This month marks four years since I began posting on the Science of Purpose. In that time, I have maintained, to the contrary of 20th century naturalism, that purpose is observable, measurable, and therefore an appropriate object of scientific study.
And while the 20th-century purveyors of scientific atheism rejected that notion, many naturalist scientists in this century have found it necessary to concede the matter. That is because, as Michael Behe has made clear, the complexity of biota is not reducible to Newtonian physics.
An Entirely New Paradigm
Some leading contemporary biologists, then, including Professor Denis Walsh of the University of Toronto, are calling for an entirely new paradigm that purportedly reconciles purpose with materialism, producing an ontology of “agency.” Walsh contributed an essay, “Objectcy and Agency: Towards a Methodological Vitalism,” in the 2018 book Everything Flows: Towards a Processual Philosophy of Biology. Here, “objectcy” (sic) is defined as “the role played by the elements in the domain of an object theory,” while “agency is the role played by the elements in the domain of an agent theory.” He writes,
The purposive behavior of organisms and their relation to their conditions of existence exhibit the sort of immanence that call for an agent theory.
More specifically:
Organisms constitute a distinct ontological category, they are agents. The existence of agents ushers in a range of natural phenomena and modal relations that are absent in an agent-free world … i.e., that do not apply to the study of non-living things…The concepts and methods we need in order to articulate an agent theory of organisms are goal, means, repertoire, requirement, teleology.
The Canonical Hypothesis
Jaques Monod, along with other champions of 20th-century scientism, was entirely mistaken on this issue. To be sure, Monod recognized that purpose is apparent in all organisms. So, in Chance and Necessity, the landmark publication of the 20th century naturalist movement, he addressed the question by acknowledging the reality of purpose, only to ultimately reduce it to the canonical hypothesis of randomness and selection:
Objectivity obliges us to recognize the teleonomic character of organisms, to admit that in their structure and performance they realize and pursue a purpose.
But later he “clarifies”:
With the globular protein we see nothing but the play of blind combination. Randomness caught on the wing … a totally blind process can by definition lead to anything; it can even lead to vision itself. In the ontogenesis of a functional protein are reflected the origin and descent of the whole biosphere.
Writing in 1970, Monod proclaimed that the overtly intentional actions performed by everything from E. coli to H. sapiens could be reduced to chemical stimuli such as hunger, pain, fear, reproduction, etc.
Why? Because the reigning metaphysics of science in the 20th century was based entirely on Newtonian mechanics and thermodynamics. As Walsh explains,
The primary substances of our commonsense ontology are objects. They are constituted of matter and take their propensity to behave in certain ways when they encounter certain external conditions … (and otherwise) remain unaltered. Objects do not initiate their own changes. The laws of nature are exogenous to objects which remain constant as the object changes. This is the Newtonian paradigm.
So, life itself is governed by the so-called “central dogma” as articulated by Francis Crick, whereby all organismal information originates in the DNA and flows in a linear sequence of molecular events in only one direction, from DNA to RNA to protein. There is no self-referential feedback of information at play anywhere in cellular life. As Monod described it: “We have at the molecular level, a veritable machine.”
Yet we know now that none of that is true.
Not Blind at All
Why? Because 56 years later, it is recognized that what transpires deep inside every living thing is not blind at all! Instead, what we are now able to see at the subcellular level is a dazzling orchestration of interactive complexity where “mere molecules” behave with previously unimaginable intentionality, as I’ve described previously (here and here). None of this can ever be reduced to the “Newtonian paradigm.”
Walsh again:
[M]odern synthesis evolutionary biology doesn’t recognize the contribution of organisms to evolution for the simple reason that it can’t. It is the wrong sort of theory — an object theory.
Acknowledging this, naturalism, as an ontology, has only two choices: concede and disband, or somehow create a new paradigm that accommodates the purpose-driven behavior that characterizes all of life.
To accommodate purpose within the framework of “reimagined” naturalism in the 21st century, a whole new framework is necessary: the metaphysics of agency.
Leading proponents of this approach, such as Amahury J. Lopez-Diaz and Carlos Gershenson in A Matter of Time: Towards a General Theory of Agency, point out:
Agency is routinely invoked across biology, cognitive science, artificial life, and philosophy as if its meaning were self-evident…[T]he renewed attention to organism-environment reciprocity, multicellularity and minimal cognition have made agency newly central rather than philosophically optional.
For organisms to exist as they do, it is necessary not only to account for the complexity of a given organism at a given time and place, but also the ability of biota in general to evolve different structures throughout the course of nature’s ever-changing environments, i.e.,
[C]omplex systems approaches from molecular parts to nonlinear interaction, emergence and self-organization by themselves don’t explain life’s historically contingent capacity to alter the constraints and possibilities of future evolution. The relevant contrast is between … systems confined to a fixed externally specified rule space and systems capable of materially reconstructing the constraints through which new functions become possible.
Performing such particular and demanding feats is truly daunting to imagine, but that is exactly what organisms do. And there is nothing in Newton or Gibbs-Helmholtz to explain it. The teleology of Aristotle accounts for it metaphysically, but not scientifically.
Reducing life’s “agency” to science thus requires the explanation of an entire repertoire of capabilities:
Agency begins when a precarious self-producing organization becomes temporally structured in such a way that its internally generated anticipatory dynamics selectively modulate organism-environment coupling in light of possible futures. Open-endedness begins when the organization can reconstruct the variables, measurement relations, effectors and norms through which its own future possibilities are defined.
An Impressive Statement
That is an impressive statement and from my point of view inarguable. For life on earth to exist and evolve in the vastness of its complexity, all that capacity for agency is certainly required. But the fundamental ontological question remains: Is agency merely a natural emergent from matter or is it, as Aquinas asserted, a transcendent immanence reflecting intelligent design?
There can be no doubt as to the metaphysical disposition of these authors:
Matter becomes agentive when it is organized so as not merely to persist, but to maintain, interpret, and transform the constraints through which persistence is possible.
[…]
Agency is not a substance added to matter, nor a metaphor imposed by observers, nor a universal property of systems that minimize uncertainty. Agency is a temporal achievement of living organization. We know now that its synthetic realization is quite literally, “a matter of time.”
With this last statement, the authors imply that the material realization of agency is not mysterious or vitalistic. The imperative of naturalism, then, is to demonstrate how agency emerged as just another part of evolutionary theory.
What both sides of the debate can agree on is just this: agency is necessary for life and could not arise purely by linear mechanics. But could agency, aka life itself, have been realized without pre-existing intrinsic design, aka teleology?
In a future post I will analyze the precise details of the naturalist model of agency’s synthetic realization, and discuss the pertinent ontological implications.