Abstract
The goal of this chapter is to present the dialectical holist stance on key topics in philosophy of biology as a theoretical bridge to Harris’s metaphysics of mind. In Sect. 6.2, I set out Harris’s necessary and sufficient conditions for life and in subsequent sections I compare these contentions with contemporary accounts. The central issues to be discussed in this chapter will be whether the notion of the unifying principle (ϕ) can be applied to the simplest unit of life, and if so, to establish what if any further philosophical insight this provides into the natures of life, evolution, and mind. In Sect. 6.3, I outline Harris’s argument that the explicative process (
) subsumes and broadens Neo-Darwinism. Here I address whether formal governance in collective living systems provides teleological direction to biological evolution. In the final section, I show that for both Harris and AE, positing formal governance across a range of biological systems implies the Gaia theory.
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Notes
- 1.
Harris purposes that initial emergence of living from the non-living may have been due to a “non-local faster than light influences” akin to the EPR experiment, which at “some threshold in the concrescence of convoluted polymers may have occurred in the primeval seas, which spontaneously initiated the generation and fecundation of living bacteria” (1991, 68). Harris made this appeal to defend his conclusion that living unity is implicit within and necessitated by prior processes of quantum mechanics. Though this line of consideration is beyond the scope of the present thesis, Harris appears to have anticipated what is now a flourishing area of research concerned with the Quantum Aspects of Life (Abbott, et al. 2008).
- 2.
- 3.
To this end, Harris follows Rupert Sheldrake’s speculative postulate of the morphogenetic field to be supported by a marriage between chaos and biology (1991, 74). Since the connection of fractal geometry to biology has already demonstrated itself to be a fruitful (e.g. Scott, 2007; Hancock, 2014), Sheldrake’s postulation of a (metaphysical) morphogenetic field appears redundant to the extent that it succeeds and excessively speculative to the extent that it posits as yet unsubstantiated forces in nature.
- 4.
Wolpert (2013) contends embryogenesis is a clear example of an increase in biological complexity over time, but one that reveals why evolution cannot be held responsible. “At best, one might argue that the embryo’s increase in complexity arose via competition occurring in the past, between its ancestors and their antagonists. This is a rather torturous connection between a current rise in complexity of a system and the process of natural selection. It also doesn’t address the possibility of hand-crafting an artificial embryo so that its complexity will rise in an artificial womb, without that womb having any ancestors” (247). In other words, biological self-organization whether of an individual cell or development through ontogenesis is presupposed by natural selection rather than its effect.
- 5.
Towards a metabolism-first model, Davies (2008) considers the “citric-acid cycle” to be one example of an autocatalytic system serving as a self-organizing precursor of living beings, “which forms the basis of intermediary metabolism” (109). Zeravcica and Brennerc (2017) have made great strides towards such a model with their research on soft-matter self-organization involving colloidal spheres.
- 6.
In this vein Ball (2009) has argued extensively that among other phenomena, lightning, convective roll cells, and river networks are structures “that arise because they offer ‘channels’ for relieving energy stress and producing entropy efficiently”. Following a number of predecessors, he goes on to write, “life itself is an example of non-equilibrium regularity and structure”, what he considers one of a number of “inevitable ordered forms, waiting to burst forth as soon as the universe gets the chance” (208). Additionally, see de Duve (2008), in which he considers life as a cosmic imperative.
- 7.
Perunov et al. contend that “an endless variety of far-from-equilibrium many-particle Newtonian systems are capable of exhibiting self-organization phenomena in which strikingly patterned structures emerge in the presence of dissipative external drives” (2016, 23). The types of phenomena they have in mind include sand dunes, snowflakes, hurricanes, spiral bundles of protein filaments, and motors, a list that appears redundant after the above discussion concerning emergence. Indeed, the “nonequilibrium world offers many test cases for the general hypothesis that organized, kinetically stable structures emerge and persist because their formation is reliably accompanied by extra work absorption and dissi-pation” (ibid.).
- 8.
Walker’s (2014) theory is in line with Tononi’s integrated information theory of consciousness. In either case, she holds “Φ quantifies how much information is generated by a physical system when it enters a particular state through the causal interactions among its elements, above and beyond the information generated independently by its parts” (433). I return to this theory in Chap. 8.
- 9.
According to Thompson, whereas an ant colony may be autonomous, it is not autopoietic because the components do not bear a circular causal relationship with its boundary. Similarly, allopoietic systems such as ribosomes or vesicles are not autonomous since they lack this circularity, their end product being different from themselves. Viruses are exemplified as systems that are also non-autonomous because outside of a host, they “do not exchange matter or energy with the environment” and are “completely inert […] subject to the vicissitudes of the environment” (123).
- 10.
Though space prevents my further discussion of the issue, Bohm’s extension of the implicate order to the nature of living systems is largely in agreement with the contentions of this section and the previous. For further details see Bohm (1969).
- 11.
In all his works, we find only one instance in which Harris mentions autopoiesis. He makes reference to Maturana and Varela’s (1980) Autopoiesis and Cognition, to which he remarks that it is by no means new, originating from Aristotle, but that it is certainly in line with his understanding of the irreducibility of an organism. Nevertheless, he finds fault with the theory on account of its being potentially relativistic concerning how such a system makes meaning (2006, 171). For Harris’s nearest anticipation of this theory see (1965, 327-28).
- 12.
Minimal autopoiesis consists only of this maintenance of identity in the circular process of material exchange but it lacks a metabolic network. Autopoiesis plus adaptivity (i.e. active monitoring of internal homeostatic or homeodynamic mechanisms) are required for meaning-making according to Thompson (2007, 148-49). As he further admits, a living material system requires the proactive quality of the latter (e.g. searching for food). To my mind, the former may just as well be considered autocatalytic.
- 13.
Minimal autopoiesis consists only of this maintenance of identity in the circular process of material exchange but it lacks a metabolic network. Autopoiesis plus adaptivity (i.e. active monitoring of internal homeostatic or homeodynamic mechanisms) are required for meaning making according to Thompson (2007, 148-49). As he further admits, a living material system requires the proactive quality of the latter (e.g. searching for food). To my mind, the former may just as well be considered autocatalytic.
- 14.
These include a steady-state inheritance system (consisting of self-regulating and gene-regulating elements), structural inheritance (e.g. cytoskeleton characteristics being passed on through mitosis/meiosis), chromatin marking (e.g. methylation patterns on DNA), and social structures including symbiotic functionality (Thompson, 2007 176-77).
- 15.
Bacteria outnumber human cells 10 to 1 but compose only a few percentages of our body mass, while their number of genes outnumber human genes by 360 times. (http://www.nih.gov/news/health/jun2012/nhgri-13.htm). Hence, the human being is an ecosystem by definition!
- 16.
Lineweaver and Davies (2013) likewise emphasize that information in DNA should be understood as being about its corresponding niches (i.e. like the organism, it is context dependent) and that it has even come from those same niches via natural selection. Davies contends that a gene is “a coded set of instructions for a ribosome to make a protein. Instructional information is clearly more than a mere bit string. There has to be a molecular milieu that can interpret and act on those instructions. In other words, biological information is contextual […] Context is manifestly a global property. You cannot tell by looking at the local level whether this or that base pair in DNA is instructional information or just junk” (Davies, 2013, 33-34). Dehmelt and Bastiaens (2011) provide further sympathetic accounts to this end.
- 17.
For further example, Koonin and Wolf (2009) have found that both Lamarckian and Darwinian views are important and capture different modalities of evolution: “in principle, the backward flow of specific information from the phenotype – or the environment viewed as extended phenotype – to the genome is not impossible owing to the wide spread of reverse transcription and DNA transposition. Highly sophisticated mechanisms are required for this bona fide Lamarckian scenario to work, and in two remarkable cases, the CASS and the piRNA system, such mechanisms have been discovered” (8). Additionally, Sarkies and Miska (2014) have proposed that mobile RNAi may provide short-term adaptation sufficient for the heritability of acquired characteristics (532).
- 18.
Though not emphasized by Harris, it appears to follow from his articulation of “freedom” that as the species or “swarm” increases its specific capacity to alter an environment; over time it establishes a positive selection effect for specific functions in future generations. In this vein, Harris’s position seems to assert that organic systems, both individual and collective, work toward transcending their own environmental and biological constraints by establishing their own. This issue will be further addressed in the following section.
- 19.
Recognizing that his account is counter the central dogma of Neo-Darwinism, Krakauer argues from what appears to be just the kind of “genetic engineering” mentioned above: “DNA is always associated with histone proteins forming the chromatin complex. Histone proteins possess long tails that can be biochemically modified. Changing the chemical environment of the cell leads to changes in the chemical composition of chromatin. Thereby DNA can be secondarily tagged along a repeating structure that is potentially as information-rich as the genome proper, and possesses the benefit of being directly modifiable within a single cell or organismal generation” (239).
- 20.
Recent discoveries by Chen et al. (2017) reveal evidence that the self-organization of viable niches in bacteria, for example, is achieved by “large-scale collective oscillation” that (in agreement with Gleiser above remarks) once again takes the form of “travelling waves” via “symmetry breaking”.
- 21.
Rothschild (2006) concludes her analysis of emergence in biology precisely in line with an interpretation of “natural selection” as formal governance: the “proper locus of natural selection”, or “evolutionary individuals could very well include the individual gene, organism, deme, and species […] Indeed, one could argue for even more levels, such as the level of a tissue or subcellular organelle” (160).
- 22.
Krakauer (2013) draws a similar conclusion concerning his own conception of evolution to be considered below, finding that the “nature” versus “nurture” dichotomy rests upon the false premise that “some traits are fixed whereas others are variable”. He claims that this premise is false “because nothing about a species remains fixed over suitably long periods of time” (242).
- 23.
In complement to this argument of organism-environment coupling, Krakauer has claimed that “there can be no information in the genome that is not already present in the environment”, which implies that evolutionary complexity “is not a property of an individual but a population” (2013, 233).
- 24.
- 25.
Here Sepkoski claims macroevolution supports Gould’s theory of punctuated equilibrium: exemplified through the case of a mass-extinction, much like the case of a forest fire, space is cleared for new life to emerge.
- 26.
For a further treatment of the role symbiogenesis plays in evolution see Gontier (2015).
- 27.
Estes et al. (2011) argue that perhaps the greatest human influence on ecology has been the widespread elimination of predators across the globe, which has been largely responsible for the mass extinction currently taking place. It is ironic, they point out, that due to the complex web of species interdependencies, “we often cannot unequivocally see the effects of large apex consumers until after they have been lost from an ecosystem, at which point the capacity to restore top-down control has been lost” (302).
- 28.
Li’s (2002) paper provides significant detail concerning how environmental variables are to be modelled such that “a theoretical framework of ecological phase transitions ” is scientifically viable.
- 29.
Further examples include amino acids, photosynthesis, wings, antifreeze proteins in the northern sea cod Boreogadus saida and Antarctic Dissotichus nawsoni (consisting of repeating threonine, alanine, and proline), sensitivity to long-wavelength green and red visual pigments, and serine protease molecules in bacteria (subtilisin) and vertebrates (trypsin), which have different structures but the same active site (Chela-Flores 2008, 158-59). Interestingly, Schloss (2008) has argued that convergent adaptations such as lungs, gills, guts, kidneys, organelles, and whole-organism branching morphologies create an internal, “three-dimensional” surface area that effectively endow living systems with an additional, “fourth dimension” (ff. 330).
- 30.
Though he does not cite Kurakin or the Gaia theory, Smith (2013) has argued that “phase transitions” provide the appropriate paradigm for understanding the biosphere. He claims some universal patterns of life should be understood as the order parameters of these transitions. As the phase transitions of the biosphere are dynamical rather than equilibrium, he argues (consistent with Bohm and Harris) the “individuality” of living systems that compose it is “derived” and “emergent” from the “core metabolism” of the biosphere (210).
- 31.
For further discussion concerning the connection between symbiosis and Gaia, see Hird’s (2010). In this work she argues that the dependence of environmental activity and regulation upon bacteria through symbiosis and symbiogenesis can be seen as Gaia’s fundamental actants, connecting life and non-living matter in biophysical and “biosocial entanglements”. Hird also provides a lucid historical summary of how the Gaia theory has subsumed the theory of autopoiesis.
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Schofield, J. (2021). Towards a Teleonomic Philosophy of Biology. In: A Phenomenological Revision of E. E. Harris's Dialectical Holism. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-65029-2_6
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