If someone had told us, twenty years ago, that today we would be reading the following in a major theoretical biology journal, we might not have believed it. Yet here it is. See, “Mind Everywhere: A Framework for Conceptualizing Goal-Directedness in Biology and Other Domains — Part Two,” by Michael Levin and David B. Resnik, in Biological Theory. From the open access paper (emphasis added):
[We] argue that current approaches to goal-directedness in biology cannot accommodate these results in a manner that helps us better understand how these systems work and fruitfully guides experimental work and practical applications in these areas of research. What is needed, therefore, is an approach to teleology in biology, informed by mentalistic concepts, such as intelligence, cognition, and intentionality. We describe and explain our mentalistic approach in greater depth, show how it can be applied to specific cases, and address some important objections to our view.
“Intelligence and Teleology”
The rapidity and breadth of Michael Levin’s “intelligence and teleology” revolution is astonishing. In the space of a few years, he has assembled a global community of like-minded investigators who openly advocate teleological arguments harking back to Aristotle and Plato. The neo-Darwinians, his opponents, are aging out of academia. Jerry Coyne is 76, Brian Charlesworth is 80, Douglas Futuyma is 83, Richard Dawkins is 84. Coyne and Dawkins have been cast by Gen Z as hidebound reactionaries for their stance on gender issues.
The neo-Darwinians have only themselves to blame for Levin’s rise to prominence. By heaping scorn and the threat of career death on anyone who dared to explore the reality of genuine purpose in living things, they left vast unexplored territories where someone with courage and insight could scoop up all kinds of interesting and neglected phenomena and recast those data in teleological terms.
No Fear of Career Death
Which is exactly what Levin has done. We’re told by a source that Levin has never feared career death. Fortunate for him! Even before college, he was writing computer code for money. From an online interview:
Mike also became very interested in computers and programming. He was paid to write software even before he started high school, and he planned to go to college to study computer science. While at Tufts University for college, Mike started a software company with his dad. He realized that to have a big impact in his field, he should learn more about the processes and computations that occur in the natural world, so he added a second major in biology. The science completely captivated Mike, and he gave up the software company to go to graduate school.
So Levin had options to fall back on, if academic biology kicked him out. But he also had courage, insight, and asked the right questions without prejudging the acceptable answers.
Or rather, mostly without prejudging. Levin and his community are offering a teleology-informed take on biology which differs from intelligent design in one all-important respect: the existence of a designer, or, if you will, the Designer. Levin is scrupulous to differentiate his ideas and approach from ID.
Thus, he is partly right, and partly wrong. Where the line separating right from wrong can be found, and why it falls where it does, is a valid question, addressed here most recently by Brian Miller. See, “Platonic Minds: How Stuart Burgess’s Ultimate Engineering Challenges Maverick Biologist Michael Levin.” For a Platonic alternative that recognizes intelligent design, see the description of biologist Richard Sternberg’s thinking in the recent book, Plato’s Revenge: The New Science of the Immaterial Genome.