Then one of us is misunderstanding the argument, Professor. Obviously, metabolism is a collective phenomenon, not merely a matter of what 6*1013 cells (the estimated number for a 70-kilogram human body) are doing individually. It may be there is a minimal need for “biological information” for metabolism. At that level, the physico-chemical laws seem quite adequate. But biology is more than metabolism. The biological information an organism needs would be precisely that which would pertain to the organization of the cells in biologically useful ways (i.e., ways that support dynamic, coordinated, integrated biological functions within the total system); e.g., the formation of macromolecules, organs, etc.; their maintenance/repair; and so forth.
The tradition of gross misuse of probability theory in the name of religion lives on.
I really do wish I could understand what you mean by this, Professor. Are you (implicitly) suggesting that a person who thinks there are very good reasons why biology may well be irreducible to physics is expressing a “religious” view? The passage that you thought was so underwhelming was written by a person — that would be Dr. Grandpierre — who wants to “keep God out of it,” and is trying just as hard as he can to ensure that outcome. To my mind, if he has any religious tendency at all, it is mainly Buddhist, probably Zen. He accepts Big Bang cosmology, but follows Alan Guth and his disciples in holding that there was a “pre-time” in which a random fluctuation in the “false vacuum” was the triggering event for the Big Bang. I.e., there is no “ex nihilo” creation, for even a “false vacuum” is a something. Hardly Genesis 1–5 here, guy. In short, on these points he and I could not disagree more. And yet I find that doesn’t matter, for the science speaks for itself. That is, the validity of the work does not depend on what cosmological model was loaded in “at the beginning.” That to me argues in favor of the integrity of the work as a work of science. FWIW.
Look, instead of just yelling at each other as usual, why don’t we try to do something useful for a change? What I have in mind is a categorization of the physicalist and physical + biological views, first by giving definitions, and then citing the eminent proponents that stand for one or the other view. The ontological reduction of biology to physics is said to be one of the oldest and most significant problems in science. Not only has the issue never been resolved, but it continues to inspire much heated controversy right up to the present time, as we shall see in what follows.
But first some descriptions/definitions: Under the citation for “The Development of Human Behaviour” in the New Encyclopedia Britannica (1988) we find the following admirable descriptions:
The Physicalist View
“Some scientists advocate the view that human beings do not differ qualitatively from other natural phenomena and that human beings are therefore controlled by the same forces that control nature. Since all natural phenomena are composed of the same units (i.e. atoms and molecules), the mechanical laws of chemistry and physics that explain the actions of these basic units provide information about how human beings act as well. The basic model of this mechanistic metatheory is the machine, in which complex phenomena are ultimately reducible to the workings of elementary parts and their relations. Movement of the parts is initiated by an application of forces outside the unit and results in a chainlike sequence of events. Applied to the study of human development, the mechanistic model postulates human beings who are essentially passive and only reactive to outside forces. The individual is at rest until activity is caused by external forces (stimuli) that bring about change (responses). Complex human activities, such as the mental act of problem solving or even the feeling of emotions, can be measured quantitatively (at least in theory) as the action of a multitude of stimulus-response connections.”
The Physical + Biological View
“A contrasting organismic metatheory holds that mechanism is inapplicable to the study of human beings because atoms and molecules within humans fuse to create characteristics that do not exist in isolated parts. A proper knowledge of human beings is lost if parts or elements are studied by themselves; hence, human development must be apprehended in a holistic rather than mechanistic manner. This organismic view applied to the study of human development yields an active model in which individuals are constantly active and in which qualitative change is evident in the individual’s action on the environment…. A third metatheory postulates that human development arises from continuous interaction among different levels of organization, including inner physical and biological phenomena as well as cultural and historical events.”
Now we let the proponents of the two views speak for themselves:
The Physicalists
Grandpierre writes, “The views prevailing today in the universities and in textbooks on physics, as well as in such influential best-sellers as Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time, express the one-sided materialistic view that human beings are mere material objects, the behavior of which will be exactly calculated and predicted by the soon-coming Grand Unified Theory of physics.”
As Hawking himself puts it, “…if there really is a complete unified theory, it would also presumably determine our actions.”
Roger Penrose: “…as I am suggesting, the phenomenon of consciousness depends upon this putative CQG (Correct Quantum Gravity theory).”
But not just eminent physicists entertain such views. As Grandpierre points out, “… [G. C.] Williams (Adaptation and Natural Selection, 1966) articulated the common belief among biologists, expressed both in current teaching and in research, that ‘the theory of selection is based on the assumption that the laws of physical science plus natural selection can furnish a complete explanation for any biological phenomenon, and that these principles can explain adaptation in general and in the abstract and in any particular example of an adaptation.’”
Jacques Monod (Nobel Prize Winner): “Anything can be reduced to simple, obvious, mechanical interactions. The cell is a machine; the animal is a machine; man is a machine.”
As Daniel Stoljar notes, “Physicalism is the thesis that everything is physical, or as contemporary philosophers sometimes put it, that everything supervenes on the physical…. Of course, physicalists don’t deny that the world might contain many items that at first glance don’t seem physical — items of a biological, or psychological, or moral, or social nature. But they insist nevertheless that at the end of the day such items are wholly physical.”
Which gets us into the really “good stuff”:
Richard Lewontin: “We take the side of [materialist] science in spite of the patent absurdity of some of its constructs, in spite of its failure to fulfill many of its extravagant promises of health and life, in spite of the tolerance of the scientific community for unsubstantiated just-so stories, because we have a prior commitment, a commitment to materialism. It is not that the methods and institutions of science somehow compel us to accept a material explanation of the phenomenal world, but, on the contrary, that we are forced by our a priori adherence to material causes to create an apparatus of investigation and a set of concepts that produce material explanations, no matter how counterintuitive, no matter how mystifying to the uninitiated. Moreover, that materialism is absolute….”
Steven Pinker: “Ethical theory requires idealizations like free, sentient, rational, equivalent agents whose behavior is uncaused” … and yet, “the world, as seen by science, does not really have uncaused events.”
N. Pearcy: “Moral reasoning assumes the existence of things that science tells us are unreal.”
The Physical + Biological View
As Grandpierre points out, other eminent thinkers argue against the physicalist (materialist) view, notably Ervin Bauer and Michael Polanyi. These are people who insist that the “decisive point” at issue is the regulative mechanism of biology on the boundary conditions of physics.
Augros and Stanciu: “All the properties of the organism we have discussed so far — its astonishing unity, its capacity to build its own parts, its increasing differentiation through time, its power of self-repair and self-regeneration, its ability to transform other materials into itself, and its incessant activity — all these not only distinguish the living being from the machine but also demonstrate its uniqueness amid the whole of nature…The organism is sui generis, in a class by itself.”
Bertalanffy: “For these features we have no analogue in inorganic systems…mechanistic modes of explanation are in principle unsuitable for dealing with certain features of the organic; and it is just these features which make up the essential peculiarities of the organisms.”
Pattee: “We find in none of the present theories of replication and protein synthesis any interpretation of the origin of the genetic text which is being replicated, translated and expressed in functional proteins, nor do they lead to any understanding of the relation between particular linear sequences or distributions of subunits in nucleic acid and proteins, and the specific structural and functional properties which are assumed to result entirely from these linear sequences.”
Bertalanffy remarked that “According to Pattee (1961), the order of biological macromolecules is not adequately explained as an accumulation of genetic restrictions via selection, but replication presupposes well-ordered rather than random sequences. Thus there are principles of “self-organization” at various levels that require no genetic control. Immanent laws run through the gamut of biological organizations.”
Polyani draws attention to the fact that “machines seem obviously irreducible…. They do not come into being by physical-chemical equilibration, but are shaped by man. They are shaped and designed for a specific purpose…. Only the principles underlying the operations of the watch in telling the time could specify your invention of the watch effectively, and these cannot be expressed in terms of physical-chemical variables…. Nothing is said about the content of a book by its physical-chemical topography. All objects conveying information are irreducible to the terms of physics and chemistry…. The laws of inanimate nature operate in a machine under the control of operational principles that constitute (or determine) its boundaries. Such a system is clearly under a dual control…. Any chemical or physical study of living things that is irrelevant to the working of the organism is no part of biology, just as the chemical and physical studies of a machine must bear on the way the machine works, if it is to serve engineering…. Biological principles are seen then to control the boundary conditions within which the forces of physics and chemistry carry on the business of life. This dual action of a system is said to work by the principle of boundary control ... such shaping of boundaries may be said to go beyond a mere “fixing of boundaries” and establishes a “controlling principle” … [that] puts the system under the control of a non-physical-chemical principle by a profoundly informative intervention…. The question is whether or not the logical range of random mutations includes the formation of novel principles not definable in terms of physics and chemistry. It seems very unlikely that it does include it.” [bolds added]
Well, there’s some “grist for the mill.” People who wish to entertain the idea that one or the other side of this debate must be right are free to do so, and may draw their own conclusions. I just meant to suggest to you dear RWP that this is not at all a situation in which the “case has been closed.”
Thank you so very much for writing!
"I just meant to suggest to you dear RWP that this is not at all a situation in which the “case has been closed.” "
Suggest all you want. Evolution is a fact.
I'm sure that is true, yes.
I am completely unpersuaded of the applicability of information theory of any kind to practical problems in biological chemistry. The existence of a couple of funded scientists who are trying to prove there is such a role is not persuasive. But in any case, you cannot treat the nearly identical behavior of nearly identical cells as separate bits of information. How intricate cellular communication is in a complex multicellular organism is an open question. But certainly, it is many, many orders of magnitude less complex than treating each reaction in each cell as independent. Such a calculation smacks of the familiar 'improbability of myoglobin' calculations presented on numerous creationist web sites, which persuade non-neophytes of nothing except the author's naivety about probability calculations.
Are you (implicitly) suggesting that a person who thinks there are very good reasons why biology may well be irreducible to physics is expressing a “religious” view?
I'm saying that the people I know who do so are generally motivated by religion, and not by scientific evidence. (And also, if you want to avoid confusion with a YEC, stay away from the standard YEC bag of tricks:-)).
My opinion on the physicalist/non-physicalist debate is that it's premature; we know of no non-chaotic system that does not display determinist dynamics, and a philosophical distaste for determinism is not sufficient scientific grounds for rejecting the premise that biological systems are determinate. Moreover, we know enough of very simple living systems to expect that if they were not deterministic, we would have seen evidence of non-determinism. For example, we have mapped out not just the genome, but also the proteome , of some bacteria. If we know every gene; if we know every protein and RNA gene product; if we've determine all their 3D structures (and we're getting there); if we know their functions, and how they interact (ditto); and we have no evidence of any special fields or forces or anything that indicates that they behave other than by the evolution of physical/chemical laws; then I would say that we're in a pretty good position to discount vitalism at the level of a single cell.
But more importantly, I would say that you and AG are playing the age-old game of God-in-the-gaps. You're positing new entities, not because of a manifest inadequacy in established ones, but because you badly want those entities to exist, and you can identify niches where current experiment can't disprove them. That surely isn't scientific.