The Nature Institute:
Biology Worthy of Life
Quotes of the Week
The following texts have been used as “Quote of the Week” on the
web page at https://bwo.life. They
are arranged here from latest to oldest.
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”)