Reclaiming a living cosmos from the dead-end tradition of Western scientism

Reclaiming a living cosmos from the dead-end tradition of Western scientism

Jackson Lears

Epigeneticists are moving toward the ideas of adaptive or directed mutation, but cautiously because such notions breach the Weismann barrier between somatic and genetic change—a breach that in Dawkins’s view would open the floodgates of “fanaticism” and “zealotry” (by which he means Lamarckism). Somewhere, Lamarck is smiling.

In recent years, epigeneticists have begun addressing larger ontological questions. Eva Jablonka has emphasized “the restlessness of matter,” while Gerd Müller and Stuart Newman have gone further, arguing that random variation and natural selection alone do not account for the presence of organic forms in nature. Instead, they invoke an “inherent plasticity” in living matter, an active responsiveness to the physical environment. Plasticity and responsiveness combined to create the capacity for generating new organic forms, though in more complex organisms these “inherent material properties” may have ceded importance to genetic factors, which have obscured the importance of earlier, more primitive epigenetic mechanisms. Given this possibility of change over time, the effort to locate the sources of organic form requires an archeological, historical dimension. As Riskin concludes, Müller’s and Newman’s “approach to the history of life assumes inherent natural agencies whose action over time has produced a history that is neither designed nor random, but contingent.”

The implications of this conclusion are fundamentally transformative. Emphasizing what human beings have in common with the rest of the natural world does not reduce humans to passive mechanisms—not if the rest of the natural world is an animated, active mechanism. And a clearer understanding of our relationship to that world requires more than masses of Big Data; it also demands a sensitivity to the ways that organisms engage with the contingent circumstances of their environment in historical time. That environment includes religions and ideologies and economic systems as well as air and soil and water. Who knows? Maybe scientists will have something to learn from historians, as well as the other way around.

The consequences of a fresh perspective might be political and moral as well as intellectual. A full recognition of an animated material world could well trigger a deeper mode of environmental reform, a more sane and equitable model of economic growth, and even religious precepts that challenge the ethos of possessive individualism and mastery over nature. Schrödinger’s question—what is life?—leads us to reconsider what it means to be in the world with other beings like but also unlike ourselves. The task could not be more timely, or more urgent.

As I noted in another thread, it's always a bit weird to me when I see "Western" thrown in front of words like Scientism...is there a non-Western Scientism? Surely it's obvious most people in the West aren't adherents to the Scientistic/Materialist faith?

Reclaiming a living cosmos from the dead-end tradition of Western scientism

Jackson Lears

The Riskin Title that J. Lears reviewed looks interesting.  I may be a lot more "over the edge" on how much Darwin's reasoning evolved around mental evolution!  The mind and its understandings becoming biological messages should be obvious to us - now - as it was to him in the 1800's.

 For decades, if not centuries, these ideas have been consigned to the dustbin of failed science. Lamarck himself has been dismissed as “not just wrong but absurd, laughable, beyond the pale,” Riskin writes. One of her great accomplishments is to go back to the sources and demonstrate that Charles Darwin was a good deal more of a Lamarckian than contemporary passive mechanists have acknowledged. He was torn between the mandate to banish agency from nature and the impulse to make agency synonymous with life. In key passages of his On the Origin of Species, Darwin postulated an innate power of transformation within organisms. Indeed, as Riskin writes, that power forms “a subterranean, dynamic presence periodically bursting up through the limpid surface of Darwin’s prose.” In Origin, he discussed how difficult it is for breeders to maintain the traits they want in a given population, describing what he called “a constant struggle going on between, on the one hand, the tendency to reversion to a less modified state, as well as an innate tendency to further variability of all kinds, and, on the other hand, the power of steady selection to keep the breed true.” Later in the Origin, he labeled this innate tendency “generative variability. - Lears 

Of course, the first Darwin to present a theory of evolution - Charles's famous grandfather - had it right.

wiki 

 Darwin's most important scientific work, Zoonomia (1794–1796), contains a system of pathology and a chapter on 'Generation'. In the latter, he anticipated some of the views of Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, which foreshadowed the modern theory of evolution. Erasmus Darwin's works were read and commented on by his grandson Charles Darwin the naturalist. Erasmus Darwin based his theories on David Hartley's psychological theory of associationism.[9] The essence of his views is contained in the following passage, which he follows up with the conclusion that one and the same kind of living filament is and has been the cause of all organic life:

Would it be too bold to imagine, that in the great length of time, since the earth began to exist, perhaps millions of ages before the commencement of the history of mankind, would it be too bold to imagine, that all warm-blooded animals have arisen from one living filament, which THE GREAT FIRST CAUSE endued with animality, with the power of acquiring new parts, attended with new propensities, directed by irritations, sensations, volitions, and associations; and thus possessing the faculty of continuing to improve by its own inherent activity, and of delivering down those improvements by generation to its posterity, world without end![10] E. Darwin.

Both Darwins' theories were betrayed by Weismann and his rogue followers.  E. Darwin had a form of "survival of the fittest" conceptualization to pass to his offspring.  And it had mental activities at it core!

The Riskin Title that J. Lears reviewed looks interesting.  I may be a lot more "over the edge" on how much Darwin's reasoning evolved around mental evolution!  The mind and its understandings becoming biological messages should be obvious to us - now - as it was to him in the 1800's.


Of course, the first Darwin to present a theory of evolution - Charles's famous grandfather - had it right.

wiki 

Both Darwins' theories were betrayed by Weismann and his rogue followers.  E. Darwin had a form of "survival of the fittest" conceptualization to pass to his offspring.  And it had mental activities at it core!

Very interesting - Thanks for the information on Darwin's grandfather!

'Where the roots of Western culture ... considered the aim of life the perfection of man, modern man is concerned with the perfection of things, and the knowledge of how to make them.'

  – Erich Fromm

Reclaiming a living cosmos from the dead-end tradition of Western scientism

Jackson Lears

"Plasticity and responsiveness combined to create the capacity for generating new organic forms..." - this strikes me as so deliberately vague as to be meaningless other than to show the lack of any real ideas. Consider any complicated irreducibly complex biological mechanism - how about the human immune system? How can these words have any application to the actual origin of such systems?  

It seems to me this is mainly an elaborate, wordy obfuscation of the real dilemma facing materialism in biology, still faced with no solution in sight by new wave evolutionary biologists like Muller. This is the mystery of where biological form came from, in all its intricate, complicated glory. Any unbiased cursory examination uncovers vast intelligence, ingenuity and even playfulness, albeit sometimes along with ugliness and cruelty of purpose. The origin of this is way beyond any material mechanisms however complicated. These new wave thinkers still insist that complex biological form had to have somehow come about without sentient intelligence, a quest that I think will never find solutions much better than Darwinism.  They kind of want to have their cake and eat it too, so to speak - solve the origin of biological form while still with one foot solidly in materialism.

The paper beginning this thread is similar to other recent papers in theoretical biology that seem to go beyond the strict limits of Darwinism (having reluctantly realized that it just doesn't work in the light of all the recent research) - vague and ambiguous. 

Here's another one, this new paper about how the cell isn't really a machine (therefore it can't be used to bolster the (of course invalid) claims of ID advocates that its origin must be design and intelligence). This is  "Is the cell really a machine?" in the Journal of Theoretical Biology, Volume 477, 4 June 2019, Pages 108-126 (unfortunately behind a paywall): 

Abstract:

"It has become customary to conceptualize the living cell as an intricate piece of machinery, different to a man-made machine only in terms of its superior complexity. This familiar understanding grounds the conviction that a cell’s organization can be explained reductionistically, as well as the idea that its molecular pathways can be construed as deterministic circuits. The machine conception of the cell owes a great deal of its success to the methods traditionally used in molecular biology. However, the recent introduction of novel experimental techniques capable of tracking individual molecules within cells in real time is leading to the rapid accumulation of data that are inconsistent with an engineering view of the cell. This paper examines four major domains of current research in which the challenges to the machine conception of the cell are particularly pronounced: cellular architecture, protein complexes, intracellular transport, and cellular behaviour. It argues that a new theoretical understanding of the cell is emerging from the study of these phenomena which emphasizes the dynamic, self-organizing nature of its constitution, the fluidity and plasticity of its components, and the stochasticity and non-linearity of its underlying processes."

The language in the paper becomes as vague and ambiguous as possible (like most post-post-neo-Darwinian thought) when it comes to proposing what all the many intracellular functions (like molecular transport) really are, if they aren't really microscopic macro-molecular machinery. The paper doesn't really propose anything scientific about what these processes really are if they aren't machinery, albeit very different than simplistic man-made machinery. There are no actual new ideas. Just use of buzz-words, like to claim it's "dynamic self-organization" not "self-assembly", as if that explains anything. I guess it's really a magical process then if it isn't at base very complex molecular machinery. 

The paper also gets into a bunch of ambiguity about the cell "harnessing" stochastic systems and Brownian motion. It should be simple - random molecular motion (microscopic brownian motion of molecules in the cell) doesn't generate function: design generates function - the intelligent use of random events, clearly what the cell is doing. But of course the author rejects the machine insight without substituting anything concrete to replace it - it just can't be molecular machinery since that gives ID a toehold in molecular biology. Again, the unintended implication that it then must be magic of some sort.

This kind of "research" paper doesn't really contribute much other than to show growing desperation at how all the latest real research in molecular biology is showing layer after layer of machinelike complexity that increasingly screams design.

This kind of "research" paper doesn't really contribute much other than to show growing desperation at how all the latest real research in molecular biology is showing layer after layer of machinelike complexity that increasingly screams design.

I don't think something being non-machinelike, or non-mechanistic, means it lacks complexity.

Also, does machine-like complexity really show design in and of itself? I thought ID was an argument from probability?

I don't think something being non-machinelike, or non-mechanistic, means it lacks complexity.

Also, does machine-like complexity really show design in and of itself? I thought ID was an argument from probability?

I notice that you don't challenge my main point about the unscientific, vague, ambiguous and probably desperate nature of both post-neo-Darwinist papers, and many others.

I didn't mean to imply that non machine-like systems necessarily lack complexity. But one of the problems of the paper is that the author doesn't explain how specific intracellular functions, like molecular transport, can be accomplished by something in the cell that is essentially at base something other than a machine. The word "machine" is defined as "an apparatus consisting of interrelated parts with separate functions, used in the performance of some kind of work". Somebody has to explain to me how intracellular molecular transport can be carried out by some sort of system that isn't at base a machine.

Certainly ID is at base an argument from probability, but the probabilities, or more accurately improbabilities, of the unguided purposeless neoDarwinian mechanism forming complicated irreducibly complex machines (like the bacterial flagellum, or the arthropod body plan including all the organ systems) in the age of the Earth much less the actual times observed in the fossil record is miniscule beyond microscopic.

nbtruthman pid='29576' dateline='1561839778']
I notice that you don't challenge my main point about the unscientific, vague, ambiguous and probably desperate nature of both post-neo-Darwinist papers, and many others.



Certainly ID is at base an argument from probability, but the probabilities, or more accurately improbabilities, of the unguided purposeless neoDarwinian mechanism forming complicated irreducibly complex machines (like the bacterial flagellum, or the arthropod body plan including all the organ systems) in the age of the Earth much less the actual times observed in the fossil record is miniscule beyond microscopic.

This is what ID is based upon.