Category: teleology

“Purpose and Desire”: a misguided biology book that got a starred review on Kirkus

December 4, 2017 • 11:45 am

On November 7,  I called attention to a new book by biology professor J. Scott Turner, “Purpose and Desire: What Makes Something ‘Alive’ and Why Modern Darwinism Has Failed to Explain It,” and how the book got a starred Kirkus review despite its avowed intent to put teleology (goal-directed evolution) back into biology.  Turner works at the State University of New York’s College of Environmental Science and Forestry in Syracuse, New York, so he’s got biology cred. But he also admits he’s a Christian, the book’s production was funded by the Templeton Foundation, the book defends intelligent design pretty strongly at the end, and Purpose and Desire was endorsed on the Amazon page by Discovery Institute IDers Douglas Axe and Stephen Meyer.

I questioned the book’s credibility based on these summaries and a bit of other stuff I read, but since Turner beefed about my criticisms, saying I hadn’t read the whole book, and because Kirkus gave it a star, I broke down and read, at great expense to my digestion, the whole damn thing, and finished it last night.

I stand by what I said then: this is a wonky, mushbrained attempt to put the notion of an external “purpose” back into evolution, and I suspect that that purpose comes from religion. Turner’s endorsement by luminaries (rather, “darkinaries”) from the Discovery Institute, its touting by the Discovery Institute as “a riveting instance of intellectual and scientific rediscovery,” its funding by Templeton, and Turner’s avowal of Christianity, makes me think that there’s an agenda behind the arguments. But never mind that, the arguments can be refuted on their own, and I’ll take up just a few of them here.  Also, Kirkus SUCKS, because they couldn’t even get a decent biologist to write the summary. It got a STAR! What a world!

Now Turner is canny: he won’t admit that God is the motive force that imparts a purpose to the organism’s evolution; rather, he says it’s “homeostasis”, which basically comes down to his claim that an organism’s evolution, and that includes microbes and plants, is directed by its striving. Birds, for instance, evolved wings and feathers not because natural selection favored those features, but because protobirds wanted to fly.  Turner defends this viewpoint by citing homeostasis, which is a well-accepted biological concept that organisms have systems to keep their bodies and surroundings constant. They regulate their temperature by behavior or metabolism, they tend to hew to particular environments, mechanisms exist to keep blood pH constant, and so on.

But that kind of homeostasis can be easily understood as a product of natural selection, not as some instantiation of a numinous “striving”. In fact, we can artificially select for organisms to increase or decrease the amount of constancy in various traits, showing that there is selectable genetic variation for homeostasis. There’s no need to evoke some “will” of the organism to explain how it evolves. “Homeostasis” is, I suspect, Turner’s code word for “God.”

A huge section of Turner’s book is devoted to the history of ideas that evolution involved striving, will, and teleology, but it fails to convince anyone but the already-convinced of Turner’s notion that Darwinism is not only flawed, but completely outmoded. Although he mentions the theory of evolution lots of times, what’s missing is any recognition that it was a genuine intellectual advance. Rather, he finds it full of holes, many of them being our current failure to understand how life originated (true, but that doesn’t mean we default to teleology), the fact that neo-Darwinism is based almost entirely on mathematical models rather than data (he’s dead wrong here), the fact that evolutionists are simply close-minded and won’t even consider teleology (not true; if there were evidence for it, the finder would become famous), and so on. These are simply gussied-up creationist arguments, worded so as to avoid sounding creationist. No wonder Templeton gave the guy dosh!

Now you might be asking yourself, “How can a plant or a bacterium have any striving since they’re not conscious?” Turner gets around that with a word salad like this (p. 221):

“The extended organism, defined as it is as a focus of homeostasis, is actually a cognitive organism, cognitive in the same sense that the coalition of sulfur-breathing bacteria and spirochetes from the previous chapter constituted a cognitive entity. Homeostasis involves coupling information about the state of the environment on one side of an adaptive boundary to the matter and energy flows across the adaptive boundary. Now the notion of what individuality is becomes clearer: the individual is a cognitive being that has a sense of itself as something distinct from the environment.”

Well, you can define “cognition” that way, just as I can define my aunt to be my uncle, but it doesn’t add any teleology, self-awareness or striving to evolution.

In fact, from the outset Turner seemingly doesn’t understand evolution by natural selection, and uses the argument below to say that whole idea is simply a tautology (that’s another creationist tactic). From page 8:

“In reality, our conception of adaptation rests on a very shaky foundation.  To illustrate, consider how a recent (and admirable) textbook of evolution put it: ‘Adaptations are the product of natural selection, while adaptation is the response to natural selection.’ This demonstrates, in one short and elegantly crafted sentence, The Problem: our current conception of this core evolutionary idea is essentially meaningless. What is adaptation? The product of natural selection! What is natural selection? The outcome of adaptation!

This type of reasoning is formally known as a tautology. . .”

Turner makes this argument over and over again, but it’s flat wrong. This is an updated version of the creationist argument that evolution is tautology because it posits “survival of the fittest,” but then judges the fittest to be those who survive. And that truly is a tautology, but that’s not how evolutionists ply their trade. Our working theory is that adaptations evolve because their constituent genes improve survival and reproduction. And that idea is not tautological, but can be tested.

If we think, for example, that mimicry evolved because mimetic individuals avoid detection by a predator, or warning coloration evolved because it scares off predators, we can (and have) tested these ideas. If evolution were simply a tautology in the way Turner posits, there wouldn’t be experimental evolutionary biology. Think, for instance, of how recent experimental work militated against the hypothesis that zebras evolved stripes because it helps camouflage them or confuse predators, and in favor of the view that stripes deter biting flies. That’s how one scenario was refuted and the other supported. You couldn’t do that if adaptation were simply a tautology.

Further, there is a nonadaptationist theory of evolution: the neutral theory. This theory is testable, has been confirmed for some bits of DNA, and posits that those bits evolve nonadaptively, by random genetic drift. That predicts that nonfunctional genes (pseudogenes) would evolve rapidly, with changes in the once-coding sections, and that’s been confirmed. The fact that Turner flaunts the “tautology” argument over and over again mystifies me. It’s not any kind of flaw in modern evolutionary theory, but he acts as if it is.

I won’t go on; the book is full of mistakes and misunderstandings of modern evolutionary biology (he says, for example, that “the gene is an agent of stasis, not of change, and this means the gene cannot be an agent of Darwinian evolution”, which is arrant nonsense). I’ll just give you his version of how flight evolved in birds. First Turner points out problems with existing scenarios for flight (I think these problems are grossly exaggerated for scenarios like “top down” flight in which feathers originally evolved for thermoregulation and then were coopted for gliding), and then offers his own “solution” on pp. 288-289, which pains me to type out. The emphasis is mine:

“And so we are left again tied in knots, necessitated by the need of modern evolutionism to exclude the one thing that could cut through it all: the ‘cauliflower’ type of agency—that form of agency driven by intentionality, striving, purpose, and desire. Could it be that birds fly, not because they were beneficiaries of lucky exaptations that enabled them to fly, but rather because, in a deep sense, the ancestors of birds wanted to fly? They wanted to glide from tree to tree, or chase after a tasty lunch, or launch themselves up trees to avoid being lunch themselves. And those wants have dragged the genes into the future in their tumultuous intentional wake. And this makes evolution at root a phenomenon of cognition, of intentionality, of purpose, of desire—of homeostasis.”

Yes, and bacteria evolved resistance to antibiotics because they wanted, in a “deep sense”, not to be killed by drugs. Gag me with a spoon.

I’m sorry, but Turner has written a dreadful book, and Kirkus misjudged its quality entirely. He will defend it, of course, by criticizing this review on his website, but he’ll only meet with the ultimate signs of failure: his book has (and will be) accepted by creationists and ID advocates, while being roundly rejected by evolutionists. Of course, we’ll do that, he’ll say, because we’re sworn to dismiss any evidence of teleology. And so Turner will age, raging against the dying of his thesis without admitting—or even perhaps recognizing—that his book is simply deeply and cleverly disguised creationism. It’s a sophisticated exercise in wish thinking and confirmation bias.

Is it a surprise that this book was published by HarperOne, the religion and “spirituality” arm of Harper Collins publishing?

 

Evolution-dissing, teoleogical, Templeton-funded book gets a star on Kirkus

November 7, 2017 • 12:30 pm
A book called Purpose and Desire: What Makes Something “Alive” and Why Modern Darwinism has Failed to Explain it“, by J. Scott Turner, came out September 12, published by HarperOne.  It hasn’t sold very well, despite Amazon recommendations by Intelligent Design advocates and Discovery Institute members Douglas Axe and Stephen Meyer and, amazingly, a starred summary from Kirkus Reviews, implying it’s a book of importance:
Here’s their review (my emphasis):

An exploration of how “there is something presently wrong with how…scientists think about life, its existence, its origins, and its evolution.”

The discipline of biology is in crisis, writes Turner (Biology/SUNY Coll. of Environmental Science and Forestry; The Tinkerer’s Accomplice: How Design Emerges from Life Itself, 2009, etc.) in this ingenious mixture of science and philosophy that points out major defects in Darwinism and then delivers heterodox but provocative solutions. That biology is in crisis may be news to readers, but the author points out that no Darwinian explanation exists for the origin of life or the origin of the cornerstone of modern biology, the gene. Darwinism also has a “hard time explaining what an organism is, or why…living things are actually (not apparently) well-designed.” Aware that alarm bells will sound, Turner denies proposing intelligent design but adds that the obstacle is philosophical: biologists must accept that Darwinian evolution is a “phenomenon rife with purpose, intentionality, and striving.” This is vitalism—not the mystical 19th-century life force but the obvious ability of living organisms to maintain internal consistency in the face of environmental perturbation. Mostly, the book is a virtuosic, if revisionist, history of evolutionary thought that rehabilitates traditionally scorned figures (Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, Georges Cuvier), reinterprets celebrated 19th-century French physiologist Claude Bernard’s ideas on homeostasis, and delivers admiring portraits of the geniuses of modern evolutionary ideas (Lewis Henry Morgan, Ronald Fisher, Sewall Wright, J.B.S. Haldane) without backing down from Turner’s insistence that they missed something. Creationists happily trumpet any criticism of Darwinism as proof that it’s false, but Turner is only proposing that the strictly materialist approach to studying life could use some help. That organisms strive is not magic but an emergent property.

An unsettling but highly thought-provoking book.

Well, no, we don’t have a well-supported Darwinian explanation for the origin of life, but we do have Darwinian explanations that good people are working on (see Nick Lane, Addy Prosser, Gerald Joyce, Jack Szostak et al.), so the claim that there are “no Darwinian explanations for the origin of life (or of the gene)” are simply false. And our lack of understanding, which is due to our not being there when life started, surely doesn’t mean that there’s something wrong with abiogenesis as a naturalistic theory, much less with “materialism.”  I’m not sure what Turner means by “a hard time explaining what an organism is”, but if they mean individuals, then no, we don’t have a hard time with that; they are simply the genome-carrying descendants of an original life form. We also have theories about how multicellularity evolved. And we certainly have explanations for why living things are “well-designed”; it’s called natural selection. But there are glitches in design as well, and those glitches are evidence not for purpose or conscious design, but for mindless evolution constrained to work with the materials it has.

Now what Turner’s evidence is for “purpose, intentionality, and striving” I don’t know, and I suppose I’ll have to read this book (I’ve requested it via interlibrary loan); but these claims have been made over and over again since 1859, and none have stood up.  In fact, the vagaries of evolution, the fact that it goes off in all directions, the pervasiveness of extinction, and the flaws in organismal “design”, all argue against some teleological basis for evolution.  “Homeostasis”—the ability of an organism to maintain aspects of its function or morphology in the face of environmental changes—is not something mystical, but a result of selection itself: organisms face varying and often unpredictable environments, and have evolved ways to deal with these so they don’t lose reproductive output (growing fur when it’s cold, spines if you’re a rotifer in a pond with predatory fish, and so on). That this can happen is evidenced by our ability to select for greater or lesser degrees of homeostasis, showing that it has a genetic basis and thus could be subject to selection.

The materialist (i.e., naturalist) approach to studying life hasn’t ever needed help, for no problem has ever been solved in biology by assuming that there’s some external, non-materialistic purpose behind it all.

Why Kirkus gave this one star is a mystery to me. Perhaps I misunderstand these blurbs (I doubt it), but I’ll find out for myself.

Here’s the Amazon summary (my emphasis):

A professor, biologist, and physiologist argues that modern Darwinism’s materialist and mechanistic biases have led to a scientific dead end, unable to define what life is—and only an openness to the qualities of “purpose and desire” will move the field forward.

Scott Turner contends. “To be scientists, we force ourselves into a Hobson’s choice on the matter: accept intentionality and purposefulness as real attributes of life, which disqualifies you as a scientist; or become a scientist and dismiss life’s distinctive quality from your thinking. I have come to believe that this choice actually stands in the way of our having a fully coherent theory of life.”

Growing research shows that life’s most distinctive quality, shared by all living things, is purpose and desire: maintain homeostasis to sustain life. In Purpose and Desire, Turner draws on the work of Claude Bernard, a contemporary of Darwin revered among physiologists as the founder of experimental medicine, to build on Bernard’s “dangerous idea” of vitalism, which seeks to identify what makes “life” a unique phenomenon of nature. To further its quest to achieve a fuller understanding of life, Turner argues, science must move beyond strictly accepted measures that consider only the mechanics of nature.

A thoughtful appeal to widen our perspective of biology that is grounded in scientific evidence, Purpose and Desirehelps us bridge the ideological evolutionary divide.

Again, homeostasis can easily evolve by natural selection, and needn’t reflect “purpose and desire”, which is either a teleological force within organisms or some external intelligence guiding the process.  It’s not surprising that this book was recommended not by biologists, but by members of the Discovery Institute.

One thing is for sure: people just love hearing that “evolutionary theory is wrong.” What is behind this seemingly wonky endeavor? Yep, you guessed it (my emphasis). As Wikipedia notes:

[Turner] is an adviser to the Microbes Mind Forum and Professor of Biology at the State University of New York College of Environmental Science and Forestry (SUNY-ESF) in Syracuse, New York. Under a grant from the Templeton Foundation, he has been a visiting scholar at Cambridge University, writing his third book, currently titled “Biology’s Second Law: Evolution, Purpose and Desire”, which builds the case that evolution operates through the complementary principles of Darwinian natural selection (biology’s “First Law”) coupled to homeostasis(biology’s “Second Law”).

Turner himself verifies the source of the dosh: “The writing of this book is funded through the generosity of the John Templeton Foundation.”

There’s nothing that Templeton likes better than to marinate science in teleology, and to show that evolutionary theory is wrong in fundamental ways. Nevertheless, prominent biologists continue to swill from the Templeton trough.

h/t: woody

Michael Shermer and Robert Wright on evolution and “purpose”

January 6, 2017 • 11:45 am

Here we have Michael Shermer and Robert Wright discussing the issue of “purpose” in evolution—something I studiously avoid because it’s not only a useless discussion, but also gives fodder to religion. I’ve written about Wright’s teleology (he might reject the word, but there it is) quite a bit, and it seems to me that—in his recent works—he’s constantly trying to smuggle some form of teleology into a naturalistic process by talking about evolution’s “purpose”. I see nothing to gain from such philosophical discussion. Where is the empirical evidence for “purpose”? If there isn’t any beyond pure naturalism, why persist?

I believe Wright’s motivation is that his religious background keeps him from fully accepting materialism. He may say he’s an agnostic, but he has a vestigial organ of teleology.

Wright’s problem is that he studiously avoids being explicit about what, exactly, is the “force” that he calls “meta-natural selection” that is propelling evolution. He maintains that it isn’t God, and perhaps he doesn’t even know what it is (he skitters from aliens to brains in vats to morality to the evolution of intelligence). But he seems to believe that there is a sign of “purpose” in evolution: a purpose instantiated in the fact that evolution has produced not only a hyperintelligent species (us, of course), but one that has created a “mega brain”: the Internet.

Wright also claims that his notion of “purpose” doesn’t posit an intelligent agent, yet some of his ‘suggestions’ do indeed involve such an agent (aliens, “something that started natural selection,” and so on). He also mentions at one point that human “purpose” involves a “moral calling”, but what can “call” one to morality except for an agent? Why not just say that morality is a combination of evolved sentiments and a cultural overlay? “Calling,” of course, simply oozes notions of religion.

Wright’s failure to pin down what he means by purpose, or even to give evidence that there is any “purpose” (“something larger than us”) behind the appearance of humans, is what keeps getting him in trouble—at least with me. If you watch him equivocate, wiggle around, and avoid specificity as he talks to Shermer, you’ll sense my frustration. I don’t see any reason to try to smuggle the notion of purpose into a purely materialistic process. And his attempt is even quasi-theological in the sense that it points to human exceptionalism (with respect to both intelligence and morality) as pointers to a “purpose”. But there’s no reason to think that our uniquely high intelligence wasn’t simply a result of natural selection (and then accelerated by the interaction of genes with culture)—an evolutionary one-off, like the evolution of feathers or an elephantine trunk.

One thing you can discern from listening to this 75-minute video is that Robert Wright is literally obsessed with me: he mentions me (and not favorably!) over and over again, and even tries to enlist Michael in dissing me (Shermer won’t have it). He even implies that I was a coward for not “debating” him on his videocast. But, as I’ve told Wright, I don’t like his hectoring, bullying, interrupting style with people he dislikes; and, more important, I prefer to write competing takes and let readers sort it out in the quietude of thought. In general, I tend to avoid debates, though I will answer questions or sometimes have “conversations.” Wright says he doesn’t have time for correcting me in writing (though he has). So be it.

There’s also some New Atheist-dissing from time to time, but you can hear that if you have the stamina to make it through this video. Around 55 minutes in, Wright not only exculpates religion from terrorism, but says that we’ll get nowhere by attacking religion per se. Shermer gives him some pushback.

Here is the website’s list of discussion pointers:

1:31 Bob’s NY Times article on evolution and purpose
23:23 Was evolution likely to produce the Internet?
37:52 The counter-entropic role of life
44:32 Is moral progress built into history?
49:56 Social and political dimensions of moral progress
56:34 The psychology of terrorism
65:50 What can we do to fight tribalist impulses?

h/t: Felipe