Last time I touched on the problems Thomistic philosophy has with evolutionary theory’s lack of any way of dealing adequately with the concept of form (formal causation, in Aquinas-speak). I mentioned that Darwin was only able to introduce his theory on “The Origin of the Species” by spending many pages seeking to demonstrate that the concept of a species, meaning a class of “natural substances” sharing a single essential nature, was meaningless anyway. To all subsequent evolutionary theory, this philosophical nominalism has been axiomatic. If evolution is a constant flux of changeable characteristics, then there can be no real genera or species embodying tiger-ness, or hors-itude, or even, come to that, basic human nature.
That poses no apparent problems when we’re concentrating on comparing macro-evolutionary changes: a point mutation here, a gene duplication there, or even a symbiotic event like the incorporation of mitochondria seems to explain nicely how you stopped being a sponge or lanceolet. But the issue of form and of universals raises its head a little more in practical terms as we see that the overall pattern of the fossil record demonstrates sudden changes followed by stasis in forms: what is it that keeps the morphology stable over those millions of years of stasis … or more fundamentally, what exactly is being kept stable?
Population genetics shows that our genetic material is in a constant state of flux: your ancestral history can even be traced by the mutations of your genes. That can show why you’re not a chimp, but if most of your alleles are different even from your neolithic or mediaeval ancestors, what makes you both “human”? And where is the boundary? What’s stable if all the genes have changed?
Conveniently we can usually choose to ignore that question because all our confusingly close hominin ancestors are extinct. Nowadays, the widest genetic differences between ethnic groups are known to be no wider than those within them. Our topical “genealogical hypothesis” for Adam confirms the biblical statement that we are all from “one blood”, and that blood is well mixed within recent memory too. Nearly all “white” Americans carry typically “African” genes acquired within recent history, and I always remember my “black” patient who appeared in a TV documentary with her “white” twin sister. Any significance to ethnic differences reflects sociology, not genetics – which makes the new insistence on clear racial self-identities a “progressive” throwback to eugenic ignorance.
And yet – admirable as it may be to bury racism under a common humanity, actually the only materialist justification for saying there is a universal called “humanity”, rather than just a lot of similar organisms, is that we interbreed. But people interbred with Neanderthals and Denisovans too. And what happens when they start hybridizing genomes with extra-specific, or even synthetic, DNA?
I’m looking forward to J Scott Turner’s forthcoming book Purpose and Desire which, in part, follows Denis Noble is focusing our attention on the inability of current evolutionary theories to explain homeostasis. There is a “normal” state for an individual, a “form” which we seek to maintain, or to restore when it is disturbed. But there is homeostasis in the species too, despite the universals called species being non-existent in a Darwinian universe. I spent a career interpreting the results of medical histories, examinations and investigations – and it was all about comparing them to what I had learned to be “normal”. Without a theory of formal causation, there is no “normal”, even though we run our lives by it.
But it’s not enough to shrug and take homestasis, species, and so on for granted in practice whilst denying their reality in theory: there is actually a direct conflict between our theory of evolution, which says that living things can change indiscriminately, and our everyday experience, which says that living things strive in a thousand ways to stay true to what they are as individuals, and as members of what Aquinas considered to be the far more clearcut embodiment of form – their species, whose origin Darwin ostensibly explained but actually explained away.
Lack of any explanation of form hits closer to home, too. In a nostalgic mood yesterday I was looking back on the achievements and follies of my youth. As a teenager I acquired a piece of paper allowing me to drive a car – a little later a bigger bit of paper qualified me to practise medicine. But why are those entitlements still valid (the medical one isn’t, but only because I erased myself from the medical register on retirement to save money)?
My physical appearance has changed to the extent that I have to tell people who I am at college reunions. All kinds of bits are wearing out, and my views, knowledge and opinions have changed radically over the years. A majority of my cells have been replaced, and nearly all the actual molecules. So in what sense am I the same individual who gained a qualification way back? Or suppose I had a guilty secret and had murdered someone in my youth, and it came to light. Would the authorities be impressed by my saying I’m no longer the same person? That doesn’t get Nazi war criminals very far.
Well, you might point to my genome as being the constant factor. But my identical twin daughters have the same genome, and yet can’t pool either their qualifications or their criminal liabilities. But in any case, our genome isn’t constant. Not only does our gene-expression change radically through life, and differently in each cell type, by epigenetic modification, but our genome itself changes extensively over time, and not least in our brain cells, where our accountability might be thought most to reside.
Now, in practical terms it’s a non-problem. I know my past is my past, and you know your past is yours, because I know that I am me and you know that you are you. Anxiety-dreams about practising medicine persist despite most of my molecules having been replaced since I last practised, and if I had guilty nightmares about a murder I once committed, neither I nor anyone else would treat the continuity of my personhood as an illusion.
Yet that is not true of the proverbial pair of boots inherited from ones great-grandfather, which had been resoled six times and had three new sets of uppers. Admiral Nelson’s HMS Victory, they say, is only 10% original: after another century of restorations it may still attract tourists, but will have no actual physical connection with the Battle of Trafalgar. There will be no real continuity of form – but there is in our case as humans, and there is in my dog’s or your cat’s case, too.
The trouble is that the concept of “me” that distinguishes us as real entities from a warship or a pair of shoes has no material explanation, on the very principle of nominalism on which biology now is based. If there are no universals in biology governing the forms of organisms (and if they are forbidden anyway because they are not efficient causes), then there are also no minds that transcend whatever material things you can name, like molecules, genes or cells.
The fact that naturalist biology, and the Theory of Evolution in particular, has absolutely no way to account for this fundamental truth of form (which, as I’ve shown, affects morphology, medicine and the whole of human experience) is a major epistemological failure, is it not? It actually contradicts reality, which ought to be a problem for accepting it as genuine knowledge.
The ironic thing is that correcting that failure is excluded in principle by a thing called methodological materialism. So I guess people will continue to shrug off the confusing philosophical stuff and get on with evolutionary biology as before, whilst fudging the biological universals (by continuing to classify organisms), fudging the biology (by assuming homeostasis without any way of explaining it) and fudging our own personhood (by still regarding our past research, degrees and Nobel Prizes as “ours”).
But the problem is this – if these non-material universals like form, normality and mind actually exist, then in all probability they have a bearing on the true nature of origins, too. To be blind to reality in one area is to be blind in all.
I came upon this recently
http://www.science-news.info/158582/jon-garvey-on-michael-denton%E2%80%99s-evolution-still-a-theory-in-crisis/
which brought me here. Your words here on “Forms, natures, homeostasis” seem to be another way of describing Michael Denton’s “structuralism.” I don’t see how evolution (i.e. common ancestry of all living things) could accommodate these things, and I’m wondering what any new science of origins would look like.
Hi drnmud (how do I pronounce that?), and welcome to The Hump.
There is, if there is indeed such a thing as formal causation, bound to be some overlap between those thinking along such lines. Not having read J Scott Turner’s book yet, I’m not sure how his ideas relate to those of Denton.
Denton’s emphasis in that book was perhaps primarily on anatomy – things like the constancy of the vertebrate pentadactyl limb. His structuralism seems to rely on there being, as it were, mathematical laws built into the universe that govern many of the structures in nature. And he may well be right – and if so, it’s completely orthogonal to evolution.
Homeostasis emphasises physiology, on the other hand – function more than structure. That too could be thought to rely on some kind of self-organisation laws, but like Denton’s ideas, in the current state of ignorance, such laws are purely imaginary – and they tend to trip over the fact that spontaneous generation of life doesn’t happen. Laws are supposed to be regular! A law that only operates only once in history isn’t a law, but a contingency – happenstance to the materialist, creation to the theist.
That leads me to a thought I came across in the book that led to this recent post which is that no science can, in principle, explain its own origins. If, indeed the origin of life (and, perchance, even the origins of individual species) are unique, then perhaps eventually the science of origins will consist of realising that there is no science of origins.
Meanwhile, there are plenty of ideas challenging received wisdom both on what has happened, and how.
Interesting thoughts, Jon; I was just pondering this issue the other day.
To clarify, are you suggesting some form of OEC punctuated “special creation” (in the de novo everyday sense, I know you have been contending there’s an alternative sense of this)? Several of your recent posts have felt like they’re creeping in that direction, but of course I could be being dense and my brain has been fried with all the events going on down here!
One solution to the confusion between homeostasis and evolution I see is that the process takes so long that, to our eyes, things look stable. I think of it like watching grass grow–if I stare at the blade, I can’t tell when it’s growing, but if I come back a week later, I see that it has. Eventually the change happens, and it happens continuously, but the rate is imperceptible when we’re staring it down.
Thanks for always making me think!
Hi Noah
That progressive creation concept has, indeed, been floating around in recent posts. A long time ago (here) I raised the discussion that, if the course of evolution into new types were directed by God (ie, theistic as opposed to deistic evolution) it might be quite difficult to say what the difference was.
The more I read of both supporters and critics, the more the modern position called theistic evolution/evolutionary creation seems to be fairly adamant that the difference between the two (and hence between “theistic evolutionists” and “creationists”) is that elusive thing called “natural causes”, ie that life and its forms are entirely the product of natural laws (ie regular and predictable happenings) and initial conditions, with some variable amount of “chance” thrown in for good measure. Which is indistinguishable from deism, once one starts to dig into its implications, since it leaves no coherent room for providential governance.
The alternative is that, at some level, change of form requires new logoi, or information, or formal causation from the God who directs it – and that either involves the rather inappropriate category of “miracle” (which represents the biblical category of “signs and wonders”), or of the quiet and, essentially, invisible category of “creation ex-nihilo”, without material means.
If that were the case, the question becomes what comes ex nihilo? At one extreme it could be “a pair or population of Thompson’s gazelles”, or some higher taxon such as “gazelle”, with a limited natural capacity for adaptation, or (my default option if I ignore Aquinas!) the changes in DNA or other efficent causes of form which, in the other scheme, are attributed to “chance” when they should be attributed to “choice”.
The theological/philosophical sticking point, it seems to me, is that creation is, par excellence, final causation (that is, the goal determines the means). The goal closes off the possibilities in the game, as in any choice. Evolution therefore cannot, as in Darwinism, be an open-ended process if it is also theistic creation. For God to determine an outcome by deciding to use means whose outcomes he can’t determine is a logical contradiction, like his creating a square circle.
I think this clears things up a bit more–thanks! So you’re not proposing that God created at some point in the past a pair of gazelles out of thin air (or out of the dust, you get my point). Like, if I was staring at a patch of empty savannah at 3:15pm and at 3:15.1pm, a dust cloud picked up and turned into a couple of gazelles. Is your point simply (or not-so-simply) that the given species we see are 100% result of God’s willing them to be there?
What would you say about the randomness we observe in the process of evolution? It seems that I can logically get onboard with the scenario you present, but it doesn’t seem to line up with observed reality. I guess it’s similar to our discussion on why it takes thousands/millions of sperm to fertilize an egg if God intends me to exist. We’re presented with a reality that sure as heck seems to involve a ton of randomness, not just in events (car crashes, etc.) but in being (how many things had to happen by chance for me to exist?).
Anyway, I’m probably projecting some personal existential issues onto your post here–thanks!
Noah – on the “mechanics” of creation, since there aren’t any, by definition, it’s pretty hard to pontificate on what one might see.
That said, some of the biggest TE fudging seems to come from confusing the invisible nature of God’s creation with it’s not happening at all. So if we take a literal view of Gen 1 as an analogy, at the beginning of Day 6 there were no animals, and then there were: an angel observing would have seen that change of state in some way.
It wouldn’t be enough to say, on the scientific side, “evolution done it”, and on the theological side, “God willed it”. If evolution is a means, then it must be sufficient – or one might as well say that nature creates life from Coca-Cola by natural laws. And if it is found inadequate to the task, then the creative act must be as distinguishable from it as changing the water into wine was from the usual work of vintners.
As for chance, I think I’ll answer in a brief post, since I had a thought about it anyway.
Hi Noah,
Analogies are usually imperfect, and the fundamental problem with this one is that the grass always remains grass, no matter what time intervals you check its growth. But normal growth is different from fundamental change.
The solution you propose seems to be that there are no things except time. That all “things” (i.e. apparent forms) are really just one “thing” under various disguises, with time being the makeup artist.
Other than this blog and the paper cited in the first comment of this blog, does anyone have any other info on universals and modern biology?
Great blog btw. You, Sy and Perry Marshall seem to be the only Christians really talking about the Third Way movement. I’m wondering if Denis Alexander’s upcoming book might address it.
-Mark
Hi Mark, and welcome to the Hump.
I may not be much help on your question – I picked up a sense of universals in relation to biological form from a smattering of Thomistic philosophy and some reflection on the prevalence of “normal values” in my medical career. Another influence was some reading around Goethe’s approach to biology, which I incidentally found through Perry Marshall.
Thomist Etienne Gilson (From Aristotle to Darwin and Back Agian) mentions it a bit, and Ed Feser’s excellent blog has considered it from time to time. A probably excellent source I’ve been meaning to read (but could never afford!) is Real Essentialism by David S. Oderberg – all Aristotelian-sources, but then they’re the guys that take such universals seriously.
Theologically, the question of universals is what makes me question the ability of any purely process of change to account for living forms, without specifically creative input.
Thanks for kind words about the blog. Sy has invested quite heavily in research triggered by some of the “new biology” (which has led to his concentration on projects outside the Hump, to our loss). There’s been interest in Third Way in the ID community, too – and a studied indifference from BioLogos, the explanation for which has been recently, and inconclusively, discussed at Joshua Swamidass’s Peaceful Science. Our overall consensus was that that branch of Evolutionary Creation wants to present science as a neat and more or less settled package, around which theology can be juggled.
Please do stick around and chip in on some of the recent topics – your input would be valuable.
Jon