All Things Are Full of Gods, page 44
HEPHAISTOS: Ah, now, wait: Turner—isn’t he also one of those who argues that life’s basic cognitive operations lead to organisms forming inner images of the outside world, and to intentionality arising from this? Rather like Thompson and Deacon?
PSYCHE: Somewhat like, yes, but that’s a minor complaint. Remember, I don’t object to the narrative that any of them offers in terms of the sequence of its episodes; my only concern is to make sure one doesn’t fall prey to yet another emergentist interpretation of the tale, or one that can’t recognize the formal discontinuity between such things as, say, accidental persistence and intentional comportment within a physical environment, or between comportment and intrinsic consciousness, as then the story will make one fail to see the full scope of the top-down causality required to overcome that discontinuity. What’s important here is that life as we know it is a hierarchy of intentional systems, oriented toward ends that exist principally as values to be pursued, not merely as finite objects of use, and that this is in some sense true from the very first.
HEPHAISTOS: You know, we could argue endlessly about whether the Neo-Darwinian process adequately explains the origins of these systems. You’ll deny that intentionality can ever arise from the non-intentional; I’ll counter that innumerable epochs of selective retention and attrition have refined these systems into such efficiency that they appear to be guided by intentionality even where none is present; then you . . .
PSYCHE: Then I shall say that such a claim, when separated from the dogmatisms of mechanistic thinking, obviously defies logic, mathematical probability, the fossil record, and even common sense. More to the point, I’ll say the very theory is a redundancy, since selection by itself is still a tautologous principle, however applied, and the question that actually needs answering concerns what has been selected. And to answer that we need only look at the processes of life itself to see that there are far more interesting forces at work than the basic algorithm of natural selection. Goodness, we can watch the processes of evolution at work in real time, and they’re simply more rapid and more dynamic than anything blind mutation could accomplish in discrete portions of the genome uncoordinated with the larger organic systems in which they might occur. The evolutionary life-sciences, perhaps out of needless deference to the methods of physics, often concentrate so obsessively on genotypes, and on gene-frequencies as the sole measure of evolutionary fitness, that they’re prone to ignore the incredible complexity of even the most basic organic systems—single cells included—or the dynamic processes that occur at the level of the phenotype, or the creative power of cells over the passive archives and templates provided by the genome. As Richard Lewontin (among others) often noted, DNA of itself is a particularly inert molecule, excellent as a platform for transcribing memory tokens, as it were, but subordinate for its expression and determination to the organism, which always somehow transcends mere coding . . . indeed, often determines that coding.22
HEPHAISTOS: And, once more, neither of us can establish how likely or unlikely it is that such order is the residue of a selective process rather than the achievement of an intentional power in nature. We don’t have a sufficient grasp of the laws at work to be able to calculate the probabilities.
PSYCHE: Oh, do be sensible, Phaesty. Are we arguing about only what can be proved in a laboratory? If so, Neo-Darwinism is excluded from the outset, since it offers nothing to observation except pontifical pronouncements of its own correctness; conversely, we really can observe organisms altering themselves genetically and morphologically in a laboratory, and in the world around us. Life evolves by way of replication. Certainly that’s where selection works its brutal magic, we all acknowledge; some species flourish, some wither away, all change. But replication is found only in living organisms, so the origins of life remain an enigma prior to selection of that kind. If life entails coding and replication, then it isn’t something that could be prised out of the lifeless by a mere process of selection. Life may be chosen, but choosing as such doesn’t confer life. And we don’t have to speculate on how living organisms replicate or how they’re altered over time. That’s something we can observe and learn ever more about; and the more we learn, the more amazing the levels of organization and cognitive operation and complexity we find. We find also a whole host of operations that not only explain but actively embody and demonstrate evolutionary adaptation right within the dynamic systems of phenotypes. We’re free to be orthodox Neo-Darwinians if we choose, but it’s sheer lunacy to continue to pretend that that’s the full story—or even the central story—of evolution. Like you, I’m an ardent believer in evolution as an open system of discovery and creativity—more than you, really, because I really mean those words in a literal way. I see life as always already spirit, engaged in the poetic labor of transforming timeless “value” into endlessly changing and multifarious temporal shapes and expressions, crafting itself into ever newer configurations and capacities. And I can point to more than enough evidence in nature in support of that vision.
VII
Creative Evolution
PSYCHE: We all know the standard genetocentric narrative, of course: an impermeable partition—the Weismann Barrier, that is—keeps an “immortal” germ cell lineage quarantined from the gametes and somatic cells of the body; the genes are the true replicators, determining everything, while the organic phenotype is merely the mortal, ephemeral vehicle by which that lineage is borne down through the ages, inviolate, imperishable, irresistible in its authority over the organism. We’re told that the true order of evolutionary causation is unilinear: genes code for proteins, forming and defining and determining organisms and their progeny in conformity to a genetic program inherited from prior generations. Occasionally, mutations occur in that germ line, and as a rule disappear as only so much fruitless genetic “noise” in the code; but every now and again, quite improbably, a mutation arises that enhances an organism’s chances of survival, and over unimaginable periods of trial and error the sheer accumulation of such beneficial mutations drives the process of evolution toward its unforeseen future. That too, of course, is often told in terms of a purposive narrative—say, genes fabricating their survival-vehicles and determining them at every level, even the psychological and the social—but then we’re assured that the language of purpose is only a metaphor, and there’s no real “urge” to proliferate and persist in the genome. Well, once again, how can we know the dancer from the dance? At this point, perhaps we’re really simply left with an inadjudicable clash of metaphysical systems.
Except that we’re not. We know that the standard narrative is not only incomplete, but largely false, except in the most trivial sense that the durable endures better than the fragile. Even where the Neo-Darwinian mechanism might apply—the preservation of a useful mutation at the lowest levels—it’s certainly only because that mutation occurs within an organic system endowed with the cognitive and intentional “skills” necessary to adopt that mutation and then to coordinate it creatively with an indescribably vast and elaborate integration of functions, in a way that reaches up from the “hermeneutical” plasticity of the RNA polymerase’s reading and interpretation of the genome, through the engineering ingenuity resident in every cell, all the way to the level of the entire phenotype.
Denis Noble is especially lucid on these issues, and especially good at exposing the false premises that inform the Neo-Darwinian orthodoxy. For one thing—and that a very crucial thing indeed—there’s no Weismann Barrier walling off the genome from somatic cells. If the genome is a kind of digital platform, so to speak, it’s one that the body’s cells both read and write. Far from genes imperiously operating the organism as a vehicle of survival, impressing inevitable phenotypic characteristics on it, they’re very much the creatures and servants of the living systems they inhabit—or, rather, within which they’re imprisoned. Goodness, it’s astonishing how many different protein syntheses can be generated using one and the same gene sequence—which is to say, obviously, that it isn’t the sequence itself that determines which of those syntheses will occur. It’s the systems themselves that have, over the epochs, relentlessly altered the phenotypic roles played by those genes, and determined the expressions of those codes, and interpreted the “meanings” of the “memory” transcribed in genetic materials. More to the point, often these adaptations appear in a single generation, in the course of a single organism’s life. Phenotypes change before genotypes do; genes are followers rather than leaders in the process. To find the truly active causes of evolutionary change, therefore, we should certainly look first at the cells, and at proteins, tissues, metabolites, organelles, and the dynamic organic systems formed in interaction with environments—in relation to which the genome contains not deterministic programs, but rather an array of templates and tools, at the disposal of the larger system. Actually, our understanding of what the gene is—what its boundaries are, how it functions—has become so ambiguous that some biologists are even willing to abandon talk of genes altogether.23
Don’t grimace at me, Phaesty. Simply consider what we now know about the power of genes to edit their own genomes. Barbara McClintock discovered genetic transposition as far back as the 1940s. She was able to demonstrate just from her experiments on maize, using radiation to disrupt its genome, that cells could engineer repairs to their own sequences by transposing latent genetic elements—what backward biologists still speak of as superfluous DNA—to other parts of the genome and activating them, then passing on the adaptation to future generations. This sort of cellular re-engineering of DNA, moreover, is anything but a simple mechanical process. As James Shapiro is so good at explaining, it’s a creative strategy for producing innovations, and for doing so far more powerfully than fortunate mutations and selection ever could: a cognitive process by which organisms employ all the biochemical and cellular tools at their disposal—all their capacities for cutting, splicing, copying, polymerizing, repairing, adapting, and so on—to alter the structure of the genome within their cells, and to transport DNA between cells, even to acquire new DNA from outside themselves . . . and also to move regions of a protein’s chain to other molecules so as to add to the functions of the receptive proteins, and to splice coding sequences or “introns” together by deleting non-coding “exons,” and to activate dormant genetic elements and suppress active ones, and so on—all in order to create, rather than merely await, beneficial changes. And, I would add, consider the vastly complex coordinations of protein-folding, according to principles that are almost certainly invisible from the merely physicalist vantage. . . .
HEPHAISTOS: Try to avoid overstatement.
PSYCHE: [With a sardonic smile:] Anyway, as Shapiro points out, there are a host of powerful evolutionary processes that occur outside any contribution made by natural selection, such as symbiogenesis or “cooperative evolution,” the process—so beautifully illuminated by the researches of Lynn Margulis—whereby distinct organisms merge to generate new organic systems. Or the horizontal, inter-species transfer of DNA. Or the duplication of genomes, “diploidy”—cases, that is, of hybrids producing double chromosomes, stabilized by intricate cellular and informational engineering—which is apparently a far more common phenomenon than we once thought, and which over the course of evolutionary history has resulted in quite a few sudden alterations of somatic structures. And, in addition to the cell’s uses of mobile genetic elements and the active restructuring of the genome, there are a host of epigenetic forces, which alter DNA functions and pass those alterations on to future generations without altering the DNA sequence, suppressing some parts of the code and accentuating others and somehow passing the acquired traits on to future generations through gametes. All of these processes, within all of these hierarchical organic systems, produce changes that are anything but random. As Shapiro describes the synthesis that he believes must inexorably displace the old Neo-Darwinian consensus, it begins from the frank admission not only that organisms are, as it were, networks of vital processes in intricately coordinated communication, but that cells themselves are cognitive—that is, sentient—entities, possessing sensory capabilities, means of responding to external and internal changes, methods of communication, powers of information-processing, and the capacity for making decisions; they’re built to evolve, through repairing and altering their own genomes in synchrony with other cells and with the whole organic system they inhabit, so as to create new hereditary characteristics. This leads to large-scale and rapid changes in the genome and in the multicellular structures to which they belong. Cells exhibit a special ingenuity in using their powers of natural genetic engineering to respond to environmental threats to their own growth, survival, and proliferation, often rapidly but profoundly restructuring the genome in doing so; and this process of heritable variation and innovation continues so long as the perils and disruptions to which they’re responding persist. Selection, in contrast, does not create so much as purify, by eliminating mutations that might inhibit adaptation. Such evolutionary innovations as survive selection and prove useful are then subject to microevolutionary refinements, and then to amplification and adaptation and new uses as successive environmental perturbations demand, until genuinely new and independent taxonomic characteristics are established, and the innovations thus produced are integrated into a distinct line and begin to constrain future developments.24
HEPHAISTOS: So organisms forge evolution rather than evolution forging organisms? That’s your claim? To be honest, that may be a distinction without a difference.
PSYCHE: My claim is that form and finality forge evolution and organism alike, using each to refine the other by way of a pervasive intentionality in nature.
HEPHAISTOS: I understand that, but of course we don’t know all the laws operative in these processes, and we have no reason to think that this . . . this cognitive ingenuity of which you speak, is anything but a refinement of material processes by purely physical forces and constraints. Need I once again remind you that, barring the discovery of how life originated, we’ve no way of judging how much natural selection could accomplish once that . . . information was flowing?
PSYCHE: And need I once again remind you that it’s the very structure of life, however basic or primordial, that exhibits intentionality and organization, no matter what contributions to its future evolution the processes of selection did or didn’t make? Unless we can discover some truly random process in the depth of life—something not always already coordinated within what look like intentional systems—I’m well within my rights to assert that the evidence of life itself is that, as far as we can tell, mind is always present in the structure of nature.
HEPHAISTOS: Present or merely potential? As we keep saying, direction is all. Your formal and final causes may look ubiquitous from the vantage of life’s system-level operations. From below, they remain largely invisible.
PSYCHE: Potentiality is already presence, even if that presence is made manifest only in being actualized. To say that mind is a potency in matter is already to say that matter is intrinsically mental—intrinsically something infinitely different from mechanism—and therefore from the very first moved toward its rational ends. Might I also note that the recognition of how fundamental cognitive activity is to every level of life does seem to clear away certain obscurities in the Neo-Darwinian orthodoxy? For instance, the seemingly saltationist geological record becomes a little less baffling when one realizes that enormous evolutionary changes can occur in very short order when environmental conditions . . . shall we say, inspire the creative ingenuity of organic systems.
HEPHAISTOS: Oh, but these are old arguments—Gould’s “punctuated equilibrium” and such—and as far as I know there’s no real agreement on what the fossil record really tells us on the matter.25
PSYCHE: There may not be agreement; but the record clearly favors the thesis of long periods of relative stability punctuated by periods of extraordinarily rapid innovation. And I won’t even bring up the issue of the mathematical probabilities of Neo-Darwinian gradualism . . .
HEPHAISTOS: Yet you just did. Please avoid rhetorical tricks, if you can. A missing mathematical formula isn’t a mathematical impossibility.
PSYCHE: True. But, even if we confine ourselves to mere probabilities, the very nature of organic systems confronts us with any number of reasons to think that Neo-Darwinism is badly in need of supplementation by a much larger, more comprehensive theory. I mean, it’s still an open question whether the notion of beneficial mutations of the genome—especially in any significant number—is a particularly useful one. Shapiro says that random mutations have nothing whatsoever to do with macroevolutionary transformations, that species don’t emerge from cumulative genetic mutations, and that genome-sequencing has confirmed as much beyond any doubt. I have to say, common sense also favors the argument. For instance, while I’m no computer programmer, I assume that the rules of digital code—whether that code’s inscribed in a platform of silicon or of nucleic acids—are consistent; and in digital code, with all its nested layerings of functions, there’s as a rule no such thing as useful noise or benign random copying errors. I assume that’s why organic cells are so lavishly equipped with means for protecting the genome against them, and for repairing the genome when they do occur. In fact, it may be that this very concept of useful randomness at the molecular level, at least as occurring with any evolutionarily meaningful frequency, is a purely metaphysical claim—a creature of theory rather than logic; certainly it remains largely immune to demonstration, no matter how many fruit-flies we irradiate, not only unobserved but technically unimaginable. Moreover, if such mutations at the level of code can become genuinely useful at the system-level of organism, surely this must be because the system is so cognitively alert and ingeniously coordinated that it isn’t dependent on the torpid process of natural selection to create new phenotypic characteristics, but can instead react to a mutation by making use of it intentionally, just as it makes use of the transposable elements in its own genome. If we’re willing to recognize this force of creative intention at every level and within every moment of the structures and history of life, and are willing to acknowledge the antecedent finality guiding that creativity as something truly situated within nature . . . well, so much becomes explicable.
