By Gary Berg-Cross
I don’t trust (by definition)
oversimplifications, but as an aid to a longer journey of understanding I can
enjoy a wise, clever and well informed mind’s pithy summarizations. A case in point is Richard Feynman (fierce
& avowed
atheist even as a young man and evidenced by his family battles to opt out
of Jewish celebrations):
At almost thirteen I dropped out of Sunday
school just before confirmation because of differences in religious views but
mainly because I suddenly saw that the picture of Jewish history that we were
learning, of a marvelous and talented people surrounded by dull and evil
strangers was far from the truth. ‘
He expressed a new affirmative stance this way:
"I thought
nature itself was so interesting that I didn't want it distorted (by miracle
stories). And so I gradually came to disbelieve the whole religion."
What
Do You Care What Other People Think? (1988)
Well that’s not the generalization I’m
thinking of, valuable as it is as background.
It more in the realm of Physics as published in his famous Lectures on Physics, including
the layman accessible material re-published as Six Easy Pieces. There
he argued that the most important scientific knowledge - from physics to
biology - is the simple fact that all
things are made of atoms. Here is how he phrased it:
If,
in some cataclysm, all of scientific knowledge were to be destroyed, and only
one sentence passed on to the next generations of creatures, what statement
would contain the most information in the fewest words? I believe it is the atomic
hypothesis (or the atomic fact, or
whatever you wish to call it) that all things are made of atoms—little particles that
move around in perpetual motion, attracting each other when they are a little
distance apart, but repelling upon being squeezed into one another. In that one sentence, you will see, there is an
enormous amount of information about the world, if just a little imagination and
thinking are applied...
(Six Easy
Pieces, p.4)
Everything made of small
units like atoms is a key idea to
understanding the world and it plays out in more than Physics. Feynman sees it
in biology too –
“everything that animals do, atoms do. In other words,
there is nothing that living things do that cannot be understood from the point
of view that they are made of atoms acting according to the laws of physics.”
Well I might not agree entirely here, but a
physics point of view explains much and it took, as RF notes :
“some experimenting
and theorizing to suggest this hypothesis, but now it is accepted, and it is
the most useful theory for producing new ideas in the field of biology.” (Six Easy
Pieces, p.20)
A temping simplification,
but perhaps we need to be cautious of this as the most useful basis for our
understanding. I think that you can argue, as Biologist Ernst Mayr has, for the
importance of biology/evolutionary biology as an independent science, different
from chemistry/physics and deserving of its own, distinct philosophy. Reductionist
“understanding” of reality, I would argue, is too naive a jump and doesn’t get
us to fuller explanations. In the diagram below you can see this view and how
it gets extended form the molecular level to a meso-view of Biology and then on
to Psychological realm of things like knowing and belief followed by
populations of people. Gee, maybe I can
explain why some populations believe in God.
Not so fast. It gets complicated, so we need to qualify
things as we move on from small grain atoms to meso- and psych-social phenomena.
It seems to me that basic unit frame is misleading for
biology, since lower level functions cannot explain the functions of more
complex organization of matter as are always found in living things. As I have
in the diagram we have emergence.
It is even more misleading
at higher scaled phenomena. Still there is much that can be imported from a
Physics and Chemistry view into biology.
I’m thinking here is biology as physical networks. In the 1930s,
physiologist Max Kleiber, put a number on this general idea. He showed that an
animal's metabolic rate is proportional to its body mass raised to the power of
3/4 . This relationship has been found
to hold across the living world from bacteria to blue whales and giant
redwoods, over more than 20 orders of magnitude difference in size.
Scaling laws based on
exponents in which the denominator is a multiple of four apply to a host of
other biological variables, such as lifespan. In the 90s West, G. B., Brown, J. H. &
Enquist(1) found an explanation for the
scaling laws in the dynamics of organisms‘ internal transport of nutrients and
other resources
"There's maybe 200
scaling laws that have quarter powers in them," says West.
OK, so there is that. But my candidate for a key idea is Evolution.
Evolution unifies Biology and as Richard Dawkins said, nothing in Biology makes
sense without evolution. That’s a highly informative propositions up there with
matter is composed of units. One might also put it as a theory that the world
is steadily changing, so organisms transform over time and this takes place via
natural selection. Daniel Dennett provides the importance of the
idea more elaborately:
'in
a single stroke, the idea of evolution by natural selection unifies the realm
of life, meaning and purpose with the realm of space and time, cause and
effect, mechanism and physical law.’
I like this appeal to
unifying key ideas across scientific domains. Call it consillience if you like
as E. O. Wilson does. And, not surprisingly, evolution also plays a key role in
evolution, although that is a more recent development of note.
Human, cognitive evolution,
is one of those candidate areas to provide a pithy insight. I would make a start on a summary in the
somewhat simply in the Feynman and Dawkins sentence style:
The
capacity for human cognition is the result of evolutionary processes and is
manifest in such processes as cognitive biases and reasoning.
Of course we may throw in
some units that are involved in evolution.
Genes, RDA and DNA come to mind but they work as part of a system and so
does natural selection. Things seems a
bit more complicated. I’ll come back to
that.
Various branches of
Psychology including the recent thrusts in evolutionary psychology and decision
science are the advanced outposts of experimentation and theorizing to investigate
this idea framed as a hypothesis. The
WASH MDC chapter’s January lecture by Elizabeth Cornwell on “The Evolution of
Sex” was a tour de force excursion in this realm. By connecting the topic to “Why God is so Concerned
with Sex” Dr. Cornwell takes a first step towards what might be some things to
consider in the connection of evolution to issues of Religion.
But to get closer to that
topic we might step back to the idea of atoms and such. I didn’t provide a key sentence for Chemistry
and that stands between Physics and Bio.
One thought is that we might put forward the Periodic Table as listing
the chemical units. But many, many things of interest are molecular and thus
higher units. We might suggest as a key thing to help understanding this constructed
chemical world something about the chemical bond and how units get put together. And it is this varying ways of composting
structures from units that gets increasingly interesting and complicates
things. By the time we get to Biological
organisms we are into a multitude of relations and many of then like individual
development and specie’s variations are contingent. Here history matters in ways it doesn’t to an
atom and that makes stating a laws for biology a bit more difficult.
In physics, laws are intended to be
universal. In evolution, such laws seem
hard to come by. Even the
"law" that acquired characters are not inherited has exceptions,
because not all heredity depends on the sequence of bases in nucleic acids
(something noted by John Maynard Smith) So Evolutionary theory is NOT a “law”
derived as things are in Physics from mathematics. It’s not that we can’t
make summary statements, but that the steps to go from there to some well
understood and somewhat complete explanation gets pretty drawn out.
Think of gas atoms colliding
to produce gross phenomena like pressure. Sure we have a PV=NRT equation that
lets us figure some things out. There is
no such simple, closed law for evolution.
It matters what the history of atoms of bio -species and genes has been.
Our Bio candidate of evolution is
not a "law" in the mathematical sense of the term. One’s tendency to
be chubby gets partially explained by genetics but it is dynamic and interacts
with many factors life. As part of the biological part we might have integrate
the networks of Biology from neural networks, genetic and metabolic networks or
patterns of protein interaction. It’s
all important and part of interlocking systems that have evolved over
time. And then it gets to interact in
humans with culture.
For all these reasons of contingency
and varied relations one is drawn into saying more about what seems a simple
thing to begin with. And perhaps it is
these summaries of the interactions that are involved that should be part of
what we need to know and would pass along as wisdom to a post apocalyptic
world. That and advice to be skeptical. As Feynman put it:
“I
think it's much more interesting to live not knowing than to have answers which
might be wrong.”
Image Credits
Simple
Explanations http://digitalsplashmedia.com/
Richard
Feynman: http://www.spaceandmotion.com/quantum-mechanics-richard-feynman-quotes.htm
Reductionism Diagram: by Gary Berg-Cross from a talk to the
Evolutionary Society, “Arguing for Biological Autonomy” & Biological Reality, Discussions of E.Mayr’s
25th book, What Makes Biology Unique?:Considerations on the Autonomy of a
Scientific Discipline
.
