Not me, you understand! My friend Sy Garte, one of the original writers here, who has moved on to various platforms of his own, is the lead author of a significant new paper. I confess upfront that I became aware it of through the ID Discovery Institute’s Evolution News and Views rather than Sy himself. His co-authors are Perry Marshall, whose 2015 Evolution 2.0 sought to bridge the gap between conventional evolutionary theory and Intelligent Design, and Stuart Kaufmann, one of the leading systems biologists and an advocate of “natural” self-organisation. A philosophically diverse trio!
Sy himself, a biochemist and geneticist by training, regards himself as a theistic evolutionist, but not of the semi-deist BioLogos type, as our original Hump “manifesto” shows. Sy was converted to Christ from militant atheism to Christianity, as you can find on YouTube, (eg here).
To cut to the chase, the central thesis of the paper is that life is provably not governed by mathematical laws (genetic or otherwise), but that organisms possess cognitive powers, aka intelligence, in the way they deal with life:
Biology exercises agency and cognition and generates negative information entropy. Organisms demonstrably exercise choice and harness affordances in ways that non-living systems do not.
They emphasise that this is not a scientific inference from life’s complexity and the failure (so far) to find mathematical laws governing it, but a deduction from mathematics itself:
We need to make clear from the outset that our central assertions are not grounded in scientific experiments which are subject to argument, interpretation, and counterexamples. They are mathematical proofs and thus logically and necessarily true.
The core issue they draw out is this:
The problem is that, as James Shapiro says, “All Living Cells are Cognitive”. This is, by definition, a mathematically intractable problem. It is equivalent to Chalmers’ Hard Problem of consciousness: Walker and Davies call it the Hard Problem of Life.
Now let me briefly polish my own fingernails here by saying that Sy credits me with introducing him to James Shapiro’s “Natural Genetic Engineering” work from which much of this thinking stems.
Two striking examples are given in the text, but I want just to concentrate on one here, in order to focus my discussion. I can think of many more off the top of my head, and the literature is full of them. This one concerns newts.
The exercise of agency does not just apply to humans. Levin reports that in newts, the construction of kidney tubules demonstrates remarkable adaptability depending on the ploidy (chromosome number) of the animal, which affects cell size.
In normal newts, kidney tubules are typically formed by the interaction of 8 to 10 small cells in a cross-section. These cells communicate and coordinate with each other to create a tubule with a lumen of a specific size. This process relies on cell-to-cell communication mechanisms.
When newts are artificially made polyploid, their cell size increases significantly due to the higher chromosome number. Despite this increase in cell size, the kidney tubules still maintain the correct lumen diameter. As the cells become larger, fewer cells are required to form the tubule. For instance, instead of 8 to 10 cells, a smaller number of larger cells are used to achieve the same geometric structure.
In cases where the cells are made extremely large, the system adapts even further. Instead of relying on cell-to-cell communication, a single large cell wraps itself into a “C” shape to form the tubule. This process uses a completely different molecular mechanism—cytoskeletal bending—rather than the usual cell-to-cell constructions.
Now, think about this. On a purely mechanistic model, if you double the number of chromosomes, it’s no longer a newt but something else – a double-newt. In fact, chromosome doubling has been hypothesised as the cause of major evolutionary changes in the past. Yet there is something in the developing embryo that not only knows it needs to be a proper newt, but has the mysterious ability to work out how it can become one despite the usual pathways, in this case to kidney tubule formation, being blocked. It appears entirely analogous to finding your supply of plastic tubing has been nicked on the Ford assembly line, and improvising some from a bit of old flex, overriding the protocol.
And hence Sy and his co-authors conclude:
What we can demonstrate empirically but cannot absolutely prove (thus making this aspect of our argument science and not mathematics) is our insistence that biological agents are indeed making choices, that humans really are choosing which scientific theories are good or bad, and that our dogs really are choosing whether to urinate in the living room or back yard. “There is nothing so amusing as a guy whose purpose is to convince you that there is no purpose”.
We admit we cannot absolutely prove that the universe is not deterministic. Perhaps all choices really are illusions. We can only point out that such a universe would be more predestined than anything imagined by most creationists.
Since it is not in their brief (and would probably fail peer-review anyway) is any explanation of how this universal cognitive ability from the humblest bacterium to the human being comes to exist. I suspect the authors would disagree anyway. Kaufmann’s forte is self-organisation, so perhaps he would say that the interaction of natural processes leads, by chance, to more than the sum of their parts. Sy would certainly see the providence of God at work, though he would still be looking for “natural” (whatever that means!) processes. And there are other “global” explanations, from the panpsychic idea that “atoms” of consciousness make up the whole of the universe, to Plato’s “world of forms,” an idea seriously held today by some in the Intelligent Design community, for example.
As I read the article I see hints that the authors, like James Shapiro, see this genuinely teleological power of cognition as being behind the macro-evolution of all that lives. In other words, it implies a Lamarckian idea that a fish might develop legs because the fish has some inkling that they would be useful, and furthermore knows enough about itself to design and implement them, together with all the physiological adjustments necessary.
Now, I’ve come to doubt, from the evidence, that these great transitions in body form ever happened at all, still less that it is plausible that the biochemical constituents of an organism, in combination, mysteriously enable a shrew to envision a stepwise transition to an echo-locating bat. There seems to me to be strong evidence for the kind of Aristotelian limitations of form that make even a polyploid newt embryo aim at, and succeed in, becoming a newt. So I’m happy to account for the beauty and wonder of the species as coming, direct, from the hand of the Word of God.
But it’s still a pretty gob-smacking trick for a newt to redesign its developmental program on the fly or (to use the article’s other example) for planarian flatworms to cope with their heads dissolving from toxic barium, never encountered in the wild, by generating a new and barium resistant head from their tails, and living out their humble lives as God intended.
The point I want to make is that this is as much a conundrum for a Christian with a strong view of providence, like me, as for a materialist atheist. The kind of things organisms seem to achieve cognitively are remarkable, if (disregarding macroevolution) they are targeted to the specific goals of remaining what they were supposed to be despite massive environmental challenges.
As I’ve said, I’ve come round to seeing the design of new forms as the creative (and therefore “supernatural”) work of God. But it’s a lot less plausible to think of God reaching out to an individual flatworm in order to help it out in a fix by an inventive intervention. In other words, what Sy’s article describes, even from a Christian viewpoint, seems not to be God’s intelligence, but some cognitive faculty belonging to living things themselves. And if human consciousness cannot be accounted for purely by the complexity of our brains, it is even harder to envisage the necessary ability to choose intelligently (in the article’s terms, to harness new mathematics) as a purely physical property of cells.
Since no scientist has a clue how the thing is done, my speculation is as good as any, though not exactly fully explanatory. In a theological column, I recently pointed out how the Old Testament (symbolically, I think) represents the life of animals as being in their blood. My underlying point was the word translated “life” in such passages is nephesh, meaning “soul” or perhaps “spirit.” So, as Aquinas argued, the Bible suggests that all living things have a soul, though of differing kinds from the “vegetative,” through the “animal,” to the rational human soul. Descartes thought that animals were soulless automata (thus encouraging vivisection), but the mediaeval St Thomas saw animal volition as real, and now science and mathematics, as per this article, demonstrate this to be the case.
This spiritual view of all life also appears in the great nature psalm, Psalm 104. Speaking about the cycle of life (rather than of the Genesis creation) the psalmist says:
29 When you hide your face,
they are terrified;
when you take away their breath,
they die and return to the dust.
30 When you send your Spirit,
they are created,
and you renew the face of the ground.
I hope I’m not reading too much into the text if I say that there seems to be an activity of God’s Spirit in the formation of, at least, animals, that is reminiscent of the breathing of the Spirit into Adam in order for him to become a living soul. That would mean that all life, and not just humanity, has a spiritual component as well as a material one, which maybe speaks in some way to the promise of the new creation in which the material creation becomes the spiritual creation (see Romans 8:18-25; 1 Corinthians 15).
The bad news, for Garte, Perry and Kaufmann, is that the spiritual is not really amenable to the methods of physical science, which has to do with the interaction of parts, of which the spiritual realm knows nothing. If I’m right, this article has actually helped to define the limits of science in biology, just as it has consciously defined the limits of mathematics therein. It may be that there is some subtle and cryptic hint to this effect from Sy Garte in the conclusion, because he and I share the same concept of what “the ultimate truth” is:
Eugene Wigner concluded his original paper by saying the following:
“A much more difficult and confusing situation would arise if we could, someday, establish a theory of the phenomena of consciousness, or of biology, which would be as coherent and convincing as our present theories of the inanimate world… Furthermore, it is quite possible that an abstract argument can be found which shows that there is a conflict between such a theory and the accepted principles of physics. The argument could be of such abstract nature that it might not be possible to resolve the conflict, in favor of one or of the other theory, by an experiment. Such a situation would put a heavy strain on our faith in our theories and on our belief in the reality of the concepts which we form. It would give us a deep sense of frustration in our search for what I called ‘the ultimate truth’”.
