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A teleological
metaphysics for biology: Hierarchical, purposive, conscious, governing entities
direct evolutionary processes.
Bruce G Charlton
School of
Psychology, Newcastle University, NE1 7RU, England
Abstract
I will argue that
modern biology – initially established by Darwin’s Origin of Species in 1859 and fully implemented by the
Neo-Darwinian synthesis of natural selection with genetics which solidified in
the middle twentieth century – is based upon fundamental assumptions
(metaphysical assumptions, in a strict philosophical sense) that render
formally-insoluble some of the major theoretical problems of biology including
the major transitions of evolution, the origins of life, the origins of sexual
reproduction and of species, and the basic mechanism behind ‘group selection’. The
fundamental deficit of the current metaphysics of biology – rooted in natural
selection – is that it lacks teleology (direction, purpose, goals) this renders
it formally impoverished and radically inadequate. I advocate a new and
teleological metaphysical basis for biology which subordinates natural
selection to an evolving hierarchy of purposive and conscious governing entities that are located
outwith biological systems, which have shaped the direction of evolutionary
history, and are the basis for the underlying cohesion, specialization and
cooperation of the living world. A system directed by governing entities is, of
course, not a 'biological' theory; but then, neither is natural selection a
biological theory: these are both 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.
Biology (including
medical research and psychology) has indeed, since the 1950s, become the most
successful – that is, by far the largest and most heavily-funded and most
status-rewarded of the sciences. However, it is striking that this progress has
been at the level of mechanisms and technologies, and not at the level of
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 Schroedinger (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 made 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 ever 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 someone 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).
Origins
of life, sexual reproduction and major transitions of life
An example: 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 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? 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 then 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 is one to which we will return
later.
And 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 (2002) –
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,
Hamilton did not really solve the problem of how sexual reproduction arose – but only clarified its
advantages (in terms of resistance to pathogenic 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
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. In sum; natural selection is much more
rapidly and powerfully dis-integrative than integrative. Yet, nonetheless,
these transitions did actually occur in evolutionary history (Charlton, 1996).
For example, in a
multi-cellular organism, the dividing component cells are constantly being
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. 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 systems are themselves intrinsically subject to neoplastic evolution?
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 (aka.‘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 within 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.
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 theorists such as WD Hamilton and GC Williams intuitively recognized
that group selection was like a thorn in the flesh 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 (ie.
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.
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 (Dawkins, 1976; 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, 1996; Maynard Smith
& Szathmary, 1997).
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 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 so much out,
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-destructive.
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. 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. There was no
reason why things had to be as they actually were, 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 or 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 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.
Potential
benefits of a teleological metaphysics
The fact that such
a large number of the most fundamental problems of biology have remained
essentially untouched during more than half a century of bioscience research on
a truly massive scale (and still growing) suggests that they are intractable –
and will not be solved under the current paradigm. However, that is only my
assumption, the evidence is compatible with the idea that the fundamental
problems of biology are insoluble under the current paradigm – however, the
scientific evidence does not, and cannot, amount to empirical or rational proof.
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 cannot
imply a new metaphysics, and cannot refute an old metaphysics.
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.
In this sense
metaphysics (or a paradigm) is not ‘testable’ by science. This is because
metaphysics itself defines the definition of science (or a specific science
such as biology), defines what counts as a test, and also how to interpret the
results. For instance, no amount of biology 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 sub-goals.
However, an
important difference between a strict model of development on the one hand, and
on the other what I am here proposing (the theory of an evolving system of
‘governing entities’), is that evolution is and must be open-ended: it has a
direction, but its instantiation in living things is continually dynamic and
tending towards change and innovation of forms without necessarily reaching a
point of closure. Development is direction aimed-at an end point, but governing
entities provide directionality that may itself develop.
But of course
there is a cost – and that cost is an intellectual one which 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! It is no coincidence
that so many of the best known and most effective public dissenters from
Christianity 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 Julian Huxley; current examples include the
campaigning anti-religion activists Richard Dawkins and Daniel C Dennett.
The intellectual
cost to be paid is to restore purpose and ‘life’ to biology, to regard natural
selection as taking place within an over-arching cognitive environment, and
indeed to assume that consciousness precedes life and controls the emergence of
life, its major transitions and – in general – life’s ability to counteract the
dis-integrative tendencies of natural selection. In other words, the outrageous
‘cost’ (as most biologists would see it) or minimal necessity (as I see it) is to
restore a spiritual dimension – not indeed within
biology – but as the framing metaphysic of biology.
I should state
immediately that although this perspective of the primacy of consciousness,
purpose and life is indeed spiritual, it is not necessarily religious in the
sense of associated with belief in any actual religion. There are great
physicists (such as Einstein) who saw reality in this ‘Deist’ way (using the
shorthand of ‘God’ for the inbuilt tendency of the universe) – and a modern
physicist as great as Roger Penrose is an acknowledged Platonist, in the sense
of regarding observable reality as based upon, and an imperfect picture of, an
ultimate world of underlying archetypal forms. So, regarding ultimate reality
as acting as if it has purpose,
consciousness and life does not necessarily require (although it might lead to
the further step) of a belief in any specific God or gods.
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 religion. And in that case,
I am suggesting that, in the end, an adequate metaphysics of biology must be
compatible-with (if not contiguous with) religion.
Statement
of the new teleological metaphysics
The chronology of
the new metaphysics is the reverse of the usual in biology. Biology usually
assumes that matter precedes life; life precedes the brain; the brain precedes
cognition – ie. brain comes before mind; and minds were around before
consciousness - including purposiveness - emerged. By contrast, I suggest
that consciousness and purpose are the starting point – and that consciousness
therefore operates upon matter with the purpose of sustaining and developing
itself via instantiations in matter
(instantiation here meaning the specific and actual realization of an
abstraction). Therefore, consciousness ‘organized’ brains, as a stepping stone
to a further development of consciousness.
Furthermore,
consciousness evolves by this development – beginning as something very general
and simple - like a basic tendency pushing towards more of itself; but becoming
more subdivided and specific by building upon each phase of instantiation.
Thus, consciousness evolves by realizing itself in the stages and transitions of
life – each step building-upon what was achieved before. And this stepwise
process is necessary – consciousness is understood as having foresight and
knowledge, but these are both limited.
(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).
Consciousness is
here understood as able to see some way ahead, and purposively shape evolution
towards this limited goal, but only to a finite, and in practice rather limited
degree. Perhaps we could suggest (approximately) that foresight stretches
(probabilistically) a few or several generations ahead, but not hundreds of generations into the
future. Therefore it was not possible to go directly from the primal general
consciousness to me or you; and in fact there were numerous intermediate
stages.
So that initially
consciousness sufficed to organize, to arrange matter into what we recognize as
the emergence of life in its most basic forms; but later consciousness was
subdivided and specialized into an hierarchy of directing consciousness’s; for
example regulating the basic transitions and divisions of life, and beyond them
the further groupings down to species, then particular human groups.
The
hierarchy of purposive and conscious governing entities
This can be
imagined as an hierarchy of conscious, purposive governing entities which operate to shape and frame the structure
of reality, including biological reality.
These governing
entities have various properties including the ability cognitively to model
future possibilities (i.e. to have foresight, to make conjectural predictions)
and choose between them on the basis of innate purpose. In essence, governing
entities can understand (to a limited but significant extent) the current
situation, and look ahead several (or many) generations towards probable
outcomes – and then arrange reality to reach the preferred possible outcome
(thereby tending to overcome both random errors and natural selection).
So these governing
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 than does Y; and then the governing entity has the power
to impose A upon the system.
What then,
actually, are these governing entities – how can we imagine them? I suggest
that different people may imagine them in different ways which suit the
workings of their own minds. Some may ‘imagine’ (or 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) 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 governing entities as actual personages who are localized in
space and time, and in some fashion material
although invisible and undetectable. This is of course a child-like way of
thinking (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 both irrational and rather disgraceful – and indeed they
are usually correct in this accusation; because avoiding this ‘anthropomorphic’
way of thinking while yet retaining a firm and imaginative grasp of science is
all-but impossible.
After all,
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?
‘Everything
is alive’
The above metaphysical
scheme describes purpose, but gives no clue as to mechanism. Indeed, it seems
initially puzzling as to how a purposive consciousness – which is being assumed
to precede the reality of organized matter – could exert any influence on
‘things’. It seems like there is a qualitative gap – a difference in kind - that
needs to be bridged between that which influences and that which is influenced.
The answer I
suggest is that everything (including unorganized ‘stuff’) needs to be regarded
as – to some extent and in some way – alive,
purposive and conscious, and made of matter. And therefore consciousness is
able to influence everything, because both consciousness and ‘things’ are some
kind of matter (albeit very different kinds), and everything is conscious.
There is therefore no gap, and no need for a bridge – there is simply an
interaction between two entities of the same basic nature.
(This solution to
an ancient conceptual problem comes from Mormon metaphysical theology; McMurrin,
1977.)
This ‘animistic’
idea that everything is alive, purposive and conscious (although in widely
differing ways and degrees) sounds strange to modern adult ears, but was the
basic assumption of many or most societies in the past – especially the type of
hunter gatherer societies in which it is thought humans evolved (Charlton,
2007). And it was also the original childhood assumption and belief that both
you and I will have had in our early lives before it was suppressed by
socialization – assuming that you can (like myself) remember that far back.
That everything is
alive is also, as mentioned above, one of the only two possible consequences of
the fact that we cannot divide living from non-living things – we have no
grounds for such a division. The alternative inference is that nothing is alive
– but that, if true, negates any possibility of knowledge or understanding of
anything, so it can be ignored. Simple logic seems therefore to entail the
assumption that everything is indeed alive, purposive and conscious – and even
when we cannot currently detect or measure such attributes, they must be
assumed to be latent or covert.
What is added here
is merely that there are also other
living entities, imperceptible but real – that is, the hierarchy of conscious,
purposive entities - and it is these whose activities may be detected by
inference (in terms of explaining what we observe) throughout the whole living
world.
So the trajectory
of evolution does not involve the creation or emergence of life or
consciousness, but instead their amplification, differentiation and
specialization. And the history of the 'origin', major events, transitions and
stages in the evolution of life (including altruism and group selection) is therefore
driven by the evolution of consciousness;
as consciousness develops its hierarchy then this draws life along with it - so
long as it is appreciated that the 'evolution' of consciousness refers to a
purposive, directional, developmental un-folding of changes: it is much more
like embryonic growth and specialization than a process of selection between ‘random’
(undirected) variants.
What
do governing entities do?
In summary -
starting from some large scale purposive, conscious and unified entity (such as
the sun, or the earth - somewhat as envisaged by ‘Gaia’; Lovelock, 1989),
consciousness differentiates and specializes to direct and shape the first and
most basic forms of life, then 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.
Each of these life
stages can be imagined as preceded and
guided by the emergence of a further conscious, cognitive, purposive entity
which has tended to shape things in a particular direction conducive to the
survival and further extension and detailed sustaining of consciousness; life
being coordinated by, and in overall harmony with, the work of hierarchically
superior purposive governing entities.
Governing entities
are located functionally-external to the group they govern – they are not a
part of that group. Also they are a focus – thus can be imagined as a point of
reference, both afferent and efferent. Further; they have positive and negative
functions.
Positively the
main role of a governing 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.
Negatively, the
governing entity will observe, monitor, integrate the group (constituting for
example a cell, multicellular organism, species or social group). Within that
group there will be – always potentially and often actually – competition,
conflict, free-riding, exploitation, parasitism and many other dis-integrative
tendencies.
In sum, it is the
governing 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 governing entity which makes the
group a unit. Unity derives from 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
unified entity only when it is governed by a single purposive,
conscious entity.
The
coherence of everything
It is the
hierarchy of governing 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 through the branching ranks of Colonels, Majors, Captains, Lieutenants,
and Sergeants to the foot soldiers.
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.
This is the
organizing principle which enables groups under direction from governing
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.
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 mutally-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 become sarcomas and kill the organism; or successful psychopaths
may exploit, parasitize and lead to the destruction of their social group.
Conclusions
and implications
In sum, the new teleological
metaphysics of biology would not affect the perspective of biology in terms of
the study of evolution by natural selection, nor in terms of the day by day
activities of biological researchers.
So much for what
it does not do! But metaphysics is
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 a means
to its own ends. This background would be assumed – and we would not suppose
that natural selection ‘has the last word’.
For example, governing
entities may use natural selection as
a means of genetic ‘quality control’ to filter-out spontaneous mutations by
replicative over-production and strong selection for fitness. But the
complexity-destroying tendency of natural selection acting upon lower level,
smaller and more rapidly reproducing sub-components; is something that is
counteracted and, at times, overcome by the governing entities orientating the
situation towards more secure and sustained existence - and towards a greater
quantity, complexity and specialization of consciousness. Presumably this is
achieved via potentially multiple
interactions between governing entities, structured by their hierarchy: the
higher entity net-influencing the lower, and each entity directing its biological
group.
So, governing entities
sometimes use, sometimes oppose, natural selection in pursuit of their
over-arching goals.
Perhaps most
importantly, the new metaphysics of biology can explain how it is that humans
could have valid knowledge of biology itself - for example, how humans might
have validly discovered a true theory such as natural selection. If humans were
merely 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 if 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 purposive, conscious governing 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.
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 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 mistaken; 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 figures as JW von Goethe
and his scientific editor Rudolf Steiner, D’Arcy Thomson, 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.
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.
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.
Finally, it is
necessary to recognize and make clear that the above metaphysics of
hierarchical, purposive and conscious governing entities is not a 'biological'
theory. But then, neither is natural selection a biological theory. Instead,
both 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.
With that in mind,
potentially valuable debate may commence.
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