Teleology is a lady without whom no biologist can live. Yet he is ashamed to show himself with her in public.
—Ernst Theodor von Brücke (quoted in W. B. Cannon 1945)
Francis Bacon (1605) disparaged Minerva and the Muses as barren virgins and thus relegated the arts to the category of things irrelevant to physical inquiry. René Descartes’s (1641) separation of the mind as thinking thing from bodily mechanism had similar implications. Creativity belonged to the ghost, not the machine. And thus, near the beginnings of the Scientific Revolution, we find early intimations of an estrangement between humanistic and scientific approaches to knowledge.
The liberal arts (ars liberalis) of the medieval university combined the trivium (grammar, dialectic, rhetoric) and quadrivium (arithmetic, geometry, music, astronomy). The fifteenth and sixteenth centuries saw reform of the trivium as the studia humanitatis, forerunners of the modern humanities. This curricular reform involved a shift from emphasis on logical disputation (dialectic) to the reading and interpretation of classical texts. Poetry, history, and moral philosophy joined the educational attainments befitting a free man (Kristeller 1978; Nauert 1990). The seventeenth century saw major developments in natural philosophy, the precursor of the modern sciences. The social sciences claimed a place at the academic table during the nineteenth century. These divisions of scholarship continue to jostle for appointments in the academy and coverage in the curriculum.
German universities of the nineteenth century were the arena of extended polemics between advocates of the Naturwissenschaften (natural sciences) and Geisteswissenschaften (roughly the humanities and social sciences; Geist can be translated as “ghost,” “spirit,” or “mind”). I am unable to fully understand these debates and adequately explain them to you, because of my very limited abilities in the German language. In my attempts to interpret a long German sentence, I can tease out possible meanings of some of the phrases but am unable to identify the intended meaning because the meaning of each part relates to the sentence as a whole, and the sense of the sentence must be understood as part of an extended argument, the thesis as a whole, that contains many sentences much longer and more complex than the sentence you have just read. English translations, when available, break up the long sentences into parsable parts but at the cost of another layer of interpretation interposed between my reading and the pretranslated text.
Hermeneutics developed as a methodology for the study and interpretation of written texts, especially sacred scriptures and the writings of classical antiquity. Its central problematic was how to make sense of a text written long ago in an alien language. Interpretation was envisaged as a recursive process in which the sense of individual words and phrases was gained from the sense of the whole but the sense of the whole was constructed from the sense of the individual parts, all in the context of reading other texts. The reciprocal relation between interpretation of parts in the context of the whole and the whole in terms of its parts came to be known as the hermeneutical circle. The scope of hermeneutics expanded to include the interpretation of all social phenomena, not just written texts. This expansion in the domain of hermeneutics has been accompanied by expanded definitions of text. At the limit, anything that is interpreted is a text, including the course of human history and all human actions, whether intentional or unintentional (Ricoeur 1971). My personal definition of a text—an interpretation intended to be interpreted—is narrower because it excludes the unintended.
Wilhelm Dilthey wrote extensively on the distinctive methodology of the Geisteswissenschaften and related these methods to general problems of hermeneutics. His statement “Die Natur erklären wir, das Seelenleben verstehen wir” (Dilthey 1894) is the locus classicus of an influential distinction between Erklären (explanation) as the explanatory mode of the Naturwissenschaften and Verstehen (understanding) as the elucidatory principle of the Geisteswissenschaften. In English translation, with succeeding sentences:
We explain nature but we understand mental life. Inner experience grasps the processes by which we accomplish something as well as the combination of individual functions of mental life as a whole. The experience of the whole context comes first; only later do we distinguish its individual parts. This means that the methods of studying mental life, history and society differ greatly from those used to acquire knowledge of nature. (Dilthey 1979, 89)
In Dilthey’s view, explanation was synthesis, a building-up from disconnected parts, whereas understanding began from a connected unity. Understanding was analysis of the parts of this singular whole. In “Die Enstehung der Hermeneutik” (Dilthey 1900; translated as the “The Rise of Hermeneutics,” 1996), he formulated the central problem of the Geisteswissenschaften (human studies) as generalization from singular existence:
When the systematic human studies go on to derive more general lawful relations and more inclusive connections from this objective apprehension of what is singular, the processes of understanding and interpretation still remain basic. Thus, these disciplines, like history itself, depend for their methodological certainty upon whether the understanding of what is singular may be raised to the level of universal validity. So at the threshold of human studies we encounter a problem specific to them alone and quite distinct from all conceptual knowledge of nature. (235)
But this problem is not unique to human studies. It arises for all living things. Each species, each gene, is an individual with a deep evolutionary history. Each organism is an individual with a unique developmental history. A biologist confronted by the behavior of a slug is in much the same position as a drama critic. The individual performance was shaped by evolutionary and developmental pasts, unknowable in detail and unmanipulable by the methods of experimental science. Knowledge from diverse sources must be brought to bear on problems of interpretation if one is to understand the meanings of a slug. Biologie is a fruitful scion of Geist grafted on Natur.
The hermeneutic circle—the reciprocal relation between understanding the parts from the whole and the whole from the parts—is central to understanding life. The metaphor of natural selection subsumes all processes by which organismal performance determines which organisms survive to reproduce and hence which genes are copied and recopied. The whole selects the parts. The problem selects the solution. Informational genes are the archival text of past performances that formed the text that informs. Material genes are actors in the play. Life is a cycle in which text and performance are reciprocally cause and effect of each other. The circle is rescued from eternal recurrence of the same by mutation (origin of difference) and selection (generation of meaning by the erasure of difference). The stage props that have withstood the tests of repeated use are tools that organisms use to interpret their world.
The intricate mechanisms of living beings, what I have called souls, enable organisms to integrate sundry sensory inputs as choices of unified action. Souls are not easily analyzed: they are explicable and inexplicable in purely physical terms. Soul-structures are physicochemically arbitrary but operate within physical law. Soul-actions are physicochemically apposite because they make sense in a physical world. Understanding the actions of souls requires explanations of motivations and meanings as well as of mechanisms. Hermeneutics and biology coexist in reciprocal tension. Biology explains the evolutionary and developmental origins of interpretative souls. Their understanding is matter for interpretation.
In this new world they no longer possessed their former guides, their regulating, unconscious and infallible drives: they were reduced to thinking, inferring, reckoning, co-ordinating cause and effect, these unfortunate creatures; they were reduced to their “consciousness,” their weakest and most fallible organ!
—Friedrich Nietzsche (2007)
The relation of parts to wholes was one aspect of Dilthey’s Verstehen. Another was subjectivity: the direct access we have to inner experience and how this relates to our understanding of other subjectivities and the objective world. All meanings exist for an interpreter, but introspection protests that the subjectivity of riboswitches is strictly metaphorical. We strongly doubt there is anything it is like to be a riboswitch. We have no empathy for riboswitches. But is there something it is like to be a chimpanzee or a slug? We have more empathy for chimpanzees than for slugs because we find it easier to put ourselves in a chimpanzee’s shoes. It is harder to imagine a slug wearing shoes, but my better acquaintance with slugs suggests that they too have some form of subjective awareness. When two slugs entwine in a nuptial embrace, each both sexes in one, I conjecture a frisson of joy.
The aspect of human souls that we know from empathic experience is spoken of as conscious awareness. Consciousness, awareness, attention, concentration, and engagement are interrelated terms for what we perceive to be limited resources of functioning souls. The Oxford English Dictionary is of limited help. Conscious is derived from a Latin root “to know” and, like the cognate word conscience, has connotations of guilt. Aware comes from an Old English word for “cautious,” the latter from a Latin root for “to beware.” Attend comes from a Latin root for “to stretch,” cognate with tension. Concentration comes from a Latin root for “to bring to a common center.” Engage comes from a French root for “to pledge.” These etymologies suggest associations with knowing, danger, direction, responsibility, centrality, and commitment.
Most problems are solved without consciousness. Our bodily actions involve myriad decisions at many spatial and temporal scales. We lack conscious access to most bodily choices, although we may be conscious of their downstream effects. For present purposes, I will distinguish autonomic and automatic actions while acknowledging no clear-cut distinction between them. Autonomic actions are fully unconscious, whereas automatic actions can, when challenged, be brought under conscious control. Examples of autonomic actions include the beating of my heart, the inspiration of breath, the influx and efflux of ions across membranes, and the construction of consciousness. Examples of automatic actions include repeated behaviors such as the scratching of an itch and the lean of a cyclist’s body as she rounds a bend. It is a common subjective perception that conscious engagement with a task plays a role in some forms of learning, but that once complex behaviors have been learned, many are better performed automatically than consciously.
The mechanisms of consciousness are tools, and the contents of consciousness are texts, used in higher-level interventions into lower-level mechanisms; but the implementation of all interventions depends on a substratum of autonomic and automatic difference making. When I walk to work, all of my cellular choices are autonomic and many of my higher-level choices are automatic. I am unaware of complex decisions where to place my feet and when to turn a corner. Freed from these mundane tasks, my consciousness is gainfully employed in planning my day or wanders freely among idle thoughts, but my attention becomes highly engaged in crossing major roads. On days when I intend to deviate from my usual route to go to the dry cleaners, I need to keep this intention near the forefront of my attention or I will arrive at the office with my dirty laundry still clutched in my hand. My phenomenological walk to work is very different on icy winter mornings when decisions where to place my feet are at the forefront of consciousness. A brief lapse of attention may cause a damaging fall. Multiple resources are brought to bear on the problem of foot placement. It is a high priority. When a slug breaks cover to venture forth across a paved path, it is alert for danger. It does not know where it is heading. Or perhaps it knows because it has been there before.
Phenomena are interpretations of peripheral inputs. They are metaphors of things in the world used to inform choices of action. In the background of my more or less conscious awareness, a perceptual model of the world is continually updated with new data. New inputs are compared to interpretations of past inputs. Model and data are brought into register (in the printer’s sense of bringing into alignment). Percepts function as detectors of difference between model and data. Alarming differences are flagged as deserving immediate attention.
The contents of consciousness are interpretations ready for use. They include items for which I do not need to search and pointers for where to search for more information. My perceptual field categorizes salient objects, situates them in space, and connects them to a storehouse of knowledge and my intentions toward them. When I needed a pen to write the first draft of this paragraph, I did not start from ignorance as to where a pen might be. I was vaguely aware without looking that a pen was by my right hand. I then turned my attention to pick up the pen. I did not need to start from scratch by searching for a dark cylindrical object, that might or might not be there, and then engaging in further interpretation to decide whether the cylindrical percept was a pen or a laser pointer. All that mental work had already been done. But before I decided to pick up the pen, its location was not at the forefront of my consciousness but in a nebulous background of content that was “at hand” if needed. I knew where to look.
Consciousness includes “holding in mind,” a short-term memory that enables coordination and coherence of actions. I recently had the intriguing nonexperience of suffering septic shock. I was seemingly alert, answered questions when asked, but gave the same answers over and over again. This is what I have been told. I seemed to observers to be conscious and probably would have said I was conscious if asked—what a silly question!—but unlike my wife who attended with care I had no recollection of what I just said. I was temporally incoherent. I remember nothing between being put in the ambulance and “coming to myself” when recollection returned as autonomic processes of cellular souls reestablished higher-level coherence. “I” came back.
A perennial “hard problem” of philosophy is how subjective awareness exists in a material world. I have no particular insight into this problem but suspect that progress will be made by gaining better understanding the final causes of consciousness, the tasks it has evolved to solve. Consciousness is a tool used as a private text. It is an interpretation of information that is used by the soul to inform subsequent interpretations. What features distinguish the tasks that require this textual prosthesis? Why cannot these tasks be performed as effectively autonomically or automatically? What are the material media on which the text is inscribed? I suspect that answers to these questions will require entering into the hermeneutic circle in which complex higher-level “considerations” intervene on lower-level mechanisms that are the objective substrate of the higher-level subjectivity. Consciousness requires engagement with metaphor.
The self-awareness of the individual is only a flickering in the closed circuits of historical life. That is why the prejudices of the individual, far more than his judgments, constitute the historical reality of his being.
—Hans-Georg Gadamer (1992)
A perennial not-so-hard problem of philosophy is how objectivity can exist in a phenomenal world. There is a sense in which all knowledge is subjective, with nothing known outside of perception. An organism does not have direct access to things in themselves, only to interpretations of things, but the interpretative faculties of organisms have evolved to enable effective action in the world and, for this reason, can be relied on to provide useful guidance. Our verdicts are just. An organism brings past prejudices—“the historical reality of its being” in Gadamer’s phrase—to all present judgments. Objective “facts” are things upon which we all can agree. Rough consensus exists among members of a species about the nature of worldly things because their shared evolutionary history has given them similar sensory and interpretative mechanisms. They have the same prejudices.
Kant wrote: “What the things may be in themselves I do not know, and also do not need to know, since a thing can never come before me except in appearance” (1781, 375). So much for pure reason! One practical reason why one might need objective information about a thing is that it will eat you if you do not take evasive action. A gazelle is eaten by the cheetah an sich, and becomes flesh of its flesh, rather than appears to be eaten by an appearance. Subjectivity is objectively grounded in the need to know.
When we interact with inanimate things, we act most effectively when we see the world “as it is.” We can trust our perceptions because inanimate things do not have purposes. Our interactions with animate things have a different flavor. We cannot always accept what we see at face value. They may have purposes that conflict with our purposes. They may have incentives to hide their intentions and manipulate our perceptions, just as we have incentives to hide our intentions and manipulate their perceptions. The evolution of our perception drives the evolution of their deception. We perceive most effectively when we “see through” their stratagems, but we deceive most effectively when we hide our motivations, perhaps even from ourselves, if self-deception gives less away to their heightened abilities to detect our deceit.
Subjectivity is an objective attribute of organisms. For this reason, an objective understanding of organisms, including ourselves, requires engagement with their subjectivity. We have evolved objective capabilities of second-person and third-person sympathy that allow us to model the subjective perspectives of others and anticipate how they will react to our actions, and these sympathetic abilities help us gain a more objective understanding of ourselves. But we distrust the objectivity of others, because human agents play games, including with evidence. We should likewise distrust our own objectivity because we are unjust like them. Our perceptions of our own motivations and of what is “fair” may be biased to favor our own ends. We have self-interested incentives to present our preferences as disinterested. For human agents who articulate their reasons, a readiness to see value in the other side of an argument can place one in a weaker position in bargaining with an adversary who sees only their side. I recognize within myself an ability to quarantine my objective judgments of multiple perspectives from my passionate conviction that the “objective” evidence supports only my side.
Finally, our perceptions may be distorted because we are used as means to the ends of other agents, both external and internal. How we perceive the “objective” world can be shaped by external actors, using social media, and by internal actors, using emotional media, to manipulate what we perceive. Our self-perceived interests may not serve our self-professed ends. Our hopes and our joys, our fears and our hatreds, have evolved to serve our genes’ replicative ends. We have evolved to be ill-satisfied, endlessly desiring something more. We do not rest on our laurels. The pursuit of happiness is an addiction to striving. The promise of contentment when we get what we want is often false advertising.
A trope embraced by many scientists is that science is objective. Humanists have their own well-developed criteria for weighing evidence and judging the value of competing interpretations, and they detect, in this trope, an invidious comparison that valorizes “hard” over “soft” scholarship. Scientists and humanists have their own subjectivities and objectivities, and I do not wish to enter into these arguments. Rather, I wish to suggest that biologists need to incorporate subjectivity into their objective understanding of living things and may have something to learn from the humanities on the subject.
If one cannot recall everything, neither can one recount everything. The idea of an exhaustive narrative is a perfomatively impossible idea. The narrative necessarily contains a selective dimension.
—Paul Ricoeur (2004)
Historical narratives are created rather than discovered. They are fruits of Minerva and the Muses, not Daedalus and Vulcan. They are interpretations of the past that require further interpretation before application to present concerns. Useful histories are not exhaustive catalogs of everything that happened but attempts to identify events and patterns that are of particular significance. They are a search for reasons why that requires judgment and discrimination. A century after Dilthey, Ernst Mayr, in his final book published in his hundredth year, wrote:
With the experiment unavailable for research in historical biology, a remarkable new heuristic method has been introduced, that of historical narratives. Just as in much of theory formation, the scientist starts with a conjecture and thoroughly tests it for its validity, so in evolutionary biology the scientist constructs a historical narrative, which is then tested for its explanatory value. . . . Evolutionary biology, as a science, in many respects is more similar to the Geisteswissenschaften, than to the exact sciences. When drawing the borderline between the exact sciences and the Geisteswissenschaften, this line would go right through the middle of biology and attach functional biology to the exact sciences while classifying evolutionary biology with the Geisteswissenschaften. (2004, 23)
The scientific critics of adaptationism have it right. Evolutionary narratives do not conform to the norms of hard science. They have more in common with the methods of the Geisteswissenschaften. Stephen Jay Gould, wearing his structuralist hard-hat, derided functionalist narratives:
Rudyard Kipling asked how the leopard got its spots, the rhino its wrinkled skin. He called his answers “just-so stories.” When evolutionists study individual adaptations, when they try to explain form and behaviour by reconstructing history and assessing current utility, they also tell just-so stories. . . . Virtuosity in invention replaces testability as the criterion for acceptance. . . . When we examine the history of favored stories for any particular adaptation, we do not trace a tale of increasing truth as one story replaces the last, but rather a chronicle of shifting fads and fashions. (1980, 259)
In a broadside against Panglossian adaptationism, Gould and Lewontin (1979) valorized the strictures of structure as constraints on evolutionary freedom but, when Gould (1990) came to recount the story of the Cambrian explosion, his narrative now favored unpredictability (contingency) over inexorability (destiny): “The resolution of history must be rooted in the reconstruction of past events themselves—in their own terms—based on narrative evidence of their own unique phenomena” (278). He objected not to storytelling per se but to particular stories being told.
Adaptationists aspire to tell the story of the synchronic what for? not just the diachronic how come? The time of adaptationist narratives is not a teleological time with a preordained end nor a directionless time of pure contingency. It is a recursive time of repetition with variation, in temporal cycles of birth unto birth and the copying and re-copying of genetic texts. The textual record of what worked in past performance permits the persistence of tradition into the future. Some stories are better than others.
Historical narratives arouse passions because what is emphasized and what is erased can be perceived as promoting partisan penchants of the present. Can there be an objective history? Historians have grappled with this question since at least the nineteenth century. There are historical facts, on which historians can agree, and interpretations of these facts which are subjects of dispute. Historians have developed standards for handling evidence and moving forward in understanding. By general agreement, some histories make a stronger case than others for their interpretation of the past, but what has been is always subject to reinterpretation. Evolutionary historians can do no better.
“How could anything originate out of its opposite? for example, truth out of error? or the will to truth out of the will to deception? or selfless deeds out of selfishness? . . . The things of the highest value must have another, peculiar origin—they cannot be derived from this transitory, seductive, deceptive, paltry world, from this turmoil of delusion and lust.”
—Friedrich Nietzsche (1886, in ironic voice)
The moat between science and the humanities can be deep. From the side of the natural sciences, humanists’ obsession with form over substance, their focus on values rather than facts, their neglect of physical causation, can be viewed as vacuous impediments to effective interventions to improve human well-being. From the side of the humanities, scientists’ obsession with parts over wholes, their focus on facts rather than values, their neglect of cultural causation, can be viewed as soulless impediments to the amelioration of human needs. Efficient and material causes are the wards of Daedalus and Vulcan. Formal and final causes are assigned to the care of Minerva and the Muses. We have come a long way from the scholastic consensus that understanding something required attention to all four Aristotelian causes. But one can admire what one sees on the other side of a ditch and welcome an exchange. The heavy hand of Vulcan may crave the lighter touch of Clio or Terpsichore.
The central claim of this book is that formal and final causes arose from efficient and material causes by historical processes. I believe that the dogmatic exclusion of teleological considerations from the working philosophy of most biologists has become an impediment to scientific progress. I believe that organisms, sometimes even material genes, interpret their world in meaningful ways. I believe that meanings and values have been present from the very origins of life, although these were not human meanings nor human values. I believe that the boundary between meaningful lives and mere existence should be placed between the living and nonliving worlds. I believe that the scientific rejection of a naturalized teleology has contributed to the estrangement of scientific and humanistic modes of understanding. I believe that the humanities and social sciences have insights to contribute to biology about questions of meaning, value, and interpretation. I believe that a Darwinian account of the origins of meaning has something to say to the humanities and social sciences about how our unique abilities have emerged from features we share with other living things. Here I stand. What shall I do next?
I would like to believe that a fuller understanding of the implications of natural selection for questions of meaning and purpose could lessen the culturally constructed barriers between the Naturwissenschaften and Geisteswissenschaften, but the prospects of natural selection reconciling Minerva and Vulcan do not, at first sight, appear promising. Darwinian accounts of human nature remain a lightning rod for all those who wish to maintain a separation between domains of physical inquiry and meaning. For religious fundamentalists, Darwinism has been uniquely singled out as the enemy within soulless science because of its claims that means can be fitted to ends without a directing intelligence. Creationists see Darwinism as teleology “shorn of all its goodness.” Other scientific disciplines are equally incompatible with scriptural literalism, but none arouses comparable religious opprobrium. From within the Geisteswissenchaften, Darwinian hypotheses about human nature provoke censure as illegitimate and puerile encroachments of simplistic science into domains where it does not belong. Even within evolutionary biology, adaptationist explanations are disdained as just-so stories, and theoreticians who emphasize the role of neutral processes consider themselves more rigorous than those whose principal interest is adaptive fit to the conditions of existence (I know this from personal interactions with faculty in my own department).
Adaptationism is singled out for disapprobation because it reaches across a boundary. On the physicalist side, adaptive “storytelling” is seen as polluting the pristine province of efficient and material causes with the messiness of meaning. On the humanist side, Darwinian explanations of human nature are rejected as hostile takeover bids by advocates of mindless mechanism. Both physicalists and humanists are happy with the border where it currently stands (we are not like them!). Territorial borders are historically contingent obstacles to freedom of movement across a continuous terrain. In terms of academic Realpolitik, Darwinism resides in the borderlands of Natur and Geist, a small principality wedged between hegemonic powers.
Many scholars have a visceral dislike of Darwinism. Their reactions relate to the four aspects of random variation, survival of the fittest, agency, and determinism. The role of chance is perceived as positing a world without meaning; natural selection is perceived as bleak and harsh; the ascription of purpose to other organisms, even genes, is perceived as blind to the uniqueness of human agency; and the explanation of human nature by natural processes is perceived as denying our freedom to restructure our world as we choose. It does not help to point out that natural selection is simultaneously criticized for invoking a world without meaning and for finding meaning where it does not belong.
The easiest concern to address is human uniqueness. Every species is unique, but humans possess culture and language to a degree that far surpasses any other species. We are a symbiosis of genes and memes that can adapt to a changing world much faster than the measured pace of genetic change. I have not addressed the extraordinarily complex and subtle mechanisms of the human brain, nor the dialectics of minds in societies, by which we make sense of our worlds. That is work for others. My limited goal has been to find continuity, rather than discontinuity, between the simplest and most complex forms of interpretation. I also hope to have lessened concerns about determinism. We have uncounted, although not infinite, degrees of freedom in observation and action. We are self-motivated agents that are buffered from external causes. We can stand our ground as unmoved movers of the here and now.
Many critics of Darwinism cannot see how directionless chance could generate something as complex as a living thing. But chance does not act alone. Natural selection preserves the progeny of fortunate accidents and the progeny of those progeny with additional fortunate accidents, while it eliminates progeny with unfortunate accidents and those without recent serendipities. The difference between a clerical error and a fortunate slip of the pen—between a false note and nailing it—is that the serendipitous error is retrospectively endowed with meaning once it is copied and recopied. And so it proceeds like a ratchet. This is the creative power of natural selection. The meanings of life bear the trace of what they are not.
Another common concern is that the role of chance seems to remove meaning from life. We are here for no reason. But chance does not act alone. Natural selection produces beings with reasons for being. It is the amoral architect of human beings capable of moral and immoral choices. “The ends justify the means” could be a definition of natural selection once “justify” is stripped of any connotations of moral approval. Natural selection has a bright and a dark face. They are two sides of a coin. The bright face reflects all the beauties and exquisite adaptations we find in the living world. The dark face hides the selective culling of the less fit in lives that are often nasty, brutish, and short. The bright face is born out of the dark face and is sustained by the dark face. The combination of beauty and cruelty is unsettling. The interplay of light and shadow is the pathos of life. We make of our lives what we will.