Stephen L. Talbott

When molecular biologists formulate their fundamental questions (how are DNA breaks repaired? how does the cell divide? how are RNAs localized in the cell? how are protein amounts regulated?) they seem to believe that the organism is actually capable of solving such problems. That is, they believe it engages in the pursuit of ends, organizing its activity according to the idea or logic of the tasks at hand. But they commonly try to answer these questions merely by tracing and adding together local causes — showing how one thing controls another, how this makes that happen. Such making, however, never reaches to the biologically and contextually expressed intentional activity that informed the original questions. Causes by themselves do not pursue tasks. The always lawful molecular proceedings in the organism are vital to analyze, but to offer these proceedings as explanations of a living performance is misguided. If the organism is able to coordinate physical causes for the satisfaction of its own needs and aims, then it governs those causes at least as much as it is governed by them.

How should we understand this governing? We need a reconciliation of the causal and intentional ways of thinking — a reconciliation that does justice to them both without a dualistic cleaving of the world.

Quote

"We cannot understand evolution without understanding the life of the organism. This life is expressed in well-coordinated processes; organisms are not mere collections of molecules, “informational” or otherwise. What is inherited, then, are ways of doing things with the available resources. If an organism can differentiate and organize its tissues to form liver and skin, retina and endothelium, brain and heart — and if it does this adaptively and improvisationally amid the not always predictable conditions in which it finds itself — then why not assume that these same well-directed powers of adaptation and improvisation are brought to bear also upon the formation of its gonads and germ cells? The validity of this assumption is rapidly being confirmed today. It may be argued that organismal performances (ways of doing things) cannot figure in evolution because they do not offer a sufficiently stable content for natural selection to work on. But this is, first, to accept the incoherent notion that the environment, as the “grim reaper” of natural selection, is the creative agent in evolution, and, second, to deny that organisms, in responding to this environment, are the capable agents we observe them to be in all aspects of their own development. But if organisms are capable agents — agents harmoniously demonstrating their intention to live a life of a certain character even when this requires overcoming aspects of their environment — we should ask, not only how they may accidentally contribute to the fitness and survival of future generations, but also how they may creatively contribute to the evolving character of those future generations. DNA sequences are appealing as the sole or primary materials of inheritance because they give us conveniently and quantitatively trackable things. But stable things and our own mathematical convenience are not necessarily the best guides for understanding life and change. What if the more pressing need is to learn to track a qualitative and coherent organizing reality we have hardly yet begun to recognize because we haven’t yet even thought to look for it? "

Beyond Biotechnology: The Barren Promise of Genetic Engineering

Excerpt from review in Nature Biotechnology:

“Once upon a time there was a German Romantic poet and an accomplished scientist named Goethe who believed that our aesthetic intuitions of nature, coming from the nature of the natural beings that we are, could provide our sciences with cognitive resources and guidance. Under the heading of a ‘delicate empiricism’ the authors ultimately offer a well-written and engaging attempt at reconstructing just such a context-sensitive approach to biology that can be relevant to our contemporary needs.”

Michael Pollan, author of The Omnivore’s Dilemma:

“Holdrege and Talbott’s analysis of genetic engineering is the smartest, most original, and most compelling I have seen anywhere, in journalism or academia.”
Genetic Explanations: Sense and Nonsense (Chapter contribution)

Chapter contributed:

The Myth of the Machine Organism: From Genetic Mechanisms to Living Beings

Excerpt: “If the organism manifests itself as a coordinated and directed activity, and if, from germ to maturity, we can recognize the unity of this activity — its distinctive way of being — and if our descriptive biological language is a continual invocation of this unified being, then why should we coyly refuse to acknowledge what we have recognized, pretending absurdly that we are just looking at a machine?”

Can Darwinian Evolutionary Theory Be Taken Seriously?

Evolutionary biologists routinely speak of natural selection as if it were an agent. It shapes the bodies and behaviors of organisms, targets or acts on particular genomic regions, favors various traits or behavioral strategies, operates in this way or that, maintains DNA sequences, promotes adaptation of populations to local environments, polices mutations, and, in general, causes an endless variety of effects. The phrase itself indicates a power to select, and this power is routinely spoken of as a force or pressure exerted upon populations.

Yet no such causal agent exists. “Natural selection” is merely shorthand for “the overall outcome of the lives and interactions of organisms”. Its meaning derives entirely from those environmentally situated organisms and what they do. Many evolutionary biologists, in fact, assure us that the idea of a selecting agent is “only a metaphor” — even as they themselves succumb to the compelling force of the metaphor.

If we really want to unpack the metaphor and free ourselves from its misleading aspects, what can we say about the organisms that give “natural selection” its meaning? One thing that has been said ever since humans began to think in a scientific or philosophical way about their fellow creatures, is that they possess a kind of active agency whereby they pursue their own ends.

But now we hear that this age-old and self-evident understanding was a mistake. The organism, whatever its obvious capacities for intelligently directed activity, does not exercise a real, present, and purposive intention. It only carries out certain functions designed into it by natural selection, just as a machine, or “automaton”, executes the intentions of its designer.

And so we are to believe that natural selection, which “is not an agent, except metaphorically”, manages to design artifacts; and the organism, without which we would lack even the concept of an agent, is not, after all, a creative or originating agent itself. Its agency has been transferred to an abstraction whose causal agency or “force” is, amid intellectual confusion, both denied and universally implied by biologists. Natural selection becomes rather like an occult Power of the pre-scientific age — all in order to render “illusory”, and indeed to usurp, the visible agency of the organism.

Continue reading full article here
Selected articles

“Getting Over the Code Delusion” (read)

“The Unbearable Wholeness of Beings” (read)

“From Physical Causes to Organisms of
Meaning” (read)

“Let’s Loosen Up Biological Thinking!” (read)

“Biology’s Shameful Refusal to Disown the
Machine-Organism” (read)

“Evolution and the Illusion of Randomness” (read)

“Genes and the Central Fallacy of
Evolutionary Theory” (read)

“How Does an Organism Get Its Shape? The
Causal Role of Biological Form (read)

“Three Questions for Intelligent Design
Theorists” (read)

“How the Organism Decides What to Make of
Its Genes” (read)
Full list of publication

For a full list of publications from Steve, please click the below two links:

Biology Worth of Life

Rediscovering Life

The Nature Institute; Ghent, New York

Quote

Books

Beyond Biotechnology: The Barren Promise of Genetic Engineering

Genetic Explanations: Sense and Nonsense (Chapter contribution)

Publications

Can Darwinian Evolutionary Theory Be Taken Seriously?

Selected articles

Full list of publication

Websites