Purpose and Desire Read online

  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 have phrased it: “You’re nothing but a pack of neurons.”1

  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, no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but blind, pitiless indifference.2

  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 succeeding each other without the help of any intelligent supervision.3

  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 dethrone what Carl Sagan once described as the demon-haunted world4—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. Just warning you. It is my hope, though, that this little venture into heterodoxy will be worth it, and that you, gentle reader, will find it worthwhile to come along.

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  The Pony Under the Tree