Nor is he alone, as the Nobel-prize winning Biologist Frangois Jacob observed that “Biologists no longer study life,” because “there is no metaphysical entity behind that word, ‘life.’
Indeed, for most modern people, nothingness is at the center of being, as irrational as that may be.
Well, strip the cosmos of its lived phenomena of life, then use this method to study life, and one will find only death.
So, what is the vitalist or platonic case ? Simply that a notion of life as primary, and something like platonic forms to instantiate species, is necessary to explain evolution.
This criticism of the neo-Darwinian premise of random change should be familiar: one finds the objection featured prominently, for example, in the arguments of the 1966 Wistar participants….Functional complexity and randomness stand fundamentally at odds with each other.
Probabilistically favored paths, he argues, must exist through sequence and function space, to enable evolutionary processes to move from one novel island to another within the time available — and those paths must have been built into the universe from the start. As Wagner writes at the conclusion of his 2014 book,
The Arrival of the Fittest, “life’s creativity draws from a source that is older than life, and perhaps older than time.”
As a superstar genius in evolutionary biology, Andreas Wagner HERE proposes something like “Platonic Form libraries” to account for the statistically impossible innovations in evolution :
“The number of potential proteins is not merely astronomical, it is hyperastronomical, much greater than the number of hydrogen atoms in the universe...
Referring to random change, recited like a mantra since Darwin’s time, as a source of all innovation is about as helpful as Anaximander’s argument that humans originated inside fish. It sweeps our ignorance under the rug by giving it a different name.
But given the staggering odds, selection is not enough. We need a principle that accelerates innovation...
Let me put this point as strongly as I can.
Without these pathways of synonymous texts, these sets of genes that express precisely the same function in ever-shifting sequences of letters, it would not be possible to keep finding new innovations via random mutation. Evolution would not work.
So nature’s libraries and their sprawling networks go a long way towards explaining life’s capacity to evolve. But where do they come from?
You cannot see them in the glass lizard or its anatomy. They are nowhere near life’s visible surface, nor are they underneath this surface, in the structure of its tissues and cells.
They are not even in the submicroscopic structure of its DNA.
They exist in a world of concepts, the kind of abstract concepts that mathematicians explore.”
John Milbank, in his second Stanton lecture, notes that when Darwin proposed his theory, “while absolute space and time and the force of gravity represent the direct divine presence, this is still manifest in a totally regular fashion expressible by comprehensible laws. There appeared to be no biological equivalent to this regular divine governance.”
He mentions there were attempts “interested in compensating for this lack in terms of discovering more regular immanent processes at work in features exhibiting apparent organic design.
This included processes leading to the constant creation of new species…that break with the Aristotelian focus upon fixity of species and the search for explanation of variation within species only, in favour of the attempt to account genetically for the variation of species itself…[a] design that ultimately explains the mutual adaptation of species and environment, while in the case of The Origin of Species the immanent law of one-way selective adaptation of species to environment becomes a sufficient explanans unto itself.
It only unambiguously does so if, as with Richard Dawkins, one seeks to show natural selection at work fundamentally on the genetic level. Yet it is in fact far more likely that natural selection works at every level – genotypic, phenotypic, species- wide…
For genetic theory, by positing the idea of an anarchic drift of mutation suggests, first of all, that the glissando of continuous variation is essentially vital rather than mechanically physical. Secondly it suggests that this can result in genetic mutations that are not expressed at the phenotypic level and are therefore never subject to the tests of natural selection, while further on down the generational line they will of themselves issue in phenotypic alterations. …
Milbank asks,
“what makes this individual biological in nature? The answer must have to do both with the inner inertial drive to organic self-development, and the drive to reproduce within certain regular parameters.
Yet in that case, if one is to evade the most nakedly teleological construal of the biological individual (granting it a kind of ‘quasi-intention’), then an entire gene population and sequence, or else an entire population group or sequence becomes the more likely subject of the evolutionary plot. But if the group assumes priority in this way, then resemblance between individuals reverts from accident to essence, and biological existence must still be construed in metaphysically realist terms.
And the possibility of extending a realism of ‘universal’ forms from the species to a cross-species level exists in terms of the disputed phenomenon of independent lines of development converging towards isomorphic ends, as with the structure of the eye. If biologists like Simon Conway- Morris are right to claim the reality of such processes, then this suggests that nature is ‘attracted’ by certain forms in an irreducible manner.
In any case, it seems that we must still think of the living individual as in some sense instantiating a formal essence. A question of the mystery of the source of ordering, if not of designed order (since no order at all may be unimaginable) still remains, especially once it is realised that the operation of ‘natural selection’ is, as once more Conor Cunningham points out, a contingent, ‘emergent’ process that has itself evolved.
And how are we to explain why this contingently-arising ‘drive to survival’ -- which sounds just as anthropomorphic as the drive to appear or to appear as beautiful – is then sustained into the future? One might say, that, of course, nothing is seeking to survive, it is just that certain random mutations turn out, within given equally accidental conditions, to be able to persist.
But this still leaves begging the question of the ontological character of the living unit, because the totality of such conditions is itself, as Bergson pointed out, the subject of change, and therefore one cannot appeal to ‘conditions’ as though these belonged generically to a kind of universally-given ‘conditioning factor’ and were not themselves totally subject to endless variation in seemingly contingent relationship to everything else.
And why does a ‘single’ gene or pool of genes remain single such as to ‘underlie’ (‘substantively’) a process of mutation? Still more, why do genes and animals self- replicate over time and for-a-time in an organic way that produces constantly new individual instances of a recognisably ‘same’ species?
These questions mean that one cannot stop asking exactly what it is that in some sense seeks to survive and to increase, or simply to sustain an inertia beneath variety? Why are there any consistent living things at all?
For if variation were more absolute, if no continuities in growth and reproduction were readily discernible, then there would be no reason whatsoever to speak of ‘life’ in any sense whatsoever.
This consideration suggests that a ‘vitalist’ view (for want of a better word) of the evolutionary process makes more sense than does the Darwinian one. For it appears that life is not exhaustively subject to mechanical or to even merely physical and chemical laws, but is instead a kind of self-organising force or habit grounded in nothing before itself.
Life endlessly engenders life and does not as life die – for if death cannot generate life, then the priority of life over death renders it immortal; there is no life without resurrection, as Russian philosophy has often argued. Nor is it born, as Michel Henry today points out, since it is not caused.
life is not built-up from the pre-living; instead, if we free ourselves of the anthropomorphic delusion that physical reality from the outset ‘obeys laws’, then we shall see that it is more likely that something like a ‘living’ impulse, a totally unpredictable auto-creative force underlies all of physical nature, with a rising hierarchy of complexity and capacity for self-casuation.
This force is, of course, what Henri Bergson once famously named the élan vitale."
...
Really, all these developments in systems biology are simply reinstating artistyitles formal and final case which the methods of science had left out. David Hart HERE put it :
“I suppose, would be the inability of certain contemporary champions of “naturalism” to grasp that the question of existence is qualitatively infinitely distinct from the question of how one physical reality arises from another (for, inasmuch as physics can explore only the physical, and the physical by definition already exists, then existence as such is always “metaphysical,” or even “hyperphysical”—which is to say, “supernatural.”)
it would be worse than naïve to imagine that the sciences have thereby proved the nonexistence of final and formal causes. In fact, by bracketing such causes out of consideration, scientific method also rendered itself incapable of pronouncing upon any reality such causes might or might not explain....
The notion that there is evolutionary convergence in certain details of physical development across species divisions—the shape of a wing, the mechanism of a cameral eye—makes good sense to him, but the independent full development of close morphological analogues like the timber wolf and the thylacine seems to strain his credulity.
If evolution is a sort of “algorithmic” process of chance mutations, incredibly numerous and rare and unpredictable, selected by adventitious environmental conditions, and is a process moreover whose course is cumulative but not accumulative—progressive but not directed—then it is certainly surprising that genetic variation over millions of years under varying conditions in different regions could actually produce such similar results in such complex organic structures.
It simply strikes me as pleasing to imagine supplementing (or even underpinning) the genetic and the convergent explanations with the Platonic or Aristotelian suggestion that, perhaps, there is such a thing as the form of the wolf or the form of the cat—lupinity or felinity as suchthat impresses itself upon the somewhat intractable material substrate according to the prevailing conditions in a given time or place.
Then the existence of both a placental mammalian wolf and a marsupial wolf, born at the end of evolutionary genealogies separated by oceans for millions of years, seems hardly surprising at all.
If nothing else, this notion is not much more incredible than the idea that there is, say, a sort of cat-shaped niche out there in certain ecosystems that environmental forces will inevitably cause to be filled…”
Much of this relies on our conception of nature of course, Himmelfarb in Darwin and the Darwinian Revolution, writes:
“The theory of natural selection, it is said, could only have originated in England, because only laissez-faire England provided the atomistic, egotistic mentality necessary to its conception. Only there could Darwin have blandly assumed that the basic unit was the individual, the basic instinct self-interest, and the basic activity struggle. Spengler, describing the Origin as ‘the application of economics to biology,’ said that it reeked of the atmosphere of the English factory … natural selection arose … in England because it was a perfect expression of Victorian ‘greed-philosophy,’ of the capitalist ethic and Manchester economics.” -
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