It’s been called to my attention that the John Templeton Foundation (JTF) is up to mischief again. I haven’t written about it for a long time, largely because I thought it had reformed. It had largely stopped giving the $1+ million Templeton Prize to theologians and clerics, and awarding it to scientists instead—albeit scientists friendly to religion. Further, the science that JTF was funding didn’t seem that bad or that connected to religion.
On the other hand, you’ll never see an explicitly atheist scientist get a Templeton Prize. That’s because of the history of the Foundation: John Templeton intended the billions he earned from his mutual fund to to show that science gave evidence for God. Ergo, for most of the JTF’s lifetime, the science it funded had a numinous or supernatural aspects to it. As Wikipedia notes:
The John Templeton Foundation (Templeton Foundation) is a philanthropic organization that reflects the ideas of its founder, John Templeton. Templeton became wealthy as a contrarian investor, and wanted to support progress in religious and spiritual knowledge, especially at the intersection of religion and science.
Well, the bad old days seem to be back again. If you click on the screenshot below, you’ll see the areas that the JTF is funding in life sciences, which appear to be areas that involve infusions into biology and evolution of goal-directedness and purpose. If those things do exist in evolution, it would constitute (or so JTF thinks) evidence for God.
The JTF, as the site above stipulates, is accepting proposals in three areas of biology, so if you want a pile of dosh and are willing to sell your soul, go ahead and send in proposals on these things:
This year we would like to receive project ideas in the following topic areas:
1.) Science of purpose. We are looking for experimental and theoretical research projects that will provide insight into the purposive, goal-directed, or agential behaviors that characterize organisms and various components of living systems. Researchers who have familiarity with our ongoing work in this area are especially encouraged to apply.
2.) Epigenetic inheritance. We are interested in funding projects that elucidate fundamental genetic and epigenetic mechanisms that regulate inter- and trans-generational transmittance of biological information and health outcomes. We are particularly interested in how early life choices and environmental exposures causally impact development and the early onset of disease, and diagnostic platforms that may predict generational disease susceptibility.
3.) Other areas of interest. We also remain open to innovative ideas in other areas of basic research in the biological sciences, such as also origins of life, complexity, emergence, evolution, human development, plant resilience, and ecological health and interventions.
This is the first of two posts on the area “the science of purpose”, an area that is, frankly, nuts. Evolution does not produce adaptations that are purposive and goal-directed, save for the production in some organisms of mentation and consciousness that can, psychologically, enact deliberately purposive behavior. But that’s limited only to a few groups of organisms And, as you’ll see, that’s not all the JTF or the biologists it funds are talking about. What they’re referring to is the recent drive to impute a kind of teleology to nature, as if the evolution of organisms was somehow driven externally to achieve adaptive ends, and driven not by natural selection but. . . . well, by various poorly explained mechanisms. A group of biologists dedicated to non-Darwinian adaptation, and a group that contains many of the people who purport to have deposed the Modern Evolutionary Synthesis, can be seen at the site “The Third Way” (Its list of members, by invitation only, can be seen here). Not all of the researchers there have bought into the teleological aspects of evolutionary biology, but some have, and as a whole they haven’t contributed much to the advances of evolutionary biology. Here’s what the Third Way is said to represent:
The vast majority of people believe that there are only two alternative ways to explain the origins of biological diversity. One way is Creationism that depends upon intervention by a divine Creator. That is clearly unscientific because it brings an arbitrary supernatural force into the evolution process. The commonly accepted alternative is Neo-Darwinism, which is clearly naturalistic science but ignores much contemporary molecular evidence and invokes a set of unsupported assumptions about the accidental nature of hereditary variation. Neo-Darwinism ignores important rapid evolutionary processes such as symbiogenesis, horizontal DNA transfer, action of mobile DNA and epigenetic modifications. [JAC: My response to the preceding sentence is “No it doesn’t!”] Moreover, some Neo-Darwinists have elevated Natural Selection into a unique creative force that solves all the difficult evolutionary problems without a real empirical basis. Many scientists today see the need for a deeper and more complete exploration of all aspects of the evolutionary process.
By funding these alternatives, Templeton hopes that people will, by thinking that modern evolutionary theory, or “neo-Darwinism” has been rejected, be more likely to see the hand of god in science. And although the Third Way also rejects “arbitrary supernatural forces”, many take the third way to be actions of the numinous (Intelligent Design advocates love it.)
In fact, a lot of the speculation of “Third Way” theories borders on the teleological, though religion doesn’t play an explicit role. Or, rather, the “religion” involved is to depose a neo-Darwinism seen as dogmatic and constricting. To see how close some of the “Third Way” biology comes to invoking teleology, see this short take by Larry Moran on the ideas of a Third Way member, James Shapiro (Moran had a longer review of Shapiro’s ideas in a book review, but it’s no longer online.) One excerpt from the shorter Moran:
James Shapiro is one of those scientist who think that evolutionary theory is due for a “paradigm shift.” His schtick is that mutations often involve genome rearrangements and that reorganization of the genome may be a sort of “natural genetic engineering” that cells use to direct evolution. It’s hard to figure out what Shapiro actually means and even harder to figure out his motives. I posted an earlier comment from him that suggests he is looking for a middle ground between science and Intelligent Design Creationism. Here’s part of that earlier post: The Mind of James Shapiro.
“Natural genetic engineering” is in fact teleological.
Why Templeton loves the “science of purpose,” and throws a ton of money at research in this area, is because it supposedly shows that there is more to the origin of adaptations than mutation and natural selection, and a lot more more to evolutionary change than just change in genes or regulatory sequences of DNA (ergo the emphasis on “epigenetic inheritance” above). And that feeds into the JTF’s original aim of showing that science points to God, renamed by them as “agency” or “purpose” in the new proposals.
In fact, meet the old proposals: same as the new proposals. Below is a grant given to a group of scientists for three years by the JTF, ending in August of this year. Click to read, though I give a summary below. Note that the grant awarded amounted to $14.5 million, a huge amount of money. JTF is rich because John Templeton was a very wealthy manager of a mutual fund, and his eponymous Foundation has plenty of money (an endowment of over $3.3 billion in 2015) to fund his desire to find purpose and God in nature. Sadly, there are too many scientists eager to glom onto this money. After all, NSF and NIH grants are hard to get these days, and so what’s the issue if, by getting JTF money, you become just another prize stallion in the Templeton stable?
Here is that grant (click to go to it):
Here’s what, according to the JTF, the $14.6 million went for. Bolding is mine:
Although biologists often use descriptive language that imputes purposiveness to living systems, many have argued that these conceptions are at best heuristic, and at worst egregious errors. However, there is a growing recognition that biological phenomena which suggest agency, directionality, or goal-directedness demand new conceptual frameworks that can translate into rigorous theoretical models and discriminating empirical tests. This project addresses the demand through a novel, interdisciplinary, large-scale program that combines philosophers, theoreticians, and experimentalists to: (i) articulate more precise concepts related to function and purpose, (ii) develop innovative formal models of agency, (iii) operationalize notions of goal-directedness for accurate measurement, and (iv) trial and implement methods and platforms to detect and manipulate directionality in living systems. Seven clusters composed of multiple distinct research groups under the leadership of a coordinator will undertake collaborative activities that include within-team investigative tasks (e.g., conceptual analysis, formal modeling, and experimental inquiry), within-cluster workshops and briefings, and across-project conferences with strategic writing enterprises and outside commentators. These collaborative activities leverage the fact that each cluster is organized around key concepts (e.g., function and goal-directedness), modeling practices, and distinctive phenomena at diverse temporal and spatial scales—behavior, development, ecology, genomics, and macroevolution—and will result in conceptual, theoretical, and empirical outputs comprising foundations for a multidisciplinary science of purpose. These foundations will foster new lines of scientific research based on an increased array of conceptual possibilities, distinctive formal modeling strategies, and next-generation experimental platforms for the discovery, observation, and manipulation of purposive phenomena.
Note that, contra the Templetonian mishgass, there is no “purpose” or “goal” of evolution, whether it be by natural selection or other mechanisms like meiotic drive or genetic drift. If natural selection operates (and that’s the only process we know that can create adaptations), then there is no ultimate goal because natural selection has no foresight. Rather, mutations that leave more copies of themselves—often by improving the ability of their carriers to thrive in their environments—outcompete other gene forms that aren’t so prolific. Evolution by natural selection is a step-by-step process that has no ultimate goal, even if a well-adapted organism, like a woodpecker, looks as if was designed. That’s why evolution can go backwards, as it did several times when land animals, which evolved from fish, returned to the seas as whales and seals.
It was in fact Darwin’s great achievement to explain the illusion of design by a Creator as the results of a materialistic step-by-step process that had no ultimate goal. Given the way selection works, how could there be a “goal”? How could there be a “purpose”?
But, ladies and gentlemen, brothers and sisters, and comrades: purpose and goals are back again. Templeton has funded their study, and apparently intends to continue to funding their study.
In the next post, which will be either today or tomorrow depending on how much other work I get done, I’ll call your attention to a new paper that highlights why injecting “purpose” and “goal directedness” into evolution is intellectually vacuous and empirically unproductive. Although I’m not surprised that Templeton is pushing this area, I am surprised at the number of scientists who are willing to jump on the purpose bus. I can explain this only by observing that one of the best ways you can get noticed in science is to depose an existing paradigm.
Here’s the header of the JTF’s homepage. Are those praying hands I see? And is that the robe of a Buddhist monk?
The “science of purpose” is “intelligent design” with a fresh name.
And “However, there is a growing recognition that biological phenomena which suggest agency, directionality, or goal-directedness demand new conceptual frameworks that can translate into rigorous theoretical models and discriminating empirical tests” is just bullsh*t with fresh verbiage.
As a (former) student of evolution and of the history of science I’ve seen all of this stuff before. This is just pre-Darwinian creationism dressed in contemporary clothing. This view of life* is on its way out—albeit slowly—else the Templeton Foundation wouldn’t be offering financial incentives to keep the fantasy going for just a bit longer.
*Allusion to the last wonderful paragraph in Darwin’s Origin of Species, which offers a different view of life, one that doesn’t require a creator meddling in the works.
I don’t think this is a version of pre-Darwinian Creationism but rather another example of what may be called New Age Light. It’s sophisticated spirituality looking for a way to inject mind-like aspects into reality. In this case, intention and purpose — but it could be consciousness or love or something else making us significant.
I used to hang with some of these people. They scorned any comparison to the fundamentalists who believed in Abrahamic gods. Their definition of “supernatural” was limited. Lots of arguments on that.
You’re absolutely correct. I’ve researched Templeton, and the intention of the foundation he created was never to support the existence of the Christian deity. It is, rather, a desire to ‘prove’ a New Age sort of teleology in which the universe is evolving spiritually.
Don’t forget Sir John’s first book: The Humble Approach: Scientists discover God. The Amazon summary shows that he was out to find evidence for a deity, even if not the Christian deity. This sort of goes against what you said about “spiritual evolution”:
The mention of Teilhard de Chardin is very very telling. He is possibly the most admired ‘thinker’ among New Age believers. This is from Wikipedia, and barely scratches the surface:
Teilhard – and Templeton, too – talk a lot about Christ, but don’t be fooled. What they mean by Christ is totally opposed to what mainstream Christians believe.
Christ reduces to the spiritual impulse to evolve. Since T is basically a pantheist (like New Agers), everything is spiritual Thus, evolution can only operate on spirit, not matter, because matter is an illusion – only spirit is real (this reverses reality, of course).
So, to be clear, Teilhard’s Christ basically reduces to a spiritual universal essence. Indeed, new agers actually scorn the idea of a singular divinity such as the Christian God, because that idea hides the ‘fact’ that we’re ALL divine. (We just need to be awakened to that fact – like New Agers have. This idea is insanely stupid and has outrageous consequences, such as the belief that “Thinking will make it so” and the belief that each person should decide what is right for themselves.)
I could go on and on. But I hope I’ve at least planted some doubts in your mind.
Thought the “third way” purports to be divorced from specific religious and doctrinal traditions, I have always contended that there are not many qualified candidates for the job of “intelligent agent” or designer. The job requires intervention in natural law that prevents things from happening that natural law produces, and/or produces things that natural law prevents. This points almost exclusively to one of the forms derived from the Middle Eastern monotheistic traditions.
That bronze age goat-herder god has certainly had a very good innings.
There seem to be two main strands of thought that attempt to argue that science points to God. One is quantum woo and the other is this directed evolution stuff. I’ve never understood this idea that the complexities of nature have religious implications. If you’re in a mood to ponder that maybe “There are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy, Horatio”, just focus on the deepest of all questions: Why is there something rather than nothing? I don’t see how the most mind-boggling aspects of quantum field theory or the amazing complexities of living organisms could point to God either more or less than the existence of the rocks in the fields and everything else in the universe. Science and reason can tell me a lot about how the world is, but nothing about why the world exists in the first place. I am reminded of a sentence of Steve Weinberg: “Those who seek extra-scientific messages in what they think they understand about modern physics are digging dry wells.” One can more generally replace “physics” with “science” in that quote.
Agreed about “digging dry wells.” I get the sense that the digging is the point, and that finding water is a bonus. For JTF they get to science-wash their theology with some epigenetics. And for $14 million Alan Love can support a lot of grad students and postdocs. One can also find more than water while digging the holes, so some more conventional projects might also get done. Once in a while the JTF drones will come by the lab, and everyone will have to look busy trying to find cosmic purposefulness, but otherwise it could be business as usual at the University of Minnesota. IDK if I agree with Jerry this is selling one’s soul. Done the right way it feels more like Robin Hood.
One could even argue that applying rigorous scientific methods to phenomena of apparent purposefulness will help sort whatever wheat there may be (or more likely won’t be) from the voluminous chaff.
We must keep in mind that matter is an illusion—although the U. of Minnesota may pretend that $14 million worth of matter is, uhhh, almost real.
As usual, I’m confused. Isn’t the scientific method purpose driven? You propose an hypothesis, then try to prove or disprove it. These folks seem to be doing the same. If the purpose is to prove that the universe follows certain rules, or that indigenous people have valuable knowledge to share or that unconscious racism is pervasive in society, as long as the scientific method is followed and any data and all results are honest and fully disclosed, isn’t that science? It’s all coming from the same place in the human psyche, a desire to understand our worlds and to prove that our world views are accurate and worthy of respect.
The sense of “purpose” in the case of the Templeton Foundation is the notion that biological evolution is purposeful—that it is directed by something other than random mutation, natural selection, genetic drift, and other known biological processes. Behind the fancy words is the idea that evolution was/is guided by a purposeful creator. (They don’t tell you this directly.) Science has already shown quite convincingly that such a purposeful creator—or purposeful agent of direction (if you don’t like “creator”)—is not needed to explain the observations. So, the hypothesis that evolution has an underlying purpose has been rejected. There’s no need to keep revisiting this notion, yet the Templeton Foundation persists.
Thank you Norman, you helped me get it. I appreciate that.
Actually, evolution does seem to have a direction — toward increasing complexity. I have never understood why organisms grow more complex rather than getting stuck in some evolutionary dead end.
Evolution has no such direction. At least not intentionally. The better essence of the process over the long term is to diffuse different anatomies into different directions as a way to fill ecological niches. Yes this included some lineages evolving greater complexity, but the vast majority never did.
Is there really any doubt that evolution has produced more complex life-forms over the past four billion years?
Note that this is not an argument that natural selection cannot produce simpler organisms. Nor is it an argument that evolution has a goal. It is merely an observation, and the reason for it may be as simple as the “left wall” that Barbara mentions.
Has anybody here studied the “assembly theory” of the origins of life?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assembly_theory
Look up the “left wall of complexity”. There must be at least a bare minimum of biochemical machinery to make life work at all, and this is the region where the vast majority of organisms reside. It’s easier to be a parasite….
Yes, I have a thought experiment and here it is: Imagine an earth-like planet with oceans and an oxygenated atmosphere (the latter should not be possible without life, but we carry on). Suppose you could fly to this planet and drop off a population of nematode worms. Something that is much more complex than bacteria, but less complex than a starfish.
Come back in about a billion years, and what one should find is that the descendants generally evolved ‘downward’, to be simpler in organization, so to fill the ecological niches of microbes. That direction provides far more space and other resources per individual, and evolutionary paths readily take to what is easy and what leaves the most descendants. Only when the spaces for microbial life are filled to the brim will life then evolve ‘upward’ to more complexity. But that space can’t hold as many individuals, and there are high costs to being large and complex.
No, some organisms have gotten simpler: fleas have lost their wings, tapeworms have lost their digestive system, their sensory system, and much of their nervous system. I could give other examples. The only reason evolution looks directional in this case is because to BECOME complex you have to start simple. If there was always a one-way route, all organisms would obey it.
Oh, think of all those subterranean organisms who have lost their eyes. I will stop now but only because there are too many examples.
My favourite example is the myxozoans: cnidarians that were once perfectly good jellyfish-like organisms (or so we guess), but have lost almost all of their cnidarian (and even animal) traits and become v. successful single-celled parasites esp. of fish (“whirling disease”). Were formerly a phylum of protozoans. The only cnidarian trait they kept was the specialized stinging organelles, which they use for infecting hosts instead of catching prey. Thousands of species, tiny genomes.
I see the 3rd way has Didier Raoult on their list of notables. Here in France, he was notorious, as Wikipedia puts it, as the guy who “… gained significant worldwide attention during the COVID-19 pandemic for vocally promoting hydroxychloroquine as a treatment for the disease, despite lack of evidence for its effectiveness”. Unfortunately, some of his statistically weak studies won over some of my friends.
The summary of that $14.6 million grant proposal says … what??? There is absolutely nothing there! To me, the authors must have been thinking (while giggling): “Wow, this is so much opaque post-modernist gobbledygook, surely it will be rejected!”
Imagine their surprise.
What, exactly, is “post-modernist” about the proposal?
The hyperbolic but obscurantist language. Postmodern may not be the best term, but po-mo papers are larded with this stuff.
“hyperbolic but obscurantist language” doesn’t make “po-mo” papers postmodern. When architects first developed postmodernism they were clear and precise, as are most postmodernists. And your appeal to “hyperbolic but obscurantist language” could lead you to dismiss much of science, which relies on technical language and jargon that is inaccessible to most lay audiences (and the “hyperbolic” is typical of grant proposals of all kinds, so I think it is hardly evidence of anything…). I always wonder about people using “postmodern” as a criticism, but are unable to specify what it is.
Shouldn’t that be “gelding” instead of “stallion”?
The John Templeton Foundation is the funding branch of a theosophic religious cult – seeking to synthesize the sum of human intellectual output with Christianity into its own religious doctrine.
Consider Pierre Teilhard de Chardin’s literature which also seemed to place “man” as a god directing its own progress to completion. I don’t think de Chardin had the money though, just powerfully intoxicating thought.
And don’t forget the “third way” / “Third Age”.
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Ok
I’ve heard of Third Position.
Also started reading about Joachim of Fiore and the definition of e.g. Middle Age, then Third .. things… that certain régimes got interested in…
Evan Longoria? 🙂
Donning my well-worn advocatus diaboli hat, here’s a half-baked defence of the not-total-unreasonableness of there being elements of purpose guiding evolution.
(1) Purpose does exist in the evolved natural world, e.g. “in some organisms of mentation and consciousness”.
(1a) We aren’t uniquely special in that regard.
(2) Natural selection has produced some biological mechanisms that affect the process of evolution itself, e.g. epigenetic regulation of mutation rates.
(3) So maybe some such mechanisms have biases in particular directions, such as “toward increasing complexity” as mentioned above. Such biases could reasonably be viewed as “purposeful”.
(4) So maybe the search for other such mechanisms isn’t a total waste.
(Hmm. Maybe I can tart this up into a grant proposal.)
See above about the fallacy of organisms becoming more complex. The purpose you note in #1 is psychological purpose, not evolved purpose.
Could you give me an example of adaptive evolved change in epigenetic mutation rates? Yes, the liability to being epigenetically modified has evolved (via natural selection), but you are talking about epigenetic mutation rates, and that seems unclear but appears erroneous.
I have no such example; note the “maybe”s. But with a sufficiently large grant I’d be winning to look for some 🙂.
We could be co-authors! Your 2nd one made me realize that there is the non-controversial phenomenon of ecological engineering, and how that in turn directs the course of evolution in species. So if one is willing to allow the term ‘purpose’ here to apply to a predictable goal, then maybe evolution after ecological engineering has a purpose?
The classical examples are how beavers alter their environment to create ponds or lakes, and beavers have evolved to swim and dive in that water. Mole rats dig cylindrical tunnels, and their bodies are distinctly cylindrical so to fit those tunnels very well.
Allan Campbell once explained Jim Shapiro’s motivation as “He wants to be Barbara McClintock.”
I hadn’t seen this mentioned in any Templeton threads here, but connecting a few dots that I came across early this year, I recently wondered if JTF is a Jesuit organization, or at least heavily Jesuit-infused. This seems to indicate that it is, FWIW.