Purpose and Desire: What Makes Something "Alive" and Why Modern Darwinism Has Failed to Explain It

434 Pages·2016·4.43 MB·English

by  Scott Turner

Contents
Cover
Title Page
Preface
1: The Pony Under the Tree
2: Biology’s Second Law
3: Many Little Lives
4: A Clockwork Homeostasis
5: A Mad Dream
6: The Barrier That Wasn’t
7: The Reverse Pinocchio
8: A Multiplicity of Memory
9: One Is the Friendliest Number
10: The Hand of Whatever
11: Plato Street
Epilogue: Evolution, Purpose, and Desire
Acknowledgments
Notes
Index
About the Author
Credits
Copyright
About the Publisher
Preface
Just shoot me now . . .
*
On one side is the ebullient and engaging Will Provine telling me:
There are no gods, no purpose, no goal-directed forces of any kind. . . . There is no ultimate
*
foundation for ethics, no ultimate meaning to life, and no free will for humans, either.
On the other side, the astonishing Francis Crick says to me that
[science has shown you that] your joys and your sorrows, your memories and your
ambitions, your sense of identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behaviour of a
vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules. As Lewis Carroll’s Alice might
1
have phrased it: “You’re nothing but a pack of neurons.”
Standing in front of me, the relentless Richard Dawkins informs me,
The universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom,
2
no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but blind, pitiless indifference.
And, standing behind me, the dangerous Daniel Dennett hectors me through
his magnificent beard that it’s all a mindless algorithm:
No matter how impressive the products of an algorithm [i.e., natural selection], the
underlying process always consists of nothing but a series of individually mindless steps
3
succeeding each other without the help of any intelligent supervision.
Beset from all sides, the message could not be more clear. It’s all endless,
mindless, purposeless, relentless, no point, no purpose, no intent, no goal, no . . .
nothing.
Oh, dear!
I’m indulging in a little bit of caricature here, of course. Provine, Crick,
Dawkins, and Dennett often show up as exemplary bêtes noires on creationist,
intelligent design, and other generally anti-Darwinian websites showing us what
the dangerous Darwinian world has in store for us, as heralded by these
supposed Four Horsemen of the Evocalypse. It’s an unfair accusation; all these
authors have written extensively, deeply, and subtly on the central paradox of
Darwinism: the problem of what seems like design, intentionality, intelligence,
and purposefulness in the living world. One cannot read their works (or meet
them in person) without sensing in them the joy that comes from being able to
frolic and wriggle through the tangled banks of the Darwinian idea.
Nevertheless, one also gets the impression of a different form of glee—an
almost Calvinist glee—at the prospect of using Darwinism as a cudgel to
4
dethrone what Carl Sagan once described as the demon-haunted world —a
world that is permeated with spirits and gods that shape and control it,
intelligently, purposefully, and intentionally. Spending time wandering through
the Darwinian thickets with our four horsemen and their acolytes, one is left
wondering whether their philosophical joie de vivre has not lapsed into
inebriation and intoxication—and into intoxication’s usual end point: grumbling
nihilism and meaninglessness.
One could dismiss this type of talk as the gloom-mongering old men like me
are prone to, but I don’t think that’s all it is. An anecdote: a few years ago, I was
sitting at lunch at my university with a friend and colleague along with a small
gaggle of students. As we often did on these occasions (as we are both
professors and therefore pedantic), we were putting on a little bit of a
performance for our lunch companions, our discussion turning on the very
problem of intentionality and purposefulness that the four horsemen had
denounced most forcefully. Our little debate centered on whether intentionality
is something “real,” that is, a genuine phenomenon that exists in and of itself,
and is therefore susceptible to scientific inquiry; or whether intentionality is only
“apparent,” that is, mindless molecular churning that creates only an appearance
of intentionality in the credulous human mind. At one point, I asked my friend
the question: What if intentionality is real? Furthermore, what if intentionality is
not only real, but is actually the most important attribute of life? Could we then
be scientists true to our calling if we ignored it? His answer was no, we could
not then be scientists; we would have to be something else—philosophers,
perhaps, or theologians. That unsatisfying end was where we left it that day, with
my questions unanswered. So I am left with them: What if the distinctive
attributes of life truly are intentionality, purposefulness, and the wants and
desires, however inchoate, of living things? How could we possibly understand
life if we deliberately ignored those attributes?
And another anecdote: this book started out as a sequel to my book The
Tinkerer’s Accomplice, which explored what I thought then to be the unsolved
and very real problem of biological design. I had included in that book a short
chapter on intentionality, arguing that intentionality was not some magical thing;
it was in fact the obverse of cognition, which itself found its origins in the
homeostasis of the brain “ecosystem.” I thought it was a pretty little idea, not
into the weeds at all, but my chapter on intentionality provoked emphatic
displeasure from a reviewer writing for the books section of a prominent
newspaper. This reviewer was a fellow scientist of some renown, and his
displeasure was provoked not so much by what I had to say about intentionality,
but by the fact that I had had the temerity to even bring up the subject, which he
felt had no place in a book that presumed to be scientific. Fair enough—
reasonable people can differ on this. But he had gone on to demand that I should
have made known my religious beliefs (I’m a Christian, if that matters, albeit not
a very good one). This struck me as strange, even a tad illiberal. Would he have
demanded a religious confession from an author whose views he had found more
congenial? And what would he have done armed with my confession in hand?
You see what happened here: I had raised issues as a scientist trying to explain
phenomena in my field of study, but my reflections were seen as being so out of
bounds (and threatening, presumably) that they could only be explained by
religious motivations that I was trying to sneak into my work. I had clearly
struck a nerve.
The conclusion I draw from these two anecdotes is that we scientists have a
problem with the very idea of purposeful life, and the problem is widespread. To
be scientists, it seems that the first thing we must do is put on blinders to squishy
ideas like purposefulness, intentionality, and a guiding intelligence. But what if
these ideas are central to the phenomenon we are studying—life itself? Can
questions of purpose and desire be imposed only from outside the work of
science? Isn’t that precisely the opposite of what we, as scientists, should do?
Yet, we force ourselves into a Hobson’s choice on the matter: accept
intentionality and purposefulness as real attributes of life, which disqualifies you
as a scientist, or become a scientist and dismiss life’s distinctive quality from
your thinking.
Which brings me to the book you hold in your hand. I have come to believe that
there is something presently wrong with how we scientists think about life, its
existence, its origins, and its evolution. It’s bad enough that we are somehow
forced into making the Hobson’s choice described above. What’s worse is that
being forced to make the choice actually stands in the way of our having a fully
coherent theory of life, in all its aspects, most notably its evolution. In other
words, this bias is now hindering scientific progress.
This is tragic, because there is nothing in the nature of the science of life per
se that forces the choice to be made. The problem traces its beginning to the
early twentieth century, when biology sold its soul, so to speak, committing the
practitioners of the science of life wholesale to the essentially philosophical
premises of mechanism and materialism. At the time, this probably seemed a
sensible thing to do, in no small part because biology (and evolutionism) had
wandered off into a muddle of obscurantism. Turning away from that older
tradition to take a new cold hard look at the material and mechanistic
underpinnings of life brought much-needed clarity to our understanding of the
phenomenon of life. That is why much of the twentieth century is rightly
considered a golden age for the science of life.
But biology paid a price for that clarity, because along the way, it lost its
hold on any claim that it was a distinct science of life. Biology could be a
distinct science, after all, if and only if life itself were a distinctive phenomenon.
Yet lurking in the fine print of that Faustian bargain struck then was the premise
that life is not distinguishable in any ultimate way from the rest of the cold and
impersonal universe we inhabit. Glossing over this clause (or, it must be said, the
enthusiastic embracing of it) has drawn modern biology into a bit of a
philosophical pickle, to wit: if biology claims to be a distinct science, on what
grounds is the distinction built? For much of the twentieth century, we could
afford to ignore this question, or at least not to engage it too critically, as we
gathered up the pretty scientific baubles that lay newly strewn about us. We can
ignore it no more, because leaving the question unresolved has brought biology
to the brink of a philosophical and scientific crisis.
Let me frame the crisis for you this way. Imagine a cumulus cloud and a
cauliflower, and answer the question, Which one is alive? I expect no one will
have any trouble identifying the cauliflower as alive and the cumulus cloud as
not, but how do we know? There are many similarities between them, after all.
When I am in a flippant mood, I point to the fact that both are white, and both
are puffy, so what’s the difference? Putting that flippancy aside, the similarities
between cauliflower and cumulus cloud actually go quite deep.
For example, both are what we call open thermodynamic systems, that is,
organized streams of matter and energy that, through what has come to be called
the Fourth Law of Thermodynamics, generate a peculiar and specified
orderliness. The cumulus (pillow) cloud can be named as such largely because
this spontaneous orderliness is manifest as puffy (turbulent, to be precise) clouds
of condensing water droplets. It is an organized stream of matter and energy that
has qualities distinctive enough to warrant a name. The cauliflower does this too
—there is really no such thing as a cauliflower; it is as transient in its own way
as a cloud on a summer’s day. So there is a deep thermodynamic similarity
between the two.
We could try to draw the distinction based upon the sources of energy
driving each system. The cumulus cloud relies on a continuous input of energy
from the sun, and when the sun departs from the sky, so too does the cumulus
cloud. The cauliflower does this too, of course, but there’s a complicated suite of
biochemical transactions interposed between sunbeam and cauliflower that does
not exist in the cumulus cloud. The cauliflower captures light energy in glucose,
whereas the cumulus cloud captures light energy in heated air and water vapor.
These are really distinctions only in order and not in kind, however, and it is
distinctions of kind that we seek. Deep down, the cauliflower is still an open
thermodynamic system that does not stand out in any fundamental way from the
open thermodynamic system of the cumulus cloud. The differing complicated
details do not, in the end, allow a fundamental distinction to be drawn.
One could argue that the distinction lies in the selection process (natural or
artificial) that has produced the unique collection of genes that specify the
cauliflower. It’s an interesting point. Brassica oleracea, the formal species name
for what we call cauliflower, exists today because it is the descendant of a long
legacy of sorting of hereditary memories that “worked”—that is, hereditary
memories that enabled the plants housing them to reproduce. Those memories
are encoded in the long strings of nucleic acids that are carried in the precious
purse of the nucleus. In short, cauliflowers have genes, whereas cumulus clouds
obviously do not: distinction drawn and done. But let’s not be so fast, because
there’s a deeper question that first has to be addressed before we can declare the
matter done, and that is, What exactly do we mean by “hereditary memory”?
If we dissociate memory itself from the mechanisms and materials that
encode it, like DNA, we are led to a fundamental definition of memory as some
means of shaping the future as a reflection of the past. When we do so, we arrive
at the startling conclusion that cumulus clouds also have a sort of hereditary
memory. Cumulus clouds don’t really exist in and of themselves; they are the
visible manifestation of a locally constrained water cycle. They need both heat
and humidity to drive them, and so they tend to form over places where there is a
ready source of water for evaporation. Often that water has come as rainfalls
from fully mature cumulus clouds. That this could be a kind of hereditary
memory may not be immediately obvious to those of us who live in moist
environments, like the northeastern United States, but it is brought starkly into
relief in dry habitats, like the semitropical arid savannas and deserts of Namibia,
where I have spent a lot of time watching clouds.
In that country, there are no permanent rivers. Rather, the land is laddered
with “linear oases,” ephemeral rivers that drain west from the high plains
through the Great Escarpment and coastal plains to the Atlantic Ocean (although
it must be said that the water in them almost never actually gets to the ocean).
During the humid summers, lines of cumulus clouds frequently form over these
linear oases, eventually dropping water right back into the comparatively moist
soils whence it came. Thus the action of yesterday’s locally constrained water
cycle sets up the conditions to power tomorrow’s turn of the water cycle crank.
We have therefore a kind of hereditary memory at work. So, if it’s to memory
we’re looking to draw the distinction between cumulus cloud and cauliflower,
the ground turns out to be a little shaky there, too, provided we are willing to dig
a little. Again, we fail to draw a distinction in kind.
If not thermodynamics, energetics, or heredity, where then should life’s
distinctive attribute be sought? I argue in this book that agency is where the
distinction can be reliably drawn. The cauliflower can be construed as a
collection of intention-driven agents that go about purposefully building a
cauliflower. Pay close attention to the wording I used. It’s difficult to imagine
such agency in a cumulus cloud. We can make complete sense of the cumulus
cloud as a physical interplay of heat, moisture, and gravity, but it would strain
credulity to go on from there to say that the cumulus cloud exists because it
wants to exist. To say that a cauliflower exists because, in some deep sense, it
wants to exist might strain credulity as well, but with a squint and a hope, we can
almost see how it could be true.
In a nutshell, this is where the crisis of biology looms, because our prevailing
modes of thinking about life—the triumphant confluence of mechanism,
materialism, and atomism that has made the twentieth century a golden age for
biology—do not deal well with the concept of agency: that ineffable striving of
living things to become something. This was the real source of annoyance for
that reviewer of The Tinkerer’s Accomplice, because intentionality is, among
other things, the manifestation of living agency, as are purposefulness, desire,
and striving. Philosophically fencing those things off, as much of the modern
science of biology has done, has brought the science of life to the brink of its
crisis.
I use the word “crisis” deliberately, because there is more at stake than
quibbles and mind play over clouds and cauliflowers. What is at stake is whether
there will be a coherent theory of life. Without a coherent theory of life,
whatever we think about life doesn’t hold water. This applies to the major
contribution we claim that the modern science of life offers to the popular
culture: Darwinism.
It is from the fount of Darwinism that the Four Horsemen of the Evocalypse
draw sustenance, and it is through an appeal to the scientific validity of
Darwinism that their acolytes make their bid to set the terms of our modern
culture. Yet there sits at the heart of modern Darwinism an unresolved tautology
that undermines its validity. We scientists might not be troubled by this, but we
should be, not least because the failure to recognize it closes off modern
evolutionism from many big problems it should be capable of answering: the
origin of life, the origin of the gene, biological design, and the origins of
cognition and consciousness, to name a few. Intentionality and purposefulness
are important to all these unresolved big questions, and yet we are very quick to
fence these off behind a wall of denial. Instead of a frank acknowledgment of
purposefulness, intentionality, intelligence, and design, we refer to “apparent”
design, “apparent” intentionality, “apparent” intelligence.
I deal more fully with all of these things in the chapters that follow, but I
want to emphasize the central question that motivates this book: can we
construct a credible and coherent theory of life that would obviate the Hobson’s
choice that modern biology has imposed upon itself? And if so, what would such
a theory look like? I claim that there is such a theory and that the path that will
lead us out of the Hobson’s choice is a proper understanding of the phenomenon
of homeostasis. Keep that term in mind, because it is a profound concept to
which we shall return again and again throughout this book. It is also a
dangerous concept because following its logic invites us to look anew at ideas
and philosophical positions that have long been regarded as scientific heresy.