A very interesting post from Holmes Rolston critiquing Dennett's cranes
metaphor (see his book Darwin's Dangerous Idea) for evolutionary
innovation.
Keith
________________________________________________________________
>Below is another installment from Holmes Rolston on the thread "Genes, Genesis,
>and God." This piece deals with Daniel Dennett's use of the metaphor of
>"cranes and skyhooks" to frame the debate about evolution.
>
>Rolston writes in conclusion: "It is not that there is no "watchmaker"; there
>is no "watch." Looking for one frames the problem the wrong way... The
>watchmaker metaphor seems blind to the problem that here needs to be solved:
>that information-less matter-energy is a splendid information-maker. Biologists
>cannot deny this creativity; indeed, better than anyone else biologists know
>that Earth has brought forth the natural kinds, prolifically, exuberantly over
>the millennia, and that enormous amounts of information are required to do
>this. The achievements of evolution do not have to be optimal to be valuable,
>and if a reason that they are not optimal is that they had to be reached
>historically along story lines, then we rejoice in this richer creativity.
>History plus value as storied achievement in creatures with their own integrity
>is better than to have optimum value without history, autonomy, or adventure in
>superbly-designed marionettes. That is beauty and elegance of a more
>sophisticated form, as in the fauna and flora of an ancient forest."
>
>-- Billy Grassie
>
>
>=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
>From: Holmes Rolston, III
>Subject: Genes, Cranes, and Skyhooks
>
>One should posit, says Daniel Dennett, "cranes," not "skyhooks" for the
>building up of evolutionary history (1995, pp. 73-80). That contrast of
>metaphor seems initially persuasive, appealing to causes more natural than
>supernatural, more immanent than transcendent. Pinpoint the issue: What is the
>most plausible account to give of these genes and their genesis? What is the
>most adequate explanation for the remarkable negentropic, cybernetic
>self-organizing that characterizes the life story on Earth? Look more closely
>and the metaphor becomes more pejoratively rhetorical than analytically
>penetrating.
>
>There is the repeated discovery of information how to re- direct the downhill
>flow of energy upward for the construction of ever more advanced, higher forms
>of life, built on and supported by the lower forms. Up and down are rather
>local conditions (down, up a few miles); it does not matter much which
>direction we imagine this help as coming from--east or west, from the right or
>left, below or from above, high or deep, immanence or transcendence, skyhooks
>or cranes. The Hebrew metaphor was that one needs "wind" as well as "dirt." The
>current metaphor is that one needs "information" as well as "matter" and
>"energy."
>
>The story in natural history becomes memorable--able to employ a memory--only
>with genes (or comparable predecessor molecules). The story becomes cumulative
>and transmissible. The fertility possibilities are a hundred times
>recompounded. If the DNA in the human body were uncoiled and stretched out end
>to end, that slender thread would reach to the sun and back over half a dozen
>times (as estimated from data Orten and Neuhaus, 1982, pp. 8, 154). That
>conveys some idea of the astronomical amount of information soaked through the
>body.
>
>In nature, in the Newtonian view there were two metaphysical fundamentals:
>matter and energy. Einstein reduced these two to one: matter-energy. In matter
>in motion, there is conservation of matter, also of energy; neither can be
>created or destroyed, although each can take diverse forms, and one can be
>transformed into the other.
>
>In the biological sciences, the novelty is that matter-energy is found in
>living things in diverse information states. The biologists still claim two
>metaphysical fundamentals: matter-energy and information. Norbert Wiener
>insists: "Information is information, not matter or energy" (1948, p. 155). In
>living things, concludes Manfred Eigen, this is "the key- word that represents
>the phenomenon of complexity: information. Our task is to find an algorithm, a
>natural law that leads to the origin of information. ... Life is a dynamic
>state of matter organized by information" (1992, p. 12, p. 15). Bernd-Olaf
>Kueppers agrees: "The problem of the origin of life is clearly basically
>equivalent to the problem of the origin of biological information" (1990, p.
>170).
>
>George C. Williams is explicit: "Evolutionary biologists have failed to realize
>that they work with two more or less incommensurable domains: that of
>information and that of matter. ... Matter and information [are] two separate
>domains of existence, which have to be discussed separately in their own terms.
>The gene is a package of information, not an object. ... Maintaining this
>distinction between the medium and the message is absolutely indispensable to
>clarity of thought about evolution" (quoted in Brockman, 1995, p. 43).
>
>John Maynard Smith says: "Heredity is about the transmission , not of matter or
>energy, but of information. ... The concept of information is central both to
>genetics and evolution theory" (1995, p. 28). The most spectacular thing about
>planet Earth, says, Dawkins, is this "information explosion," even more
>remarkable than a supernova among the stars (1995, p. 145). And, adds, Klaus
>Dose: "More than 30 years of experimentation on the origin of life in the
>fields of chemical and molecular evolution have led to a better perception of
>the immensity of the problem of the origin of life on Earth rather than its
>solution. ... We do not actually know where the genetic information of all
>living cells originates" (1988, p. 348).
>
>When sodium and chlorine are brought together under suitable circumstances,
>anywhere in the universe, the result will be salt. This capacity is inlaid into
>the atomic properties; the reaction occurs spontaneously. Energy inputs may be
>required for some of these results, but no information input is needed. When
>nitrogen, carbon, and hydrogen are brought together under suitable
>circumstances anywhere in the universe, with energy input, the spontaneous
>result may be amino acids, but it is not hemoglobin molecules or lemurs--not
>spontaneously.
>
>The essential characteristic of a biological molecule, contrasted with a merely
>physicochemical molecule, is that it contains vital information. Its
>conformation is functional. With the typical protein, enzyme, lipid, or
>carbohydrate this is structural, keyed by the coding in DNA. The coding here is
>information about coping in the macroscopic world that the organism inhabits.
>The information (in DNA) is interlocked with an information producer-processor
>(the organism) that can transcribe, incarnate, metabolize, and reproduce it.
>All such information once upon a time did not exist, but came into place; this
>is the locus of creativity.
>
>With this "information" as the model for what needs to be explained, return to
>the "cranes" and "skyhooks" metaphors. Stripped of the rhetoric, what the
>"skyhook" metaphor means, Dennett says, is explanations that are more
>"mind-like" and the "cranes" metaphor posits "mindless, motiveless
>mechanicity." Dennett holds that Darwinian science, extrapolated
>philosophically, has discovered cranes upon cranes "all the way down" and
>building up and up with "creative genius." "There is simply no denying the
>breathtaking brilliance of the designs to be found in nature" (1995, p. 76, p.
>155, p. 74). But if the secret of such creativity is information possibilities
>opening up and information searched and gained, then the kind of explanation
>needed can as plausibly be said to be mind-like as mindless mechanicity.
>
>One might look to the potential deep in matter, "cranes all the way down," as
>Dennett puts it. There is a kind of bottomless bootstrapping, as if lifting
>oneself up and up by one's own bootstraps was not remarkable, matter lofting
>itself up into mind. Such cranes, piling up higher and higher, are still pretty
>"super," quite imposing with their endless superimposing of one achievement on
>another. One can just as well look to some destiny toward which such matter is
>animated and inspired (skyhooks). Even after an infinite regress of cranes, or
>a regress ending in nothing at all, or in informationless matter-energy, or in
>a big bang, one might not find that explanations are over. The issue is where
>the information comes from by which matter and energy become so superimposingly
>informed across evolutionary history that this brilliant, "sacred" (Dennett)
>output arises from a beginning in mindless chaos, how "out of next to nothing
>the world we know and love created itself" (p. 185).
>
>In this "world of propensities," concludes Karl Popper, the "inherently
>creative" process with its "staggering" biodiversity is neither mechanistic nor
>deterministic. "This was a process in which both accidents and preferences,
>preferences of the organisms for certain possibilities, were mixed: the
>organisms were in search of a better world. Here the preferred possibilities
>were, indeed, allurements" (1990, p. 26, p. 20). Cranes or skyhooks,
>evolutionary development is "attracted to" (in the current "chaos" metaphor)
>cumulating achievements in both diversity and complexity, and this attraction
>needs explanation. Attractors, or, at a more metaphysical level, even an
>Attractor, seem quite rational explanations.
>
>Dennett sometimes finds the process "uncanny" in being somewhat like "mind."
>"To me the most fascinating property of the process of evolution is its uncanny
>capacity to mirror some properties of the human mind (the intelligent
>Artificer) while being bereft of others" (Dennett, 1987, p. 299). It seems
>important to Dennett that the design is a mirage. Or, more accurately, the
>design isn't a mirage, for there is a designing system, but that there is a
>Designer of the designing system is a mirage. One needs no supernature, and the
>evidence for this is that we can plunge into sub-nature, and sub-sub-nature,
>and sub- sub-sub-nature, simplifying all the way down until there is nothing at
>all. Although creativity is forbidden from above, it is welcomed from below.
>But set aside the above-below imagery, still the "attraction" to something out
>of chaos, the "genesis" of something out of nothing, of more out of less--such
>brute fact remains as evident as ever, and as demanding of explanation.
>
>The creation of matter, energy, law, history, stories, of all the information
>that generates nature, to say nothing of culture, does need an adequate
>explanation; some sources, source, or Source competent for such creativity. In
>the materializing of the quantum states, bubbling up from below, in the
>compositions of prebiotic molecules, in the genetic mutations, there are
>selective principles at work, as well as stabilities and regularities, forming
>and in- forming these materials, which principles order and order up the story.
>
>
>There once was a causal chain that led to vertebrae in animals, where there
>were none before, an incremental chain no doubt, but still a chain by which the
>novelty of the vertebral column was introduced on Earth. Such a chain is
>constructed with the emergence of more and more information; this information,
>coded in DNA, informs the matter and energy so as to build the vertebral cord.
>The cord is constructed because it has a value (a significance, here a
>precursor of meaning) to the organism. It makes possible the diverse species of
>life that the vertebrate animals defend. Continuing the development of the
>endoskeleton, it makes possible larger animals with mobility, flexibility,
>integrated neural control. When such construction of valuable biodiversity has
>gone on for millennia, the epic suggests mysterious powers that might well
>signal the divine presence.
>
>The question, the biologists will say, is of the selective forces. Yes, but the
>answer comes, partly at least, from seeing the results, with ever more emerging
>from what is earlier less and less. One seeking to detect the divine
>"inspiration" ("information") will notice how there are occasions--seasons,
>contexts, events, episodes, whatever they are called--during which critical
>information emerges in the world, breakthroughs, as it were, incremental and
>cumulative though these can also be. The could be in some inspiration that
>first animates matter and energy into life, or launches replication and genetic
>coding, or eukaryotes, or multicellular life, or sexuality, or energizes life
>with mitochondria and chloroplasts, or glycolysis and the Krebs cycle, or moves
>life onto land, or invents animal societies, or acquired learning, or endows
>life with mind, and inspires culture, ethics, religion, science.
>
>The skeptics reply is always to emphasize that evolution is not elegant. It is
>wasteful, blundering, struggling. Evolution works with what is at hand, and
>makes something new out of it. The creatures stumble around, and if there is a
>God who "intervenes" God ought to do better than that. There is only a "blind
>watchmaker" (Dawkins, 1986). Still, consider again the remarkable results, and
>the providence appropriate to a God who celebrates an Earth history, who
>inspires self-creativity. The word "design" nowhere occurs in Genesis, nor am I
>using it in this argument, though the concept of creativity pervades the
>opening chapters. There is divine fiat, divine doing, but the mode is an
>empowering permission that places productive autonomy in the creation.
>
>It is not that there is no "watchmaker"; there is no "watch." Looking for one
>frames the problem the wrong way. Maybe that kind of frame is needed at the big
>bang with the anthropic principle; it is the right frame for genesis and the
>genes. In the earthen genesis, there are species well adapted for
>problem-solving, ever more informed in their self-actualizing. The watchmaker
>metaphor seems blind to the problem that here needs to be solved: that
>information-less matter-energy is a splendid information-maker. Biologists
>cannot deny this creativity; indeed, better than anyone else biologists know
>that Earth has brought forth the natural kinds, prolifically, exuberantly over
>the millennia, and that enormous amounts of information are required to do
>this.
>
>The achievements of evolution do not have to be optimal to be valuable, and if
>a reason that they are not optimal is that they had to be reached historically
>along story lines, then we rejoice in this richer creativity. History plus
>value as storied achievement in creatures with their own integrity is better
>than to have optimum value without history, autonomy, or adventure in
>superbly-designed marionettes. That is beauty and elegance of a more
>sophisticated form, as in the fauna and flora of an ancient forest.
>
>The elegance of the thirty-two crystal classes is not to be confused with the
>grace of life renewed in the midst of its perpetual perishing, generating
>diversity and complexity, repeatedly struggling through to something higher, a
>response to the brooding winds of the Spirit moving over the face of these
>earthen waters. The genes do bubble up from below ("cranes"--if one insists on
>looking down) but these genes are lofted higher and higher in their creative
>genius, resulting in course in the genius of the human spirit, elevated enough
>to look the world over and ask ultimate questions--debating, as we are doing,
>the best metaphors for what has been taking place on this Earth.
>
>"Skyhook" is at least an upward looking word. Or if "deep" is your preferred
>direction, either way there is something "uncanny" about several billion years
>of continuing breakthrough in achievement and power, made possible by and
>manifest in the genes.
>
>In the next (and final) Meta installment, we return to these themes as the
>opening up of new possibility space, in which this information explosion can
>take place--all this raising the possibility of God in, with, and under natural
>and human history.
>
>
>References
>
>Brockman, John, 1995. The Third Culture: Beyond the Scientific Revolution. New
>York: Simon and Schuster.
>
>Dawkins, Richard, 1986. The Blind Watchmaker. New York: W. W. Norton.
>
>Dawkins, Richard, 1995. River out of Eden: A Darwinian View of Life. New York:
>Basic Books, HarperCollins.
>
>Dennett, Daniel C., 1987. The Intentional Stance. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
>
>Dennett, Daniel C., 1995. Darwin's Dangerous Idea. New York: Simon and
>Schuster.
>
>Dose, Klaus, "The Origin of Life: More Questions Than Answers,"
>Interdisciplinary Science Reviews 13(1988):348-356.
>
>Eigen, Manfred, with Ruthild Winkler-Oswatitsch, 1992. Steps towards Life: A
>Perspective on Evolution. New York: Oxford University Press.
>
>Kueppers, Bernd-Olaf, 1990. Information and the Origin of Life. Cambridge, MA:
>The MIT Press. Maynard Smith, John, 1995. "Life at the Edge of Chaos?" New York
>Review of Books 52(no. 4, March 2, 1995):28-30.
>
>Orten, J. M., and O. W. Neuhaus, 1982. Human Biochemistry, 10th ed. St. Louis:
>C. V. Mosby Co.
>
>Popper, Karl R., 1990. A World of Propensities. Bristol, U.K.: Thoemmes.
>
>Wiener, Norbert, 1948. Cybernetics. New York: John Wiley.
>
>--
>Holmes Rolston, III
>Department of Philosophy
>Colorado State University
>Fort Collins, CO 80523
>Phone: 970/491-5328 office
>Webpage: http://lamar.colostate.edu/~rolston/
>
>
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Keith B. Miller
Department of Geology
Kansas State University
Manhattan, KS 66506
kbmill@ksu.ksu.edu
http://www-personal.ksu.edu/~kbmill/