The basis for philosophy in science, especially biology

We did not want to write this epistle since we have said things along these lines a few times before and said even more of it to our friends. Richard Dawkins had once said something like philosophers do not add much to knowledge unlike scientists; hence, they are pretty stuck up with or even confused about issues. Yet, the same Dawkins had admitted that it is interesting that the sense of self is something we have, even though the molecules constituting our physical selves, even neurons undergoes a turnover through our lives, being replaced by other equivalent atoms derived from our nutrition. On the other hand there is a philosopher Daniel Dennett who presents nothing more notable than principles enunciated by Darwin over 150 years ago and calls that philosophy. Against this backdrop, our attention was brought back to these issues by an article kindly pointed to us on Twitter. This article was written for the popular press by a professor from an Ivy League university, which some colorful characters associated with our life have made their kShetra. In it he makes the below statements:

“Darwin did not supply a major set of new principles that could be used to derive general conclusions about life and its history: he crafted a framework within which his successors construct models of quite specific evolutionary phenomena.”

“To understand the fundamental processes that go on in living things — mitosis, meiosis, inheritance, development, respiration, digestion and many, many more — you need a vast ensemble of models, differing on a large number of details. Spelling out the explanations requires using metaphors (“reading” DNA) or notions that cannot be specified generally and precisely in the austere languages of physics and chemistry (“close association”). But the phenomena to be explained also decompose into a number of different clusters.”

These statements, in our opinion show that the learned professor is outright wrong or at best wading into a rather inextricable quagmire. He is a man famous for being a philosopher of biology among other things so we felt perhaps a discourse on this matter might be worthwhile even if we might be repeating ourselves in someways. A presentation like the above statements could play right into the view that philosophers have nothing of worth to contribute. But that is not a line we seek to pursue: First, we descendants ancient natural philosophers; hence, this is too integral a part of our approach. Second, we do believe a philosophical framework, in particular as close an approximation as possible of the right ontology, is required to approach every domain of knowledge. Third, we belong to a tradition, which was prevalent among the subset of the Indo-Europeans (as far as we can see, attested among Greeks, Iranians and Arya-s) wherein axiomatic thinking emerged (Which would equate to the professor’s Newtonian principles: “Newton looked forward to a vision of the cosmos in which everything would be explained on the basis of a small number of physical principles.”). So the idea is to present a prolegomena to scientific philosophy which is actually based in science, with particular reference of biology.

Did Darwin really not “supply a major set of new principles that could be used to derive general conclusions about life and its history”?

In principle, these were not new because some version of them had already by posited in the ancient world by the sAMkhya thinkers among the Arya-s and Empedocles among the yavana-s (as pointed out by Haldane). This idea among the Hindu sAMkhya thinkers was even recognized by and enthusiastically described by the Islamic scientist al Biruni (despite his dislike for Hindus or misunderstanding of other spheres of their knowledge). Yet, Darwin and Wallace were the ones who closer to our times clearly presented these ideas along with a reasonable body of support for their presentation (Of course it is a different matter that Wallace did not take the thing whole way to its natural conclusion though Darwin did exactly that). Now Darwin’s principles are not just a framework, they are principles that can indeed give a general conclusions about life, unlike what the professor says. Some successors of Darwin, like Fisher, Wright and Kimura, presented these principles in a mathematical language. However, irrespective of whether one uses that language or not, the only principles in town for explaining actual life processes are essentially Darwinian in nature. More importantly, these principles stem from underlying chemistry, physics, and above all geometry. It is a different matter that majority of practicing biologists and their applied variants (biotechnologists and physicians) have an insufficient grasp of practically using evolutionary principles. This gives an illusion that the Darwinian principles are not proximal to the actual studies in biology. Likewise, despite what the prolix socialist raconteur, SJ Gould tried claim, nothing of what he considered profoundly distinctive about his explanations of biology lies outside of Darwinian principles.

Darwin did not have the advantage of knowing genetics or biochemistry; hence, it might appear that his principles are ad hoc patches for “quite specific evolutionary phenomena”. However, once we introduce biochemistry we see that his principles can be tethered to more basic foundations that lie within biochemistry and geometry. Before we do this we need to look at one issue regarding explanatory domain of a science in order to see the problem in the professor’s statement that: “you need a vast ensemble of models, differing on a large number of details.”

This might be placed along side Albert Szent-Györgyi’s statement (In our opinion wrongly pessimistic). “In my quest for the secret of life I started my research in histology. Unsatisfied by the information that cellular morphology could give me about life, I turned to physiology. Finding physiology too complex, I took up pharmacology. Still finding the situation too complicated, I turned to bacteriology. But bacteria were even too complex, so I descended to the molecular level, studying chemistry and physical chemistry. After twenty years’ work, I was led to conclude that to understand life we have to descend to the electronic level and to the world of wave mechanics. But electrons are just electrons and have no life at all. Evidently on the way I lost life; it had run out between my fingers.”

The valence of carbon is typically 4. This knowledge is sufficient to explain a whole lot of biochemistry – it can be taken as an axiom for biochemistry. That does not mean it is a universal axiom. In other areas of physics or chemistry it is something that arises naturally from even more basic principles like the formulation of Schrödinger equation for an atom. Now when you are doing biochemistry and you want to explain why a biomolecule has a certain structure you do not typically need to go back to deeper quantum mechanical principles, rather you can make do with a knowledge of carbon’s valence and some geometrical principles associated with that as axioms. However, that does not mean that the underlying quantum mechanics does not ultimately explain the biochemistry – just that you do not need to think of and use that low-level principle constantly while operating at a higher level. When you write a script to do some simple operation like say leaching a series of web pages you are not too concerned about bits handled in the assembly code, but that does not deny the underlying principle. Likewise, if you are studying neurobiology and want to understand how a neuron interacts with a glia you may take glial molecules like D-serine and TNF-alpha as given: mere entities. Now, could say that we have detailed specific model in which the above molecules are mere entities which could be as well be called “X” and “Y”. However, that does not mean that their underlying biochemistry does not matter. In fact ignoring the fact the D-serine is a small molecule and TNF-alpha a protein could make a great difference to the model – so more likely than not the basic geometrical consideration in the least and biochemistry are fundamentally impinging upon matters. Now one may ask where do Darwin’s principles matter for all this?

Continued …