On March 19 I wrote a critique of decision theorist Jeremy Sherman’s view that evolution is powerless to explain why organisms “try” to do things and appear to “value” some behaviors more than others. Well, of course, he’s wrong because, although he’s not dumb, he apparently doesn’t understand how natural selection could lead to “purposeful” behavior. Those behaviors, seemingly directed to an end, evolve because the genes that produce them leave more copies than genes producing alternative behaviors.
This isn’t rocket science. Parents who “try” to care for their offspring and behave in “purposeful” ways to foster and protect them will leave more offspring than parents who are indifferent to their offspring. Ergo the genes promoting parental-care behavior will outcompete those promoting parental indifference.
And so it goes for all of natural selection on animals. Because we are built by genes, which, unlike other molecules, replicate themselves (albeit with some errors), living things will evolve to show behaviors that promote the replication of their constituent genes. This is what gives nature the appearance of design, adaptation, and “striving.” That striving may or may not be conscious: an amoeba “tries” to find food and a Drosophila “tries” to reproduce, but it’s doubtful whether these activities involve conscious thought or even consciousness. Conscious thought, which is likely one way of fostering the replication of genes, is an evolutionary add-on that permits adaptation when the brain becomes a sufficiently complex computer.
Well, Sherman is back again, stung by my criticisms, and writing the same damn piece at Alternet (click on screenshot below; do Alternet authors even get paid?). In so doing, he gives an encomium to Intelligent Design:
What’s the “valid point”? That ID has a way of poetically explaining “agency” and the “effort” and “trying” of organisms: the Intelligent Designer. Now Sherman doesn’t buy it, as he says he’s an atheist, but still likes it because the God account is “beautiful, intuitive, evocative, and poetic”. But so what? He doesn’t believe it, so how could such an explanation be “valid”? Only because it gives an alternative to an explanation that Sherman hates even more: “we are just complex chemistry”, the explanation that happens to be true.
At any rate, Sherman says that science can’t explain the appearance of organisms “trying” to do stuff. Here’s his Big Mystery:
What do I mean by agency? Agency is the behavior of agents like you and me though not just of humans. Agency is evident in any living being, any organism making an effort for its own benefit, effort fitted to circumstances. You are an agent but so is a bug, begonia or bacterium. All organisms try to stay alive. Trying is the heart of agency.
Most organisms don’t know they’re trying, don’t feel like trying and aren’t trying to try better. Still, they try to stay alive. That’s agency.
Agency boils down to three basic attributes, absolutely essential to the life and behavioral sciences, and completely irrelevant in the physical sciences:
Effort: Trying, which is what’s meant by behavior in contrast to mere phenomena. Chemicals don’t try to do anything. Agents do.
Function: The effort is of benefit for the agent. An agent’s adaptive traits are functional because they improve the agent’s chances of succeeding at what’s of value to it, chiefly survival and reproduction. Nothing is of value to chemicals, but things are of value to agents.
Fittedness: Which is different from material conformity. Molecules may fit together physically but that’s different from fittedness, responsiveness to context.
No physical scientist could get away with saying that chemical changes try to keep going for their own sake. Down the hall, behavioral scientists can talk all they like about agents trying to keep going for their own sake. What explains this double standard? Scientists still have no answer, though they could.
What tries to stay alive, or rather persist, is DNA, the replicator that builds bodies—the “vehicles”. And the vehicles aren’t “trying” to do anything, as they’re not conscious, nor do the organisms that appear to have agency need be conscious. Some forms of DNA just leave more copies than do others. And that, over time, leads to bodies and behaviors—all the blind result of differential replication of DNA. No striving, no will. is necessary, which is the amazing and fantastic part of how natural selection creates diversity. The process is mindless, driven by differential replication of molecules that replicate.
So much is easy to understand once you know a bit about natural selection, and I think most readers here can understand that. Sherman apparently doesn’t. He doesn’t like the natural-selection explanation, even though it’s the right one and he has no alternative:
Most scientists today will tell you that agency emerges with evolution by natural selection, which they regard as a kind of blind watchmaker, without acknowledging that even a blind watchmaker is an agent trying to make watches.
Some are so desperate to explain away agency that they try to redefine the word “design.” “Nothing tries,” they’ll say. “Evolution doesn’t try to design, but it designs you. You don’t try. You’re just the product of chemical (DNA, RNA) replication, which isn’t trying either. You may try to believe that you try but you don’t” By this supposedly scientific pretzel logic, agency is nowhere but everywhere.
Here, for example, is Jerry Coyne, a big name in evolutionary theory arguing that my question “what is agency?” is the product of my muddle-headed thinking.(link is external) To him, evolution proves that we are nothing but deterministic chemistry. What distinguishes us is that we are the robot bodies of DNA copying chemically under natural selection’s “design.”
Chemicals copy in any chain reaction. What then is the difference between DNA and other chemicals? DNA has “heritable material.” What is “heritable material”? It’s equivocation, kind of a homunculus and kind of a chemical. He might just as well say that DNA has a soul.
And no, chemicals don’t copy in “any chain reaction”. But thank you, Dr. Sherman, but I’d prefer that you try to understand evolutionary biology rather than give me a backhanded compliment. If you don’t understand the difference between how DNA functions in a living organism and a chemical like benzene functions in a lab, then I can’t help you. The fact is that the one replicates and builds bodies that often have behavior, while the other doesn’t. That makes all the difference in the world.
But at the end Sherman says he does have an explanation for value: “Here’s a new scientific explanation for the emergence of agency, developed by UC Berkeley scientist Terrence Deacon.” But the video shows not Deacon but Deacon channeled through Sherman’s gobbledy-gook, and it makes no sense to me beyond the explanation I’ve given above: DNA variants that promote their own replication, sometimes through the pursuit of what we see as “value”, are the ones that persist. Ergo, some organisms have the appearance of “valuing” reproduction and survival. Nothing new here, folks, move along.
Watch for yourself: