I thoroughly enjoyed reading this essay! As an old zoologist, allow me one question: isn't it the case that we humans, especially in the western industrialised nations, have severed the ties of our species to natural selection, thanks to modern medicine? My friends in the medical professions always howl with outrage when I ask this question ... what do you think?
For sure, there's a number of issues on the horizon, not least natural childbirth itself. I think evolutionary medicine as a subdiscipline does approach some of this, but they are more academic than practical atm
"Perhaps for some the use of mere language to brush away difficult questions is enough, but for many this type of rhetoric will never suffice."
Yes, indeed. I think you have neatly encapsulated the Zeitgeist: the division between those neo-troglodytes who think all the world's a narrative, and the others, we troubled few, who really want to know what the world consists of and how it got that way.
Definitely this essay sparks an interest in the question of what is life!
I do suspect that your view won't withstand the test of time, or that the dichotomy you present will turn out to be reconcilable - I expect that mechanistic explanations will prove to be perfectly sufficient to explain life, even while they will provide a satisfying sense of beauty and wonder as greater complexities are uncovered.
Still, this entire essay strikes me as a wonderful expression of your personal essence. There may have been numerous vitalists before you, and there will probably be many vitalists after you, but how could "Biological Vitalism, or What Is Life?" have been written by anyone else but the Stone Age Herbalist?
Describing the situation as a "haunting" or even as "demonic" seems apt since, despite its persistent appeal, actual understanding from attempts at vitalism or unreduced teleology are just as elusive and fanciful. A few things should be kept in mind:
-- Humans tend to gravitate toward teleological and narrative thinking. They do this for the animate and inanimate alike. They do it cross-culturally, cross-historically, and across the lifespan. They often acquire the illusion of understanding via the deployment of teleological thinking. They are tenacious in appealing to it even when they know it doesn't apply. We could easily expect that even very smart humans would insist on a vitalistic interpretation of biology in the face of a fully successful non-vitalistic theory of life.
-- The most sophisticated and thorough attempts at teleological and vitalistic theorizing (e.g., Aristotle and some later biologists) are failures. However ingenious their thinkers may have been, they simply don't apply to biology as we know it. And there is no sign of any sort of progressing vitalistic research program.
-- Note how there seems to be something akin to a God of the gaps thing going on here: the areas at the frontiers of our current knowledge, where significant conceptual revision is most likely to be needed upon new discoveries, are what are used to suggest that some kind of non-reduced teleology is still necessary.
-- If a pattern for reducing apparently teleological processes has been established, it is not necessarily refuted for failure to yet see how it applies in particular instances. But natural selection explanations do precisely that: show how non-teleological processes *can* give rise to patterns that are extremely usefully described with teleological language.
-- It's possible that dominant narratives about Darwinism have been oversold in terms of how readily it is *currently* able to provide the degree or depth of understanding we need for certain biological phenomena. Such overconfidence would be par for the course for every even semi-successful human intellectual venture, and to be expected. Overconfidence on theory Y doesn't rule out the full success of a refined theory Y', nor does it predict the success of some to-be-formulated-theory-X-for-which-we-have-strong-intuitions-and-a-serious-lack-of-developed-theory.
These are all fair and accurate comments, and I don't disagree with them. I used the terms haunting and demonic specifically because they do imply that a lack of answers within the biological sciences will always prompt a human, all to human argument for something non-materalistic to fill the gaps.
What I have tried to lay out here, and will expand on in time, is a purely materialistic approach towards biology, one which might not be compatible with Darwinian or neo-Darwinian thought, but sits comfortably within the boundaries of physics. Vitalism is the best term for it at the moment, but I think its possible to generate a philosophy or vision of biology which can incorporate the aesthetic without recourse to the supernatural.
Vitalism is not wrong so much as dreamy, it is allowed to dream simply because logic is mostly a hindsight, and until we know what we are looking at, we…. —do not know how to explain it, so we dream instead. Often at this stage we throw stuff into the… —gap. It possible that this ability to circumvent the gap is at the heart of both consciousness and life, but as we are at the heart of both we may never have hindsight enough to find the logic of it. I find Nick Lane has the best recent description of the parameters of this gap (and there is always a gap) in his The Vital Question. I also find Bergon's vitalism (as opposed to physics per sse) useful as a description of being alive, and have used Deluezeiaieia…—an versions of Bergson in my own poetic attempts to describe all this (gateway drug at https://whyweshould.substack.com/p/casewells-jaspers-but-meikas-deleuzian)
What a wonderful piece, and for me coming at the right time after a good recent introduction to Rupert Sheldrake’s ideas of morphic resonance. Sheldrake himself has a YT channel, but I found an excellent introduction to his thought here: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLoQPX7JAiYGQmyWiCfIIkgkAuw97Eyicg
Very nice. I think that this really sums up the matter for me, 'Teleology is like a mistress to a biologist: he cannot live without her but he’s unwilling to be seen with her in public.' For me much of the problem comes from asking trained biologists, 'Well what is the rate of random mutations that are pro-survival?' and watching them try and come up with a non-zero answer. It just doesn't work the way that high school biology said that it does.
This was a remarkably interesting essay, thanks!
You're welcome, glad you enjoyed it, hopefully not too esoteric
I thoroughly enjoyed reading this essay! As an old zoologist, allow me one question: isn't it the case that we humans, especially in the western industrialised nations, have severed the ties of our species to natural selection, thanks to modern medicine? My friends in the medical professions always howl with outrage when I ask this question ... what do you think?
For sure, there's a number of issues on the horizon, not least natural childbirth itself. I think evolutionary medicine as a subdiscipline does approach some of this, but they are more academic than practical atm
You’d be very interested in Dr. Edward Dutton’s work, I think.
also recently in the news https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2210924120 "Electron transport chains as a window into the earliest stages of evolution"
"Perhaps for some the use of mere language to brush away difficult questions is enough, but for many this type of rhetoric will never suffice."
Yes, indeed. I think you have neatly encapsulated the Zeitgeist: the division between those neo-troglodytes who think all the world's a narrative, and the others, we troubled few, who really want to know what the world consists of and how it got that way.
Please keep up the purposeful work.
Logocentrism is certainly one of the curses of modernity
The answer to all this is the Big Bang theory. The New York Times told me so.
Ah to have the confidence of a NYT journalist
Definitely this essay sparks an interest in the question of what is life!
I do suspect that your view won't withstand the test of time, or that the dichotomy you present will turn out to be reconcilable - I expect that mechanistic explanations will prove to be perfectly sufficient to explain life, even while they will provide a satisfying sense of beauty and wonder as greater complexities are uncovered.
Still, this entire essay strikes me as a wonderful expression of your personal essence. There may have been numerous vitalists before you, and there will probably be many vitalists after you, but how could "Biological Vitalism, or What Is Life?" have been written by anyone else but the Stone Age Herbalist?
Describing the situation as a "haunting" or even as "demonic" seems apt since, despite its persistent appeal, actual understanding from attempts at vitalism or unreduced teleology are just as elusive and fanciful. A few things should be kept in mind:
-- Humans tend to gravitate toward teleological and narrative thinking. They do this for the animate and inanimate alike. They do it cross-culturally, cross-historically, and across the lifespan. They often acquire the illusion of understanding via the deployment of teleological thinking. They are tenacious in appealing to it even when they know it doesn't apply. We could easily expect that even very smart humans would insist on a vitalistic interpretation of biology in the face of a fully successful non-vitalistic theory of life.
-- The most sophisticated and thorough attempts at teleological and vitalistic theorizing (e.g., Aristotle and some later biologists) are failures. However ingenious their thinkers may have been, they simply don't apply to biology as we know it. And there is no sign of any sort of progressing vitalistic research program.
-- Note how there seems to be something akin to a God of the gaps thing going on here: the areas at the frontiers of our current knowledge, where significant conceptual revision is most likely to be needed upon new discoveries, are what are used to suggest that some kind of non-reduced teleology is still necessary.
-- If a pattern for reducing apparently teleological processes has been established, it is not necessarily refuted for failure to yet see how it applies in particular instances. But natural selection explanations do precisely that: show how non-teleological processes *can* give rise to patterns that are extremely usefully described with teleological language.
-- It's possible that dominant narratives about Darwinism have been oversold in terms of how readily it is *currently* able to provide the degree or depth of understanding we need for certain biological phenomena. Such overconfidence would be par for the course for every even semi-successful human intellectual venture, and to be expected. Overconfidence on theory Y doesn't rule out the full success of a refined theory Y', nor does it predict the success of some to-be-formulated-theory-X-for-which-we-have-strong-intuitions-and-a-serious-lack-of-developed-theory.
These are all fair and accurate comments, and I don't disagree with them. I used the terms haunting and demonic specifically because they do imply that a lack of answers within the biological sciences will always prompt a human, all to human argument for something non-materalistic to fill the gaps.
What I have tried to lay out here, and will expand on in time, is a purely materialistic approach towards biology, one which might not be compatible with Darwinian or neo-Darwinian thought, but sits comfortably within the boundaries of physics. Vitalism is the best term for it at the moment, but I think its possible to generate a philosophy or vision of biology which can incorporate the aesthetic without recourse to the supernatural.
Vitalism is not wrong so much as dreamy, it is allowed to dream simply because logic is mostly a hindsight, and until we know what we are looking at, we…. —do not know how to explain it, so we dream instead. Often at this stage we throw stuff into the… —gap. It possible that this ability to circumvent the gap is at the heart of both consciousness and life, but as we are at the heart of both we may never have hindsight enough to find the logic of it. I find Nick Lane has the best recent description of the parameters of this gap (and there is always a gap) in his The Vital Question. I also find Bergon's vitalism (as opposed to physics per sse) useful as a description of being alive, and have used Deluezeiaieia…—an versions of Bergson in my own poetic attempts to describe all this (gateway drug at https://whyweshould.substack.com/p/casewells-jaspers-but-meikas-deleuzian)
What a wonderful piece, and for me coming at the right time after a good recent introduction to Rupert Sheldrake’s ideas of morphic resonance. Sheldrake himself has a YT channel, but I found an excellent introduction to his thought here: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLoQPX7JAiYGQmyWiCfIIkgkAuw97Eyicg
Substack doesn’t provide YT previews so the channel is called Formscapes
An excellent read - very thought provoking.
Thanks Paul!
I beg you to read George Canguilhem!!
The work of Bill Dreiss gives a satisfactory answer in my opinion.
What’s being selected for is minimization of waste heat, storing accessible energy, driven directly by the principle of least action.
Check out his work on thermodynamics at “4thlaw”.
Have you been reading Ian McGilchrist’s ‘The Matter With Things,’ by any chance?
Very nice. I think that this really sums up the matter for me, 'Teleology is like a mistress to a biologist: he cannot live without her but he’s unwilling to be seen with her in public.' For me much of the problem comes from asking trained biologists, 'Well what is the rate of random mutations that are pro-survival?' and watching them try and come up with a non-zero answer. It just doesn't work the way that high school biology said that it does.