Platonic Biology

Theodosius Dhobzhansky famously wrote that “nothing in biology makes sense except in light of evolution.”  I gather that Dhobzhansky, an Orthodox Christian, was arguing against creation scientists and other critics of Darwinian Theory.  I agree with him and will add one more step.  Nothing in Darwinian Theory makes sense except in light of Plato. 

Plato’s Socrates more famously advanced a theory of forms or ideas as a way of making sense of human perception and intelligence.  In a nutshell, the theory goes as follows.  When we perceive a physical object, say a tree, our perception only captures one possible perspective on that object.  Thus the tree looks small from a distance and large up close.  Likewise we see only one side of it at a time.  It is our intelligence, not our perceptions, that informs us that the tree is one object that has not changed as we approach it and circle around it.  That one tree is in fact invisible to the eye and visible only to the intelligence. 

We also notice that the tree itself does seem to change over time‑gray and leafless in November but green and flourishing in June.  Yet it is still this same tree: an object that is one thing and another as it extends across the dimension of time.  Likewise, we recognize this tree and another tree as one and the same kind of thing because our intelligence informs us of a pattern that is more persistent that any individual tree.  Plato (or his Socrates) supposed that the pattern was more real than the example because it was more persistent and more knowable. 

Plato’s many critics as well as his misguided disciples (Neoplatonists, for example) neglected to notice that Socrates usually qualified his speculations by saying that it is only “something like this”.  I think that it is indeed something like this and that a qualified but genuinely Platonic approach is necessary to make sense of Darwinian biology. 

I am working on revising a paper I presented last year in Montreal.  You can see critical comments on the paper by Scott James here and my reply to those excellent comments here.  Some sections of the paper and my argument can be found here, here, and here. 

In this post, I will present some examples of Darwinian ideas that are in fact Platonic ideas.  To begin with, consider this argument: if it’s a mammal, then it’s an animal; it’s a mammal, therefore it’s an animal.  That simple, biological modus ponens recognizes this here organism as an expression of a larger object that extends across time and space.  Individual mice and men come to be in dependence on larger forms that are more persistent across evolutionary time and more pervasive across evolutionary niches at any one time.  That is “something like” what Socrates had in mind. 

Evolutionary theory works exactly the same way that Plato’s theory worked: by recognizing that the caterpillar and the butterfly as well as the butterfly and the moth are, in a very real sense, the same things.  What is real is mostly invisible to the eye but visible indeed to the properly educated intelligence. 

To take another example, natural selection is a robust, Platonic idea.  Although we have no Platonic writings about mathematics, he clearly thought that training in math was essential for philosophy and regarded mathematical concepts as among the most important ideas.  Natural selection is a logical rather than strictly mathematical principle, but it works the same way as such explicit Platonic ideas as justice and the good.  Natural selection is the same thing whether it is shaping pathogens or pacifists, liver cells or lush barflies. 

I will close here with one final example: the pied flycatcher.  The male of this avian species attracts females with the implicit promise he will help provide for her and her young once they are hatched.  He often makes the same promise to a second female, but there is only some much time he can invest and the second female will find that she is cheated.  The female that he supports will spend more time warming eggs and chicks with a payoff of four or five healthy progeny.  The cheated female will be lucky if one or two survive.  The logic of fidelity and adultery are the same whether we are talking about avians or apes.  I am not sure whether Plato would be pleased to admit adultery among the ideas, but this Platonist has no problem. 

In my paper, I argue that political autonomy is another expression of biological autonomy.  All living organisms build walls between inside and outside, self and not-self, and maintain what is inside in resistance against what is outside.  Life is a Russian doll of coalitions, cells in organs, organs in bodies, individuals in tribes.  At every level, the Platonic idea of autonomy is expressed. 

Cartesian long enough

Rene Descartes was, in many senses, the father of modern analytic philosophy.  While very few modern philosophers would imagine that they are dualists, almost all of them have confined themselves within the categories of Cartesian dualism.  Descartes saw the physical world as fundamentally dead: matter in motion.  Thus conscious mind could be accounted for only by supposing that it was ontologically independent of the physical body.  Physicalists and materialists have supposed that the mind was ontologically dependent on the physical body, as red paint is ontologically dependent on the stuff in the paint can.  Yet in doing so they maintain the Cartesian understanding of mind and matter as the phenomena to be explained or, in the former case, explained away.  Descartes’ mind remained something of a scandal for modern physicalist thought. 

This is one reason why Darwinism has been an open wound on the modern soul.  Apart from its supposed challenge to Biblical creation, Darwinism seemed to many to amount to an invasion of the realm of the mind by the physical sciences.  If mind is simply a Darwinian engine for survival and reproduction, then art, literature, music, are only so many scratches and cat calls produced by Cartesian machines.  This is why confirmed evolutionists like Stephen Jay Gould and Richard Lewontin went to war against the “ultra-Darwinists” like Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett.  Gould and Lewontin were trying to save a space for Cartesian mind to do beautiful things and care genuinely about each other.  I believe this is a dilemma easily escaped once one is liberated from the Cartesian dichotomy. 

The philosopher Hans Jonas saw early that Darwinism cuts both ways.  If it means that life is more dependent on physical processes than Descartes had supposed (and it is) it also means that physical processes are less dead than he supposed (and they are).  As mind and information are always embedded in some material, so the physical matter in the kosmos has within it the potential to produce mind.  Were it not for planet Earth, with its astonishing variety of living organisms, some ghostly visitor to this kosmos would never have guessed that stardust and light had such a potential. 

I submit that the thesis that autonomy is an essential element in the phenomenon of life is the means for finally liberating us from the Cartesian trap.  Here is a bit from the conclusion of the Kepa Ruiz-Mirazo and Alvaro Moreno paper I referenced in my last post:

If we understand the phenomenon of life as a complex network of processes that take shape and propagate both at an individual and a historical-collective dimension—in our terms, as the history of the proliferation of various forms of autonomous organization (from chemical to unicellular, multicellular, developmental, cognitive, and, only recently, to rational autonomy)—the radical Cartesian separation between nature and mind simply disappears. The capacity of a system to determine itself, to establish its own rules and norms of behavior, and to create meaningful environments no longer belongs exclusively to the realm of rationality. At the same time, the natural world cannot be regarded as a universe where blind forces, acting without any sense or purpose, operate: the study of the fundamental mechanisms underlying biological organization, with all their intricacies, has clearly refuted that possibility.

Once life begins on this world, it begins exploring.  Lineages extend across time but they also fork.  Organisms push into new niches as they create new niches.  Such niches are defined not only geographically, as creates crawl up the sand of the primordial beach; they are also defined in terms of complexity.  All organisms are autonomous‑resisting what is outside and other in order to preserve what is inside and the self.  As Mirazo and Moreno argue, life jumps to increasingly robust kinds of autonomy.  The eukaryotic cell, possessing a nucleus, can regulate itself in ways that prokaryotic cells cannot.  Multicellular organisms add further levels of self-regulation, including, eventually, conscious awareness. 

Human freedom and nobility are greater, I submit, than anything else in the visible kosmos.  They are greater by many magnitudes than the simple cells from which they arose.  Yet they are expressions of the potential already evident in the Ur organism.  The Cartesian dichotomy has blinded us to this for a long time.  It is time to drop it. 

Jesus v. Darwin

I have a copy of this cartoon on the wall outside my office at Northern:

For several reasons I have been thinking lately about the mutual hostility between conservatives (especially religious conservatives) and Darwinists.  The proximate cause of the quarrel is obviously political.  The two sides having drawn apart and against one another almost a century ago, they now dislike each other because they dislike each other.  That is how politics often (almost always) works. 

This explains a curious fact about the latter faction: the rare emphasis on a particular scientist.  While both Isaac Newton and Albert Einstein were certainly celebrated and influential and while both had their followers, as it were, it is rare to speak of Newtonians let alone Newtonism, or to hear someone described as a Relativist in the sense of Einstein.  Yet we speak of Darwinists and Darwinians all the time. 

This is so, I suggest, for the same reason as one speaks of Marxists or Lutherans for that matter.  To announce one’s acceptance of Darwin’s theory is a pledge of allegiance.  There is nothing especially wrong with this.  We are political animals.  This is what we do. 

There are deeper causes for the quarrel, however, and they require explanation.  Why did a hostility open up between Darwinian biology in particular and Christian (an increasingly other Abrahamic religions) and why has it been so persistent?  Why is there much less friction between religion and geology, for instance, or astronomy?  Such sciences once got the philosopher Anaxagoras expelled from Athens.  Today, only young earthers are offended by physics, and they are rather rare. 

One reason has to do with the historical moment at which Darwin’s theory appears.  The Nineteenth Century was the period in which the center of gravity in Western culture shifted decisively from religious authority to secular authority, both in science and in government.  Darwin’s achievement was neither the cause nor in any important sense a consequence of that shift; however, because it coincided with it, it came to be identified with it. 

A second reason for the quarrel is that religious thought in general and theology in particular had responded to the rise of modern science with what I call the Olympian Strategy.  The simple rule of this strategy is to imagine that the God or gods dwell somewhere that one cannot easily look.  An adolescent version of this strategy is to imagine that angels live on the tops of clouds, which works reasonably well until the invention of aircraft.  Before Darwin, it was tempting to suppose that while science could explain day and night, the stars and the seasons, and volcanos, only a creator God could explain the human eye or the wings of birds.  I note that the Intelligent Design movement seems still to be trying to sustain the Olympian Strategy. 

While both of these explanations are part of the story, I recently have come to think that something more deeply rooted in the history of Biblical Religion is at work.  Pagan gods lived in the world, even if largely out of sight and at high altitudes.  The Biblical God existed before the world that He created and therefore exists outside that world, however much or often he intervenes in it.  This separation of God from the world has very important existential consequences.  For pagans, the moon was a divine being, worthy of reverence and awe.  In Genesis, it is demoted to the status of a street light, hung in the heavens by the Creator.  Much the same thing is true of the sun. 

The Biblical God’s jealousy left no room for the vast population of gods, demigods, spirits, nymphs, etc., that had inhabited the ancient world.  This by no means precluded admiration of the natural world.  One could admire it as divine art in the same way that one admires the arts of human beings.  It did however, open up a persistent temptation to view that world with contempt.  Matter is mere matter, dead and inert, without spirit. 

The power of this temptation is evident from the wee small books towards the end of the New Testament.  Consider 1^st John 4:

Beloved, believe not every spirit, but try the spirits whether they are of God: because many false prophets are gone out into the world.

² Hereby know ye the Spirit of God: Every spirit that confesseth that Jesus Christ is come in the flesh is of God:

³ And every spirit that confesseth not that Jesus Christ is come in the flesh is not of God: and this is that spirit of antichrist, whereof ye have heard that it should come; and even now already is it in the world.

What is that bit about Jesus Christ “come in the flesh”?  As explained to me by a Biblical scholar (which I am not), the early church was infiltrated by Gnostics.  The latter believed that the material world (and hence, the flesh) was corrupt and bad.  If Jesus was indeed a savior, he could not have come in the flesh but only in the form of an immaterial spirit.  This teaching was resolutely rejected by the Church.  Christ was born of woman into flesh and blood.  When he rose he swung his legs off the slab and walked out of the tomb.  Why else was it necessary to roll away the stone? 

There is a lot to chew on here.  All the major churches teach the resurrection of the body, which acknowledges that human being is unthinkable apart from human bodies.  This view rather literally redeems the flesh.  I suggest, however, that Christian culture has not entirely escaped the Gnostic infection.  There remains a tendency to see the flesh and more the material components of flesh as low and ugly.  This explains the fact that today, most American Christians seem to be thorough going substance dualists.  They imagine, against church doctrine, that the spirit is altogether distinct from the flesh and floats away from it at death toward heaven or hell.  The resurrection of the body is largely forgotten in this gospel of Walt Disney. 

I suspect that it is a lingering Gnosticism in Christian culture that is offended by Darwinism.  From this point of view, if living organisms, including human beings, emerge by natural processes from inorganic matter, then life is corrupt beyond redemption. 

There is an alternative view.  If the world is God’s creation, then every part of it, down to the smallest particle, has God’s design in it.  The philosopher Hans Jonas argued that Darwinism was in fact the antithesis of materialism.  It means that life, mind, and spirit are potentially present even the most inert physical materials.  This is evident in every living human being, for living persons are made of living organs which are made of living cells which are made of dead molecules.  The resurrection of the dead is not something that happens (perhaps not only) on some coming day.  It happens at every breath. 

I do not take sides in the quarrel between religion and Darwinism because I think that the quarrel arises from a mistake.  The quarrel will subside when we learn to take a more generous view of the natural world.  Nothing in it is irredeemable.