Charlton, BG. Reconceptualizing the metaphysical basis of biology: a new definition based on deistic teleology and an hierarchy of organizing entities(2016) The Winnower.
DOI: 10.15200/winn.145830.07350
This is the final, archived, version of my 10,000 word paper on the nature of biology. (It has several significant differences from the draft version I published a few weeks ago.)
For ease of reading, I suggest downloading and printing the PDF file version of the journal article:
https://www.thewinnower.com/papers/3497-reconceptualizing-the-metaphysical-basis-of-biology-a-new-definition-based-on-deistic-teleology-and-an-hierarchy-of-organizing-entities
Reconceptualizing the
metaphysical basis of biology: a new definition based on deistic teleology and
an hierarchy of organizing entities
Bruce G Charlton
School of
Psychology, Newcastle University, NE1 7RU, England
Abstract
Modern biology was
initially established by Darwin’s Origin
of Species in 1859 and fully implemented by the Neo-Darwinian synthesis of
natural selection with genetics that solidified in the middle twentieth century.
I will argue that this ‘paradigm’ is based upon fundamental metaphysical
assumptions that render formally-insoluble some of the most important
theoretical problems of biology. These problems include the origin of life, the
major transitions of evolution, the origins of sexual reproduction and of
species, and the basic mechanism behind ‘group selection’. The fundamental
deficit of the current metaphysics of biology is that it lacks a unified and
coordinated teleology (direction, purpose, goals). I advocate a new teleological
and metaphysical basis for biology that is minimally based on a ‘deist’
conception of reality: i.e. that everything is governed by a unified principle
of purpose, order and meaning. Such a teleology suggests a definition of
biology around the concept of development – that is the growth, differentiation,
coordination and interactions of entities; unfolding through time through the lifespan
and across generations. The local and specific implementation of teleology is
suggested to be accomplished by a hierarchy of cognitive organizing entities that are located outwith biological systems.
These putative organizing entities work on biological entities primarily
through building-in purposiveness during development. A deistic system directed
by organizing entities is, of course, not a 'biological' theory; but then,
neither is natural selection a biological theory: both are metaphysical
frameworks for the science of biology.
Fundamental
unsolved problems of biology
From more than two
decades of theoretical consideration of biology, especially evolutionary
biology, I have concluded that there are no satisfactory answers to some of the
most important and most fundamental questions of biology. I will argue that the
fundamental reason for this is the lack of any teleology (purpose) in natural
selection, which is the current dominant biological paradigm. Therefore, I
propose a new teleological metaphysics for biology.
Biology (including
medical research and psychology) has, since the 1950s, become the most ‘successful’
– that is, by far the largest and most heavily-funded and most status-rewarded
of the sciences (Charlton & Andras, 2005). However, it is striking that
this progress has been at the proximate level of mechanisms and technologies,
and not at the level of fundamental understanding.
Indeed, the
triumph of biology was preceded and accompanied by a major act of redefinition
of the subject itself. A little book called What
is Life? by the great physicist Erwin Schrödinger (1944) served as a
catalyst for this change, and was accompanied by an influx of physicists and
chemists into biology, leading to the triumphant discovery of the structure of
DNA and of the coding and transcription mechanisms by which genes make proteins
(Judson, 1979).
But in paving the
way for these discoveries, the definition of biology was implicitly changed
from ‘The science of living things’ to ‘The science of things that reproduce
and are subject to natural selection’. This move away from the livingness of
biology was what allowed non-biologists to take-over the subject at the very
highest level; and since then biology has been dominated by researchers who use
physics, chemistry, engineering (i.e. big, expensive machines of various
types), computers, statistics, economic theory and a range of other
non-biological perspectives and technologies.
As I say, the
triumphs are well known – but the major unsolved problems of biology from 1950
remain unsolved; however, mainstream attention has simply shifted elsewhere and
there is currently perhaps less interest in these matters than at any time
since before biology became a separate science.
Such lack of
interest – and of knowledge – has meant that most people are not even aware,
have not even noticed, that these problems are unsolved. Because, so long as an
‘answer’ to such problems is good enough to survive a couple of minutes
semi-attentive and unfocused consideration by a narrowly-trained micro-specialist
who is not really a biologist, and is adequate to support and sustain a program
of publication and grant-getting (which are regarded as sole and the necessary
requirements of modern science), then this is regarded by modern biological
researchers as sufficient proof of that answer’s validity (Charlton, 2012).
But the problems
remain – and they are so fundamental as to cast doubt on the whole basis of the
‘paradigm’ that defines, controls and validates modern biology (Kuhn -1970 - popularized
the idea of a paradigm governing science – but at bottom, ‘paradigm’ is just a
new, and confusion-generating, name for metaphysical assumptions).
Origins
of life
An example is the
question: What is life? – which is the title of that influential book by
Schroedinger (1944). The current answer is, implicitly: that is ‘life’ which
reproduces or replicates and is subject to natural selection.
But this answer
includes viruses, phages and prions – which hardly seem to be ‘alive’ in that
they lack a dynamic metabolism; and also some forms of crystal – which are
usually regarded as certainly not-alive (Cairns-Smith, 1990). Furthermore, some
economic theories and computational programmes explicitly use the mechanisms of
natural selection - and these are not regarded as part of biology.
Strikingly, there
has been no success in the attempts over sixty-plus years to create life in the
laboratory under plausible ancestral earth conditions – not even the complex
bio-molecules such as proteins and nucleic acids. It has, indeed, been well-argued
that this is impossible; and that ‘living life’ must therefore have evolved
from an intermediate stage (or stages) of non-living but evolvable molecules
such as crystals – perhaps clays (Cairns-Smith, 1987). But nobody has succeeded
in doing that in the lab either, despite that artificial selection can be
orders of magnitude faster than natural selection.
Since there is no acknowledged
boundary dividing biology and not-biology, then it would seem that biology as
currently understood has zero validity as a subject. What are the implications
of our failure to divide the living from the non-living world: the failure to
draw a line around the subject? Well, since there is no coherent boundary, then
common sense leads us to infer in that case either
everything is not-alive or everything is-alive. If nothing is-alive, not even
ourselves, there seems to be no coherent possibility of us knowing that we ourselves are not-alive, or indeed of anything
knowing anything – which, I take it, means we should reject that possibility as
a reductio ad absurdum.
Alternatively, the
implication is that if anything is-alive,
then everything is-alive, including
the mineral world – so we dwell in a wholly animated universe, all that there
is being alive but – presumably – alive in very different degrees and with
different qualities of life. This inference I intend to regard as valid: it
will be my working metaphysical assumption, and is one to which we will return
later.
So; if life is to be
regarded as universal, it seems that the presence of ‘life’ can no longer be
used as definitive of biology; and since reproduction/ replication is also
inadequate, then we need a new basis or principle around-which may be made a
different definition of the subject ‘biology’. I will argue, below, why this new
principle should be ‘development’.
Sexual
reproduction and the major transitions of life
What of sexual
reproduction? How did such a massively inefficient reproductive mechanism arise
in the face of its immediate short-term damage to reproductive success? The
great evolutionary theorist William D Hamilton recognized sexual reproduction
as a major unsolved problem, and worked on it for decades (2001) – but neither
this recognition, nor his attempted solutions in terms of ways to combat
parasites and pathogens, has attracted much interest or acceptance.
And indeed, even
if he was correct, Hamilton did not really solve the problem of how sexual
reproduction arose – but only
clarified its advantages (mainly in terms of resistance to infection) once
sexual reproduction had already arisen, and already become established. The
mechanism of how natural selection managed to cross the formidable
short-to-medium-term barrier of vastly reduced reproductive success (caused by
the need to find a suitable member of the opposite sex with whom to reproduce,
and the approximate halving of potential reproductive units) remains utterly
unclear.
The same problem of
short-term disadvantage tending to undermine long-term advantage also applies
to the ‘Major Transitions’ of evolutionary history – which include sexual
reproduction but also the evolution of the simple (prokaryotic) cell, the
complex (eukaryotic) cell, multicellular organisms, and social organisms (Maynard
Smith & Szathmary, 1997). Each of these transitions requires overcoming the
fact that natural selection operates much more powerfully and directly upon the
lower, simpler and smaller levels of organization that replicate more rapidly;
so that there is a constant pressure and tendency for these lower levels to
become parasitic upon higher levels (Charlton, 1996).
In sum; natural
selection is much more rapidly and powerfully dis-integrative than integrative.
Yet, nonetheless, these transitions did actually occur in evolutionary history.
For example, in a multi-cellular organism, the dividing component cells are
constantly being naturally-selected for neoplastic (e.g. cancerous) change –
such that they cease to cooperate with and contribute to the organism, and
instead exploit it as a ‘host’ environment (Charlton, 1996a). How, then, did
multicellular organisms evolve the many integrative systems (e.g. nervous,
paracrine, hormonal and immune systems) designed to impose cooperation of
specialized cells and suppress non-functional and actively parasitic (e.g.
mutated) cell variants; bearing in mind that all such integrative systems are
themselves intrinsically subject to neoplastic evolution (as well as loss of
function from cumulative damage)?
The same phenomenon
and problem must (according to the theory of natural selection) apply to the
genetic organelles of the complex cell (such as chloroplasts and mitochondria;
Charlton et al, 1998); and also to the individual organisms in a social
organization (such as human society). Yet eukaryotic cells actually did arise –
despite their innate and intractable tendency to self-destruct; and there are
numerous highly evolutionarily-successful social animals among (for instance)
insects, birds and mammals. Indeed, it has been calculated that ants and humans
are the two groups with the greatest biomass among animals on earth, with ants
dominating the tropics and humans the temperate zones – termites are also highly
numerous in the tropics (Ridley, 1996).
The general problem
is therefore that the net effect of natural selection is to break down the
major transitions of evolution before they can be established – unless (as I
will argue later) this tendency is overcome by some as-yet-unknown purposive
(and indeed cognitive) long-termist, integrating and complexity-increasing
tendency.
The
nature of species
Darwin’s first
great evolution book was termed On the
Origin of Species by means of Natural Selection… (1859); and that is a clue
to the next unsolved problem – which is: ‘what is a species?’
Darwin was trying
to explain how ‘species’ (in a very general sense of the major, as well as
minor, sub-divisions of living things) originated. To do this he already had to
assume that he knew, more or less, what species were.
In other words,
natural selection was proposed as a historical mechanism (in practice the only
mechanism) which led to modern species. In yet other words; natural selection
was supposed to explain species – and species was the thing that was explained
(Panchen, 1993). Unsurprisingly, therefore, there has never been a principled
explanation that was based on natural selection of what species actually are
and how they are divided (Hull, 1988). At root, my understanding is that impasse happens because species are
being used both as that which explains, and as that which is explained – which
is circular reasoning.
And, in practice
as well as in theory, all possible suggestions for such a definition are
refuted by data. For example, the idea that species cannot interbreed to yield
fertile offspring is untrue with numerous exceptions - some natural and some
artificially generated. And the systems of differentiating and classifying
species on the grounds of ‘homologous’ anatomy, physiology and genetics do not map-onto
the classification of species in terms of their inferred lineage (e.g.
cladistics) – and the identification of homology has itself (like species)
never been objectively defined (Horder, 1993).
Furthermore, there
is no more evidence now than there was in 1859 that natural selection is
capable of being the sole and sufficient ‘explanation’ for the diversity of
life upon earth. I put ‘explanation’ in quotation marks, because it is
debateable whether natural selection – being based upon contingent and variable
selection acting upon undirected (a.k.a.‘random’) variation (Hull, 2001) - is
actually a real explanation; because then the ultimate explanation is
apparently that there is no explanation. Natural selection does not say ‘why’,
but instead ‘how’ evolution occurs. The nature of change is contingent upon
undirected events shaped by contingent processes, and therefore is essentially
non-predictable in its specifics. In some senses, therefore, natural selection
does not genuinely ‘explain’.
In effect, with
natural selection, at most one can
only say: Many things might have happened for many reasons, but as an
historical fact ‘this’ is what actually happened.
Certainly natural
selection can coherently describe the historical situations leading to
relatively small differences between organisms – perhaps up to the level of
creating new and related species. This was already known to Darwin and was
indeed the basis of his evidential argument – e.g. he described the nature and
scale of effects of artificial selection done by animal breeders, plus some
effects on the shape and size of beaks among Galapagos finches. To this, modern
biologists could add observations on the modification of microorganisms under
laboratory conditions, for instance the evolution of bacterial resistance to
antibiotics. And there are also human racial differences of skeleton, teeth,
skin and hair, brains and behaviours and many others – probably amounting to
sub-species levels of differentiation – again these were (approximately) noted
by Darwin (for instance in the mention of ‘favoured races’ in the subtitle of
his 1859 book).
But all these are
quantitative, not qualitative, changes; changes in magnitude but not in form.
Neither natural selection, nor indeed artificial selection done by Man, has
been observed creating a new genus, nor any taxonomic rank more fundamental
such as a new family or phylum. There is no observational or experimental
evidence which has emerged since 1859 of natural selection leading to major,
qualitative changes in form – nor the originating of a novel form. Nobody has,
by selection, changed a cat into a dog, let alone a sea anemone into a mouse
(or the opposite); nobody has bred a dinosaur from a bird, nor retraced, by
selective breeding, a modern species to its assumed ancestral form. There have,
at most, been attempts to explain why such things are impossible in practice –
why, for instance, the linear sequence of evolution cannot be ‘rewound’.
The
problem of group selection
The final example
concerns group selection. My impression is that the most thoughtful and
perceptive evolutionary theorists intuitively recognized that group selection
was an anomalous residue in the post-teleological paradigm of Neo-Darwinism;
because true group selection (when properly understood) entails a purposive
cognitive mechanism that can predict, can ‘look ahead’ several generations, and
infer what is likely to be good for the survival and reproduction of the
species (i.e. future descendants) rather than for the specific individual
organism under here-and-now selection – and can therefore impose this long-term
groupish direction to evolutionary change, in the face of evolution that
benefits the individual in the short-term (Hamilton, 1998).
Whether or not it
is due to the built-in ‘spooky-spiritual’ aspects of group selection, there has
been and is a powerful and almost moralistic desire within biology utterly to
purge group selection from Neo-Darwinian theory (Dawkins, 1976). However, it should be noted that Hamilton himself did not reject the significance of group
selection; on the contrary, he continued to believe it was real throughout his
later career as is apparent from his essays and commentaries in the Narrow Roads of Gene Land collections
(1998, 2002). However, so far as I know, he did not suggest a distinctive
mechanism for group selection.
Group selection is
most often discussed in relation to ‘altruism’. Altruism is behaving such as to
increase the reproductive success of others at the expense of one’s own
reproductive success (for example, sacrificing a young and potentially fertile
life for the benefit of the group – perhaps in defence against a predator). Altruism
indeed calls-out for explanation, since it is very frequently, almost
universally, observed – e.g. multicellular animals depend on it for continued
existence, social animals depend upon it for the continuation of sociality. But
the proposed solutions – inclusive fitness/ kin selection and various types of
reciprocal benefit (Ridley, 1996) – do not explain the origin of altruism, but instead explain why altruism – once
established, may be advantageous to sustain.
The problems are at
root the same as the previous examples – favouring the long term over the short
term: in this instance imposing cohesion and cooperation that benefits the
whole against the tendency of natural selection to favour the part at the
expense of the whole. For example, preventing the amplification of selfish,
short-termist, parasitic variants and lineages (which are immediately
advantageous, and much more strongly selected-for), so as to pursue the
long-term cohesion, survival and reproduction of the group. Lacking such a
mechanism or tendency, any groupishness and long-termism would continually be undermined,
and would tend rapidly to be undone by the strong selection pressure for
individuals to exploit and parasitize the group (Maynard Smith & Szathmary,
1997).
Hence, despite
half a century of exclusively selfish gene theorizing in mainstream
evolutionary biology; the apparent need for some kind of longer-termist and
group-favouring process remains.
The
necessity for teleology in the metaphysics of biology
Natural selection is an inadequate metaphysical basis
for biology because it lacks teleology - a goal, direction or purpose.
This lack of
teleology means that the potential for meaning - for knowledge - is excluded
from the system of biology, and from any other system which depends upon it.
Thus natural
selection is radically too small a metaphysical frame - it leaves out so much
that is so important, that what remains is not even a coherent subject. This is
revealed in the un-definability of biology and the incapability of biology to
understand the meaning of life and its origins, major transitions and
categories. Without teleology, biology is self-destroying.
Indeed - without
teleology we cannot know. I mean we
cannot explain how humans could have valid knowledge about anything. No knowledge of any kind is possible. If Natural
Selection is regarded as the bottom-line explanation - the fundamental
metaphysical reality (as it is for biology, and often is with respect to the
human condition) then this has radically nihilistic consequences. And this is a
paradox – if natural selection was the only
mechanism by which consciousness and intelligence arose then we could have no
confidence that the human discovery of natural selection was anything more than
a (currently, but contingently) fitness-enhancing delusion.
The reason is that
natural selection is at best – and when
correctly applied - merely descriptive of what-happened-to-happen. Since
tThere was no reason why things had-to-be
as they actually were, and there is no reason why the present
situation should stay the same, then there will be no reason to suppose that
the future outcome is predictable. There is no greater validity to
what-happened-to-happen compared with an infinite number of possible other things
that might have happened - so there is no reason to defer to
what-happened-to-happen, no reason why what-happened-to-happen is good, true,
just, powerful or anything else - what-happened-to-happen is just what led to
greater differential reproductive success for some length of time under
historical (and contingent) circumstances. Nothing more.
Therefore - if
humans are nothing more nor other than
naturally-selected organisms - then there is zero validity to: cognition, emotions,
intelligence, intuitions, morality, art, or science - including that there is
no validity to the theory of evolution by natural selection. None of the above
have any validity - because they all are merely products of what-happened-to-happen
(and are open-endedly liable to further change).
In sum - Without
teleology, there can be no possibility of knowledge.
(This is not some
kind of a clever paradox - it is an unavoidable rational conclusion.)
If, and only if,
biology includes direction and purpose, is the subject compatible with the
reality of knowledge. A new and better metaphysics of biology must therefore
include teleology.
A
deistic and teleological metaphysics
Metaphysics is the
branch of philosophy concerned with basic assumptions – descriptive of the
fundamental nature of reality. Science takes place within metaphysics, and therefore the results of science (any
possible results of science) can neither prove nor refute any metaphysical
description – although some metaphysical systems will more clearly and simply
make sense of (or ‘explain’) science than others.
For example, the ‘evidence’
that these fundamental problems are unsolved amounts only to the fact that they
are as yet unsolved – failure to
explain can never ‘prove’ that an explanation is impossible. Only that nobody
has yet come up with a satisfactory
explanation. Therefore, the ‘proof’ that these biological problems are
insoluble is not any empirical finding but philosophical reasoning.
In this sense
metaphysics (which is to say a ‘paradigm’) is not ‘testable’ by science. This
is because metaphysics itself underpins the definition of science (or a
specific science such as biology); metaphysics determines what counts as a
test, what observations to make and also how to interpret observations. For
instance, no amount of biological research can ever decide whether biology is
1. the science of alive things or 2. the science of replicating things. This is
not possible since definition 1 leads to one kind of biology using one type of
expertise and methods; but definition 2 to another kind of biology with very
different personnel and methods, as we have seen emerge over the past 70 years.
I therefore
suggest that a new paradigm – or, more strictly, a new metaphysical basis or
frame - for biology is required to address these and other fundamental defects
and deficiencies in modern biology; and to place biology honestly, accurately
and fruitfully in context of the total field of human discourse in general. In
a nutshell, I will be arguing that the overall shape of evolution across
history is best explained as a directional process of development – somewhat like
the metamorphic unfolding of a fertilized egg via an embryo towards sexually
mature adult and parenthood. Processes of selection occur within this teleological
development – but are subordinated to the overall goal and contributory,
coordinated sub-goals.
Furthermore, I
will suggest that a teleology of biology having the required properties entails
‘deism’; deism being belief in a single, overall, unifying - but potentially
abstract and impersonal - source of order and meaning for reality.
Deism here refers to the
assumption of some kind of deity; but theism refers more specifically to the
reality of gods or God. It is necessary,
therefore, to distinguish between on the one hand the general idea of deism,
which I regard as essential for a coherent and viable definition of biology;
and on the other hand the idea of theism, with theism being a particular sub-category
of deism, and more specific than is required for the practice of biology.
Deism and theism may seem
superficially to be identical-in practice; and perhaps both equally absurd! –
at least to the usual atheistic professional biologist; but the distinction is
both significant and important. I personally believe in the reality of the
Christian God; but such a specific belief is not necessary for there to be a useful and potentially fruitful
teleology of biology, as is demonstrated by the many historical examples of
non-Christian biologists. (However, as a generalization, the long-term success
of science as a social system, in particular its adherence to the principle and
habit of truthfulness, may depend rather more specifically upon scientists
having been - at least - raised in a
Christian or Jewish milieu, with
their somewhat distinctive doctrinal emphasis on honesty; Charlton, 2012.)
So, the adoption of deism
as an assumption could be seen as constituting a cost entailed by providing a coherent teleology of biology; a cost
which explains the sustained resistance to such a thing and which may explain
why teleology has been for so long and so stubbornly resisted within
professional biology. Because teleology at the price of deism is a cost that
most modern biologists would utterly refuse to pay; since they are, as a strong
generalization, the most materialistic and positivistic and anti-spiritual,
militantly un-religious people the world has yet known! (Indeed, I know of only
two practicing Christians among evolutionary biologists - one of them being
myself; and that only for the past seven years.)
It is no coincidence that
so many of the best known and most effective public dissenters from
Christianity and promoters of atheism since Darwin have been recruited from a
tiny minority of eminent evolutionary theorists – past examples include
Darwin’s ‘bulldog’, the early agnostic TH Huxley; and his grandson, the
humanist and an architect of the Modern Neo-Darwinian Synthesis, Julian Huxley;
current examples include the campaigning anti-religion activists Richard
Dawkins and Daniel C Dennett.
But militant
atheism is not merely a product of being a scientist: biologists are typically much
less spiritual than mathematicians and physicists, who often espouse deistic
ideas. As examples; Einstein saw reality in this ‘deist’ way with an abstract,
impersonal, but unifying ‘God’; Roger Penrose has stated he is a Platonist; the
theoretical physicist Paul Davies won the Templeton Prize for his many writings
from a deistic perspective; and Freeman Dyson, also a Templeton Prizeman, is a
Christian, as was Kurt Gödel.
In sum – even if I
can show that deism is what biology most needs, and even though there is
nothing ‘unscientific’ about such an assertion, deism seems very unlikely to be
welcomed or accepted by the mass of currently active and dominant professional
biologists.
Why
deism specifically?
So, I will assume
that deism is the necessary intellectual ‘cost’ that must be paid to restore
purpose and cohesion to biology; it is minimally-necessary to restore ‘a
spiritual dimension’ to biology; not indeed within
biology – but as the framing
metaphysic of biology. That is, the spiritual dimension is located outside of
biology to give it shape and bounds, meaning, and direction. Biologists needs
not adopt deism as a ‘religion’; but they must at least accept it as a
working-hypothesis.
But the concept of
deism is unfamiliar, as is its distinction from theism. I should therefore
clarify that although this deistic perspective of the primacy of consciousness,
purpose and ubiquitous life is indeed spiritual, it is not necessarily
religious in the sense of associated with belief in any actual religion. A
deist regarding ultimate reality as having the cognitive property of purpose
does not need to take the further step of a belief in ‘theism’, theism being
the belief in a specific God or gods.
The deism that is
entailed by a belief in teleology includes
many possible forms of theism, including belief in a ‘god’ who originally
created everything (and is therefore the source of ultimate cohesion); but the
deity of a non-theistic deist is not necessarily the creator, does not necessarily
intervene in the ‘running’ of the universe, and may be a wholly impersonal and
abstract god that has no specific interest in Men or specific people. Deism
therefore may mean any assumption of any ultimate, but perhaps abstract,
rationality, order, or overall organizing tendency.
Nonetheless,
honesty compels me to suggest that abstract deism has historically, and in the
lives of many individual scientists and other intellectuals, been a metastable state which sooner-or-later
falls one way or the other: either into atheism or theism (belief in a God or
gods). And in that case, I am suggesting that, in the end, an adequate
metaphysics of biology must be compatible-with (if not contiguous with) theistic
religion. However, this move into theism is not a formal philosophical
necessity, but rather a matter of probabilistic human psychology.
At any rate, it may be useful, at this point, further
to clarify why a teleology for
biology entails deism. The reason is that teleology (purpose) in biology is
based on, requires that, reality be coherent, cooperative and
complementary because reality as-a-whole must have purpose. This, in turn,
requires that there is a single and unifying organizing entity to enforce coherence, cooperation and complementarity.
So, for life, for reality, to have purpose, it must hang-together - and for
reality to hang-together requires some unifying conception of deity.
Deism is the assumption that the universe has just
such an organizing principle or entity - which may be a personal supreme
creator god among other lower gods, or one God – which is theism; or the
organizing principle may be something impersonal - a 'god of the philosophers':
in other words an hypothesis which is inferred and assumed (rather than
believed as a matter of faith). An example would be the ‘Platonic’ hypothesis
that there is a coherent primary reality outside of time where dwell objective
and eternal values and archetypal forms – in comparison to which the earthly reality
we observe is only a derived, time-bound, approximate, partial, and more-or-less
corrupt version.
Biology needs a teleology, and indeed the more
specific is that teleology, the more can be inferred from it. However, if
biology is to be a coherent and general science, then its teleology cannot be
more specific than what can be agreed-on by deism. Therefore, scientists can,
and indeed must, minimally agree on a general concept of deity. But beyond that
agreement, there will very probably be disagreement concerning the attributes, nature
and specific purposes of deity. In sum, the teleology of biology as-a-whole
seems to be based on a general and hypothetical deity, but not on any specific
God.
Therefore, deism supplies teleology, but only to
a limited degree. So we need to distinguish between the implications of the
fact of teleology and the specific direction of teleology. The fact of
teleology includes the consequences of there being an ultimate unity and an
expectation of a primary and significant degree of coherence, cooperativeness
and complementarity. I think the acknowledgment of teleology may also provide
the basis for a coherent definition of the essential nature of biology as a
subject – which I will discuss below. But what exactly is the specific aimed-at
destination of teleology may be a subject of disagreement and theorizing; e.g. there
will probably be different ideas of what the direction and purpose of
'everything' as a whole, and at lower levels. And there will also surely be scientific disagreement over the
specific mechanisms by which teleology is implemented at the various levels and
instances of biological organization.
There remains much that requires debate and
investigation, plenty for biologists to do; but all biologists ought to, and need to, be able to agree that there is an ultimate teleology, hence
coherence, to biology.
The
nature and essence of biology as a subject: Development
When biology is
defined in terms of teleology it gives an indication of how the subject may
fruitfully be defined in terms of its focus; because teleology concerns
direction. Teleology, as described above, entails the emergence and coordination
of multiple elements over time in pursuit of purpose. In simple terms,
therefore, the essence of biology as a subject has to do with development; that is with growth and
form, with differentiation and cooperation.
In sum, the core
of biology is ‘life as history’ – meaning here the unfolding through time, including functional interactions - of
entities such as cells, organisms, groups and ecosystems. I would argue that
this understanding of biology has priority over reproduction in general and
gene replication specifically – which have been made the focus of biology for
the past seventy-odd years.
Such a
re-definition of biology around the theme of development would also serve to reconnect
the subject with its deepest intellectual roots in natural history; to rebuild
the subject around a core that is distinct
from chemistry and physics on one hand, and medical research on the other; with
organisms being of interest primarily in terms of their structure, function and
interactions over their lifespan. This would surely be preferable to modern
biology which has become so narrowly focused that it sometimes seems as if the
only scientifically-interesting things that organisms do is replicate or die!
(I will suggest a
further reason why biology might beneficially be defined in terms of
development below when I discuss the causal relationship between phylogeny (evolutionary
history) and ontogeny (development.)
The history of definitions
of biology can be described as beginning with the subject conceptualized as ‘the
study of living things’; then
changing from about 1944 to ‘the study of reproducing
things’; and I now propose that in future biology should become ‘the study of developing things’.
Statement
of the new teleological metaphysics: The hierarchy of organizing entities
The chronological
sequence of the new metaphysics is the reverse of the usual posited in biology.
Current biology usually assumes that matter precedes life; life precedes the
brain; the brain precedes cognition – in other words that a solid brain comes
before cognition (thinking) - including purposiveness - emerged.
By contrast, I
suggest that consciousness and purpose are the starting point – and that
consciousness, with its ultimate teleology, therefore operates upon matter with
the proximate goal of sustaining and developing itself via instantiations in matter - instantiation here meaning the
specific and actual realization of an abstraction: building of abstraction into
solid form. Therefore, (baldly-stated) consciousness ‘organized’ brains.
(The above
conceptualization owes much to the work of Owen Barfield, who was himself
expressing ideas of Rudolf Steiner, who was in turn JW von Goethe’s scientific
editor for the standard collected works – so this theory has its ultimate roots
in Goethe’s biology; see for example Barfield, 1982; Naydler, 1996).
So that (to put
things simply); initially consciousness sufficed to organize undifferentiated
matter into ‘physics’, ‘physics’ into ‘chemistry’, and ‘chemistry’ into what we
recognize as the emergence of biological entities in their most basic forms. And
the directing consciousness which drove biological evolution was further subdivided
and specialized; for example regulating the basic transitions and divisions of
life, and beyond them the further groupings down to species, then particular
human groups.
This system of
consciousnesses can be imagined as an hierarchy of organizing entities – an hierarchy with its apex in deity. These
organizing entities operate to shape and frame the structure of reality,
including biological reality – these entities all being, ultimately,
coordinated and unified by the deity. These organizing entities are inferred to
have various properties including the ability cognitively to model future
possibilities (i.e. to have foresight, to make conjectural predictions) and
choose between possibilities on the basis of innate purpose. In essence, organizing
entities can understand (to some limited but significant extent) the current
situation, and look-ahead towards probable outcomes – and then organize biology
to reach the preferred possible outcome.
These organizing entities
are assumed to have the same kind of role as the human mind does in relation to
the human body; or as a good, wise and competent human leader has in relation
to the society he rules. That is, the ability to infer that if X continues then
Y will probably result – which means the decline or demise of the cell/
organism/ group/ society; but that if instead we do A we should arrive at B –
which offers a much better prospect of survival and continued or enhanced reproduction
(and, importantly, progress towards ultimate teleology) than does Y; and then the
organizing entity has significant (but not absolute) power to impose A upon the
system.
What then,
actually, are these organizing entities – how can we imagine them? I suggest
that different people may picture them in different ways which suit the
workings of their own minds. Some may understand them in a mathematical or
computational way; some see them as akin to ‘laws of nature’; some may
understand them to be fields of force – like Sheldrake’s morphogenetic fields
(Sheldrake, 1981 & 1988) but with a primary role in imposing purpose rather
than form; some may understand them as immaterial but personalized entities –
rather like the medieval astrological model of angels who inhabited (or rather
actually were) the planets and stars – but in a realm beyond and with different
properties from worldly (‘sublunar’) place, and outside of Time, and who
influenced from this realm all manner of events on earth and inside Time
(Lewis, 1966).
I personally have
a very literal, simple mind; and cannot for long refrain from anthropomorphic
representations of any cognitive and purposive entity – in other words, I
imagine these organizing entities as both personalized and material entities, localized
in space and time - although imperceptible and undetectable (at least, by
normal sensory observation). This is of course a child-like way of thinking about
causality (although not really child-ish) – but perhaps not so uncommon as may
superficially appear. After all, neuroscientists are always accusing each other
of treating the brain as if it was inhabited by a ‘homunculus’ (little man)
which is meant to be an error both irrational and shameful – and indeed the
accusers are usually correct in this accusation; because avoiding this ‘anthropomorphism’
while yet retaining a firm and imaginative grasp of science, is all-but
impossible.
Famously, Einstein
reasoned about relativity by imagining a man (a homunculus perhaps!) riding in
a tramcar away from the medieval clock in the Swiss city of Berne at speeds
approaching the speed of light (Hoffman, 1972). If Einstein apparently needed
(or, at least wanted) to do the most advanced and abstract theoretical physics
by anthropomorphic metaphors, then maybe biologists should not be ashamed to
follow his example?
The proximate
implementation of teleology
In summary -
starting from some large scale purposive, conscious and unified deity (perhaps
envisaged as the sun, or the earth/ Gaia; Lovelock, 1989) - organizing entities
direct and shape the first and most basic forms of life, prokaryotic then
eukaryotic cells, followed by the major divisions or classifications of living
things down to (real) species, sexual reproduction, individual organisms and
social groups. (The evolution of Man may, or may not, be assumed to require a
further level of organizing entity – or else the direct intervention of the
deity.)
Organizing
entities are located functionally-external to the biological entities that they
govern – they are not a part of biology. Organizing entities are an external
focus for biological entities – thus can be imagined as a point of reference:
both monitoring and shaping biology. The main role of an organizing entity is
to impose goals, direction, purpose – in a word: teleology. This entails
imposition of form, cohesion, cooperation – and identity. Identity is the
process by which the group is defined – the choice of inclusion and exclusion,
the drawing of a boundary.
It is the organizing
entity that make a group a real group in the true sense of the word ‘group’–
and not merely an arbitrary, temporary or expedient line drawn around a
collection of autonomous entities: it is the organizing entity which makes the
group a unit. Biological unity therefore derives from teleological unity.
A group of many
entities (such as a collection of components in a cell, of cells in an organism,
or organisms in a society) is itself a real and objective unified entity only when it has been organized by a single
purposive, conscious entity.
If this is accepted, and some kind of general
mechanism for teleology is assumed - such as the hierarchy of organizing
entities - then the question arises as to how teleology is imposed? There seem
to be two possibilities - purpose could be continuously imposed from outside a biological entity by the continuous
or intermittent operation of some kind of field, force or form; or else purpose
could be built-in.
While I think it likely that external forms/
fields/ forms have a role, especially in terms of organizing the simpler and
more basic (physics and chemistry) levels of evolution (Sheldrake 1981 &
1988); something additional, more detailed and generative of autonomy seems to be required for
biological entities. Biological purpose seems most likely to be built-in;
specifically that, as an entity is formed and develops, its purposive nature is
built-into the structure and organization (by the action of its organizing
entity) such that there is a degree of agency and self-regulation which is also
coordinated with the overall teleology (probably by means of in-built
complementarity of function).
For example, in multicellular organisms there
may be the mechanisms of cell-suicide or apoptosis - such that if a cell
experiences a mutation that may endanger the organism - perhaps by a neoplasm
such as cancer - then the cell destroys itself (for the good of the whole
organism). There is, in general, considerable altruism built-in at the cellular
level of a multicellular organism such that the existence of multicellular
organisms is essentially an exercise in mutual altruism. Some types of motile
white blood cells such as macrophages (which resemble free living amoebae) will
kill themselves in the process of defending the organism against microorganism
invasion (these dead warriors are found in pus): and this purpose is apparently
built-into them in terms of their core functionality.
The primary reliance upon built-in teleology
also makes it easy to understand the existence, indeed often at high rates, of
the opposite - of behaviours which are non-functional, free-riding, and
parasitic. This is explicable in the sense that teleology - including traits
that are long-termist, altruistic, cooperative and coordinated – is built-into
the organism during normal development, but is nonetheless vulnerable to
disruption by abnormal development and subsequent, later events that disrupt or
destroy these built-in mechanisms. For example, genetic damage or mutations
during the lifespan of the entity: mutant mitochondria in a eukaryotic cell,
cancer in a multicellular organism, the effects of mental illness in human
society.
Therefore, I think it most likely that organizing
entities work to impose teleology during development at the point where
entities are being formed - either originally and/ or when being reproduced.
The teleological behaviours are part of the design specification built into the
entity. Short-term selfishness can, and does, arise in or after development –
and then it is typically dealt with by built-in regulatory mechanisms found in
those ‘normal’ entities who have experienced undisrupted development and
avoided subsequent damage.
The
coherence of everything
It is the
hierarchy of organizing entities which ensures that overall and in the long
run, all directions of all sub-entities are coordinated and integrated. This
can be imagined on the lines of a military hierarchy of orders coming down from
a General (i.e. deity) through the branching ranks of Colonels, Majors,
Captains, Lieutenants, and Sergeants to the foot soldiers (i.e. the layers of
organizing entities).
Vertical, multi-level coordination therefore comes
from the teleology branching-out from a single locus. And horizontal coordination within-hierarchical-levels comes from the
mutual reciprocity and complementarity of functions – imposed on groups of
biological entities by organizing entities.
This is the
organizing principle which enables groups under direction from organizing entities
to be recognized and understood (to some significant extent); it is what
roughly corresponds to intuitions that there is an underlying order to the
world: notions such as ‘the balance of nature’, ‘the circle of life’, the
principle of ‘compensation’, or the earth conceptualized in terms of a goddess
or organism termed Gaia (Lovelock, 1981).
Thus the universe
of reality broadly hangs-together, as we observe it does; and does not utterly collapse
into a chaos of ever-smaller and faster-replicating, more mutually-exploiting purposeless
entities, as we observe it does not. There is a background tendency to
homoeostasis and elaborated specialization and coordination – and there is,
both overall and at each level and each individual unit of organization –
organizing purpose and direction.
Of course, in
particular times and places, natural selection may be amplified, may become
powerful enough to overcome the cohesive and integrative influence of
conscious, purposive entities; and consciousness diminishes, and cooperation,
complexity and order begin to break down. The purpose is then not attained but
instead thwarted.
It can happen at
any level. Ultra-selfish genes (such as transposons or segregation distorters)
may potentially lead to intra-genomic conflict with loss of
informational-identity, functional corruption and cell death; rogue malignant
(or selfishly non-functional) mitochondria may kill their symbiotic host cells;
connective tissues may be naturally-selected to become sarcomas and kill the organism;
or successful psychopaths may exploit, parasitize and lead to the destruction
of their social group.
But the fact of
life persisting; and the observations relating to evolutionary history; entails
that the background reality is teleological and cooperative.
Explaining
the necessity for an intermediating hierarchy of organizing entities
A teleology of biology
can be accepted merely on the basis of deity, and without the kind of complex,
intermediate system of organizing entities which I have proposed – and leaving
aside any speculations on the more detailed way in which teleology I
implemented in practice. In other words, it can be asserted that once a
presiding deity has been invoked as our working hypothesis – then everything
significant that happens in biology can be attributed directly to that deity.
Such a view is possible
and coherent, albeit such a tactic might reasonably be characterised in terms
of vague ‘hand-waving’; so why do I take the further step of inferring the
existence of a hierarchy of organizing entities; and attributing to them the
role of implementing teleology in a much more direct, specific, and proximate
fashion?
Essentially, the reason
for introducing intermediary causes of teleology, adding to the overall deist
unity as the cause of teleology, is firstly in order to explain the phenomena
of development of the organism; which
is also termed ontogeny or
within-organism change through the life span: growth, change of form, selective
cell death, differentiation and maturation. And also secondly to explain phylogeny; that is between-generation,
within-lineage evolutionary change: the history of extinctions, and of new and
changing species.
In different words, the
hierarchy of organizing entities is intended to account for the dynamic aspects of biology: to explain
why biology is full of change; creating, adapting and failing.
Ontogeny and phylogeny (as
types of ‘changing’), happening through time, imply that deity either cannot or
will-not achieve biological form directly and finally; but either must or
chooses to attain form by incremental steps from an initially very simple
situations – one stage building-upon the preceding. To me, this suggests that
deity works by means of intermediary causes.
Furthermore, biology
itself seems to have a hierarchical and multi-branching organization – both
ontogeny and phylogeny display this – that is evident both within organisms and
other coherent entities in the form of development, and also across the range
of biological organisms and other coherent entities in terms of the systems of
biological classification. This suggests that the organization of biological
teleology also has a hierarchical and multi-branching structure analogous to
the taxonomy of living things (the ‘tree of life’).
If this is assumed, then
it seems necessary that the hierarchy of
organizing entities must pre-exist the structure of actual biological entities,
in order that it is already in-place to organize each cumulative step in
phylogeny.
If so, then the broad-brush
resemblance between ontogeny and phylogeny (Horder, 2008) which was noted more
than a century ago by Haeckel – may have its basis not in Haeckel’s formulation
of ontogeny recapitulating phylogeny, with the history of evolutionary change (supposedly)
being recorded in developmental sequences, nor by any modification of that
idea; but the opposite. I suggest it is a matter of phylogeny recapitulating
ontogeny, in the sense of evolutionary change being driven by developmental
processes.
That is, the organizing
entities work primarily to affect ontogeny, to build-in teleology by shaping the process of development; and
thereby, as a consequence, these same organizing entities are also setting-up
mature biological entities in evolutionary sequences and relationships. By
affecting development, the organizing entities impose teleology on evolution.
To be even more specific,
the first member of a new species (or level of biological complexity) has been
shaped by the ordering entities – including by changing its various heritable
structural features (such as genes, and non-genetic cellular structural formal
features such as cytoplasmic structures and constituents, or cell membrane
attributes). Thus ontogenetic change comes first, and then this is transmitted via heritability first to initiate, then
establish, the step-wise phylogenetic changes that mark evolutionary history.
Conclusions
and implications
In sum, the new deistic
teleological metaphysics of biology enables the subject to re-defined around
the concept of development. The scheme would not affect the perspective of
biology in terms of the study of evolution specifically by natural selection,
nor in terms of the day-to-day activities of most biological researchers. But
metaphysics is nonetheless vitally-relevant insofar as natural selection would
henceforth be assumed to operate within
purposive cognitive processes that have foresight and are able to organize,
coordinate, and either counteract or use natural selection, as means to the
overall teleology. This background would be assumed – and we would not suppose
that natural selection ‘has the last word’.
Perhaps most
importantly, the new metaphysics of biology escapes the self-refuting paradox
of natural selection; because it can explain how it is that humans could have
valid knowledge of biology itself – as the most relevant example: how humans
might have validly discovered a true theory such as natural selection. If
humans had been merely contingently evolved to optimize reproductive success,
it is not formally impossible but it is vastly
improbable that we could have valid knowledge of anything - including natural
selection; since a mechanism for discovering valid knowledge could only have
happened by undirected chance and when it also happened to optimize
reproductive success in the immediate short term of generations. However, if by
an astonishing coincidence, it happened-to-happen that humans had had
naturally-selected the ability to have valid knowledge – knowledge for instance
of the theory of natural selection; then we could not know we knew this this
for a fact, without a further astonishing coincidence of knowing that we had
happened to evolve this way!
But - if our metaphysics posits the existence
of purposively-unified, conscious, organizing entities outwith the boundaries
of biology, and to that extent independent of (controlling of) the vicissitudes
of natural selection; then valid
knowledge might be assumed to originate from that external source. In
other words, we can know about natural selection and that it is true, only because we ourselves are something more
than merely naturally selected. In sum, the suggestion is that humans have
been cognitively-organized via our
built-in teleology such that objective knowledge is possible for us.
I am, of course,
fully aware that the above purposive metaphysics of biology sounds bizarre,
supernatural and indeed just plain absurd from the perspective of modern
biology! I have, after all, been thoroughly educated-in and acclimatized-to
that world, and have worked within it for several decades, both teaching the
subject of natural selection and publishing many papers; including many which metaphysically-assumed
that natural selection was indeed the last word on things – the exact framing assumptions
that I am here and now criticizing as radically incomplete; for example my
books Charlton, 2000 and Charlton & Andras, 2003 - especially the Appendix
to 2003.
However, stepping
outside of that professional ghetto, I am also aware that this general type and
nature of metaphysical explanation that I am now proposing has a long and
continuing pedigree among mathematicians and physicists – and indeed within a
strand of theoretical biologists which includes such diverse figures as JW von
Goethe and his scientific editor Rudolf Steiner, D’Arcy Thompson, AN Whitehead,
Conrad Waddington (and other members of the prestigious, albeit heterodox,
Theoretical Biology Club of Cambridge University), and in recent years Brian
Goodwin, Stuart Kauffman and Rupert Sheldrake.
Such individuals
(to a variable degree) have recognized that – if it is to be coherent - the
subject and methods of biology must be conceptualized within a larger (and, as
I term it, metaphysical) framework or paradigm which lies outside the
discipline of biology; however the above-named biologists were primarily
concerned with integration, organization and the development of form – while my focus here is on the
need for an externally imposed purpose.
However, I would note that there is a sometimes explicit, but more often unstated
and unacknowledged, teleological assumption behind much of the work in this
idealist, mathematical-geometric and morphological tradition.
The axiomatic
assumptions of this paradigmatic purposive framework are the basis for all
scientific work. Science is always and necessarily subordinated to philosophy,
even when that philosophy is unacknowledged - or even when it is denied. Many
clever and successful - but unreflective - modern scientists believe themselves
to be superior to metaphysics, to have transcended and replaced it with ‘solid’
empirical scientific ‘proof’. All this really means is that they do not
understand, and do not want to know about, their own metaphysical assumptions –
because they want to believe that these are just-plain-true, rather than the
consequence of non-scientific but instead philosophical choices made by actual people at some particular time and
place.
But different
choices yield different consequences; and the choice of natural selection as
the bottom-line explanation of biology has had an intellectually stunting and
transcendentally crippling effect on the discipline – has indeed destroyed the
cohesion and identity of biology, and made it a self-refuting paradox.
My hope is that
this new, teleological metaphysics of biology will provide a framework
within-which biology can operate in a coherent and contextualized fashion;
rather than, as in recent decades, simply ignoring its major problems and
deluding itself with assertions that its partial and incomplete explanations -
based on the dogmatic assumption that natural selection is the one and only
true mechanism of evolution and the bottom line reality of everything - have
universal applicability and eternal validity. However, I think I have
demonstrated that this is merely an assertion, and indeed an arrogant, uninformed,
arbitrary and indeed utterly absurd assertion! Let us then acknowledge that
there are metaphysical choices that have-been and must-be made – and try to
evaluate and compare these choices.
It is necessary to
recognize and make clear that the above metaphysics of hierarchical, purposive
and conscious, organizing entities is not a 'biological' theory. But then,
neither is natural selection a biological theory. Instead, both of these are
potential metaphysical frameworks for biology. Biology cannot exist without a
metaphysical framework – and the current one may not be the best, since it has
so many, such serious, failures to its name.
In conclusion, I
suggest that biology requires wholesale reconceptualization based on a new set
of deistic and teleological metaphysical assumptions.
Acknowledgement. I thank Rupert Sheldrake for
pointing-out that my suggested hierarchy of organizing entities bears
resemblance to the scheme proposed by Alfred Russel Wallace in The World of Life: A Manifestation of Creative Power,
Directive Mind and Ultimate Purpose (1910). (Wallace was – with Darwin –
the co-discoverer of Natural Selection.) Rupert also asked me a couple of
pertinent questions concerning the original draft; in the process of addressing
which, I (by stages) ended-up significantly expanding and refocusing this
paper.
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