Just to pique your interest and raise your expectations, here’s a short blog note on current currents in biology that promise changes in our understanding of life. I’ve already mentioned here the professional association called The Third Way of Evolution where eminent evolutionary biologists are espousing a path that is neither neo-Darwinism nor creationism. Three new books reflect this current – “Evolution Evolving: The Developmental Origins of Adaptation and Biodiversity,” “Evolution ‘On Purpose’: Teleonomy in Living Systems,” and “Phenotypic Plasticity and Evolution: Causes, Consequences, Controversies.” Among others.
But beyond the noise in evolutionary theory (not against Darwinism, by the way, but just against the genetic reductionism of neo-Darwinism), there are deeper issues going on in biology itself. These come on several fronts – the strong turn to exploring the origin of life begun around the turn of the century, the strong interest in development and physiology as supplementary sources for evolutionary change as touched on in some of the books above, the growing interest in biological networks and organization theory, the challenges within neuroscience such as 4E cognitive sciences and ecological psychology, and the rise of systems chemistry where the chemistry of life is teaching how to design nano machines (see “Life’s Ratchet: How Molecular Machines Extract Order from Chaos”). Two new books capture the sense of the oncoming wave – “Properties of Life: Toward a Theory of Organismic Biology” by Rosslenbroich and “How Life Works: A User’s Guide to the New Biology” by Philip Ball.
What are the issues driving this uneasiness with biology as usual? For origin of life studies it is the wall that Darwin avoided – the first cell, which brings up questions of agency and source of activity and a challenge to the question of what could be evolving. For the issues in development and physiology the questions revolve around whether phenotypes themselves can have evolutionary potential (allowing genetic accommodation – see West-Eberhard’s foreword in the aforementioned “Phenotypic Plasticity” book). For biological networks and organization theory the distributed and almost cybernetic quality of life that takes away any privileged center is shown to be a feature of living things. For the many new streams within cognitive science the old concept-in-the-closet of the “mind” is seen to have many unusual characteristics that do not fit the old subject-in-a-brain view. There is now the ecological view of cognition, the extended view of cognition as including aspects of the environment, the enactive view where the body’s activity is itself part of thinking, and so on. Systems chemistry is a field in chemistry with many applications that jumps between origin of life questions and commercial applications of highly unusual character – molecular ratchets, motors, clocks, etc. I was shocked just now not to be able to find a book on systems chemistry at Amazon; try “Systems Chemistry” article by Ashkenasy, Gonen et al in the Chemical Society Review in 2017 (46:2543-2554).
Currently these five large fields hardly talk to each other. The two books by Ball and Rosslenbroich pull some of the threads together to forecast an upheaval in biology. It is easier to look backward to see the potential trap that the life sciences probably fell into. The discovery of the laws of physics with Gallileo and Descartes and Newton pulled early life studies (not named “biology” until a century and a half later) into the notion that animals could be little machines … with maybe some sort of soul or connection to rationality. This simplistic model stuck even as physics went through its own revolution and even with continual conflicts (is everything just random matter?, what/where is consciousness?, free will?, how did life start?, what about viruses?, can organisms really fuse in symbiosis to form new species?, …). The current movement of biology highlighted up above is in large part biology’s hitting the wall with the machine model of life.
And where will this forecasted “revolution” in biology go? I’ll go out on a limb to say that it will challenge our view of the nature of life. Individuality will take a side seat alongside the mutualistic and metamorphizing aspects of life. The fecundity of nature to find time persistent patterns of energy flow among constraints as in organization theory (“Organization in Biology” edited by Mossio) will be recognized as a general feature. And lastly, this will inject a truce between religious extremists by supporting a pluralistic pantheism endorsed by William James where the world is inherently creative in all its crevices in a way that is neither a dead universe nor a creative universe run by a distant executive. Biology might look like a sleepy world of researchers, test tubes, and data centers. The ideas seeping out of the conflicts and surprises carry a lot of potential. More to come.