A new paper attacking the idea of “purpose, agency, and goals” as important factors in the development and evolution of organisms

January 2, 2025 • 10:15 am

This is the third and last of a series of posts on the misguided concept of “agency and purpose in biology,” which one can take as the statement that “organisms have goals, and guide their own development and evolution towards those goals”.

In my first post, on December 23, I noted that the John Templeton Foundation (JTF) was spending millions of dollars funding grants on the science of “purpose and agency”. I pointed out one JTF grant that just ended, which handed out $14.5 million to a consortium of investigators to study this topic. And the JTF intends to continue funding this area:

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.

If you know the JTF, you’ll understand why they keep replenishing a trough full of grant money for such studies, for John Templeton (a mutual-fund billionaire and a believer) funded his Foundation with the intent of showing that science itself gave evidence for “spiritual reality”, aka a god or gods. Although some of the investigators supping at the trough deny that they’re engaged in teleology, much less giving evidence for divinity, all of their work feeds into the JTF’s mission, and the authors of an article just published online at the Journal of Evolutionary Biology (JEB) agree: the idea of teleology sneaks into many of these papers.

In my second post, on December 26, I analyzed one of the JTF-funded papers often cited to support the idea of agency and purpose in organisms, a paper in BioEssays by Sonia E. Sultan et al. I found it vacuous and intellectually confusing, mistaking “purpose” and “agency” for the results of natural selection and, in the end, making the ID-friendly argument that neo-Darwinism cannot explain the origins of “novel, complex traits”. That assertion alone discredits the paper, for the one paper that actually tried, using conservative assumptions, to mathematically model the origin of a complex trait (the camera eye), did so very successfully. No problems encountered! The purpose-and-agency folks’ view is that “since we don’t fully understand how an eye/wing/brain evolved, there must have been something beyond natural selection involved.” I suspect you know the fallacy of this argument.

Here are two concepts of agency advanced by Sultan et al and quoted in the paper below:

● “Biological agency—the capacity of living systems […] to participate in their own development, maintenance, and function” (Sultan et al 2022, p. 1);

● “Organisms themselves actively shape their own structure and function” (Sultan et al 2022, p. 4);

Now, a paper by James DiFrisco and Richard Gawne, published in JEB, takes apart the whole misguided notion and program of “agency and purpose” in evolution, and cites a lot of papers that tried to advance misguided ideas similar to those of Sultan et al. The title of the new paper is below, but if you click on it you will go to a truncated version of the article. However, you can read the entire paper as a pdf file available for free here.

Here are what I take as the paper’s important points:

A.) The idea that organisms direct their own development and evolution through some nebulous, non-neo-Darwinian process is incorrect. Everything touted as “purposeful” and “the results of agency” can be explained by natural selection molding organisms’ responses to a changing environment, both within one lifetime or across generations. As DiFrisco and Gawne say, goal-directedness “is an adaptation due to natural selection.” In my own example, cats and other mammals often grow longer fur during cold seasons because natural selection has favored genes that give organisms the capacity to put out more fur when their bodies detect cold weather. This is simple natural selection, and there is no “purpose” or “agency” involved.

B.) Some of the papers on purpose and agency aim to “rescucitate the Aristotelian view of biological purpose and teleology as real rather than merely apparent”, so some authors really do have a teleological bent, one that you can find in some works of the “Extended Evolutionary Synthesis.”

C.) The agency and purpose trope is, in the end, a metaphor that does no explanatory work nor promotes further research. Only the framework of neo-Darwinism can help us understand the origin of adaptations.

D.) The only “true” purpose and agency we see in biology is that which we see in the cognition of organisms capable of responding to environmental challenges by thinking rather than by a mechanical response. But even the p&a authors are the first to aver that this is not the sense in which they use these terms. In truth, as a hard determinist I see even cognition as a mechanical process and not something different in principle from a bacterium moving towards food, but this is not so important in this debate since the “cognition” view of purpose isn’t the subject of scientific work by the Templeton-funded authors.

I’ll quote the authors’ own conception of their aims as given in the JEB paper:

Box 1: The central claims of this paper.

1. An organism’s capacity for goal-directed behavior does not itself explain any biological phenomena. Apparently goal-directed behaviors are, instead, something to be explained as an evolved characteristic of biological systems.

2. The capacity for goal-directed behavior (outside of human cognition, which can set arbitrary, novel goals) is explained by Darwinian natural selection acting in populations of individuals.

3. Notions such as self-determination, or the idea that the whole organism is a cause of its own developmental or physiological processes, are either empirically untestable, or restatements of ordinary questions about which causal mechanisms at which scales influence events.

4. Downward causation and context-dependence are “mechanistic” in the sense relevant to experimental biology. They are not mysterious processes that require adopting the teleological form of investigation provided by an agency perspective.

5. Rejection of molecular reductionism or determinism does not necessitate a commitment to the idea of biological agency. Researchers need not embrace the agency perspective in order to acknowledge the importance of multi-level complexity, emergence, and downward causation.

6. The idea that biological goal-directedness is a product of natural selection rather than the inherent agency of organisms does not require commitment to the idea that all traits are adaptations. It is compatible with genetic drift, mutation, and developmental constraints playing an important role in evolution.

7. Agency is a psychological concept with origins in heuristic ascriptions of intentionality. Accordingly, it is applicable only where psychological explanations are useful—i.e., when explaining the behavior of humans and possibly other neurologically complex organisms such as primates.

8. Agency is not an empirically meaningful property, and incorporating the agency concept into experimental practices will not contribute to progress in biology.

And a few quotes that underline their contentions (indented). First, the important of natural selection in explaining adaptations:

It is important to recognize that the attribution of non-fitness-related goals to an organism can only be empirically grounded in the psychological case, where investigators can ask another human being to report on their internal cognitive states. For systems that lack the capacity to report on such states, the attribution of goals is empirically unmoored and arbitrary (see Fig 1). Is it the goal of a given stem cell to differentiate? (Manicka and Levin 2019; Levin 2021; 2022) Or, if the stem cell fails to differentiate and dies, was that really its goal? In order for goal-attributions to explain anything, goals would need to be linked to some empirically detectable feature of the system other than the actual outcomes of its behavior. Otherwise, these explanations would be circular and uninformative. It is not clear that this can be done without reference to natural selection.

The intellectual and biological vacuity of adding “purpose” to already-existing explanations:

Even if one allows explanations based on agency, it is difficult to see how such explanations could be useful for understanding an ordinary biological process—e.g., wound healing. To explain why a wound heals following injury, the statement that it is because the system possesses agency and pursues the goal of healing wounds is not useful from a scientific point of view. This is because agency is not an experimentally meaningful property that can be subjected to tests as to whether its presence or absence influences wound-healing. The “goal” of wound-healing is not something that can be detected or measured, but would have to be inferred and attributed ex post facto based on the system’s actual behavior (see above, “Agency and goal-directedness”). This procedure cannot predict that wound-healing fails in pathological cases (e.g., tumorigenesis), nor can it explain why such malfunctions do or do not happen. In the context of modern biological research, wound-healing is understood to be explainable in terms of complex positive and negative feedback mechanisms in which a wide array of signaling molecules mediate the progression through cell- and tissue-level processes, from wound detection to hemostasis, inflammation, cell proliferation, re-epithelialization, and tissue remodeling (Singh et al 2017; Rodrigues et al 2019). These feedback mechanisms are tuned to parameter values conducive to survival and reproduction because of natural selection.

Between mechanistic explanations and adaptive ones (Tinbergen 1963; Stearns 1982), there is no obvious role for a distinct form of explanation based on agency.

How could you investigate how wounds heal by even considering the idea of “purpose and agency”? As the authors note, there is no real “goal” here, but merely the sorting-out of genes that have different effects on wounds, with the genes that contribute to healing leaving more copies (their bearers survive and/or reproduce better). That’s simply natural selection. Ergo, there is no scientific benefit of JTF giving lots of dollars to study agency and purpose. They could give money for studying neo-Darwinian explanations, which we know are often the way to go, but doing so would simply justify scientific materialism, something anathema to JTF, as it leaves out god.

Finally, one more quote, as you can read the paper yourself (it’s written very clearly and should be accessible to those with a smidgen of biology knowledge):

An initial difficulty with the notion of self-determination centers on the self. It is not clear how to interpret expressions such as “the capacity of living systems […] to participate in their own development.” Development is the process of an organism going through the stages of its life cycle. It is not something separate from the organism. So how can an organism fail to participate in its development? If we suppose that the development of a given organism is fully determined by a set of underlying molecular factors, it is still the development of that particular organism rather than of another entity. It is also difficult to interpret the statement that “typical descriptions […] treat organisms [as] separate from and passive to the conditions under which they develop and evolve” (Nadolski and Moczek 2023, p. 3). If this refers to environmental conditions, it is an ordinary question of the relative causal importance of internal versus external factors. If it refers to internal conditions, however, the statement veers into obscurity. How can an organism be or separate from, or passive to, a process of development of itself?

This quote—and indeed, the whole paper—shows that the “purpose-and-agency” school is either engaged in a semantic rather than a biological argument, they are simply unable to grasp evolution, or they wish to make a name by couching neo-Darwinian mechanisms in “I-have-a-new-paradigm” language. . Indeed, epigenetics (at least some forms) were not part of the modern synthesis, but neither do they play into notions of agency and purpose. Epigenetic modifications can be evolved features of organisms that are ultimately coded in the genome, or they can be environmentally-induced modifications of DNA that are rarely adaptive and, at any rate, usually disappear in two or three generations at most, making them useless to explain the evolution of adaptations.

The lesson is twofold. Beware when you see biologists banging on about agency and purpose, and think about natural selection instead. Second, the JTF is throwing away its money on misguided projects. I’d like to ask them to give money to fund real biology, as they have over a billion dollars in endowment, but funding real biology would not advance the JTF’s purpose of finding the numinous using science.

The intellectual vacuity of attributing “agency” and “purpose” to organisms

December 26, 2024 • 10:40 am

On December 23rd, I called attention to the huge amount of money that the John Templeton Foundation (JTF) was throwing at biology projects giving evidence of “purpose and agency” in organisms. For example, one grant given to a group of investigators, titled “Agency, directionality, and foundations for a science of purpose,” handed out more than $14.6 million! And one of the few areas in biology they’re funding again next year is, yes, projects on the “science of purpose”, to wit:

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.

Now you can easily see how this fits into the JTF’s original aim, which was to find evidence for divinity and spirituality in science. And indeed, I’m sure that’s why they’re funding this area. But I’ve already argued that the only kind of “purpose” found in organismal behavior is that involved in conscious cogitation, which is present in only a few organisms. Yes, some behaviors look “purposeful,” as when a bacterium moves toward or away from light, but that’s a purely mechanical response—not the kind that, say, humans have when they decide, “I’m going out for pizza.” And of course there is no goal-directedness or purpose in evolution, which simply sorts out genetic variation based on whether genes leave more or fewer copies of themselves, often leaving more when they adapt their carrier better to the environment.

However, the biologists who get funded for work on “agency” and “purpose” will be the first to tell you that they are not really imputing to organisms the kind of mental “purpose” that some organisms have, nor are they looking for anything numinous or supernatural. Rather, they seem to be whipping up a bunch of word salad that makes it seem that they are overthrowing the neo-Darwinian view that adaptations arise from genetic variants sorted out by their relative contribution to the genes of descendants. Such researchers pretend that they are making profound new statements about biology and evolution, but when you look at the papers carefully, as I did with one of the influential papers (below) that Templeton funded in its “purpose and agency” program, you find nothing new. In this case, a whole paper touting “purpose” is merely re-describing something known for a long time: organisms can evolve “norms”of reaction”. These are simply the plastic developmental programs that organisms evolve to respond to environmental changes, so that behavior, physiology, and appearance can change when conditions change. That superficially may look like “agency”, but there’s no “will” involved, and nothing beyond genes responding to environments.

The evolution of norms of reaction is not hard to understand. Take one familiar plastic response: mammals like cats that grow longer fur in the winter. This is due simply to natural selection acting on the DNA to respond to cold temperature by growing thicker fur. And, of course, as we know from all the varieties of dogs and cats with more or less fur, artificial selection can do that, too. We needn’t think about “purpose” or “agency” when we see this, nor need we say, “one purpose of this trait is to keep the cat warm” or “the cat has agency to grow longer fur to keep in warm in winter.” That kind of talk about “purpose” is only confusing, hiding what really happened during evolution: natural selection for flexible forms of development.

And there are gazillions of traits that you could say look as if organisms have such agency or purpose, but they are all the result of natural selection. If a goat loses its front legs in an accident, it may well eventually walk on its hind legs. To do that, a number of their bones, tendons, and muscles have to be reconfigured to allow adaptive locomotion. But this, too, is a result of evolved plasticity: in the past, injuries may have been common, and those individuals with genes that allowed their development to compensate for those injuries, thus allowing the sufferer to survive and reproduce, outcompeted individuals lacking genes giving their bodies the ability to cope with injuries.

This is nothing new in evolution; people have talked about plasticity and “norms of reaction” (how organisms change to cope with changes in the environment”) for ages, and there are even experiments showing that such coping is due to natural selection. But authors like those of the paper below, funded by the JTF, gussy up an old concept by calling it “biological agency”, enabling them to get a ton of cash from the JTF.

I see the effort as intellectually confusing and, indeed, hubristic, because surely the authors know what they’re doing. In the next and final installment of this “agency” mishigass, I’ll highlight a paper that calls this kind of effort to task, showing that it really doesn’t show anything new. Yes, I get excited when new concepts and findings appear in biology and especially evolution, but this ain’t one of them.

Click on the headline below to read the paper, which is free (there’s a pdf here):

The Sultan et al. paper is poorly written, full of big words that are supposed to constitute their idea of agency. But let’s see first how they define agency. Excerpts from the paper are indented.

What is agency? Sultan et al. assure us that it isn’t anything supernatural, but what it really is comes down to “self-regulation” that, in the end, simply amounts to the norms of reaction of an organism.

Living systems have evolved to be robust, responsive, flexible, self-synthesizing and self-regulating. This dynamic flexibility is manifest across diverse levels of biological organization, from cells, to tissues, to entire organisms, to reproductive lineages, to social colonies, and throughout a variety of organismal activities—from molecular signaling pathways to morphogenetic, metabolic, immune, endocrine, and behavioral systems. We use the term biological agency to refer to this suite of robust processes that is constitutive of living systems (See Box 1). Biological agency, in this sense, is the capacity of a system to participate in its own persistence, maintenance, and function by regulating its own structures and activities in response to the conditions it encounters.^[⁶⁹^] Attributing agency to a biological system is based on natural, empirically determined processes and connotes neither consciousness nor deliberate intention.

Agency is a dynamical property of a system.^[¹⁶²^] It consists in the system’s capacity to transduce, configure, and respond to the conditions it encounters. Crucially, agential systems are capable of maintaining functional stability in response to conditions that would otherwise compromise their viability.

Try as I might, I cannot see a distinction between this farrago of fancy words and good old “norms of reaction”. “Self regulation” is simply the end result of natural selection acting on organisms so that when the environment changes, they respond through their evolved developmental systems in an adaptive way. Note that the authors explicitly rule out “purpose” of “deliberate intention” in the “consciousness” sense here. Ergo, “maintaining functional stability in response to conditions that would otherwise compromise their viability” is just like a cat growing longer fur in the winter, but it sure is a fancy way of saying it.

Here some examples the authors adduce for “agency”:

Polypterus fish reared in a terrestrialized environment in which fish are forced to walk on their pectoral fins rather than swim, adjust—within a lifetime—not just their behavior, gait and posture but also their skeletal features, in ways that parallel the fossil record of tetrapods’ ascendance onto land.^[¹³⁶^] Tadpoles exemplifying the ancestral detrivorous life style and associated gut morphology will adjust the latter if forced to consume a carnivorous diet, in ways that partly parallel evolved changes in specialized carnivorous lineages.^[¹³⁷^] Examples such as these suggest that interactions between developmental systems and environmental circumstance may bias the production of phenotypic variation in the face of novel or stressful environments toward functional, integrated, and possibly adaptive variants.

No, the phenotypic direction isn’t “biased” by anything but natural selection. Polypterus fish live in shallow water and have lungs, and it’s possible that their ancestors evolved to walk on their fins to get around in that shallow water or even to leave the water for brief periods of time if their ponds are drying up and they need to get to another pool of water. Or, it’s even possible that this norm of reaction isn’t evolved at all, but simply the result of an organism struggling to move when that’s the only alternative it has. Here’s what it looks like:

Try that with a goldfish! Why do Polypterus show “agency” in this way but not goldfish? Probably because of the evolutionary background of this species, which is sometimes regarded as an example of the kind of fish that evolved into terrestrial teterapods. But what “agency” are they showing? Likewise, it’s easy to see how tadpoles could occasionally encounter a situation in which there is more “meat” (other organisms or their remains) to eat than there is non-animal detritus. In that case, tadpoles able to evolve a way to change their digestion in such a circumstance would leave more offspring than those that couldn’t. Of course for this system to work, the environment would occasionally have to change in a way that would give organisms like this an advantage (it doesn’t have ot change every generation). If organisms evolved a developmental system to adapt to environmental changes that couldn’t conceivably have occurred, then we’d have something to talk about! But I know of no such cases.

To justify their “new” approach, the authors give examples of three phenomena that, they say, can’t be explained by conventional neo-Darwinism:

1). Genome-wide association studies (GWAS), in which genes for traits are identified by looking at which genetic variation in an entire genome is correlated with variation in a trait, often reveal “too few genes”. For example:

In the case of body weight, for example—a biomedically critical trait in the context of obesity, insulin resistance and type 2 diabetes—115 genetic loci that showed significant statistical association with body mass index (BMI) collectively explained less than 3% of the variation among adults,^[⁸^] and a meta-analysis based on an enormous sample of 700,000 individuals (conferring great statistical power) still explained only 6% of BMI variation^[⁹^] despite using a high-dimensional correlation matrix that is known to inflate these estimates.^[¹⁰^] While such extremely large studies may incrementally add to the variance explained by identifying additional loci of small effect through sheer statistical force, over 90% of (a) phenotypic variation for BMI and (b) risk of type 2 diabetes remains unaccounted for,^[^11, 12^] pointing to a more fundamental issue.

And yet heritability studies, involving simple correlation of BMI between relatives is measured, show that between 40% and 70% of the variation of that trait among individuals is due to variation in genes. We can find only 6% of those genes, so where are the rest? One explanation is that there are many genes affecting BMI whose effects are too small to be measured by GWAS, which requires pretty big effects to find a genetic region affecting a trait. Further, GWAS analyses rely entirely on SNPs (single nucleotide polymorphisms in DNA sequence), and are unable to detect duplications and deletions, which we know make a contribution to human trait variation (see references here, here, and here). Finally, GWAS is unable, except in vary large samples, to detect rare genes, and yet given the size of the genome, everyone has quite a few “rare” genes. When you use large samples, as they have done for human height, the missing heritability diminishes to almost zero: the genetic variation detected by GWAS gives predictions that are almost the same as that based on standard heritability studies.

The authors add this:

Biomedical researchers concerned about the limits of the GWAS approach are therefore increasingly calling for conceptually broader studies directly addressing processing pathways that modulate gene function and hence phenotypic outcomes in individuals via complex gene-environment interactions,^[¹⁸^] environmentally-mediated epigenetic modifications,^[^19, 20^] and physiological and developmental feedback systems such as microbiome composition, which changes dynamically in response to the individual’s diet, behavior, and social environment.^[²¹^]

Yes, perhaps there are some differences in microbiomes that are responsible here, but there are many traits where there are “missing genes” that cannot be imputed to microbiome inheritance. As for epigenetic modifications and the like beyond bacteria in the gut, those would also show up in GWAS studies, and so can’t constitute “missing genes” (an epigenetic modification occurs at a given site in the DNA, involves a modified base, and is supposedly inherited over at least one generation).

But much of the above is simply gobbledygook: how can “dynamic changes in response to diet, behavior, and social environment” account for missing genetic variation that shows up in heritability studies but not GWAS studies? This could occur only in species in which cultural, nongenetic factors are inherited, like the tendency to eat fatty foods. But these factors are usually ruled out in most heritability (e,g., in flies) and those studies still show a substantial genetic contribution to variation in a phenotype. What the authors consider “agency” here is not clear, but they are doing a service by highlighting a problem that has yet to be solved: “dark heritability.” We don’t know the answer yet, but we have some clues, and time will tell.

2). The authors drag in epigenetics to explain the missing heritability. This second problem is really the same as the first: we have a mismatch between results revealed by GWAS analysis and simple studies of heritability via correlation between relatives. But this doesn’t solve the problem: it compounds it for two reasons. First, epigenetic modifications of DNA will show up in GWAS and heritability studies, and so don’t constitute “dark genetic variation”. Further, non-coding RNAs, which the authors further use to explain missing variation, are also inherited. Finally, and most important, epigenetic modifications of DNA resulting solely from the environment (and not coded for themselves in the genome) almost never persist for more than two or three generations, and thus can’t explain a persistent appearance of “adaptive change” over evolution. Nor are epigenetic modifications usually adaptive, and they can be maladaptive (as in the “Dutch famine trauma”), because they are not evolved but simply the effect of the environment on a genome not adapted to changes in that environment.

Here is one example the authors use to show agency via purported epigenetic change:

An experimental example using isogenic plants points to part of what may be missing. In one series of experiments with the common herb Polygonum, parent plants of the same genetic line were either drought-stressed or given ample water. When their offspring were grown in identical, dry, conditions, they developed differently: the offspring of drought-stressed parents produced significantly larger and more rapidly-extending root systems than those of the moist-grown parents, an inherited phenotypic effect that resulted not from a genetic difference but in response to parental conditions.

“Isogenic” means that all the plants were genetically identical. And yes, it’s hard to imagine that offspring have a way of genetically “knowing” whether their parents experienced drought, though there could be cytoplasmic effects. So this looks like agency, and may be due to adaptive epigenetic modification. But this is the exception, rather than the rule.

3.) This is the kicker: neo-Darwinism cannot, say the authors, explain the origins of “novel, complex traits”. Here we have one of the assertions of intelligent design, but although there’s no designer, the authors’ claim about the impotence of neo-Darwinism in producing complex adaptations is simply wrong (they are implying, I think, that organisms are somehow using their AGENCY to develop those complex traits. Here’s the assertion:

The origin of novel complex traits constitutes a central yet largely unresolved challenge in evolutionary biology.^[⁶¹^] Ever since the founding of evolutionary biology one of the discipline’s core motivations has been to understand such elaborate innovations as the vertebrate eye, the insect wing, or the mammalian placenta, traits whose origins transformed the diversity of life on earth. Yet conventional approaches to understanding evolutionary change have provided few opportunities to make significant headway.^[⁶²^] Of the four evolutionary processes conventionally recognized—natural selection, genetic drift, migration, and mutation, the first three can only sort among existing variants and their distribution within and among populations, but by themselves cannot bring about novel features.^[⁶³^] This privilege is instead restricted to mutation, yet all attempts to explain the evolution of novel complex traits solely via the coincident origin, spread, and fixation of one beneficial mutation at a time have failed.

Sorry, but this resembles what comes out of the south end of a cow looking north. There is no conceptual reason that sorting out existing and new genetic variants via conventional natural selection is impotent to produce complex traits. The problem is that we simply weren’t there when many complex traits evolved, and so don’t know the genes involved, the selection pressures involved, or even the developmental pathways involved in producing the traits.

I know of only one attempt to get at this problem, and that involved the evolution of the camera eye. This was the work of Nilsson and Pelger summarized in a delightful summary by Richard Dawkins called “The eye in a twinkling“. Using conservative (“pessimistic”) assumptions about mutation rates, heritabilities, and the number of developmental steps required to transform a light-sensitive spot into a complex “camera eye” with a lens, retina, and cornea (viz., what we and some cephalopoods have), Nilsson and Pelger found out that the evolution of this assuredly complex trait took around 400,000 generations. As Dawkins noted:

Assuming typical generation times of one year for small animals, the time needed for the evolution of the eye, far from stretching credulity with its vastness, turns out to be too short for geologists to measure. It is a geological blink.

And so it might be with other traits, like wings or placentas. The problem is making an appropriate model, and that is hard or impossible without knowing how the trait evolved (we have some idea with the eye, as Dawkins notes, hearkening back to Darwin, who first raised the “eye problem”.) But without such models, it’s almost deceitful to say that we need a new paradigm to explain the evolution of complex traits. (In fact, we can see the evolution of complex traits—like whales evolving from land ungulates in a mere 10,000 years. And that is surely due to selection, though we can’t say with assuredness that conventional neo-Darwinism was involved. But our ignorance does not justify us trying to depose a well-established paradigm, and one that works very quickly in the case of artificial selection (genetic analysis of adaptations invariably shows that changes in the DNA are involved). Are dog breeds all due to epigenetic modifications of DNA or “agency” in the ancestral wolf? I don’t think so!)

I’ve already gone on too long, but if this paper is typical of the kind of research the JTF is funding as evidence for agency and purpose, it’s throwing its money down the toilet,.

Oh, and one last beef. When I saw this claim in the Sultan et al. paper, I was astonished:

In Maize, for instance, the “profound” architectural and reproductive changes that distinguish cultivated Maize from its wild progenitor, Teosinte, resulted not from novel mutants but from the response of a complex epistatic network to the atmospheric CO₂ and crowded planting conditions encountered during the species’ early cultivation.^[¹⁵⁵^]

What? This change, from the grass teosinte on the left to modern corn on the right (hybrid is in the middle) has nothing to do with novel mutations?

John Doebley, CC BY 2.5, via Wikimedia Commons

I looked up reference 155 and found this:

For example, genetic research shows that once-emphasized conventional assumptions about morphological change—e.g., that the change was driven mainly by human selection for rare mutants of a few single genes that were deleterious in wild plants and favorable in field environments or by selection for new, advantageous mutations that appeared postcultivation—have, for some major traits, been supplanted by different and/or more complex processes. These processes include (i) regulatory changes that targeted diverse developmental pathways and led to changes in gene expression (e.g., how, when, and to what degree existing genes are expressed through changes in the amount of mRNA during transcription); (ii) extensive rewiring of transcriptomic and coexpression networks; (iii) in an increasing number of wild progenitors, the presence and availability to the first cultivators of preexisting, nondeleterious genetic components for major domestication traits (known as “cryptic genetic variation”) that induce trait variation only under specific environmental or genetic conditions; and (iv) deviations from simple Mendelian expectations.

Every change mentioned involves mutations, whether they be structural, regulatory, or “cryptic” (genes showing their effects only under limited conditions). There is nothing new here, merely an explication of how artificial selection on teosinte involved a variety genetic changes. There is NO AGENCY in teosinte, not even construed as broadly as Sultan et al. do.

In the end, the paper seems to be much ado about nothing, which, in the last chapter (maybe tomorrow) another author will analyze critically, showing that there’s no “there” there.

I know many people won’t be interested in this analysis, but I wanted to get it on the record because so many people are hearing that not only is neo-Darwinism a pretty useless paradigm for understanding adaptation, but now are hearing as well that some nebulous “purpose” and “agency” are involved. As usual, Templeton’s money has only muddied the water.

h/t: Luana for her explanations of GWAS.

The John Templeton Foundation is at it again

December 23, 2024 • 9:45 am

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?

Frank Wilczek, the newest Templeton Prize winner, talks about science, religion, and their relationship

May 20, 2022 • 9:15 am

The Los Angeles Times has a long interview with Frank Wilczek, polymath and physics Nobel Laureate who recently nabbed the $1.3-million Templeton Prize. As I wrote a couple of days ago, Wilczek doesn’t fit the mold of those who’ve won the Prize over the past decades, as he professes no belief in a personal god (he’s a pantheist), and emphasizes the power of science versus faith. It is the case, though, that the prize, which used to go to believers like Mother Teresa and Billy Graham, is increasingly being conferred on scientists.

My main impression of the article is that the paper is subtly pressuring Wilczek to admit to some belief in the numinous, but Wilczek won’t bite. He does say a few strange things, but on the whole Wilczek seems to be one of us “nones”: a “pantheist” who rejects the idea of a personal God. Instead, he sees the whole of nature as “God”. Well, I could say that, too, professing that I see all the panoply of evolution as God. Does that qualify me for the Templeton Prize?

Originally I saw no harm in giving the prize to someone who is, in effect, an atheist in the sense of being an “a-theist”—someone who rejects any conventional notion of gods. But several readers noted that giving Wilczek the Templeton Prize enables the Foundation to enfold him into their stable of faithheads and, to some extent, justify their aim, which the L.A. Times says involves extols “the power of the sciences to explore the deepest questions of the universe and humankind’s place and purpose within it.” The very notion of a “purpose” for humankind immediately conjures up the notion of God. And those readers may be right: Wilczek’s acceptance harms science.

Click to read:

Here are some statements by the Times and by Wilczek that struck me. First, the paper tries to draw a connection between Wilczek and belief in God:

As a theoretical physicist, Wilczek has been peeking under the hood of our perceived reality for more than 50 years. His insights and ideas have led to several revolutionary scientific discoveries, as well as an almost theological perspective on the nature of the world and our role in it that he shares in his myriad articles, books and talks for a general audience.

And yet, Wilczek has said some stuff that can be used to claim that he believes in a God, even though he’s a pantheist (in my view, a humanist). Here’s a quote from him given by the paper:

You’ve written that “in studying how the world works, we are studying how God works, and thereby learning what God is.” So, what do you think God is?

Let me lead into that by talking about two of the greatest figures in physics and their very different views of what God is. Sir Isaac Newton was very much a believing Christian and probably devoted as much time to studying Scriptures and theology as he did to physics and mathematics.

Einstein, on the other hand, often talked about God — sometimes he used that word, sometimes he said “the old one” — but his concept was much different. When he was asked seriously what he meant by that, he said he believed in the God of Spinoza, who identified God with reality, with God’s work.

That was Einstein’s view and that is very much closer to my spirit. I would only add to that that I think God is not only the world as it is, but the world as it should be. So, to me, God is under construction. My concept of God is really based on what I learn about the nature of reality.

Now I think that the quote in bold (from the Times’s question) is poor, and clearly leads to misinterpretation. The “God” of Wilczek is not the kind of God that nearly any believer accepts. Later on in the article, he emphasizes that. I’m still symied, though, by Wilczek’s statement that “God is not only the world as it is, but the world as it should be.” What does he mean by that? Even as a pantheist, how can you take as God a reality that doesn’t even exist? And how should the world be?

But here again, the L.A. Times tries to imply that there’s a more conventional religious cast to Wilczek’s views. From the paper:

In addition to groundbreaking discoveries, Wilczek’s work has also led him to some of the same conclusions shared by mystics from all religions: the myth of separateness and the fundamental interconnectedness of all things.

As he wrote in “Fundamentals,” “Detailed study of matter reveals that our body and our brain — the physical platform of our ‘self’ — is, against all intuition, built from the same stuff as ‘not-self,’ and appears to be continuous with it.”

Other spiritual insights from his decades of scientific study include the idea of complementarity — that different ways of viewing the same thing can be informative, and valid, yet difficult or impossible to maintain at the same time, and that science teaches us both humility and self-respect.

The quote given by Wilczek is far from “spiritual”: it argues that the stuff of our body and brain obeys the laws of physics, be they deterministic or indeterministic. That’s NOT “spiritual! (He also more or less rules out a “soul.”)

And the idea of “complementarity” clearly refers to the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics: an electron can behave as a particle and a wave at the same time. We don’t understand quantum mechanics at its most basic level—does it correspond to any reality?—but our lack of understanding doesn’t promote spirituality, any more than our failure to understand what dark matter or dark energy are constitute “spiritual insighta.”

The Q&A with Wilczek tells us more about him. The stuff in bold is the paper’s questions (my comments are flush left):

Do you consider yourself an atheist, agnostic? Do you have a definition you’re comfortable with?

Not affiliated with any specific recognized church is certainly part of it, but I’m more comfortable saying that I’m a pantheist. I believe that the whole world is sacred and we should take a reverential attitude toward it.

What, exactly, does he mean by saying the “whole world is sacred”? We can have a “reverence” towards it because it’s amazing and yet still comprehensible, but that’s not the same thing as believing in God. It would have helped had Wilczek defined what he means by “reverential” and “sacred”. In fact, I’d love to interview him myself. These answers, of course, involve words that would put him into the running for the Templeton Prize.

Are science and religion in conflict with each other?

No, they are not in conflict with each other. There have been problems when religions make claims about how the world works or how things got to be the way they are that science comes to make seem incredible. For me, it’s very hard to resist the methods of science which are based on the accumulation of evidence.

On the other hand, science itself leads to the deep principle of complementarity, which means to answer different kinds of questions you may need different kinds of approaches that may be mutually incomprehensible or even superficially contradictory.

He’s just admitted that they ARE in conflict with each other! For there are very few religions—none of them Abrahamic—that don’t at bottom rest on certain empirical assumptions about the world and Universe. He’s also admitted that science is based on evidence (but omits the obvious addendum: “and religion is based not on evidence but on faith”). The “deep principle of complementarity”, by which I assume he means quantum complementarity, is baffling but doesn’t show there’s anything wrong with science, much less that the answer involves the numinous. By saying “on the other hand,” though, he implies that “complementarity” is immune to scientific evidence.

You’ve written that “in studying how the world works, we are studying how God works, and thereby learning what God is.” So, what do you think God is?

Let me lead into that by talking about two of the greatest figures in physics and their very different views of what God is. Sir Isaac Newton was very much a believing Christian and probably devoted as much time to studying Scriptures and theology as he did to physics and mathematics.

Einstein, on the other hand, often talked about God — sometimes he used that word, sometimes he said “the old one” — but his concept was much different. When he was asked seriously what he meant by that, he said he believed in the God of Spinoza, who identified God with reality, with God’s work.

That was Einstein’s view and that is very much closer to my spirit. I would only add to that that I think God is not only the world as it is, but the world as it should be. So, to me, God is under construction. My concept of God is really based on what I learn about the nature of reality.

Here again Wilczek admits that he sees God as “reality”, not as something supernatural. The Gods of Einstein and Spinoza were not goddy gods, but simply physical reality, and wonder before reality is not religion. Einstein, of course, rejected the idea of a personal God, and I don’t believe ever said that “reality” is “God’s work” (but I’m willing to be corrected). As far as I know from my reading of Einstein, he was a straight-up pantheist, and any palaver about what God did or wanted (like “not playing dice”) were mere musings about the nature of reality.

Does that God have a will?

Not a will as we would ascribe to human beings, although I’m not saying that’s logically impossible. I would say it’s really a stretch, given what we know. The form of the physical laws seems to be very tight and doesn’t allow for exceptions.

The existence of human beings, as they are, is a very remote consequence of the fundamental laws. One thing that [the physicist] Richard Feynman said really sticks in my mind here. He said, “The stage is too big for the players.” If you were designing a universe around humans and their concerns, you could be a lot more economical about it.

Of course a god with a will is not logically impossible, but it’s clear that Wilczek doesn’t buy it. And of course he must know that Feynman was an atheist, and appears to share Feynman’s view that the universe doesn’t look as it it were constructed with humans in mind.

There is more Q&A, but I’ll just give one last exchange:

While I was preparing for our interview, I came across a statement by the Catholic Bishops of California that said science cannot answer our deepest and most perplexing questions like, “Why am I here?” “What is the purpose of my life?” “Why have I suffered this loss?” “Why is God allowing this terrible illness?” They said these are religious questions. Do you agree?

Science doesn’t answer those questions. On the other hand, you ignore science at your peril if you are interested in those questions. There’s a lot you can learn from science by expanding your imagination and realizing the background over which those questions are posed. So, saying that science doesn’t have a complete answer is a very different thing than saying, “Go away, scientists; we don’t want to hear from you, leave it to us.”

Now here Wilczek missed a shot, but it’s a shot that would have made Templeton revoke its Prize. What he should have said is this: “Science doesn’t answer those questions (though it can inform them), but religion doesn’t either.” He’s cleverly avoiding dissing religion.

The problem with softball interviews like this is that nobody ask Wilczek the really hard questions, or at least questions that would lay his disbelief out clearly. Example: “what exactly did you mean when you said that “the world is ‘sacred'”? And so on. What’s clear is that Wilczek doesn’t adhere to the notion of God shared by the vast majority of religious believers around the world. Instead, he sees God as physical reality, pure and simple.

The only remaining question is, “With Wilczek’s views, why did Templeton give him the Prize?” There are many possible reasons, but, thank Ceiling Cat, I’m not on the board of those who have to weigh the factors.

Elaine Ecklund has a new book, and yes, it’s more of the same accommodationism

August 31, 2021 • 9:30 am

It’s been a long time (over a year) since we’ve examined the oeuvre of Elaine Ecklund a sociologist at Rice University—and now “director of the Religion and Public Life Program in Rice’s Social Sciences Research Institute—who used to be the subject of many posts. The reason? Because she made her living as a researcher heavily funded by the Templeton foundations, and apparently dedicated to showing that religion and science are compatible. She was not above twisting or misrepresenting her data to make that point which, besides the tendentious nature of her scholarship, upset many of us, including Jason Rosenhouse and Russell Blackford, who panned her 2019 book Secularity and Science for misrepresenting the very data she published.

For most of the years I’ve written this site, Ecklund has been heavily funded by three foundations started with John Templeton’s mutual-fund fortune. According to her c.v., she’s currently sitting on three grants from the Templeton Religion Trust totaling $ 3,939,548! Sir John Templeton’s ambition, when he founded the John Templeton foundation, was to show that the more we learn about science, the more evidence we have for God.

Well, Ecklund doesn’t talk about her own religious belief, but she’s dedicated her career (and spent a gazillion Templeton dollars) trying to show that scientists aren’t as atheistic as people think they are, and that scientists are “spiritual people,” not meanies like Richard Dawkins. This message, of course, plays right into Templeton’s program, ergo the continual stream of funding she gets from their foundations. And once you’ve gotten your stall in the Templeton Stable, the feed bag has no bottom.

Now Ecklund has a new book, coauthored with David R. Johnson, which promises to be more of the same. I haven’t yet read it, but I’ve read several of her books and papers, and have never failed to be infuriated by them. To get an idea of what it’s about, there’s a summary of the contents in the puff piece issued by Rice University and on Ecklund’s personal website. The book is called Varieties of Atheism in Science (you can also get it from Oxford University Press). The screenshot below links to the Amazon page.

Some of the puffery in a press release from her school, Rice University:

As it turns out, the “New Atheism” embraced by the likes of Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris and other notable scientists is at odds with the beliefs of most scientists who are atheists.

“Atheist scientists and religious communities, for example, certainly disagree about many things, but we found that they have so much more in common than they might think they share,” Ecklund said. “Both groups often have a sense of fascination about the world, a sense of meaning and purpose and a desire to explain something larger than themselves.”

This is completely disingenuous. Science has ways of showing what we think is true about the world, while religion just makes stuff up and its claims about the cosmos are falsified or untestable. The “sense of meaning and purpose” of scientists rests on the desire to find out the truth about the world, or involves secular stuff like their families and hobbies, while that of believers rests on the assumption that a deity confers meaning and purpose upon us. Finally, “something larger than ourselves” means “the universe or the Earth” to scientists, but “God and his plan” to religionists. We also have in common that we eat, breathe, and sometimes like books and music. We should be friends!

But wait! I rant! The puffery goes on:

. . . Ecklund and Johnson argue that improving the public’s perception of scientists requires uncovering the real story of who atheist scientists are.

“As the pandemic continues to ravage the global population, never before has it been more important to improve the relationship between the public and the science community,” Ecklund said.

Of the New Atheists, the book concludes, “It is now our responsibility to replace their rhetoric with reality.”

“Reality” is Ecklund’s construal of the data, which, as we’ve seen repeatedly, doesn’t quite match with what the data themselves say. And I wonder who those 81 interviewed scientists are. They certainly don’t include Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris or me!

The onus for improving the “science-religion relationship” rests not on scientists, who by and large are atheists who ignore religion, but on religionists and their rejection of science. It’s not the scientists who are making the pandemic worse by ignoring data!

Which reminds me, as I continue my rant, of a lovely quote from The Great Agnostic, Robert G. Ingersoll:

“There is no harmony between religion and science. When science was a child, religion sought to strangle it in the cradle. Now that science has attained its youth, and superstition is in its dotage, the trembling, palsied wreck says to the athlete: “Let us be friends.” It reminds me of the bargain the cock wished to make with the horse: “Let us agree not to step on each other’s feet.”

That, in a nutshell, is the academic program of Elaine Ecklund.

Here’s a summary of her new book with Johnson from Ecklund’s personal website:

A significant number of Americans view atheists as immoral elitists, aloof and unconcerned with the common good, and they view science and scientists as responsible. Thanks in large part to the prominence and influence of New Atheists such as Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Daniel Dennett, and Sam Hitchens, [JAC: SAM HITCHENS????] New Atheism has claimed the pulpit of secularity in Western society. New Atheists have given voice to marginalized nonreligious individuals and underscored the importance of science in society. They have also advanced a derisive view of religion and forcefully argued that science and religion are intrinsically in conflict.

Many in the public around the globe think that all scientists are atheists and that all atheist scientists are New Atheists, militantly against religion and religious people. But what do everyday atheist scientists actually think about religion? Drawing on a survey of 1,293 atheist scientists in the U.S. and U.K., and 81 in-depth interviews, this book explains the pathways that led to atheism among scientists, the diverse views of religion they hold, their perspectives on the limits to what science can explain, and their views of meaning and morality. The findings reveal a vast gulf between the rhetoric of New Atheism in the public sphere and the reality of atheism in science. The story of the varieties of atheism in science is consequential for both scientific and religious communities and points to tools for dialogue between these seemingly disparate groups.

Well, unless Ecklund produces a survey showing the percentage of “people around the globe who think that all scientists are atheists and that all atheists scientists are New Atheists”, I will doubt that. Many atheist scientists have criticized the likes of Dawkins, Harris, and [Sam] Hitchens for being too outspoken and “shrill.” So even atheistic scientists themselves think that not all atheist scientists adhere to their views.

Given the way Ecklund has vastly overblown her findings in the past, I’d take that second paragraph above with a grain of salt. For years Ecklund has been calling for productive dialogue between science and religion, and yet what we have, and will always have, is an unproductive monologue, with science telling religion, “Your claims are either unevidenced or disproven.” Religion has nothing valuable to say to science, though they often repeat the ironic mantra: “Be humble”. Yet it is “humble” to be a believer who not only thinks there’s a divine being, but claims to know its nature?

Will I read the book? I suppose so, but only in the way that I visit the endodontist for a root canal.

Jane Goodall nabs the Templeton Prize

June 2, 2021 • 9:30 am

I was a bit queasy when I woke up this morning to see the announcement below. It’s not that I don’t like Jane Goodall, for who doesn’t? She’s a respected primatologist, spent years finding out new stuff about chimps, and is also a conservationist and prolific publicizer of science, as well as founder of her eponymous institute. She’s also long-lasting, having turned 87 this year while remaining as active as ever (she says she travels 300 days per year!). Nor do I begrudge her the $1.5 million that the John Templeton Foundation hands out to the prizewinners, as Goodall will undoubtedly use it for good causes.

No, I was queasy because the prize was given, as it always is, to someone who conflates science and spirituality, promoting John Templeton’s accommodationist mission. Granted, the JTF’s giving it to more scientists these days (they used to give it to people like Alvin Plantinga, Rabbi Sacks, John Polkinghorne, Chuck Colson, Mother Teresa, and Billy Graham, but they’re realizing that they’d better “science up” the prize). The word “God” and “divine” has been downplayed, replaced by the eupheism “The Big Questions”. As the Wikipedia entry on Sir John notes,

In an interview published in the Financial Intelligence Report in 2005, Templeton asserts that the purpose of the John Templeton Foundation is as follows:”We are trying to persuade people that no human has yet grasped 1% of what can be known about spiritual realities. So we are encouraging people to start using the same methods of science that have been so productive in other areas, in order to discover spiritual realities.”

If you know what “spiritual realities” are beyond something numinous and divine, please enlighten me. Were I to answer that, I’d use terms of neurology and emotion rather than anything external to the physical world.

And Goodall is really known for showing not human exceptionalism, which is what the Prize is about, but for showing our psychological and behavioral connections to our closest relatives. In other words, she’s showing that we’re part of an evolutionary continuum, and share many traits with other primates. Evolution is one Big Question that’s been answered to most people’s satisfaction. Another is that our closest living relative is the chimpanzee.

Click on the screenshot to read:

Here’s the announcement from Templeton, or part of it:

Dr. Jane Goodall, DBE, founder of the Jane Goodall Institute, UN Messenger of Peace and world-renowned ethologist and conservationist, whose groundbreaking discoveries changed humanity’s understanding of its role in the natural world, was announced today as the winner of the 2021 Templeton Prize. The Templeton Prize, valued at over $1.5 million, is one of the world’s largest annual individual awards. Established by the late global investor and philanthropist Sir John Templeton, it is given to honor those who harness the power of the sciences to explore the deepest questions of the universe and humankind’s place and purpose within it. Unlike Goodall’s past accolades, the Templeton Prize specifically celebrates her scientific and spiritual curiosity. The Prize rewards her unrelenting effort to connect humanity to a greater purpose and is the largest single award that Dr. Goodall has ever received.

“We are delighted and honored to award Dr. Jane Goodall this year, as her achievements go beyond the traditional parameters of scientific research to define our perception of what it means to be human,” said Heather Templeton Dill, president of the John Templeton Foundation. “Her discoveries have profoundly altered the world’s view of animal intelligence and enriched our understanding of humanity in a way that is both humbling and exalting. Ultimately, her work exemplifies the kind of humility, spiritual curiosity, and discovery that my grandfather, John Templeton, wrote and spoke about during his life.”

Investigating the “deepest questions”, Sir John’s original purpose in bestowing the Prize fund, was intended explicitly to show that the more we learned about science, the more we understood about God. Those are what Templeton calls “The Big Questions”, like “why are we here?” and “what does it mean to be human?”. (The ultimate question, which isn’t broached, is “What is God like?”) As for Goodall’s efforts to “connect humanity to a greater purpose,” that’s just bogus. Sure, she’s shown evolutionary commonalities, but evolution is not a “purpose.” “Purpose” implies teleology, i.e., for Templeton, “God.”

Goodall’s work surely enriched our understanding of chimps far more than about humans, but did show that in many respects, such as tool-using, humans are not unique—not exceptional among the beasts of the field. As for “humility”, I know nothing about that, though Goodall has a reputation for being nice and certainly was engaging the one time I heard her speak. But that’s not the kind of humility that Templeton means: they mean “humility” before the Great Unknown—the same way theologians are always bragging that they’re “humble”. (They’re not: they pretend to know things they don’t.)

What about Goodall? It does appear she has a spiritual side that helped her get the prize. Here’s another paragraph from the award description (my emphasis):

Dr. Goodall receives the 2021 Templeton Prize in celebration of her remarkable career, which arose from and was sustained by a keen scientific and spiritual curiosity. Raised Christian, she developed her own sense of spirituality in the forests of Tanzania, and has described her interactions with chimpanzees as reflecting the divine intelligence she believes lies at the heart of nature. In her bestselling memoir, A Reason for Hope, these observations reinforced her personal belief system—that all living things and the natural world they inhabit are connected and that the connective energy is a divine force transcending good and evil.

What? The “divine intelligence she believes lies at the heart of nature”? “A divine force connecting all living things in the natural world”? Indeed, the subtitle of her 1999 book is “A Spiritual Journey.” And I’ll readily admit that “spiritual” can be construed as “awe before Nature”. If that’s what spiritual can mean, than I am spiritual, and so is Richard Dawkins. But “divine”? That’s a different kettle of fish. And yet eleven years ago she abjured acceptance of the divine in Right Attitudes:

In the May-2008 issue of O, The Oprah Magazine, Jane Goodall discussed her spirituality: “amazing moments—when you seem to know something beyond what you know and to understand things you don’t understand—can’t be understood in this life.”

“Can’t be understood in this life.” That means it’s beyond empirical investigation. But I digress: there’s more:

When asked if she believes in God in an interview published in the Sep-2010 issue of Reader’s Digest, Jane Goodall said,

I don’t have any idea of who or what God is. But I do believe in some great spiritual power. I feel it particularly when I’m out in nature. It’s just something that’s bigger and stronger than what I am or what anybody is. I feel it. And it’s enough for me.

That could simply be “evolution” or “wonder”. So why, in 2021, is Templeton touting Goodall’s acceptance of a “divine intelligence in nature”? As usual, as with other scientists like Francisco Ayala, Templeton often bestows its Big Prize on scientists who don’t explicitly say they believe in God, but are sufficiently ambiguous or waffle-y about the concept that they can slip under Templeton’s radar. And of course there are the explicit religionists who get the prize: people like Francis Collins.

Well, judge for yourself from the 9½-minute video below, and, later, from the Templeton Lectures that Goodall has signed up for:

As the 2021 Templeton Prize laureate, Dr. Goodall filmed a reflection on her spiritual perspectives and aspirations for the world and an interview with Heather Templeton Dill to announce her award. She will participate in the 2021 Templeton Prize Lectures in the fall.

In the video she mentions the soul, the Bible, “powerful spirituality” and so on, and says that “even the trees have a spark of divine energy”. The interview is definitely infused with the numinous. Granted, she says some good stuff about ecology and conservation. One telling statement, “It is just a feel of spirituality, you know, it’s something so powerful and so much beyond what even the most scientific brilliant brain could have created.” What? Where does it come from, then?

At 8:35 she resorts to a form of the First Cause argument: “What created the big bang?”

Before you give me flak for dissing a much beloved scientist, I’ll assert again that Goodall’s scientific work is exemplary and helped change the paradigm of human exceptionalism that preceded her. I admire her a lot, and clearly her life has produced on balance a great good. But that’s not what Templeton is giving her the prize for! She gets her $1.5 million for banging on about spirituality.

No, Goodall’s probably not perfect in that she evinces a weakness for the numinous, but we all have her flaws, and given her accomplishments, that a trivial one. What burns my onions is that the JTF is roping her into their stable so they can parade her as another example of someone whose work helps bring us closer to the Divine.

You can’t not like and admire this woman. The problem is that Templeton saw an opportunity to use her, and seized it.

Templeton pays $1 million for an unanswerable question: do keas feel joy?

July 1, 2020 • 12:00 pm

Keas, Nestor notabilis, are the world’s only alpine parrots, found in New Zealand. What is it like to be a kea?

When Tom Nagel wrote his famous article about what it is like to be a bat, he concluded that although bats may have consciousness, the content of that consciousness is inaccessible to us. He’s pretty much right about that, though, as I note below, perhaps some subjective sensations can be sussed out in nonhuman animals. But it would be hard, and probably impossible.

But the way to do this is not the way that the Templeton World Charity Foundation (TWCF) and the John Templeton Foundation (JTF) are doing. They’ve just spent a million dollars on grants to see if animals feel joy. The description of the project is below at stuff.co.nz (click on screenshot).

This is one of those wonky Templeton projects where the organization throws a pot of money at a bizarre issue, one unlikely to have any useful results. I’ll leave it to you to guess whether the results will be anything more than “keas like to do X and don’t like to do Y.”

But I digress. Here’s the project:

Two New Zealand professors have joined a team of international researchers to try to answer one burning question – can animals, like humans, feel emotion?

Experts from Scotland, the United States and New Zealand, including University of Canterbury (UC) associate professor Ximena Nelson and the University of Auckland’s Dr Alex Taylor, are taking part in the joyful by nature research project, funded by the Templeton World Charity Foundation.

The Scottish and American researchers would focus on dolphins and apes, while Nelson and Taylor would focus on New Zealand’s native kea, the world’s only alpine parrot and a species well-known for their unique social attributes.

Experts believe the study could have significant implications for animal welfare and ethics.

. . . . The John Templeton foundation has provided $1 million funding for the research which has been given a three-year term, with an option for a two-year extension.)

(This is a bit confusing, because it seems that two branches of the Templeton Empire are funding the same work.)

First of all, even if we could figure out if keas (or other species) felt “joy” in the same sense we do, would that really have “significant implications for animal welfare and ethics”? I don’t see how. What’s more important is whether they suffer and feel pain, prefer some conditions more than others, and whether we have the right to make animals suffer and die to improve our own well being. Whether they have emotions similar to those of humans is an anthropomorphic and misguided way to formulate an ethical policy.

But, more important is the presently unanswerable question of “do animals like keas experience joy”? Here are the data the article adduces to suggest it:

Many New Zealanders were familiar with kea as cheeky and destructive, but few would realise how remarkably intelligent they were, Nelson said.

“Their cognitive ability is similar or better than many primate species, or humans up to the age of 4,” Nelson said.

Cognitive ability, can, of course, be measured in various ways, and is much easier to assess than emotions. And it could be relevant to animal welfare and ethics. But that’s not what Templeton is funding (my emphasis below).

There were a number of factors into kea behaviour that suggested they feel emotion or joy, Nelson said.

Their babies are raised by adults in crèches, they play and roll around like children, kick stones and dance about and are naturally social creatures, she said.

“They get excited – [their warble] is like laughter.”

Animals develop play behaviour between one another for many reasons. An example of this is young cats or kittens, who play fight to hone their predatory skills. The reason why kea play is unclear.

. . .The lack of any obvious predator allowed kea “spare time” to do whatever they liked, which may have initiated their play behaviours, Nelson said.

Kea also appear to be affected by the seasons, just as humans are and responded in the same way and played in the snow and sun but hid from the rain, she said.

And there you have it: there is an alternative explanation to “play behavior” enacted because it’s fun. It’s enacted because it helps hone skills useful later in life. And, in fact, most ethologists think that play behavior is practice for adult skills (not just predatory ones; my ducks zoom and flap to practice flight motions). It could also be fun, but that would not be its raison d’être. (However, fun or joy could be the proximate stimulus that prompts the animals to begin doing adaptive behaviors.) But in the end the question remains: How do we know whether keas can experience joy?

We can’t, not in any way these researchers could find out. The only way I see to begin addressing this question is to do extensive brain analysis in humans and keas, finding out what areas of the brain (better yet, which neurons are activated) when a human feels joy and when a kea “plays.” If there are consistent neuronal patterns and brain areas associated with joy in humans, and those same areas light up when keas are playing, we might begin to wonder if keas feel something akin to joy.

But we don’t even know the brain patterns of joy in humans, and comparative studies of brain function between humans and birds is fraught with problems. Further, keas are heavily endangered, and looking at their neurons and brains is out of the question.

I thought of one jocular way: teach the keas to speak English and then ask them if they feel joy. You can already figure out the problems with that, though this kind of self-report is how I know that other humans feel joy.

No, at present the question of whether keas (or any other creature, really) can feel joy like we do is unanswerable, and may be forever unanswerable. Templeton has wasted a million bucks, as they do so often, on a dumb project that can’t even address the questions of animal welfare it asks.

Keas, of course, will be protected whether or not they feel joy. We refrain from bashing them on the head not because we know they feel joy, but because they’re amazing animals and are endangered. And if by some miracle we find out they can feel joy, well, that’s not useful for questions of animal welfare: we’d need to look at chickens and ducks and other fowl that we kill or cage.

Templeton, this looks like another million bucks down the drain.

Here’s a kea, photographed by me in New Zealand two years ago:

h/t: Gordon

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