points is a straight line. Nor has any collection of cells in his
brain derived such a proof. Nor, in his short life, is he likely even to
have considered the bare fact of the matter. The most we can say is that
the child’s flawless sentient and muscular performance, with its
uncalculated mathematical precision, may suggest something about his
future mathematical potentials.
(from “From Bodily Wisdom
to the Knowing Self, Part 3: Where Do Intelligence and Wisdom Reside?”)
April 25, 2022
You may have heard about the archerfish, found in warmer waters of the far
east. This fish “spits” a forceful stream of water sufficient to dislodge
an insect from its sticky attachment to a stem or leaf up to at least two
meters away. Of course, when looking from the water into the air, the fish
must correctly compensate for the same refraction of light that, in our
own experience, makes a stick look “bent” at the point where it enters the
water.
That itself is mystifying enough. But researchers recently showed that the
archerfish’s achievement is even more startling. This cunning hunter emits
its lethal jet in such a way that the last water released (the trailing
part of the stream) eventually catches up with the water released earlier
— and does so right at the distance where the insect is located, making
for maximum force of impact. Moreover, the way to do this changes a great
deal, depending on whether the insect is 10 cm away or, say, 100 cm.
The gathering of water in the fish’s mouth, its dynamic shaping, and the
force of propulsion imparted to the stream in order to achieve the proper
result at each distance, are extraordinarily complex — and not fully
understood. But researchers, in testing the fish with targets at 20 cm, 40
cm, and 60 cm, reported that “jet tips recorded just before impact were
equally well focused, and their shapes bore no information on how long
they had traveled before”. That is, the fish adjusted the dynamics and
timing elements of its water jet in order to have it “come together” in
just the right way at whatever distance the target resided.
(from “From Bodily Wisdom
to the Knowing Self, Part 3: Where Do Intelligence and Wisdom Reside?”)
April 18, 2022
When a Pacific Ocean Chinook salmon is prompted by some deep urge to
migrate from the open ocean to its natal stream — there to lay its eggs
and die — several years may have passed since it left that stream as a
juvenile. Supposing it hatched in a central Idaho waterway — and leaving
aside thousands of miles of ocean travel so as to reckon only from the
mouth of the Columbia River — its return journey could well extend over
900 miles. Struggling against stiff currents and strong rapids, the fish
must gain several thousand feet in elevation. Upon reaching its birth
stream, the male “knows” to pair up with a female, the female “knows” to
dig a depression in the stream bottom in order to lay her eggs, and the
male “knows” to fertilize the eggs. Both fish “know” to protect the eggs
from predators — and both very likely die before the eggs actually hatch.
(from “From Bodily Wisdom
to the Knowing Self, Part 3: Where Do Intelligence and Wisdom Reside?”)
April 11, 2022
The arctic tern migrates between its antipodal summer residences
(from the Arctic and sub-Arctic summer to the Antarctic summer and back)
every year. The meandering and partly improvised course of its annual
round trip, shaped to take advantage of prevailing winds, amounts to as
much as 56,000 miles (90,000 km) — well more than twice the entire
circumference of the earth, and mostly over the “pathless” sea. For
mating, the tern usually returns time and again to the same northern
colony. The slender bird accomplishing these feats, armored against the
elements with nothing but delicate feathers, weighs about 4 ounces (110
g).
(from “From Bodily Wisdom
to the Knowing Self, Part 3: Where Do Intelligence and Wisdom Reside?”)
April 4, 2022
To discover ourselves in the universe — which is to say, to discover
ourselves as discoverers, or knowers, of the universe — tells us
something about what the universe is like. It does so fully as much as
our discovery of gravitational attraction among objects of the solar
system informs us about the reality of gravity in the universe. If we
find ourselves to be knowers of a knowable world, then knowing and being
known — being cognized, being the stuff of cognition, being
meaningful — belong to the world’s and our own character. Speaking
and being spoken belong to the very fabric of things.
(from “Who Are You and Who Am I
and Who Are We?”)
March 28, 2022
Two systems biologists, one from the Max Delbrück Center for Molecular
Medicine in Germany and one from Harvard Medical School, have written:
“The human body is formed by trillions of individual cells. These cells
work together with remarkable precision, first forming an adult organism
out of a single fertilized egg, and then keeping the organism alive and
functional for decades. To achieve this precision, one would assume that
each individual cell reacts in a reliable, reproducible way to a given
input, faithfully executing the required task. However, a growing number
of studies investigating cellular processes on the level of single cells
revealed large heterogeneity even among genetically identical cells of the
same cell type”.
The question they are asking is how cells can do the right thing,
cooperating to form the unthinkably complex architecture of a mammal while
dealing with the heterogeneity — the continual fluctuation — of their
molecular “components”. There is no determinate mechanical or
computational rigidity here, no interaction of the parts of a smoothly
running machine. Where is the sequence of reliable causes that can account
for the predictable outcome of the process as a whole, when all the causal
details are so variable and so obviously being shaped to living purposes?
We need to understand all those physical connections. But we get to the
living processes only when we raise ourselves above the causal web and
view it from a different level of meaning — a level where we can ask:
“What is going on from the organism’s point of view”. It’s always that way
with meaning. The movements of a ballet dancer can be analyzed in terms of
the play of force in muscle, bone, and flesh, but we read the
movements only when that play becomes effectively transparent to us — only
when we look through it to another level of meaning. This is the
kind of thing biologists will always notice themselves doing, if only they
observe themselves.
(from “How Biologists Lost Sight
of the Meaning of Life”)
March 21, 2022
The recognizable expressiveness of things is not something added to their
“real” content. It is the fullness of the content itself. Without it, all
content disappears. Abstract schemata in general and measurements in
particular do not give us reality. Painfully obvious as this is, it
remains widely ignored. But our measurements have to be measurements of
something, and we have no scientific understanding until we can speak
intelligibly about what this something is. Nor can we do this in any terms
except qualitative ones. Simply filling in our quantitative notions with
unexamined, almost unnoticed qualitative mental pictures does not make our
work worthy of science.
(from “Recognizing Reality”)
March 14, 2022
With remarkable nuance, the organism contextualizes its genome, and it
makes no sense to say that these powers of contextualization are under the
control of the genome being contextualized. Thus, the human genome yields
itself to a radical and stable “redefinition” of its meaning in the
extremely varied environments of some 250 different cell types found in
brain and muscle, liver and skin, blood and retina. It is well to remember
that the genes in your stomach lining and the genes in the cornea of your
eye are supposed to be the “same” genes, and yet the immediate context
makes very different things out of them. An especially revealing case of
contextualization occurs when a genome fit for the needs of all the varied
cells of a worm-like larva is subsequently pressed into perfectly adequate
service for the entirely different cell types — and different bodily
organization and different overall functioning — of a graceful, airborne
butterfly. The genome, it appears, is to one extent or another like clay
that can be molded in many different ways by the organism as a whole,
according to contextual need.
(from “Natural Genome Remodeling”)
March 7, 2022
Here are 5 features of what I am calling “The Reduction Complex”, by
which I refer not only to reductionism, but also to materialist and
mechanistic thinking:
(1) There are a few, simple, fundamental constituent elements of the
material universe.
(2) These elements relate to each other externally, like the parts of a
machine.
(3) The fundamental elements and the laws governing them can be precisely
characterized mathematically and logically.
(4) The fundamental elements and laws account for and ultimately explain
everything that happens. This explanation proceeds unidirectionally,
"from the bottom up".
(5) The constituent elements and laws of the world possess no intrinsic
character of mind.
We can discover the coherence of our five reductionist propositions by
recognizing in them the operation of a single gesture of the cognizing
mind. The gesture itself is not pathological; rather, its singleness —
its operation in conjunction with a suppression of the necessary
counterbalancing gesture — is alone what renders it and its reductionist
results pathological. Reductionism, at root, is not so much a body of
concepts as it is a way of exercising (and not exercising) our cognitive
faculties.
The cognitive gesture I'm alluding to here is the inner act of isolating
something so as to grasp it more easily and precisely and gain power over
it. We want to be able to say, "I have exactly this — not that and not
the other thing, but this". The ideal of truth at work here is a
yes-or-no ideal. No ambiguity, no fuzziness, no uncertainty, no essential
penetration of one thing by another, but rather precisely defined
interactions between separate and precisely defined things. We want
things we can isolate, immobilize, nail down and hold onto.
(from “The Reduction Complex”)
February 28, 2022
Molecular biology — the discipline that was finally going to reduce life
unreservedly to mindless mechanism — is now posing its own severe
challenges. In this era of Big Data, the message from every side concerns
previously unimagined complexity, incessant cross-talk and intertwining
pathways, wildly unexpected genomic performances, dynamic conformational
changes involving proteins and their cooperative or antagonistic
binding partners, pervasive multifunctionality, intricately directed
behavior somehow arising from the interaction of countless players in
interpenetrating networks, and opposite effects by the same molecules in
slightly different contexts. The picture at the molecular level begins to
look as lively and organic — and thoughtful — as life itself.
(from “Let’s
Loosen Up Biological Thinking!”)
February 21, 2022
Every cell of our bodies behaves such that, if we knew it to be conscious,
we would naturally assume that its behavior issued from thoughts and
intentions. Of course, no one would attribute consciousness to cells,
unless perhaps at an unimaginably primitive level. But the fact of
mind-like (intended, reasoned) behavior is already given in the character
of the behavior itself, quite apart from the assumption of conscious
awareness. We needn’t remain blind, even in ourselves, to thoughts and
intentions operating beneath the level of consciousness.
And we shouldn’t forget that while the bacterium may have no conscious
awareness of what it is doing, the scientist is fully capable of raising
its behavior to full consciousness, and in doing so cannot help
experiencing that behavior, if not actually acknowledging it, as an
expression of mind-like intent and reason.
(from “Psyche, Soma, and the
Unity of Gesture”, Part 2 of “From Bodily Wisdom to the Knowing Self”)
February 14, 2022
Our understanding necessarily alternates between narrow focus on the parts
of an activity viewed separately, and receptivity to the larger expressive
picture. The two facets of understanding serve each other. This is related
(rather exactly, I think) to the interplay between our hearing of
particular words as we listen to speech, and our progressive apprehension
of the overall meaning that more and more shines through those words,
modifies their identity, and subordinates them to the developing direction
of thought. We could not understand speech without hearing individual
words, but neither could we understand the individual words in their
current meaning without grasping the overall import of what is being said.
(from “Who Are You and Who Am I
and Who Are We?”)
February 7, 2022
In the growing embryo literal streams of cells are flowing to their
appointed places, differentiating themselves into different types as they
go, and adjusting themselves to all sorts of unpredictable perturbations —
even to the degree of responding appropriately when a lab technician
excises a clump of them from one location in a young embryo and puts them
in another, where they may proceed to adapt themselves in an entirely
different and proper way to the new environment. It is hard to quibble
with the immediate impression that form (which is more idea-like
than thing-like) is primary, and the material particulars subsidiary.
(from “How Biologists Lost Sight
of the Meaning of Life”)
January 31, 2022
All science, right down to its most tough-minded, quantitative
formulations, remains permeated by qualities wherever its equations and
algorithms touch revealingly upon actual physical phenomena — that is,
whenever the science gives us understanding of the world. But the
reductionist, while relying upon these qualities for the sense of his
explanations, refuses to speak about them in any meaningful way.
Some day we will be dumbfounded at the long-sustained pathology whereby
the scientist looked out upon a world consisting of nothing but qualities
and then claimed to explain it while refusing to say anything substantial
about the nature of those qualities.
(from “Recognizing Reality”)
January 24, 2022
Our failure to reckon adequately with the wild Other is as much a feature
of human social relations as of our relations with nature, and as much a
feature of our treatment of domesticated landscapes as of wilderness
areas. In its Otherness, the factory-farmed hog is no less a challenge to
our sympathies and understanding than the salmon, the commonplace
chickadee no less than the grizzly bear. We do not excel in the art of
conversation. If the grizzly is absent from the distant mountains, perhaps
it is partly because we have lost sight of, or even denigrated, the wild
spirit in the chickadee outside our doors.
If we really believed in the saving grace of wildness, we would not
automatically discount habitats bearing the marks of human engagement. We
would not look down upon the farmer whose love is the Other he meets in
the soil and whose struggle is to draw out, in wisdom, the richness and
productive potential of his farm habitat. Nor, thrilling to the discovery
of a cougar track in the high Rockies, would we disparage the cultivated
European landscape which, at its best, serves a far greater diversity of
wild things than the primeval northern forest.
The point is not to pronounce any landscape good or bad, but to ask after
the integrity of the conversation it represents. None of us would want to
see the entire world reduced to someone’s notion of a garden, but neither
would we want to see a world where no humans tended reverently to their
surroundings. We should not set the creativity of the true gardener
against the creativity at work in our oversight of the Denali wilderness.
They are two very different conversations, and both ought to be — can be —
worthy expressions of the wild spirit.
(from “A Conversation with Nature”)
January 17, 2022
Nine years ago Richard Conn Henry, an astrophysicist at Johns Hopkins
University, published an opinion piece in Nature entitled “The
Mental Universe”. He urged the scientific community to repeat Galileo’s
achievement in “believing the unbelievable”, and recalled Sir James Jeans’
famous remark that “the Universe begins to look more like a great thought
than like a great machine”. We don’t know all that this implies, he
continued, “but — the great thing is — it is true. ... The Universe is
immaterial — mental and spiritual. Live, and enjoy”.
The most dramatic thing about the article was the lack of drama: it
produced no visible controversy. After all, physicists have long been
accustomed to receive such assertions peaceably, because the science
itself seems tolerant of them.
But suppose Henry had made a narrower and more modest claim — just a small
part of what he implied in “The Mental Universe”. Suppose he had written
only of “The Mental Cell”. Would the occasion have been equally
unremarkable? Most molecular and cellular biologists, I suspect, will
readily picture the unseemly consequences likely to follow upon the
appearance of words like immaterial, mental, and
spiritual in their published papers. It would be as if an unspoken
taboo were violated.
(from “Let’s
Loosen Up Biological Thinking!)
January 10, 2022
From humans to bacteria, every organism is a cognitive creature, carrying
out mind-like functions in every aspect of its life. All biologists know
this, even if they are strongly encouraged by the reigning intellectual
climate to forget it. Be aware, however, that one might speak of the
mind-like aspects of simpler organisms (1) without suggesting that these
organisms have minds in anything like the familiar human sense, and (2)
while recognizing that the effective wisdom playing through the simplest,
one-celled organism — and the cells of our own bodies — far transcends any
mental achievements we humans are consciously capable of.
(from “Psyche, Soma, and the
Unity of Gesture”, Part 2 of “From Bodily Wisdom to the Knowing Self”)
January 3, 2022
It ought to be a truism among biologists that our understanding of living
creatures must be, at its most fundamental (irreducible) level, an
understanding of activity. And therefore our knowledge of changes
in the organism — for example, evolutionary changes, or the
transformations during development — must be, fundamentally, a knowledge
of changes in activity, not mere rearrangements of things with predefined
functional identities. The experimentalist, in comparing two specimens
under different conditions, can note down all the differences in
quantities of this or that molecule, or all the differences in morphology
of leaf or limb. But each of these changes precipitates, so to speak, out
of an altered process.
The organism is always a becoming, and to think about a capacity
for becoming is radically different from thinking about a collection of
well-defined (which is to say, context-independent) things. If the
biologist’s training included even one week where this difference was held
up for attention, everything in biology would be colored
differently. We can perhaps glimpse the difficulty of the task by asking:
How would we characterize a change in directed (forming) activity, as
opposed to a change from one finished form to another, or a mere
rearrangement of things?
(from “Who Are You and Who Am I
and Who Are We?”)
December 27, 2021
Mathematical biologist Joshua Plotkin, referring to the discovery of vast
regulative processes bearing on DNA, concludes: “Just the sheer existence
of these exotic regulators suggests that our understanding about the most
basic things — such as how a cell turns on and off — is incredibly naïve”
... And referring to the “huge number of potentially regulatory elements
in a very crowded nucleus”, University of Massachusetts geneticist Job
Dekker wonders “How do cells ensure that genes only respond to the right
regulatory elements while ignoring the hundreds of thousands of others”
It’s a good and obvious question. An editor of Science amplifies it
this way: “If you think air traffic controllers have a tough job guiding
planes into major airports or across a crowded continental airspace,
consider the challenge facing a human cell trying to position its
proteins”. A given cell, he notes, may make more than 10,000 different
proteins, and typically contains more than a billion protein molecules at
any one time. “Somehow a cell must get all its proteins to their correct
destinations — and equally important, keep these molecules out of the
wrong places”. And further: “It’s almost as if every mRNA [an intermediate
between a gene and a corresponding protein] coming out of the nucleus
knows where it’s going”.
Of course, there’s not much sense in saying particular molecules “know”
where they are going. But the context they find themselves in certainly
embodies and gives expression to a kind of wisdom that proves highly
effective in coordinating their movements.
(from “How Biologists Lost Sight
of the Meaning of Life”)
December 20, 2021
A reader responded to my article,
“The Reduction Complex”,
by complaining that “Talbott never defines what he means by ‘quality’”.
Another reader voiced a similar concern when he asked me for a definition
of “the exact method of holism — how it runs as a science and not as
poetry”. I respect these requests. This essay is the beginning of a
response. But I am afraid my response may not be quite what my
correspondents were looking for. The crucial issue, we will find, is
whether their insistence upon a definition and an exact method is an
insistence upon conformity to the very science we need to reform. After
all, we typically try to define a thing by holding it fast, freezing it,
nailing it down. We want to say what it is, so that we can point
at and delineate it in no uncertain terms. We want to grasp it securely
and without ambiguity.
There is, in other words, an aggressive philosophical stance concealed in
the seemingly innocent demand for a definition. But what if reality, like
water, slips through our clutching fingers? How much good will it do us
to pin something down if the reality we are trying to lay hold of is a
power of movement and becoming — a living, animating power by which each
thing is continually becoming something different? What if the entire
business of qualities is to express the moving, pulsing, darting, gliding,
ascending and descending, throbbing, living, self-transforming character
of the world's phenomena? Can we exactly define that which is continually
transforming itself?
If, from the start, we insist that the poet could not possibly be
exercising badly needed cognitive faculties neglected by today's dominant
science — well, then, we are not asking what sort of new science might
arise. Rather, we are insisting that, whatever it is, it must embody the
limitations of the science we already have.
(from “Recognizing Reality”)
December 13, 2021
Tolkien once wrote that we create “by the law in which we’re made.” Our own
creative speech is one, or potentially one, with the creative speech of
nature that first uttered us. (How could it be otherwise?) This suggests
that our relation to every wild thing is intimate indeed. We speak from
the same source. We cannot know ourselves — cannot acquaint ourselves with
the potentials of our own speaking — except by learning how those
potentials have already found expression in the stunning diversity of
nature.
Every created thing images some aspect of ourselves, an aspect we can
discover and vivify only through understanding. The destruction of a
habitat and its inhabitants is truly a loss of part of ourselves, a kind
of amnesia. Wendell Berry is right to ask, “How much can a mind diminish
its culture, its community and its geography — how much topsoil, how many
species can it lose — and still be a mind?” As Gary Snyder puts it, “The
nature in the mind is being logged and burned off.”
When Thoreau told us, “In wildness is the preservation of the world,” the
wildness he referred to was at least in part our wildness. If
humankind fails to embrace with its sympathies and understanding — which
is to say, within our own being — every wild thing, then both we and the
world will to that extent be diminished. This is true even if our refusal
goes no further than the withdrawal from conversation.
(from “A Conversation with Nature”)
December 6, 2021
It is not at all clear how a universe of appearing things — things
declaring themselves to us and bearing the sources of our language and
thought within them — could possibly be alien to our own story. Not only
have we drawn our interior life from the world’s meanings, both sublime
and awful, but we live in a world whose very nature is to be encompassed
within our consciousness — to live within us. Far from finding ourselves
strangers in an alien universe, we embrace with our imagination and
understanding the most distant galaxies, bearing witness to the
significances of their light.
(from “A Physicist, a
Philosopher, and the Meaning of Life”)
November 29, 2021
How does the cell divide? How is body temperature maintained? How do
signals originate, move through the uncertainties of multicellular
environments, get transduced, and ultimately produce their specific
effects within individual cells? — such inquiries about sustained
narratives commonly provide the questions for molecular biological
research projects. But the “explanations” arrived at typically abandon the
narrative context of the original inquiry and focus instead on isolated
physical causes. For example, how does the structure of this molecule fit
together with the structure of that one, or which proteins interact with
which others? It may be implied that answers to such questions explain
the narrative, but they never do. The physical transactions are simply
caught up in the narrative.
The truly biological problems have to do with how countless such
interactions are woven together as the threads of an integral and
recognizable story, when it would be perfectly lawful, in a physical
sense, for every one of the interacting molecules to head off in a
direction irrelevant to the storyline and engage in any one of a thousand
other transactions. No analysis of physical lawfulness can distinguish
the different cases, because physical laws know nothing of the organism’s
storyline.
What the typical explanations fail to acknowledge, in other words, is the
overall, ongoing, coordinated activity — the appearance of purpose — that
prompted the very questions the biologists began investigating. The
language of physical causes never gets us to the story of the organism —
never traces the organism’s unique and colorful path through its own
world. Of course, we do need the usual physical picture, but we get its
meaning only when we look through it, rather as we “listen through”
the physical sounds of speech in order to discern the thoughts and
intentions of the speaker.
(from “The
Problematic Effectiveness of Reason in Biology”, Part 1 of “From Bodily
Wisdom to the Knowing Self”)
November 22, 2021
The problem of form in the organism — how does a single cell (zygote)
reliably develop to maturity “according to its own kind” — has vexed
biologists for centuries. But the same mystery plays out in the mature
organism, which must continually work to maintain its normal form, as well
as restore it when injured. It is difficult to bring oneself fully face to
face with the enormity of this accomplishment. Scientists can damage
tissues in endlessly creative ways that the organism has never confronted
in its evolutionary history. Yet, so far as its resources allow, it
mobilizes those resources, sets them in motion, and does what it has never
done before, all in the interest of restoring a dynamic form and a
functioning that the individual molecules and cells certainly cannot be
said to “understand” or “have in view”.
We can frame the problem of identity and context with this question: Where
do we find the context and activity that, in whatever sense we choose to
use the phrase, does “have in view” this restorative aim? Not an
easy question. Yet the achievement is repeatedly carried through; an
ever-adaptive intelligence comes into play somehow, and all those
molecules and cells are quite capable of participating in and being caught
up in the play.
(from “Who Are You and Who Am I
and Who Are We?”)
November 15, 2021
Meaning is a fundamental given of the world we live in. If there is
anything in the evolutionary literature purporting to explain the origin
of speech that does not already assume a capacity for speech, I would like
to know about it. As Owen Barfield has succinctly fingered the matter:
asking about the origin of language is like asking about the origin of
origin. We can speak only because we were first spoken. And before we
were spoken, the single cell was spoken, bearing in all the narrative
details of its molecular adeptness and harmony the reverberating imprint,
the resonance, of the speaking through which it lives.
So, no, we do not require a tortuous philosophical analysis of meaning. We
need only wake up to the sea of meaning within which we all swim, and
without which we would have no world whatever. We live by grace of
meaning; our world is a logos-world. To pretend to refuse this
meaning is to attempt a self-effacement (and a world-effacement) we can
never fully carry out. It is to refuse to stand awake as human beings.
Meaning never arises from the non-meaningful. The question we should ask
ourselves is not whether meaning can arise from what is not meaningful,
but whether “not meaningful” makes any sense at all. Which, of course, is
to ask whether “meaninglessness” has any meaning. That’s the kind of
absurd territory we lose ourselves in when we ask for an informative and
truthful science without meaning.
(from “How Biologists Lost Sight
of the Meaning of Life”)
November 8, 2021
Nothing here implies that humans possess greater “moral worth” (whatever
that might mean) than other living things. What distinguishes us is not
our moral worth, but the fact that we bear the burden of moral
responsibility. That this burden has risen to consciousness at one
particular locus within nature is surely significant for the destiny of
nature. When Jack Turner suggested that the last ten thousand years of
human history may have been “simply evil,” he ignored the worthy
historical gift enabling him to pronounce such a judgment. How can we
downplay our special gift of knowledge and responsibility without fatal
consequences for the world?
(from “A Conversation with Nature”)
November 1, 2021
We have seen that a great unknown presses in upon us from all sides.
Despite our impressive technological successes, the fundamental terms of
our science remain seemingly impenetrable mysteries. What one physicist
wrote in 1985 is no less true today: “As yet no physicist can tell you
what sort of world we happen to live in”. Humbling as it may seem in an
era so arrogantly dismissive of the past, our current physical science
gives us no basis for belittling the ancient human experience of living in
something rather more like a universe of beings than a universe of things.
But we have also seen that an intelligible world is more intimately near
to us than most of us have dared to hope. If we understand the world at
all — and we are all convinced we do — it can only be because it consists,
by nature, of qualitative appearances (“phenomena”) available to
experience. It presents itself on the stage of our inner being.
And, finally, by looking at the history of language we have seen that the
expressive face of the world appeared to our ancestors as a kind of
speech, and it was from this presentation that our own powers of speech
derived. Like language, every natural phenomenon was an exterior through
which there shone interior significances. The essential elements of nature
were not mute, expressionless things, but resonant images symbolizing
meanings.
(from “A Physicist, a
Philosopher, and the Meaning of Life”)
October 25, 2021
We find some sort of reason and intention (or purpose) at all levels of
biological description. No explanation of electrical, mechanical, and
chemical interactions in a dividing cell conveys the narrative meaning of
cell division. Nearly all the specific interactions, considered singly,
could occur under other circumstances, or could occur differently in the
present circumstances. Their elaborate and magnificently coordinated
“striving toward cell division” — a striving that tries to adapt in a
consistently directed way to whatever conditions the environment may throw
up — does not lawfully follow from the underlying physical
lawfulness. The striving and adjustment to circumstances, rather than
being explained by the physical lawfulness, gives direction to it.
In one way or another all biologists acknowledge intention or purpose in
this inescapable, practical, and descriptive sense. They recognize that
the objects of their study are creatures caught up in a narrative — a
narrative that is coming from somewhere and going somewhere in a
reasonable, means-end sort of way, and not merely a law-abiding way.
Organisms live purposeful lives. Yet, it is this narrative stream that
the molecular biological literature assiduously ignores.
(from “The
Problematic Effectiveness of Reason in Biology”, Part 1 of “From Bodily
Wisdom to the Knowing Self”)
October 18, 2021
Even a superficial acquaintance with the biological literature today makes
it clear that the effort to explain the whole organism as a result of
self-contained causal parts that do not participate in, and are not
sustained by, the life of their larger context is destined to fail. If
biologists are going to speak incessantly about the importance of context,
then they need to reckon honestly with the problems it raises, rather than
immediately change the subject to “controlling factors” — factors that, as
the contemporary literature makes so vividly clear, never do control in
absolute terms. If all such factors are context-dependent, we ought at
least to ask ourselves how this qualification modifies the notion of
“control”.
We are, in fact, beset by questions on all sides. What exactly are we
referring to when
we speak of “context” and “organism”? How can we make these terms, as we
are compelled to use them, more than necessary blanks in our descriptive
language — blanks about whose necessity we can say nothing? For example,
does our actual use of these terms differ much from the way people of an
earlier era might have used “archetype” or “entelechy” or “being”?
When biologists speak of the organism’s activity, who exactly do they mean
to say is performing that activity? When they acknowledge that something
in the organism is context-dependent, what in fact is it dependent upon —
what agency, or unified sphere of activity, or principle, or lawfulness,
or other reality of any sort are they appealing to? They cannot be
pointing merely to a particular collection of objects, because the
collection can be endlessly varied or perturbed, and yet the context
remains more or less coherent, and the organism more or less maintains its
character. What is coherent? What has this character?
(from “Who Are You and Who Am I
and Who Are We?”)
October 11, 2021
If we cannot define “meaning”, what are we doing when we ask what someone
means? Apparently what we’re asking for is not something neatly
packageable or nailed down like a ... — well, I was going to say “like a
dictionary definition”. But, of course, dictionary definitions do not
nail down anything at all. They define words by using other words, and
simply assume that we will be able to dance our way into the midst of the
circling words by moving in tune with the meanings we already possess and
improvising upon them.
Meaning of any significance is never something we can hand someone
definitively, because each word we speak depends upon and participates in
all the others. We can never say of any profound meaning, “There! I’ve
got it!” Meaning is a journey. We can only track meaning as we
might track the blossoming of a flower, getting to know it better and
better even as we continually lose its old form and must rediscover its
truth newly metamorphosed.
The English philologist, Owen Barfield, reminded us that we can suggest
meaning, but cannot convey it as though it were a “bit” of the information
biologists are so fond of. This is why, as Barfield demonstrated, our
grasp of new meaning is typically mediated by figurative or metaphorical
language — language that can only encourage and assist us toward
exercising our own powers for intuiting the content at issue. We do not
transmit information; we assist at the birth of insight.
(from “How Biologists Lost Sight
of the Meaning of Life”)
October 4, 2021
When we consider that an almost unfathomable intelligence is already at
work in the zygote — for example, in the very processes through which the
future brain will be formed and begin to function — it seems rather rash
to regard the conscious intelligence with which we employ our brains as
absolutely separate from that earlier, brain-forming intelligence. It’s
not clear how we might even speak coherently about the presence of
fundamentally disconnected intelligences at play within the unity
of an organism.
(from “Toward a Thought-Full Teleology”)
September 27, 2021
The well-intentioned exhortation to replace anthropocentrism with
biocentrism, if pushed very far, becomes a curious contradiction. It
appeals to the uniquely human — the detachment from our environment that
allows us to try to see things from the Other’s point of view — in order
to deny any special place for humans within nature. We are asked to make a
philosophical and moral principle of the idea that we do not differ
decisively from other orders of life — but this formulation of principle
is itself surely one decisive thing we cannot ask of those other orders.
There is no disgrace in referring to the “uniquely human.” If we do not
seek to understand every organism’s unique way of being in the world, we
exclude it from the ecological conversation. To exclude ourselves in this
way reduces our words to gibberish, because we do not speak from our own
center.
(from “A Conversation with Nature”)
September 20, 2021
So far as the historical record testifies, our evolutionary trajectory has
not accorded with the usual assumptions. There is no evidence that we
slowly ascended from a crude life of material unmeaning to a humanly
contrived realm of meaning, value, culture, and spirituality. Our life
today, with its materialistic convictions about the meaninglessness of
nature, has required a long descent from the living, ensouled landscape
upon which our ancestors were nurtured.
(from “A Physicist, a
Philosopher, and the Meaning of Life”)
September 13, 2021
Organisms do things; rocks have things done to them. Even at rest a cat
is doing something; rocks do not rest, but are brought to
rest. An organism is always engaged in tasks, always going somewhere.
Its activity is directed and in some sense intentional and
purposeful (“teleological”). Its judgments in responding appropriately to
environmental challenges reflect a profound biological wisdom.
From the molecular level on up, organisms mobilize their resources in
order to achieve things, whether replicating DNA, splicing RNA,
orchestrating cell division, forming embryonic organs, healing wounds,
breathing, constructing a nest, securing food, caring for offspring,
shedding a skin, maintaining body temperature, hibernating, or anything
else we can properly regard as biological activity. Such activity is
always part of a life story, and the protagonist in that story is in
some sense what every story protagonist must be: a reasoning
agent.
But you will already have asked, quite rightly, what is meant by
“reasoning agent”? And even if we are driven to use such a phrase, how
can we distinguish an aphid’s “reasoning” from that of a nuclear
physicist? This is the question I will address here. Until we sort the
matter out, the language of the preceding paragraphs (and even much of the
standard biological literature) invites horrible misunderstandings. Note that
I have already twice said, in some sense. We must be on our guard.
(from “The
Problematic Effectiveness of Reason in Biology”, Part 1 of “From Bodily
Wisdom to the Knowing Self”)
September 6, 2021
[Regarding the hair follicle niche in mammals and the primacy of context
over cellular identity:]
Dramatically, the authors [of a technical article] show that “niche stem
cells can be dispensable for tissue regeneration, provided that the
overall integrity of the niche is maintained”. When the stem cell
population in the bulge or hair germ is destroyed by laser ablation,
distant epithelial cells flow toward the damaged compartment and go
through a transformation of identity enabling them to replace the lost
cells. As the authors summarize it, “The overall structure and function of
the tissue is maintained because cells are capable of adopting new fates
as dictated by their new niche microenvironment”.
It is impossible to reconcile these goings-on in the hair follicle with
the picture of an organism being constructed from an available collection
of well-defined parts as building blocks. The larger context helps to
“decide” what sorts of elements it will have, how they should be
transformed, and how they will come into mutual relationship. Nothing
could be further from the common picture of the organism or the cell as a
product of bottom-up causation, where the sole basis for understanding
consists of putting back together in our minds the parts we have
previously analyzed out of — and severed from — their life-receiving
connection to the whole.
(from “Who Are You and Who Am I
and Who Are We?”)
August 30, 2021
[Regarding physicist Steven Weinberg’s remark that “The more the universe
seems comprehensible, the more it also seems pointless”:] By “pointless”,
Weinberg later explained, he meant “not particularly directed toward human
beings” (NPR interview, undated). But what does that mean? Surely we do
not need, or want, the universe pointing to us in some selfish sense. But
when we comprehend things — when we are joined to them in an act of
understanding — they lend themselves to the intimacy of our innermost
being; their sensibility becomes our own. A universe that gives itself to
us in this way does not seem to have the “chilling, cold impersonal
quality” Weinberg finds in it.
Actually, you couldn’t find more anthropomorphic — which is to say, more
humanly meaningful — terms than “chilling”, “cold”, and “impersonal”.
Weinberg, one happily notes, has not entirely fled his own humanity. And
we doubtless do run into things we justly describe with the qualities he
discerns, thereby relating them to our inner life and discovering
something about their character. It’s just that these are not the only or
even the most common qualities human beings find when they gaze, fully
informed, into a starry sky or the teeming protoplasm of a living cell.
(from “How Biologists Lost Sight
of the Meaning of Life”)
August 23, 2021
When a pianist plays a Beethoven sonata, the infinitely complex movements
of her fingers, arms, and whole body must somehow express her intentions.
On any particular occasion — say, a funeral or wedding — she may inflect
her interpretation so as to yield a slight shift of character and mood.
This means she will modify all those complex movements in an almost
unthinkably nuanced manner.
The result is an utterly refined physiological realization of her
intentions, all the way down to the finest details of gene expression.
These must vary, for the sake of the performance, from one cell to the
next over trillions of cells.
So tell me: Do we, in this picture, find any break between the pianist’s
conscious effort to realize her expressive intentions, and the unconscious
expression of those intentions at the molecular level? Is not every cell
of her body informed by her thoughts, feelings, and intentions — this
despite the fact that no cell thinks, feels, or intends in any way we
would want to call “conscious”?
(from a talk titled “Toward a
Thought-Full Teleology”)
August 16, 2021
The classicist, Bruno Snell, somewhere remarked that to experience a rock
anthropomorphically is also to experience ourselves petromorphically — to
discover what is rock-like within ourselves. It is the kind of discovery
we have been making, aided by nature and the genius of language, for
thousands of years. It is how we have come to know what we are — and what
we are is (to use some old language) a microcosm of the macrocosm.
Historically, we have drawn our consciousness of ourselves from the
surrounding world, which is also to say that this world has awakened, or
begun to awaken, within us.
(from “A Conversation with Nature”)
August 9, 2021
Historically, then, nature presented us with exteriors whose inner
significances were, so to speak, written on their faces. Phenomena
constituted a living language, rather as, still for us today, the
sense-perceptible human face can scarcely be distinguished from its
expressive eloquence — from the meaning it communicates. Similarly, it was
from the evocative countenances of nature that our forebears discovered,
in a living unity, the profound potentials of meaning that eventually
yielded our current, analytically refined language.
(from “A Physicist, a
Philosopher, and the Meaning of Life”)
August 2, 2021
How, precisely, do we define a protein, when its form and function depend
on the molecules with which it associates? How do we understand the
identity of a cell in the developing embryo, when it can become any one of
many different kinds of cell, depending on where it migrates to? And when
we find the same plant with a radically different character in different
environments, what are we recognizing as the “same”? How, if at all, can
we conceive the separate identity of something that is always taking on
the character of its larger context?
(from “Who Are You and Who Am I and Who Are We?”)
July 26, 2021
To demand a definition of “meaning” — that is, to ask for the meaning of
“meaning” — is actually to run away from it. Meaning is where we start
from. We cannot define it because meanings are what we employ in order to
define things. Asking what “meaning” means is like trying to prove the
validity of the logic we use in proofs. As human beings we must — and do
every day — simply wake up to meaning. If we possess cognitive capacities,
even as infants, it can only be because these capacities are themselves
products of the world’s play of meaning — call it the logos if you wish —
through which you and I have come into being.
So asking about the meaning of “meaning” does not send us in a circle. It
returns us to our origin and to the immediately given character of the
world that produced the deer and bee and us.
(from “How Biologists Lost Sight
of the Meaning of Life”)
July 19, 2021
It seems that, while we are free to imagine organisms chock full of
machines, information processors, and cybernetic devices — all of which
import the human interior into the organism — any actual reckoning with
this conscious interior is taboo.
(from a talk titled “Toward a
Thought-Full Teleology”)
July 12, 2021
[Regarding the view that humans are incompatible with nature and can only
harm it:]
We do as much damage by denying our profound responsibilities toward
nature as by directly abusing them. If you charge me with
anthropocentrism, I accept the label, though on my own terms. If there is
one creature that may not healthily scorn anthropocentrism, surely it is
ó anthropos. How should we act, if not from our own center and from the
deepest truth of our own being? But it is exactly this truth that opens us
to the Other. We are the place within nature where willing openness to the
Other becomes the necessary foundation of our own life ...
There is no disgrace in referring to the “uniquely human.” If we do not
seek to understand every organism’s unique way of being in the world, we
exclude it from the ecological conversation. To exclude ourselves in this
way reduces our words to gibberish, because we do not speak from our own
center.
(from “A Conversation with Nature”)
July 5, 2021
The story of the Greek sun-god “Helios” could hardly have originated as an
animistic effort to account for a material sun, given that neither the
history of language nor what we know of mythic consciousness affords any
evidence that a purely material sun had yet been conceived. The sun’s
glory, its light and warmth, were directly and non-reflectively
experienced as ensouled realities.
(from “A Physicist, a
Philosopher, and the Meaning of Life”)
June 28, 2021
What do we mean when, regarding ourselves, we speak, as so many do, of a
psychosomatic unity? Who will specify exactly what is meant by the
psychological half of “psychosomatic”? And whatever is meant by it, how
and in what sense do psyche and soma become a unity? — a question neither
biologists nor cognitive scientists nor philosophers have been able to
resolve with any hint of consensus, despite centuries of effort. Looking
beyond ourselves, in what sense do we find anything like a psychosomatic
unity in chimpanzee, nightingale, cricket, or amoeba? If we cannot answer
such a basic question despite our being driven to employ a descriptive
language that
includes
both physical and psychic terminology,
then what do we understand?
(from “Who Are You and Who Am I and Who Are We?”)
June 21, 2021
We are nothing but creatures of meaning. We never make a movement that
isn’t a meaningful gesture — one that the psychiatrist, physical
therapist, student of temperaments, sociologist, stage director, and all
the rest of us can read with more or less success. Even an infant, in its
own way, finds significance in the most subtle human movements. Any infant
who is not raised in a speaking environment fails to develop anything like
normal human capacities. And “speaking environment” refers to the meaning
implicit in every significant gesture. Before they themselves can speak,
infants take an interest in and learn to read gestures — to the point of
distinguishing, in silent videos, between speakers of two languages they
have never heard before.
Meaning is just there, whether we speak words or not. Every act of ours is
a signifying. And we collectively understand each other’s meanings well
enough to engender civilizations that are infinitely complex tapestries
woven from those meanings ...
Here, then, is my question for the skeptic: Where in the pervasive matrix
of meaning I have just characterized do you find an unscientific
obscurantism? More particularly, which of the meanings you speak and
understand and found your life upon and discover in other creatures is a
puzzle to you? I would like to know the precise nature of the disreputable
element in these meanings you live by — for example, in all the words you
have spoken, understood, and been willing to respond to today. This
collection of words, I am sure, goes far beyond the more acceptable
technical terms of any particular science. Yet, apart from specially
deserving cases, you don’t recoil from such words in disgust.
(from “How Biologists Lost Sight
of the Meaning of Life”)
June 14, 2021
[Regarding human manipulation of the natural environment:]
There is an alternative to the ideal of prediction and control. It helps,
in approaching it, to recognize the common ground beneath scientific
managers and those who see all human “intrusion” as pernicious. Both camps
regard nature as a world in which the human being cannot meaningfully
participate. To the advocate of pristine wilderness untouched by human
hands, nature presents itself as an inviolable and largely unknowable
Other; to the would-be manager, nature is a collection of objects so
disensouled and unrelated to us that we can take them as a mere challenge
for our technological inventiveness. Both stances deprive us of any
profound engagement with the world that nurtured us.
My own hope for the future lies in a third way. Perhaps we have missed
this hope because it is too close to us. Each of us participates in at
least one domain where we grant the autonomy and infinite worth of the
Other while also acting boldly to affect and sometimes even rearrange the
welfare of the Other. I mean the domain of human relations.
We do not view the sovereign individuality and inscrutability of our
fellows as a reason to do nothing that affects them. But neither do we
view them as mere objects for a technology of control.
How do we deal with them? We engage them in conversation.
(from “A Conversation with Nature”)
June 7, 2021
In Odysseus’ day, techne was a conscious resourcefulness that had
scarcely begun to project itself into the material apparatus of life. What
apparatus existed was an enticement for further creative expression of the
nascent human self. While the technology of the Greeks may seem
hopelessly primitive to us, it is worth remembering that the balanced
awakening heralded by Homer culminated in a flowering of thought and art
that many believe has never been surpassed for profundity or beauty
anywhere on earth.
Today, that balance seems a thing of the past. The powers of our minds
crystallize almost immediately, and before we are aware of them, into
gadgetry, without any mediating, self-possessed reflection, so that we
live within a kind of crystal palace that is sometimes hard to distinguish
from a prison. The question is no longer whether we can use the
enticement of clever devices as a means to summon the energies of dawning
selfhood; rather, it is whether we can preserve what live energies we once
had, in the face of the deadening effect of the now inert cleverness bound
into the ubiquitous external machinery of our existence.
(from
“The Deceiving Virtues of Technology”, Chapter 1 of
In the Belly of
the Beast)
May 31, 2021
We have learned, especially since Darwin, that knowledge of the past
illuminates the biological present — that, as the mantra of contemporary
evolutionary theorists would have it, “Nothing in biology makes sense
except in the light of evolution”. The mantra could serve as Barfield’s
theme as well, but with this difference: he did not forget to include
consciousness in that which evolves. The omission, after all, looks on its
face to be disastrous. If we had no hope of fully understanding the
biology of organisms before the idea of evolution dawned upon us, how much
more must we remain in darkness while ignoring the evolution of the
cognitive instruments through which alone we can grasp that idea — that
is, while ignoring the evolution of the instruments of our understanding
itself.
(from “A Physicist, a
Philosopher, and the Meaning of Life”)
May 24, 2021
In biology, the word “mechanism” today often refers merely to “lawful
physical interaction”. This habit of expression makes it easier to
associate physical lawfulness with machines. But clouds, though physically
lawful, are not machines. Nor are rocks and rivers. Nor is cytoplasm.
If only biologists using the word “machine” were required to say what they
mean beyond “lawful physical interaction”! The only thing distinguishing
a machine from physical objects generally is the human purpose unnaturally
imposed on the arrangement of parts. So anyone who feels the need to draw
on the idea of a machine rather than lawful objects unmanipulated by human
intelligence, is probably invoking human purposes under the table, even if
unwittingly.
(from a draft of a talk titled “Toward a Thought-Full
Teleology — Beyond the Hollow Organism”. The talk, not yet publicly
available, is scheduled to be delivered at a June 28-29, 2021 conference
sponsored by The Linnean Society of London. The conference theme is
“Evolution
‘On Purpose’: Teleonomy in Living Systems”.)
May 17, 2021
In every sphere of knowledge it’s easy to put out of mind those questions
that are so fundamental and yet so seemingly impenetrable that they leave
everything we think we understand woefully ungrounded. Biology is no
exception.
Who, or what, is the organism, and what guarantees the remarkable unity of
character, the distinctive and recognizable way of being, consistently
achieved by the developing individuals of a species? Where do we look for
collection of parts — an explanation for the integral performance of the
whole?
(from “Who Are You and Who Am I and Who Are We?”)
May 10, 2021
Are the meanings we find in the world specifiable? I would answer that we
can always make a start at a valid description and, happily, we can never
make an end of it. In observing the rose, we may note its color and
beauty, its water- and sap-transporting processes, its thorny power of
rending, its changing appearance under sunlight, shade, and moonlight, its
unique relationship with each insect among its circle of animal
companions, the scent of its flowers, its way of reflecting the world in a
dewdrop, the distinctive pattern of its root growth, its cellular
metabolism from one cell type to another, the sour taste of its fruits,
and much, much more. And we may hope to glimpse, running through all
these features, the unity that constrains the entire ensemble to perform
qualitatively and harmoniously as this kind of plant, and not another.
No human biography or characterization of a plant is ever complete, but
neither are we absolutely barred from any understanding we may seek. That
is the way with meaning; we can always plumb it more deeply or from
different angles. Meaning is never a fixed quantity, but always opens out
onto the entire universe of meaning. Text and context are inseparable.
And if we know enough to ask a half-way coherent question, then in the
very framing of the question we have already found our way toward some of
the understanding we seek.
(from “How Biologists Lost Sight
of the Meaning of Life”)
May 3, 2021
Why, after all, does Jack Turner agree with his opponents that acceptable
“messing” with ecosystems would have to be grounded in successful
prediction and control? Once we make this assumption, of course, we are
likely either to embrace such calculated control as a natural extension of
our technical reach, or else reject it as impossible. And yet, when I sit
with the chickadees, messing with their habitat, it does not feel like an
exercise in prediction and control. My aim is to get to know the birds,
and to understand them. Maybe this makes a difference.
(from “A Conversation with Nature”)
April 26, 2021
[Russian philosopher Vladimir Solovyov remarked that] “The body of the
universe is the totality of the real-ideal, the psycho-physical”.
Solovyov points out that there can be no such thing as a “material unity”
— not, at least, as matter is normally conceived. “Material things”,
imagined as empty of thought, just coexist side by side. Any unity must be
ideal. After all, even the mathematical laws of physics, which offer one
route toward a unified understanding of phenomena, are ideas — but ideas
that belong both to our understanding and to the nature of things
themselves.
(from “Vladimir Solovyov on
Sexual Love and Evolution”)
April 19, 2021
[It would be well to say:] “technology is our hope if we can accept it as
our enemy, but as our friend, it will destroy us.” Of course
technology threatens us, and of course it calls for a certain
resistance on our part, since it expresses our dominant tendencies, our
prevailing lameness or one-sidedness. The only way we can become entire,
whole, and healthy is to struggle against whatever reinforces our existing
imbalance. Our primary task is to discover the potentials within
ourselves that are not merely mechanical, not merely automatic, not
reducible to computation. And the machine is a gift to us precisely
because the peril in its siding with our one-sidedness forces us to
strengthen the opposite side — at least it does if we recognize the peril
and accept its challenge.
(from
“The Deceiving Virtues of Technology”, Chapter 1 of
In the Belly of
the Beast)
April 12, 2021
According to the evolutionary story that most of us have forcibly absorbed
from a young age, humankind somehow raised itself above the beastly,
mindless, material substrate of its origin so as to achieve, step by step,
the mystifying wonders of language and poetry, music and art, politics and
science, and all the other sublimations contributing to high culture. The
sea of meaning within which we now swim — without which we would have
nothing we could recognize as human life — somehow bubbled up from
somewhere, if only as an illusion of the human mind, and cast a
kind of spell over the bedrock meaninglessness of brute matter.
“Somehow”, I say, since the meaning at issue, and the question how it
could have emerged from an eternal silence of Unmeaning is so great an
enigma for conventional thinking that it has received no fundamental
elucidation. Nor is it evident that we need to seek an origin of
meaning. Perhaps what we will actually discover is a larger,
meaning-soaked surround, progressively coming to a focus in human minds.
(from “A Physicist, a
Philosopher, and the Meaning of Life”)
April 5, 2021
René Descartes’ cleaving stroke through the heart of reality has been
almost universally accepted — perhaps most of all in biology. We live
with the violence done to the unity and harmony of the world by that
stroke, and merely choose which half of this improbably fractured whole to
accept and which half to reject. And so the “material” that materialists
accept is dualistic material, just as the mind, or interiority, they
reject is dualistic interiority. Instead of searching for a
non-Cartesian way forward, we imagine ourselves shut up in suspiciously
deceptive minds, looking out at an alien world of mindless extended
substance.
(from a draft of a talk tentatively titled “Toward a Thought-Full
Teleology — Beyond the Hollow Organism”. The talk, not yet publicly
available, is scheduled to be delivered at a June 28-29, 2021 conference
sponsored by The Linnean Society of London. The conference theme is
“Evolution
‘On Purpose’: Teleonomy in Living Systems”.)
March 29, 2021
Precisely at the point in evolutionary history where the understanding
consciousness arises and becomes aware of itself, it begins to deny its
own powers. We are those who, by grace of our own evolutionary
inheritance, can in one way or another enter into the meaning of the life
of every living creature and make it our own. Yet, fearing
“anthropocentrism” — which is to say, fearing ourselves — we end up
belittling the gift of understanding.
As for the dangers of anthropocentrism: yes, there are such dangers.
Projecting ourselves onto other creatures as if they were blank screens is
always a temptation. But I would say an equal danger today is quite the
opposite. We are òi anthropoi, and it is therefore our obligation to be
properly anthropocentric — to exercise our full potentials rather than to
project onto ourselves and fellow organisms the character of particular
mechanical products of our own activity. Scientists wish to understand
life. Wouldn’t it be far better if they brought to bear upon this life the
expressive powers of the living, cognizing thought through which we
conceive and build machines, rather than constrain their thinking to the
deadened terms of the contrived objects?
(from “How Biologists Lost Sight
of the Meaning of Life”)
March 22, 2021
If bird feeders are problematic [because of an unnatural crowding of
birds], what was I to think of my own habit of sitting outside for long
periods and feeding birds from my hands? Especially during the coldest
winter weather and heavy snowfalls, I sometimes found myself mobbed by a
contentious crowd, which at different times included not only chickadees
but also titmice, red- and white-breasted nuthatches, hairy woodpeckers,
goldfinches, juncos, blue jays, cardinals, various sparrows, and a
red-bellied woodpecker. To my great delight, several of the less wary
species would perch on shoulders, shoes, knees, and hat, as well as hands.
But by what right do I encourage tameness in creatures of the wild? The
classic issue here has to do with how we should assess our impact upon
nature. Two views, if we drive them to schematic extremes for purposes of
argument, conveniently frame the debate ...
(from “A Conversation with Nature”)
March 8, 2021
The Russian philosopher Vladimir Solovyov spoke of a two-fold
impenetrability of things: they are separated from each other both in time
and in space. “That which lies at the basis of our world is being in a
state of disintegration, being dismembered into parts and moments which
exclude one another”.
Overcoming this disintegration — re-membering ourselves and the world in
which we live — is, as Solovyov saw it, a personal and social task with
cosmic implications ... He cited — to give but one example of the
principle of unity — a simple, profound, and universal physical
phenomenon, one that would change a great deal of modern thought if we
would only spend some time contemplating it: I mean the phenomenon of two
objects gravitationally attracting each other. In Solovyov’s language:
here we see that “parts of the material world do not exclude one another,
but, on the contrary, aspire mutually to include one another and to mingle
with each other”.
We could not retain our commonplace image of separate parts if we truly
reckoned with the mutual participation of two objects gravitationally
attracted to each other. It is not a matter of one object exerting an
external force upon another “from a distance” (as students are often asked
to imagine the matter), but of two entities caught up in a single, unified
embrace wherein the being — the very substance and activity — of one is
inseparable from that of the other. This truth, evident enough to the
physicist, suggests that there is something pathological about our routine
habits of perception through which we form our picture of a world
consisting of separate and disconnected objects.
(from “Vladimir Solovyov on
Sexual Love and Evolution”)
March 1, 2021
Early technological man carved out his civilized enclosures as hard-won,
vulnerable enclaves, protected places within an enveloping wilderness full
of ravening beasts and natural catastrophes. We, by contrast, live within
a thoroughly technologized and domesticated landscape where it is the
remaining enclaves of wildness that appear painfully delicate and
vulnerable. Today, if we would set bounds to the wild and lawless, it is
the ravening beast of technology we must restrain. If nature still
threatens us, the threat is that it will finally and disastrously succumb
to our aggressions.
(from
“The Deceiving Virtues of Technology”, Chapter 1 of
In the Belly of
the Beast)
February 22, 2021
The question, “What sort of world do we live in?” came to be enveloped in
darkness precisely at the point where our science was thought to be most
fundamental! We have a physics of light and color framed as far as
possible in language suitable for those who cannot see, and a science of
acoustics that might just as well have been formulated by those who cannot
hear.
The dismissal of qualities from science — which is to say, the dismissal
of the world of experience — has meant that physicists, when they venture
at all beyond their equations and well-designed instruments, lose
themselves in a Wild West of speculation, illustrated by the “many worlds”
theories so prominently heralded today. This is high-flying conjecture
that puts to shame those medieval doctors whose soaring intellectual
acrobatics were precisely what the pioneers of the Scientific Revolution
so badly wanted to bring down to earth, where ideas could be tested within
human experience.
(from “A Physicist, a
Philosopher, and the Meaning of Life”)
February 15, 2021
Where do we look for an understanding of life? Where, if anywhere, does
life put its own meaning on display most forthrightly and clearly?
There is one high promontory within the sprawling panorama of life on
earth that does indeed afford a perspective upon the whole — a place
from where the unique processes occurring throughout the kingdoms of life
become peculiarly visible, manifesting their significance. There is, we
can know without a doubt, one evolutionary achievement that offers not
only an unlimited survey of the entire drama of life, but also lends
itself to the penetrating insight we need for recognizing and expressing
the many meaningful aspects of the drama.
This evolutionary achievement lies in the place we know best — in
fact, the only place where the necessary sort of knowing occurs at all.
It is where life becomes conscious of itself — where the living
creature not only acts out its own significant existence, but is capable
of contemplating this existence along with that of all other living
things. It is the one outgrowth within the great, age-old tree of life
where life’s own power of survey blossoms and reaches its fullest
fruition: the understanding consciousness of man.
(from “How Biologists Lost Sight
of the Meaning of Life”)
February 8, 2021
What must be realized through individual human striving today can be seen
as an expression — a further development and transformation — of the very
processes that were at work in simpler, less individuated life forms. When
we observe animals of increasing complexity, we notice a progressive
internalization of function and an expansion of interior, sentient life,
culminating in self-awareness. That which worked on the organism
throughout evolutionary history to develop this capacity for
self-awareness, now works through the human being in the exercise
of this capacity. Is there any reason to doubt that it is the same power
in both cases?
All of which suggests that evolution has had a certain mindful
character all along — or a more-than-mindful character, inasmuch as
the power to engender minds can hardly be alien or inferior to the
capacity of the minds it engenders.
(from “Vladimir Solovyov on
Sexual Love and Evolution”)
February 1, 2021
I’d like you to think for a moment of the various words we use to
designate technological products. You will notice that a number of these
words have a curious double aspect: they, or their cognate forms, can
refer either to external objects we make, or to certain inner activities
of the maker. A “device,” for example, can be an objective, invented
thing, but it can also be some sort of scheming or contriving of
the mind, as when a defendant uses every device he can think of to escape
the charges against him. The word “contrivance” shows the same
two-sidedness, embracing both mechanical appliances and the carefully
devised plans and schemes we concoct in thought. As for “mechanisms” and
“machines,” we produce them as visible objects out there in the world even
as we conceal our own machinations within ourselves. Likewise, an
“artifice” is a manufactured device, or else it is trickery, ingenuity, or
inventiveness. “Craft” can refer to manual dexterity in making things and
to a ship or aircraft, but a “crafty” person is adept at deceiving others.
This odd association between technology and deceit occurs not only in our
own language, but even more so in Homer’s Greek, where it is much harder
to separate the inner and outer meanings, and the deceit often reads like
an admired virtue. The Greek techne, from which our own word
“technology” derives, meant “craft, skill, cunning, art, or device” — all
referring without discrimination to what we would call either an objective
construction or a subjective capacity or maneuver. Techne was what
enabled the lame craftsman god, Hephaestus, to trap his wife, Aphrodite,
in a promiscuous alliance with warlike Ares. He accomplished the feat by
draping over his bed a wondrously forged snare whose invisible bonds were
finer than a spider’s silken threads. The unsuspecting couple blundered
straightway into the trap. As the other gods gathered around the now
artless couple so artfully imprisoned, a gale of unquenchable laughter
celebrated the guile of Hephaestus. “Lame though he is,” they declared,
“he has caught Ares by craft (techne).” Here techne refers
indistinguishably to the blacksmith’s sly trickery and his skillful
materialization of the trick at his forge.
Likewise, the Greek mechane, the source of our “machine,”
“mechanism,” and “machination,” designates with equal ease a machine or
engine of war, on the one hand, or a contrivance, trick, or cunning wile,
on the other. The celebrated ruse of the Trojan Horse was said to be a
mechane, and it was admired at least as much for the devious and
unexpected turn of mind behind its invention as for the considerable
achievement of its physical construction.
(from
“The Deceiving Virtues of Technology”, Chapter 1 of
In the Belly of
the Beast)
January 18, 2021
If we believe that an empirical (experience-based) science — a science
grounded in the conceptual ordering of sensible appearances — really does
give us genuine knowledge of the world, then a reasonable conclusion is
that this world is, by nature, a realm of conceptually ordered appearances
possessing the qualities of sense. It asserts its existence and character
in the terms of conscious, thought- and sense-derived experience.
(from “A Physicist, a
Philosopher, and the Meaning of Life”)
January 11, 2021
[Regarding the nineteenth-century Russian philosopher Vladimir Solovyov’s
treatment of evolution:]
Consciousness alone is where the evolutionary process is first fully and
explicitly realized. Evolution here “comes into its own” and
declares itself in human awareness. That which has gone on from the
beginning now operates, at least in part, through the conscious choice of
the individual and the quest for universal ideals.
In slightly different words: what must be realized through individual
human striving today can be seen as an expression — a further development
and transformation — of the very processes that were at work in simpler,
less individuated life forms. When we observe animals of increasing
complexity, we notice a progressive internalization of function and an
expansion of interior, sentient life, culminating in self-awareness. That
which worked on the organism throughout evolutionary history to develop
this capacity for self-awareness, now works through the human being
in the exercise of this capacity. Is there any reason to doubt that it is
the same power in both cases?
All of which suggests that evolution has had a certain mindful
character all along — or a more-than-mindful character, inasmuch as
the power to engender minds can hardly be alien or inferior to the
capacity of the minds it engenders.
(from “Vladimir Solovyov on
Sexual Love and Evolution”)
January 4, 2021
[Concerning the fairly recent researches into “competing endogenous
RNAs”:]
They participate in a vast “breathing” process, one of whose primary
outcomes is the regulation — the balancing and counterbalancing — of the
mRNAs themselves in proper relation to ever-changing conditions in the
cell and its environment. The challenge for our understanding is
considerable when we realize that all these RNAs are (to revise the
metaphor only slightly) “swimming” in a common pool, one whose significant
eddies and currents can be intricately distinct even as they continually
flow one into the other.
The upshot of it all is that protein-coding RNAs are found to share
broadly in the fluid life of the organism, and not to be mere cogs in a
deterministic mechanism. In particular, they gain additional, noncoding
(regulatory) functions, and the sharp distinction between coding and
noncoding regions of DNA begins to look even more artificial than it has
already become.
(from “RNA: Dancing with
a Thousand Partners”)
December 28, 2020
Surely our technological prowess does reflect a practical knowledge of the
world. But the pleasure and wonder of it easily blinds us to the fact that
we remain infants in fundamental understanding. How often do we remind
ourselves that the nature of matter and energy is a mystery to us, or
that, when we speak of “the physical”, it is difficult to indicate even
roughly what we mean? When we get down to the submicroscopic specifics, we
find nothing there, no thing of any recognizable sort. We identify
reliable mathematical relations suggesting particular structure, but we do
not know: the structure of what?
(from “A Physicist, a
Philologist, and the Meaning of Life”)
December 21, 2020
[Owen Barfield, commenting on nineteenth-century philosopher Vladimir
Solovyov’s view of sexual attraction and evolution, writes that
Solovyov]
opens with a biological survey which easily, and to my mind irresistibly,
refutes the age-old assumption … that the teleology of sexual attraction
is the preservation of the species by multiplication. On the contrary, it
is apparent from the whole tendency of biological evolution that nature’s
purpose or goal (or whatever continuity it is that the concept of
evolution presupposes) has been the development of more complex and, with
that, of more highly individualized and thus more perfect organisms. From
the fish to the higher mammals quantity of offspring steadily decreases as
subtlety of organic structure increases; reproduction is in inverse
proportion to specific quality. On the other hand, the factor of
sexual attraction in bringing about reproduction is in direct proportion.
On the next or sociological level he has little difficulty in showing that
the same is true of the factor of romantic passion in sexual attraction.
Both history and literature show that it contributes nothing towards the
production of either more or better offspring, and may often, as in the
case of Romeo and Juliet, actually frustrate any such production at all.
Why then has nature, or the evolutionary process, taken the trouble to
bring about this obtrusively conspicuous ingredient in the make-up of
homo sapiens?
(from “Vladimir Solovyov
on Sexual Love and Evolution”)
December 14, 2020
One finds that in once-isolated and sharply focused areas of
molecular biological investigation, the focus is rapidly becoming
less sharp. Boundaries are becoming more permeable, so that it is
difficult to separate one topic from another. Every “classical”
function of a molecule or structure or pathway is turning out to
be just one of many different and often (at first) seemingly
unrelated functions. Every niche is interwoven with other niches,
and the play of “causes” and “effects” is more like the flow of a
stream with its endless, interpenetrating eddies than an
interaction of discrete machine parts
That’s why terms such as “network”, “systems approach”,
“interconnected”, “combinatorial complexity”, and above all
“crosstalk” and “context-dependence” now show up with such
striking frequency in technical papers. The take-home message is
that we’re witnessing a transformation in the way we must think of
organisms.
(from “Dancing
with a Thousand Partners”)
December 7, 2020
Can the kind of agency we witness so obviously in the development of an
individual organism be at all applicable to evolution — that is, to vast
populations of co-evolving organisms?
When we speak, not about physical processes as such, but rather about an
underlying biological agency, intention, and purposiveness, then the
distinction between an individual animal as a collection of molecules,
cells, and tissues, on the one hand, and an entire population as a
collection of organisms, on the other, becomes an open question. The
whole business of telos-directed biological activity, wherever we
have observed it, is to bridge radically different physical processes.
That is, it brings diverse and complex physical phenomena — for example,
in the brain, heart, liver, intestines, and skin of a developing mammal —
into integral unity and harmony, making a larger whole of them. When we
have seen this purposeful coordination and harmonization in one organic
context involving many distinct physical elements, it is only natural to
look for it in other organic contexts.
(from “Teleology and Evolution: Why Can’t We
Have ‘Evolution on Purpose’?”)
November 30, 2020
When we speak of agency, we speak of capacities we ourselves routinely
exercise. But at the same time we must admit that our experience of our
own agency is closely bounded on all sides by mystery. We do not fully
understand where our thoughts and actions come from, or how our intentions
move our bodies. It would be a mistake to clothe the mystery of
biological agency in the imagined form of a grandly sovereign,
all-knowing human individual.
And if we cannot be entirely clear about the sources of agency in our own
lives, we can hardly be dogmatic about the nature of the agency — or
diverse agencies — at work in a single bee colony, a particular species of
rodent, or the biosphere as a whole. Nothing, however, prevents our being
good observers of living beings, which is also to be observers of the
clear manifestations of biological agency. In this way we become
familiar with the complex and perhaps many-voiced character — the way of
being — of particular organisms.
(from “Teleology and Evolution: Why Can’t We
Have ‘Evolution on Purpose’?”)
November 16, 2020
This sort of interpenetrability [characteristic of biological agencies] is
exactly what we find in language — that is, in different contexts, and
even in different words and phrases. We can put words together in
infinitely varying ways. Any two words or ideas or philosophies, no
matter how different, can be brought into meaningful relation, thereby
modifying each other. A word is given its meaning by the character of the
larger thought in which it participates, just as a heart receives its
meaning from the larger organism in which it participates. Neither the
word nor the heart thereby suffers a loss of identity, but rather gains in
the richness of its meanings and its relational potentials.
(from “Teleology and Evolution: Why Can’t We
Have ‘Evolution on Purpose’?”)
November 9, 2020
An animal’s development from zygote to maturity is a classic picture of
telos-realizing activity. Through its agency and purposiveness,
an animal holds its disparate parts in an effective unity, making a single
whole of them. This purposiveness informs the parts “downward” from the
whole and “outward” from the inner intention, and is invisible to strictly
physical analysis of the interaction of one part with another.
(from “Teleology and Evolution: Why Can’t We
Have ‘Evolution on Purpose’?”)
October 19, 2020
Technology is our hope if we can accept it as our enemy; as our friend it
will destroy us. If we look to technology for the solution to our
problems, we will only worsen our existing one-sidedness and invite the
destruction of everything worth saving. If, on the other hand, we oppose
technology with what is not machine-like in ourselves — with an ability to
read the world instead of merely manipulating it and losing sight of it —
then we will receive from technology the gift of our highest selves.
(from “Owen Barfield and Technological
Society”)
Steve Talbott :: Biology Worthy of
Life