Joseph Needham : Full Mechanical Biologist

Following on from my fortuitous discovery of Joseph Needham, I want to take a little look at an essay of his I read at the back of a seminar room while enduring some really boring seminars about stars and crap. The piece I picked is called Mechanistic Biology in a volume entitled Science Religion and Reality. You can read the entire thing here in a variety of formats; Mechanistic Biology runs from pages 219-257. 

Specialisation is not a slippery slope

Reading essays from earlier periods is a fascinating way to discovery what people were actively concerned with - what was front-and-centre research at the time and what alternatives were they grappling with. In Needham's day (1925) it seems they were facing an unpleasant renaissance of interest in vitalism, the idea that there is some supernatural force that acts to animate living matter. As Needham describes it, a vocal minority with some popular appeal but absolutely no traction whatever within the genuine scientific community, they feel very much like the modern fringe opposed to the standard model of cosmology. They have enough populist sway to have some clout in the outreach department, but nowhere near enough evidence to be convincing to any serious researcher. This is extremely annoying to have to deal with, because then we have to refute things that are largely just bollocks. It's gratifying to see that we won't be stuck with this forever.

(Note : I am not talking about all ideas that run contrary to expectations, no, not even ones I regard as wrong-headed like planes of satellites and the masses of giant clusters. I'm talking about notions like plasma cosmology and deliberately contrarian nonsense about the Big Bang never happening.)

It's also interesting to hear from Needham, a great polymath, worrying about the dangers of over-specialisation while also not really having any clue how to ensure this doesn't happen :

However good those old days were, it is no use regretting the past without facing the future. One is sometimes struck with horror at the thought of what human beings will become if the process goes on at the rate at which it has  gone on in the last hundred years. But the tendency is quite inevitable and can only be partially controlled. It is no bad thing that men should learn caution in speaking of matters which they themselves have not studied. But the ever-rising tide of specialisation has obscured the fact that there are not a few problems, especially in the fields of pure knowledge, which cannot be understood in the terms of one subject.

One can almost feel the anguish of wrestling with a contradiction : no, people shouldn't pronounce expertise on fields on which they know nothing, but at the same time, specialisation will ultimately lead to a lack of knowledge and understanding. And the more we learn, the worse this gets.

Have we remedied this in the intervening century ? Possibly it has been alleviated somewhat. The internet means a specialist can now more readily search out relevant knowledge from other fields as and when required. But perhaps more generally we continue to stand on the shoulders of giants people of about average height : that is, we build on top of what's gone before, not from it. There is enough redundancy in the system, it seems, which each incremental advance being extremely hard-won, that we can take for granted the findings of others to advance our own. 

For example, I have a a decent enough working knowledge of how to process and analyse data from a radio telescope, but I have not much chance of ever understanding how the damn thing works at any serious level of technical detail*. Only by assuming the telescope is basically functional do I have any chance of doing any data analysis. Of course, I'm very much aware that "the telescope going wrong" is a perfectly valid source of error, which is all I really need to know - if I spot something seriously awry, I contact another specialist.

* For a scary example of just how complicated something as mundane as electricity is, see this.

And perhaps also we simply have more specialists. You can afford to divide a field into smaller segments, provided each has at least a little overlap with their neighbours. Most of us try to keep aware of at least the major developments in other fields. We do, from time to time, try to step back and make sure the whole edifice isn't creaking too much before continuing in our narrower interests. So the dangers of over-specialisation may be a somewhat Malthusian fallacy, or like the concerns that London would eventually be knee-deep in horse manure as the population increased... not unfounded, but hardly inevitable either. Specialisation does increase, but this isn't the only variable in play : the number of specialists also increases, there's always an an element of chance at work, each preceding discovery is increasingly well-tested, and in order to reach a deep level of specialisation, you cannot avoid having at least some broad level of background knowledge. So I think it's nothing really much to worry about.

Vitalism wasn't always stupid

Life, says Needham, is one area where over-specialisation is especially dangerous, there being no unifying theory behind biology. But he sees vitalism as more of a problem for philosophers than any meaningful difficulty for biologists. The theory of evolution certainly helped hammer several large nails in vitalism's coffin, but Needham looked towards a more general case of fully mechanistic biology, explaining not just evolution but life itself in terms of purely natural, predictable forces. He also, delightfully, rejects this.

Not that he has much sympathy at all towards vitalism :

Since the sixteenth century, the mechanistic theory in biology has been able to point to experimental successes in its support, and indeed, from position to position, sometimes slowly and sometimes with greater rapidity, it has marched forward until it has achieved in the last fifty years its most amazing triumphs. And all through its history it has evoked the condemnation of the theologians, the mystics, and the idealist philosophers. With remarkable unanimity they have refused to have anything to do with a biology which makes man's body the equal of those of the animals, and his spiritual part a functionless shadow without importance. 

He begins with a history of the development of mechanistic biology, noting that each experimental step reduced the possible hiding places for any animating vital force. To be fair, in earlier times there were indeed problems that simply could not be solved by available empirical data. Only improved instrumentation and experimental techniques were able to manage that. It may be easy to point to the views of sixteenth century physicians as evidence of their backward, superstitious beliefs, but this would be a mistake : at that time, the leap of faith would have been required to say that there wasn't a vital force rather than that there was one. As late as the very end of the 19th century (!), it was necessary to demonstrate experimentally that such a force was nowhere to be found :

In 1897 Atwater and Rosa constructed a large and exceedingly delicate calorimeter by the aid of which  they were enabled to determine the total amount of energy entering an animal or a man and the total amount leaving him. The error was exceedingly small and their result was that the amount taken in was exactly balanced by the amount going out. Accordingly not only was it found that the chemical compounds of which the body is made up were all such as could be studied and synthesised in the laboratory, but also there was no doubt that the law of the conservation of energy held as rigidly for the animal body as it did for inorganic nature.

Needham doesn't have much sympathy for his contemporary neo-vitalists, seeking to breathe the animating force back into their own dead data. His rebuttal is a model of good argumentation, addressing plainly and concisely the arguments and only the arguments, with not a word said about the character of the proponents themselves. He also gives credit where credit is due, noting that some of them felt compelled by experimental evidence and not ideology :

Haldane*, on the other hand, was led to neo-vitalism entirely by experiments on the adult animal. Haldane also considers quite impossible the mechanistic theory of heredity. " On the mechanistic theory," he says, " the cell nucleus must carry within its substance a mechanism which by reaction with the environment not only produces the millions of complex and delicately balanced mechanisms which constitute the adult organism, but provides for their orderly arrangement into tissues and organs, and for their orderly development in a certain perfectly specific manner. The mind recoils from such a stupendous conception ! " 

* He's another fascinating chap. A Marxist atheist who taught biology without a degree, he came up with the idea of "primordial soup" and served as a captain in WWI. He is not, however, to be confused with the Haldane who gave his name to the principle by which research should be separated from politics.

To the modern reader this probably seems very strange. We're all familiar with massive levels of data compression, but we also know that, as Needham pointed out, there is no need for some continuous centralised directive given to every single cell. The DNA can just encode a set of general rules, not the absolute final, detailed body plan.

So I shall pass over the rest of the critique of vitalism; the argument is as utterly dead as worship of Zeus and Poseidon. What is not dead, however, is materialism. 

Mind out for materialism 

Vitalism has a deeply unsatisfactory tendency of being continuously pried-out from its hiding-places, being used as sort-of placeholder to explain any and all mysteries only for them to be continuously found to be explicable by perfectly ordinary, comprehensible physical phenomena. But materialism, the more general assertion that everything around us can be explained entirely by observables, is a routine assumption in science.

I have taken some pains to explain my position on this. In brief, we make this assumption when doing science because if we were to plug every gap with God, we would never explain anything. There are always gaps in science. But we don't have to hold this to be true in all things. Science, that is, measurable, empirical observation, does not hold sway over everything. Not everything can be quantified or measured. No amount of improvements to measuring equipment will ever allow us to observe guilt or anger or ennui; we can observe the effects of these, we can experience them - but that is all we can do. They are to be found nowhere in physical reality whatever. So I am quite comfortable with anyone who says that God is a way of understanding, rather than explaining, reality. Conversely, anyone trying to say, "God literally decides where every atom goes and He can choose to turn you into a large angry duck at any moment if He so chooses" is, in all probability, mad.

Needham, despite refuting vitalism proper, has some strongly dualistic tendencies, to the point I'd like to invite him round for a beer with John Locke. Quoting Bergson and others, he notes that all of our models are really just models of our observations, which are not direct measures of reality. The difference is crucial.

"The forceps of our mind are crude and they crush the delicacy of reality when we attempt to hold it." Scientific descriptions, mechanistic descriptions, according to Mach, are "quite fictitious, though still valuable modes of describing phenomena, and to place the laws of physics actually in external nature is to hypostatise an abstraction of purely human origin.

The very name of " fact," says LeRoy, should put us on our guard against believing that it is something outside ourselves — on the contrary, that which has been made, factum est, cannot be made an immediate datum. There is no such thing as an isolated fact, but everything flows into everything else, and to dissect out facts from the body of reality is a proceeding that may be very useful but cannot be ultimately valid. Isolation, fragmentation, analysis, these are the real watchwords of the scientific method. 

The important part of his philosophy for us is that there is a profoundly subjective factor in science — quite unrealised by men such as Huxley and Tyndall. The scientific man plays an active part in the selection of the facts before him, and his selection of those facts is determined by the construction of his mind. 

Now this is enormously important in its own right. Followers of scientism, holding that only scientific knowledge is of any validity whatsoever, easily fall into the trap of thinking that science is a purely objective project devoid of the concerns of mere mortals (and on these grounds are often, though by no means always, wont to justify a horrendous immorality). It isn't. It has never been so and never will be, because it can't. True enough that you can, say, weigh a fish and find that it weighs 1.53 kg. You can make repeat measurements and prove this. Facts exist. You can, as I said, use them as evidence to support or a detract from a theory. But selecting which facts are relevant, deciding how to use them to construct a model - that is always far more subjective. To quote another article : it’s the fallacy of believing that all the facts you know are all the facts there are. You may be able to test your model objectively, but you can't construct it without being subject to your own biased perspective.

But I digress. To return to materialism, Needham is saying that our observations are ultimately mental constructs. This is not to say that they are meaningless, but they are only representations of some deeper reality which we can never fully access. Needham takes this to a logical extreme that in my view absolutely torpedoes materialism :

If we accept the view that the scientific method does not give an absolutely true picture of reality, and that the form of scientific theories is almost entirely the creation of our own minds, then we cannot possibly extend the sway of physics and chemistry to mind, for their essence is mechanistic and we should then be describing mind in terms of an emanation from itself. It is as if we followed the practice of patients suffering from certain types of mental diseases who are so much bound up with the happenings of their dreams and fantasies that they interpret all their fully waking experience in terms of their imaginary life. The creature would thus sit in judgement upon the creator, and the substance would be interpreted in the language of the shadow.

That is, the representations themselves cannot be the absolute truth of reality, because how our senses render the world is largely arbitrary (I will expand on this point in a forthcoming review of Eagleman's Livewired). Just as we can choose to render data from a telescope as images or audio or even tactile, printed surfaces, so our brain decides how best to present incoming data to our minds. So our notion of, say, an atom, is a mental construct based on data rendered by our subjective and changeable brain. We do not have any absolute knowledge of the thing that gave rise our observation of an atom, we have only knowledge of our observations. And that's not the same thing at all.

Materialism in the sense of, "it's all atoms bashing about" is thus shown to be fatally self-contradictory. It makes no difference at all how detailed and careful our observations are : ultimately, everything is just a mental construct of our senses. And you cannot explain mental constructs (the mind itself) by saying that they are due to atoms when you have to admit that atoms themselves are mental constructs !

Crucially, this is not to say that we have to accept idealism. We do not have to concede that everything is a subjective mental rendering, just all of our observations. We can still legitimately posit that those observations are induced by something external, we just have to remember how privileged our position is : just because we render the world largely in a visual way does not mean that blind animals have a less valid perspective... while we may look down on them, animals which have senses beyond our own would think that we are severely handicapped, living in an altogether more limited and incomplete reality. As, in fact, we are.

It's helpful to occasionally remember throughout the day that what you're seeing is a rendering constructed by the brain - there are no images in reality at all, only in your mind. Helpful, but it could easily drive one quite mad.

Looks like dualism's back on the menu, boys ?

Needham continues this line of thought :

Moreover, the mechanistic conception of the universe is almost patently stamped with the evidences of mental origin. The more one thinks about it the more one feels that whatever may be the objective substrates of external things, it is only due to the configuration of our minds that we conceive of matter and energy in mechanistic fashion. Our minds are like templates in engineering, they necessitate the corresponding flexion of the universe, and before we can understand any set of phenomena they have to be made to fit. " In a sense we are always anthropomorphic," says James Ward, " since we can never divest ourselves of our consciousness ; hence not only spiritualistic intuition but the very mechanical interpretation of the Universe, which in the last analysis derives its concepts from our human experience, is of an anthropomorphic nature."

Mind, therefore, and all mental processes cannot possibly receive explanation or description in physico-chemical terms, for that would amount to explaining something by an instrument itself the product of the thing explained. 

But he also reaffirms his dismissal of vitalism :

The triumph of mechanistic biology has indeed been a real one, for it has succeeded in abolishing the vital force in living things which so unnecessarily complicated the whole question. We are back again with the concept of the undivided anima, and the ground is perfectly clear for philosophical and psychological discussion as to the psychophysical problem. It is in this that the achievement of physico-chemical biology is to be found.

Mental processes, however, are different. They are not observable. So vitalism can be disregarded because we can almost certainly explain life as a result of physical processes, but consciousness and the mind are not the same thing at all. This leaves Needham striving to find an acceptable form of dualism :

But if we adopt this view, that living matter is the result of the impact of mind into the world of mechanics, we shall not be able to go the whole way with Descartes. For he would have said that nothing was produced by that impact, rather bodies acting mechanically were produced by necessity in the world of mechanics and into one type of them and one only " God breathed a living soul." Descartes was led to this position by various now obsolete arguments... Comparative psychology of the present day would not admit his conclusions for a moment.

We may agree with James Drever, who in a recent paper said, " The behaviour of the living organism as such it is not the physiologist's business to study. His task begins and ends with the functioning of the individual mechanisms." 

According to this theory, then, it is the physical functions of life that physics and chemistry are competent to explain... It will have been observed that, however we phrase it, we are left with a complete dualism of matter and spirit. Whether we remain at that point or proceed further by the adoption of a relative dualism will depend upon our personal philosophical predilections. 

For my part I prefer to adopt a relative dualism the way to which was shown by Merz. It is a modification of Spinoza's. If we do take this step we may also think it possible that laws may some day be discovered capable of explaining both the mechanistic world of physics and chemistry and that other world of mental phenomena which is studied by the psychologist.

Needham goes on to reject the "phenomoenalistic parellism" of Kant and Spinoza. This sounds an awful lot like neutral monism to me, the idea that there is only one sort of substance but we can never know the true nature of it. There are no "things" in that tables, spoons and giraffes are just labels for some unknown, more fundamental "stuff". As in, there is no real distinction between a planet and and asteroid - they are both just collections of atoms, except we extend this line of reasoning considerably further : yes, spoons and planets are made of atoms, but again, an atom is ultimately a mental construct - the true "stuff" that induces all this, that we cannot know.

Needham doesn't say why he rejects this, except to say that there are "unanswerable arguments". He prefers that there is an interaction between the mental and material. This is my instinct too. Numbers don't exist, neither does justice or all the rest, but our physical behaviour depends on us counting or evaluating whether other people are being fair or not - things which are ultimately only mental constructs. Needham concludes with a mystery, which I think any dualist would have to accept - that we cannot explain how this interaction actually works :

The biochemist and the biophysicist, therefore, can and must be thorough-going mechanists, but they need not on that account hesitate to say with Sir Thomas Browne, " Thus there is something in us that can be without us and will be after us though indeed it hath no history what it was before us and cannot tell how it entered into us." 

For my part, I would say that traditional materialism is unviable. You cannot explain that mental constructs (say, numbers) arise as a result of other things you can demonstrably prove, by your own theory, are themselves other mental constructs (e.g. atoms), that's circular and silly. You can say that there's some other deeper, unknown thing which produces the representations, but then you're clearly in neutral monism territory. Though it doesn't seem to me that neutral monism must inevitably deny any interaction between the mental and physical as Needham posited; rather, if anything the opposite ought to be true. They're both ultimately the same stuff, so why shouldn't they interact ?

Idealism would seem to also tend towards neutral monism. If everything is a mental representation, then it has the same problem of materialism. It escapes this dilemma only by explicitly saying that this deeper level is the ultimate layer of reality and the mind of an unknowable God, which is neutral monism in all but name. The simulation hypothesis, by contrast, explains sod all, because adherents don't seem to understand what a representation actually is : it leads to an infinite (i.e. meaningless) series of nested simulations which solves exactly nothing. 

So that's where I stand. Dualism might be a correct and complete theory in and of itself (mind and matter are clearly different), but neutral monism is a more satisfying unification. To be a dualist in everyday life is just common bloody sense, as is being a materialist in science. Dualism and materialism are both "true" in their respective domains, but philosophically, both idealism and materialism seem unsustainable if we take them literally.