In previous posts in this series on the science of purpose, I have claimed that scientific atheism, aka scientism, emerged from the mistaken belief that randomly generated structure-function relationships (SFRs) were reducible to the neo-Darwinian randomness-selection hypothesis. I further argued that SFRs themselves must by definition rely on an inherent underlying duality which defines their very nature, such that a “relationship” must obtain when a structure randomly materializes, resulting “secondarily” in the consequent function. Thus came the mistaken claim that since all natural structure is derived from random processes, the resultant function must likewise be understood as random and unintended.
Here I will endeavor to point out that structure-function relationships, just like most dualities themselves, are fictions of language, a façon de parler. They exist for the sake of description only, but do not actually contain the full meaning of the entity they endeavor to describe. As such, much confusion can arise when this is not recognized. In the words of the Zen master Alan Watts:
“Parts” are fictions of language, of the calculus of looking at the world through a net which seems to chop it up into bits. Parts exist only for purposes of figuring and describing, and as we figure out the world we become confused if we do not remember this all the time.
The Book, p. 97
I realize this may sound radical or astonishing to many, because it goes to a fundamental ontological principle most either haven’t recognized or have chosen to avoid. That is why it is only now, 300 years after Descartes, that the truth can finally come to light.
Please Bear with Me on This
Throughout this series I have claimed that the crucial point of departure that led to the reductionism of modern science into scientism was when Descartes replaced the scholasticism of Aquinas with Cartesian metaphysics. And it was Newton’s mechanics, which succeeded beyond all expectations, that famously and unfortunately led to Laplace’s sanctioning of scientism. By now, however, most of the philosophical world has finally discarded “Cogito ergo sum.” But Descartes’s legacy of philosophical dualism, as his means to make difficult concepts “intelligible,” still permeates our understanding of the world. For example, it turns out that there is still another dualism nested in the very foundation of Newton’s scientific revolution, which must now be confronted. It exemplifies the strained logic that mechanics employs to misleadingly simplify the complex. Our ultimate goal is to articulate a unifying theory that explains and reconciles emergence with specified irreducible complexity. The only way to do this is to demonstrate the error of logic in dualistic reductionism, thus leading us to the final renunciation of scientism, and to the further completion of intelligent design ontology.
What Is the Dualism We Now Must Reconcile?
In fact, this dualism was recognized a hundred years ago by two of the greatest physicists of the 20th century: Albert Einstein and Erwin Schrödinger. But the philosophical implications have only recently been brought to light by perhaps the greatest philosopher of biology of the 20th century, Robert Rosen. Alas, Rosen’s revolutionary work has gone underappreciated if not barely recognized, because the thrust of his work was contrary to neo-Darwinism, and ultimately undermining of scientism itself. Rosen recognized this problem but refused to stray from the truth as he saw it. Much of what follows was inspired by his writing in Life Itself and Essays on Life Itself. But it remains for us here to finish the trail of logic he blazed, taking his lead to the final denouement of reconciliation.
In Essays on Life Itself, Rosen expounds on what Schrödinger had discerned: the fatal flaw in reducing life to biochemistry. Schrodinger wrote:
We cannot expect that “laws of physics” will suffice straightaway to explain the behavior of living matter… The orderliness encountered in the unfolding of life springs from a different source.
What Is Life? pp. 85-6
On this basis, it can be said that Schrödinger anticipated what Michael Behe formally articulated as irreducible complexity 50 years later in Darwin’s Black Box:
Now it is the turn of modern biochemistry to disturb. Systems of irreducible complexity inhabit the cell. The resulting realization that life was designed by an intelligence is a shock to us in the 20th century who had gotten used to thinking of life as the result of simple natural laws.
Darwin’s Black Box, p. 252
So, What Is That Obscure Dualism?
It is none other than m, i.e., mass. What Einstein and Schrödinger realized was that in Newton’s mechanics, m was in one setting a source of inertia that required an external force in order to achieve acceleration, and in another setting was the actual force itself. This conundrum was somewhat sarcastically described as follows:
GRAVITATION, n. The tendency of all bodies to approach one another, with a strength proportional to the quantity of matter they contain — the quantity of matter they contain being ascertained by their tendency to approach one another…
Ambrose Bierce, The Devil’s Dictionary (1911)
So as strange as it is to realize, modern science is based on, not exactly a contradiction, but rather a clue to the concealed circularity that all dualities entail: an incompleteness that can only be resolved by eliminating the duality and replacing it with a complementarity.
A Compilation of Dualisms
Returning to science as the embodiment of the work of Isaac Newton, a science which is quite literally a compilation of dualisms, Rosen writes:
Newton’s laws transmute the initial dualism between system and environment into a dualism between states and forces or between states and dynamical laws. It is this dualism between states and dynamical laws that has determined the character of contemporary science
Life Itself, p. 95
In his classic series of lectures — which he combined into the monograph What Is Life? — Erwin Schrödinger invoked the dilemma of the m = force vs. m = object duality to explain the problem of life. He made it clear that Newtonian as well as quantum mechanics were utterly incapable of explaining life. Why? Because that same duality that is embedded in Newton’s m reappeared in the structure-function relationships of DNA and of phenotype. How could an aperiodic crystal, DNA, “force” the formation of phenotype?
As Schrödinger perceived it, the real problem was to somehow move the holonomic order characteristic of a molecule into the nonholonomic order manifested by phenotype (which is not a molecule). In more general terms, the problem is to realize an inertial structural holonomic thing in terms of a force exerted on a dynamic nonholonomic thing.
Essays on Life Itself, p. 16
The only way to make sense of this conundrum is, again, to relinquish the structure-function duality in favor of a unified theory of life. We already know that many phenomena escape complete description in a “context-independent” setting. The paradigm for this is, of course, light, where the description of light as either a wave or a particle itself is entirely context-dependent. Hence the need to invoke the concept of a “complementarity.”
The Proof of a Claim
Schrödinger recognized that life itself could not be explained by mechanics, and Rosen reaffirmed that idea 50 years later. The proof of this claim is that the conventional paradigms governing biology have run into the same sort of dead end that confronted physics at the end of the 19th century: black-body radiation, as previously mentioned. The greatest molecular biologist of all time, Carl Woese, put it this way:
By the end of the 20th Century, the molecular vision of biology had in essence been realized. Look back on 100 years. Did not a similar sense of science coming to completion pervade physics at the 19th Century’s end? Biology today is no more fully understood in principle than physics was a century ago. In both cases the guiding vision had reached its end and in both, a new, deeper, more invigorating representation of reality is (or was) called for.
“A New Biology for a New Century,” Microbiology and Molecular Biology Reviews, 2004, p. 173
Upon reflection, we can see from all of the above that emergence and specified irreducible complexity, the dead ends for evolution that characterize the limit of explanation of reduction in biology, were the inevitable results of the dualistic, mechanistic approach of molecular biology. As Woese described it:
In the last several decades we have seen the molecular reductionist formulation of biology grind to a halt, its vision of the future spent… Biology must break free of reductionist hegemony, and press forward once more as a fundamental science, which means an emphasis on holistic nonlinear emergent biology with understanding the nature of form as the primary defining goal of a new biology.
In a further post, I will define and resolve these “conundrums.”
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