Latest / One Universe, Two Books / T is for Teleology. Or Trouble. Michael Flannery

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T is for Teleology. Or Trouble. Michael Flannery · One Universe, Two Books

• speaker-0: Good day, everyone. Welcome to the NAS Podcast One Universe Two Books, where we explore the no man's land of the contested boundary between science and religion, between reason and revelation, and dare I say it, between truth and error. I'm here with my co host, Dr. Ian Oxnavad, who is my colleague at the NAS. Say hello to everyone, Ian. Happy to be here, Scott. Looking forward to today. Ian's also the co-host with our NAS colleague, Leela Nora Kish, on another podcast series, Cafe Berlin. Check it out. You'll be glad that you did. But okay, on to today's episode of One Universe Two Books. If you want to make a biologist uncomfortable, nay, make his head explode, just drop the word teleology into the conversation. The word is innocent enough, it simply means working toward a goal. Purposefully and with intention. There's a goal, and things, especially living things, strive toward that goal, and doing so requires intelligence and purposeful intentionality. Since the mid nineteenth century, the notion of purpose has been relentlessly drummed out of polite biological discourse as being akin to some sort of creepy creationism. Well, our guest today has quite a lot to say on that subject. Michael Flannery is a historian of science with broad interests in bioethics, healthcare, and the history of evolutionary thought. Until 2016, when he retired as Emeritus Professor, he was director of special collections at the Library of the University of Alabama at Birmingham. He's a prolific author, and he's written extensively on the history of evolutionary thought, with a focus on Alfred Russell Wallace, who was of Charles Darwin's contemporary who almost scooped Darwin as the discoverer of natural selection. He also has a new book coming out soon, titled Free Spirits Science's Loyal Opposition and the Quest for Teleology. I've put references to his books in the description. Check them out, they're well worth reading. His work has illuminated the rich intellectual landscape of nineteenth century evolutionary thought. Something which modern students should know, but unfortunately are rarely taught. In a nutshell, there's far more to the story than Then Came Darwin and All Was Light. Okay, let's bring in Michael Flannery. Welcome Michael Flannery to One Universe Two Books. speaker-1: Pleasure for me to be here. I thank you for the invitation. Looking forward to it. speaker-0: So when we were introducing you, we were introducing you as champion of teleology and and this is kind of a dirty word amongst biologists. We've been we've been well, we biologists have been trying to abolish any thought of teleology from our discussion as being somehow unscientific or quasi-religious or what have you. But We advertise you as a champion of teleology, especially in biology, so tell us what teleology is. speaker-1: Well, i i in a word, it's purpose. and as as you have pointed out in your own book, Purpose and Desire, which is a great exposition on teleology, it has had a long and somewhat tortured history in in all the sciences, biology certainly primarily. But certainly in cosmology and many other areas as well. And in fact, Ian Ian would probably agree with me on this, teleology has been an important issue in theology as well. And there has been all kinds of discussions about that, pro and con, and well onward we go from there. I I think my my current work, which is called Free Spirits, is about what I call science's loyal opposition and the quest for teleology. What do I mean by royal loyal opposition? Well, right now Science is being held by a core group of let's just call it frankly anteleologists in the guise of Darwinian evolution, let's say. They not only believe that they hold together the core truth of the science of life, which is a pretty lofty claim, but they also claim to hold possession of science itself, I believe. And that's the sticking point for me, because there have been which I try to develop in my ongoing research, hosts of scientists who have thought otherwise. Good scientists, Nobel laureate scientists. And yet oftentimes they kind of get pushed off to the margins and well, you know, they were good scientists, but then when they start talking about purpose and desire and teleology and s you know, they're not really dealing with science then. Well that's that's a that's a handy demarcation, but somewhat self serving I'd say. So what I mean by the loyal opposition is the people who and good scientists who have been supporting teleology and their own work our scientists in our right and they might be considered right now the loyal opposition to those who currently hold sway in the in the court of science. speaker-0: when it comes to the loyal opposition, you know, there is an expectation on the other side to treat the loyal opposition with respect and as intellectual equals. I mean, that's the whole whole loyal part of the loyal opposition. But lately it seems that it's become very heated and actually negative and of course the the the the the essential illustrative event of that was the reception of Thomas Nagel's book on on on mind and cosmos, you know. I I I mean he Thomas Nagel is a very respectable philosopher. He's been writing about the problem of teleology for many years, and I was astonished at the savagery of the attack against him, you know, that that there was a lot of character assassination going on, he's over the hill, he might have been good once, but you know look at look at what he's come to now. And I've always wondered where does that animosity come from? I mean is there any reason to actually destroy someone for disagreeing with you? speaker-1: don't know myself. I I I find the level of of animosity, as you say, Well, beyond it's it's not only unreasonable, it's just at a level that I wouldn't expect, and yet we see it repeatedly. And that makes me think that those who yell most loudly, you know, Thomas Nagel must be senile, he's over the hill, he doesn't know what he's doing, as you say, must be worried, seriously worried about their position. in not just the court of science, but their reputations in science as scientists. And they see anybody who questions that as impugning their their professional status, maybe even their turf, I don't know. But it has not gotten better, and and and let's be frank, it it hasn't been helped by the, in my opinion, extremely weak metaphysical tirades of the likes of Richard Dawkins, who still seems to be able to write books that people Buy off the shelves. I don't really understand why that is, because I've never thought of him. I mean, he may have been a great biologist in his respected sphere, but lately he spent an awful lot of time talking metaphysics and David Bentley Hart once referred to watching or reading Richard Dawkins. work in philosophy somewhat akin to watching a dolphin tap dance. so that's a fairly I can't I can't beat that one. But but nonetheless I guess I think I do think a lot of this it's not just about the science, it's about the metaphysics. It's about where we take this in the realms of philosophy. my own view is that that science and and you point this out because I have seen some of your some of your podcasts in your in your course on evolution, it's very interesting. You take some very deep dives there. And that's worth it for a lot of people to take a a close look at. But you you make it very clear that that science and certainly Dar Darwinian science makes an awful lot of philosophical and what I would call metaphysical claims. And I think they can be tested on that basis. metaphysics is equally open to testing as is science. It's tested in a different way, but it's testable. We can test it for logic and for coherence and, you know, all the things that probably Ian is familiar with in his work in theology because it's so so much akin to the study of philosophy itself. So I don't divorce science from metaphysics. I I think any good scientific theory has to rest upon a good metaphysical platform. speaker-0: it's impossible to divorce science from metaphysics because it's it's a met it's a it's one of, at least three great metaphysical traditions of of making sense of the physical world. You know, there's there's of course the atomistic tradition, descended from Democritus and Leukippus and and and then there's the whole schools of thought that prevailed during the medieval period derived from the thoughts of Plato and Aristotle. And s somehow the trope has taken root that the only legitimate scientific approach is atomistic and reductionist and and you know without any understanding or even admission that there can be such a thing as as as purpose driven phenomena, which of course life falls right into and actually, s from some of our other guests maybe even the cosmos fits into it. You know, that's a whole other thing I'm a biologist, but that's where I I come in. But somehow or other the the the the the label of science has been captured by this kind of atomistic reductionist tradition to the utter ignorance of of really two of the main drivers of Western philosophy. again which I will point out is actually a Western phenomenon of Western culture, you know. So Ian, do you have some thoughts on on on what Michael was telling us Yeah it I mean it raises an interesting point and I don't know how much of it is just sort of reaching a critical mass because of advances in science going on right now. Like I was reading about how AI companies are looking for philosophy majors. They're actually looking for philosophers. you know, and it seems like w in a lot of ways we're starting to come full circle and kind of going back to metaphysics where the altitude, if you will, of science from an atomistic point of view just can't go any higher without taking on the machinery of metaphysics. Or lower on the or lower or lower. and and metaf and people on the metaphysical side I think are very eager to open new areas of ethics and, you know, research questions, et cetera. And it's starting to kind of make what was old and assumed new again, in the sense that these were not separate fields. For those for those who are listening who don't know much about this, w all these different fields of philosophy, biology, the arts, even, they were all interchangeable parts of the same sort of macro field of of study and they were they were not inseparable from each other. And there were different assumptions that guided that. So the fact that you see we the very fact that if you go into a college or university now and you have to major in something kind of shows how atomistic these different fields have become. And from a civilizational standpoint you could argue that humanity's got dumber as a result of this because they just don't They just don't ask the questions that they need to because they pretend that everyone else in the room doesn't exist, when in fact they always have. and you can see this in big areas of science where you look at breakthroughs in cancer research right now. Well, okay, that's great from a science point of view, but why are you even bothering with that? Unless there's some sort of purpose behind it. You know, are you just looking for the breakthrough for its own sake or are you actually motivated by something that's not scientific? You trying to prolong and save human life. That's a very that brings you right back to metaphysics. speaker-1: Yeah, I I think I think as you're talking Ian I I'm thinking too, you know, science and metaphysics all deal with a fundamental question, and that is epistemology. How is it that we know? Right? So in a sense, they have to be conjoined. I wonder to myself how much of Well, as Scott was talking about, this this sort of violent reaction against anyone who suggests that tele teleology deserves a place at the science table. I mean, just suggests it deserves a place. Which is really all Thomas Nagel did. the that is completely ruled out, and I'm wondering how much of this is being driven by the ascent of the Darwinian paradigm, which evolved itself evolved to the point where by the end of the nineteenth and early twentieth century we got to something called the dry the the white draper thesis, the so called science, religion, war thesis. that that re that science was at war against religion, never the twain shall meet. And that seemed to set off a whole trajectory of thought that not only w were they sort of an oil and water mix, but they could never be brought back together. And I would say, well maybe the Draper White thesis is dead, except that I keep seeing publications from people like Richard Dawkins. So I don't know. Any any thoughts on on the sort of the historical roots of this divorce between science and religion? speaker-0: Well I think you're gonna have quite a lot to say about that and we're going to get into it. But the as we go along. But the interesting thing about the whole Draper White war of science and religion, you know, if delve into the historical roots of this, and this is where you can provide us some real enlightening comments, is that it actually derived from a kind of political war of professional scientists like Thomas Huxley and the dominance of the Anglican Church in the Oxbridge universities, you know. The the Oxbridge universities had been the bailiwick of the Anglican Church, specifically the High Anglican Church in England and and Huxley of course represented an emerging class of professional scientists, you know, people who weren't involved in training for the clergy, as Charles Darwin was by the way, you know, th the that that they could make their careers as scientists. But to break into the Oxbridge universities, which Thomas Huxley did to a degree, you have to kind of, you know, declare a war against the dominant political powers in the Anglican church and that was of course the the the religion side of the war of science and religion. And of course there's this fascinating involvement of the sons of Thomas Huxley and Charles Darwin in promoting this, promoting this this war. So, you know, the the this this this idea that this is some conflict between reason and science on the one hand and religion and and other kinds of philosophical approaches on the other is a total utter myth, you know. And of course we never teach about that in our universities. speaker-1: Right. I I think that's that's all very true. And in fact, let's not forget when Huxley was you know, by the way, referred to as Darwin's bulldog defender, when when Huxley was pushing so hard against say for example the the the scientific credentials of Richard Owen. Say he was trying to reconcile that Anglican science nexus. when Huxley was fighting against Owen, he had some power behind him. It's called the X Club, and it was a whole group of individuals like minded who were pushing to not only professionalize. science, but I think secularized culture as well in some profound ways. they had one of their most powerful allies as a fellow by the name of Norman Lockier Lockier who was the editor of Nature. And so the X Club, Huxley included, also got a bully pulpit from which to voice their ideas through the pages of nature and it was a it was a it was a a formidable formidable group, let's just say. the problem is in a lot of that sometimes polemics outshone let's just say the science and it became a highly polarizing discussion between positions of power, desire for political power, cultural prominence, and so forth and so on. So you know it's y don't think that you know there may be people out there that are not familiar with the history they think, well, you know, we've got we've got Huxley and and Darwin fighting against these big forces of the Anglican church and so They got they had considerable power on their own side, and that's how their theory became a paradigm I speaker-0: Yeah, yeah. And of course, the role of polemics was very important in that era, you know. Of course the exemplar of that is the Huxley Willoughberce debate. again the mythology of it, mostly told by the sons of Charles Darwin and and Thomas Huxley, you know, and with the idea of making their fathers look good, you know, th and and there is that whole motivation there, you know. But that this this this conflict between High Church and and broad church as it was called you know that that that kind of dynamic is rarely considered in our discussions of, you know, the interface of science and religion and d w different ways of well different forms of atis of epistemology, basically, as you said. Ian, you're a deeper student of religion than I am. there seems to be this this this tension in the Christian church, specifically in the Anglican church, between this high church elite power structure and the court of sort of populous broad church dynamic. Is that br is that a broad phenomenon in the in the various f sects of the Christian church? I well, it's interesting. So I was reading Michael's piece. I was reading your piece on on Owen and Darwin and Owen trying to retain the metaphysical connection that biology of biology to Platonism. He was using Platonism specifically. And something that really stood out from that was that he relied on the the wisdom of Solomon. And he actually mentions the wisdom of Solomon, which is for those of you who don't know, there's a whole Protestants especially, in Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy, there's a whole set of books that Protestants would call the Apocrypha and are not considered legitimate scriptural sources. In Catholicism and Orthodoxy, on the other hand, Eastern Orthodoxy, Greek, Russian, etc., as well as is Rome, those books are retained. Now, in the Anglican church, what's interesting about this is that they they never considered these metaphysical, legitimately, divinely inspired scriptural sources. And why this is so critical, I think, to point out, is that the wisdom of Solomon and this whole genre was very critical to establishing what Christianity was in its relationship to Greek philosophy. And why this actually matters is because it connects the revelatory tradition of Judaism The same genre as Proverbs, in Protestant Bibles is the only one that really has it, to Greco-Roman philosophy. And why this matters is because it connects the ethics to the metaphysics. So, in the Wisdom of Solomon, for example, which is one of several books that you see in the early centuries of the Christian church, these were the books that were the center of debate about the nature of existence and About who Jesus was, what was the relationship to the Hebrew Bible, Greek philosophy. These were the big question books that all the early church fathers turned to. And you wouldn't have Christianity without these books. And yet, fast forward to the Anglicans and the Protestants, they basically threw this out. and what's interesting about that is that they were only used really for ethical and moral sources of. Of knowledge in the Anglican setting. And I can see how Anglicanism specifically would be primed to set up these debates. I don't think that you would necessarily have the unmooring if you had this in a Catholic, Orthodox, or even a Jewish setting. Because the metaphysics is not considered this separate thing from science. What happens in the empirical physical world. The only way that you bridge that gap between what is this ideal in the Platonic sense and what is physical around us is through these wisdom books. It's how does the impenetrable other side of existence, God that's unreachable because we're we're bounded beings, how does that interact with the world around us? Well, th those books answer that. Those books give you the machinery to answer and tackle those questions philosophically. Right. And you don't have that without those books, really. So you're left with with this this blank spot, and it seems like it almost primes the Anglican world to have this debate with science. I just don't think you get it if this was a Catholic setting or Greek Orthodox or or even Jewish setting. I just don't see that happening. And what's kind of creepier about it is that when you and not and this isn't really in the article, but as much because you you you zoom out, you look at Owen versus Darwin, Owen Was a big opponent of eugenics, which was percolating at the time. And Darwin, Darwinism was used as the basis for eugenics. So the the end result of divorcing the science from the metaphysics is something very sociopathic and ultimately very dangerous. And I think this sort of brings us full circle in the sense of well, you can't separate ethics from metaphysics on the philosophical religious side. And if you don't have that connection to the metaphysics of science, you wind up with the tools of genocide readily available and readily legitimizable. And I think that's the big story that if you read this up close, you kind of miss it. And this is one of the things that kind of has a, I would say has a mass appeal to this whole area of discussion, is that when you actually start to look at the the inner workings of it. The implications are pretty damn big. speaker-1: Yeah. Well that that that comes out a little bit in the article to which you're referring, in the whole debate that Owen had with Huxley on the hippocampus. And in fact, Huxley wants to make the point that there's certainly no difference between the ape and the human hippocampus. And Owen is rejecting that. And it actually gets bound up in a lot of for Huxley rather telling racist language that that that Owen is actually defending against. There's a a a very good book about this called about the hippocampus by Christopher Cousins. And that's what I rely on in my discussion of that hippocampus. As it turns out, when we look at the the the long story, the broad picture, it turns out that that Owen turned out to be actually right about the hippocampus. There are unique features of it at the human level, but it's more at the it's not so much at the morphological level, it's it's at the at at the deeper level. At the neurological level. And he seems to have been vindicated on that. And another aspect of Owen, you know, well, why would he use this literature that you've done such a good job of of explaining in the Anglican d tradition? I think, and this would require some more investigation on my part. But I think Owen was yes, he's often regarded as a broad church Anglican, but I think in truth, if you burrow a little deeper, you'll find out that he was tremendously influenced by the Oxford movement. And the Oxford movement, of course, what did they want? They actually wanted a return back to the Catholic roots of of the early Christianity from which Anglican Christian Ism sprang. And that's where you get people like John Henry Newman and a whole group of individuals out of Oxford seeking to actually return Anglicanism back to its Catholic roots. most of them remained Anglican, but of course all of them did not. The most notable example is John Henry Newman. Who eventually became himself a Catholic. When we see Owen making those kinds of arguments, those are actually rather Catholic arguments. And so where do you think they're he's getting those from in an Anglican tradition? Well, he's he's probably getting them from the influence of the Oxford movement, which by then had pretty much spent itself. speaker-0: Interesting. A sectarian conflict, if you will, that we've been talking about, you know, these these different movements that occur within faith traditions, Anglicanism or Catholicism or Judaism, you know, there there's there's always this kind of tension again to use the analogy between the high church and the broad church. aspects of of whatever religious faith that you're talking about. And the the to me the the the takeover of the Oxbridge universities that Thomas Huxley initiated is a kind of an early example of of what we now describe as the long march through the institutions that the progressive left has has has has undertaken so successfully in our own modern universities. And of course when you when you have that kind of thing going on, propaganda is a very, very important tool. You know, you you you you tell a story and you tell the story again and again and again until everyone believes it. And I wonder if that's not the root of this mythical war of science versus religion. You know, the the the professional scientists who basically successfully made the long march through the universities back in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, they got to control the narrative. And and as a result, you know, some of the rich history of evolutionary thought that you described in many of your articles and your books and also in your forthcoming books is just not taught to students anymore. You know, it it's all Well, before Darwin it was all these people, maybe they kind of edged the way towards evolutionary thinking, but didn't quite get there, you know. and then there was Darwin. It's like Newton, you know, describing the the motion of the universe. And and I remember when I was a student of biology, we never learned about Owen except in derogatory terms. We never learned about other kinds of evolutionary thought that actually blossoms beautifully in the late nineteenth century as i they just weren't taught because it was regarded as unnecessary to teach because all you need to know is the Darwinian thing. So so this dynamic of power that goes along with long marches through universities, it has nothing to do really with science versus religion, reason versus faith and those kinds of things. It has everything to do with seizing political power. but we don't teach that anymore. Pardon me? speaker-1: Professional turf. speaker-0: I exactly, exactly. And and I I I I do remember I never was required to take a philosophy course, both when I was an undergraduate and when I was a graduate student. and this seems to be the norm actually among scientists, science education. speaker-1: Well, when I think about certain aspects of the development of of Darwinian theory and you know how when you know Darwin releases Origin of Species eighteen fifty nine and Asagray, by all accounts a devout Presbyterian, decides to champion Darwin's theory to America. Well There's a head scratcher for you. Why why would you necessarily do that? And I'm not saying that the theory on its face is inimicable to religion, although Janet Brown kind of says so in her two-volume biography of of Darwin. She has some support for that. But you wonder why would somebody like Asa Gray who was who was a devout Presbyterian, but why would he single handedly take it upon himself to champion Darwinism in the American arena? Well, if you dig a little deeper you find out that he was at Harvard and he was vying for money and position against Louis Agassiz, also at Harvard. And Agassiz had the lion's share of the funding for his museum and the lion's share of the resources of the university for his museum. And so when you look at it from that context, you're kind of saying, Well, Asa, I I I you know, y I you may be excited about this theory, but are there some ulterior motives at work here? And I think there were. I mean, I think obviously he saw a way of Of wedging a position for himself by diminishing the stature of Louis Agassiz, which at the time was quite high. speaker-0: Man. I guess he was was was was pretty much a a a a platonist and a species fixist, you know, to to chart out some things. And and you know and and of course Asa Gray versus Thomas Huxley on this, yeah. There's this amusing anecdote that Huxley says Darwin is the death of teleology, and Asa Gray comes along, you know, a short while later and says and emerges as a champion of teleology, how Darwin has vindicated the the purposeful view of life. And and you know, this is this is just a a a a vignette of the really complex and rich history of evolutionary thought in the late nineteenth century, which, you know, we really don't go into very much. speaker-1: But as you point out, Scott, it's never taught that way, is it? speaker-0: No, it's never taught that way. It's never taught that way. we're on you know, the the the the trope that science is the death of philosophy is very prominent in science education, ignoring completely of the fact, of course, that science is a form of philosophy. You know, that's yeah and you can't escape the epistemology and the metaphysics of science if you're gonna do science. So you have somebody say Well it it it's it The hard science is is is just philosophy by other means. It's it's a it it it's almost as if people seem to forget where the questions come from in the first place. because if you take away the big questions that derive experimentation, right, from a philosophy of science, which is I I I had to take philosophy of science and I'm very thankful there's not a day that goes by that I'm not thankful I had to take it, because it was actually one of the most interesting things ever. How do you know what you know? And do you really know it? Where where does that impulse come from and how do you verify, etcetera? It's it's interesting in that without that you don't really have good questions. Because if you take if you take science, right, if you take biology or any hard science or just the scientific method, and you don't have deeper questions behind it, you're really just playing with a toy over and over again to see how it du acts differently when you do different things. It it has a pointlessness to it that then makes science itself look pretty idiotic. And boring, by the way. And boring. speaker-1: Beyond boring. speaker-0: Yeah. Yeah. It's it's it becomes it becomes a well funded, you know, high tech jackass video where it's like, Well what do the cells do if I do this? What do the cells do if I do that? Right. As opposed to what's the deeper question? speaker-1: I I I have to say, since I have this opportunity to speak with you directly, Scott, that when I when I picked up your book and and and you know was reading through purpose and desire, you you have a lot to say about termites. And and and it resonated with me because I had spent a month or so in Ghana. And I re remember I remember seeing these huge eight to ten foot termite mounds. When I first saw them, I didn't even know whether they're like towers. And they says, those are t termite mounds. So when you started talking about termites and what they were doing and why they were doing it and all this, it it resonated with me. and then the other thing that resonated with me in your book, it was interesting, there were two touchstones. One was the termites, and the other was Claude Bernard. And I got into the history of science through the history of pharmacy, curiously enough. And and so Claude Bernard, who is really in many ways regarded the father of modern pharmacology, really resonated with me as well because I I remembered his experiments on Cure RA and how it affected the motor nerves, which in fact in turn affected the muscles, and then how carbon monoxide displaced oxygen when introduced to the hemoglobin of the blood. So so I I mean I just have to say it was a it was a it was a curious fit for me as a reader. speaker-0: Well thank you for pointing that out. You know, the the the two are related in my mind, you know. With respect to the social insects, of which termites are one of course, and bees and wasps and ants are are the other. You know, I I I sort of had this trope building in my mind as I was working on that is that studying the social insects drives all scientists crazy. and you know you know, Darwin Darwin tried to figure out what goes on with bees? why on earth should bee colonies have this enormous population of of of self sacrificing workers to benefit just one one creature and and and he never came up with it. It it it it just drove him baddie. And at least in terms of my own intellectual evolution, the same thing can be said for termites and and I I I was a physiolog I s well still am, I like to think, a physiologist, which actually comes from a very different intellectual tradition from genetics and and and you know, those those biochemistry and those kinds of fields. and you know, Claude Bernard comes into that is as you say, a central figure in in the development of physiology. But the interesting thing about Claude Bernard is that is that our understanding of Claude Bernard right now is very limited in scope. Again, it's a it's a control of the narrative about Claude Bernard. he was a great experimental physiologist, he was a very good empiricist. he literally founded modern physiology and so he deserves great credit for that. But if you delve deeper into the thinking of Claude Bernard, you know, of course This word homeostasis keeps coming up, even though Claude Bernard didn't coin it, that was someone else. know, the the only the only introduction I had as a student to Claude Bernard's thinking was was homeostasis as this machine that regulates something, you know. And And Bernard's own thinking about this was actually very deeply metaphysical, vitalist in in a way. and you know, this is also part of the of the control of narrative by the kind of reductionist people on the reductionist side of the anatomistic side of the scientific spectrum. And and in that in Bernard's own conception of homeostasis there's this very profound and sometimes explicitly mentioned notion of purpose that that living things strive towards something, you know, towards some state. And it's not necessarily blood sugar levels or body temperature or things like this, that the organism itself has a kind of homeostasis which which is it's most important living Attribute and a and just to connect these two again, when you look at things like social insect colonies, they behave a lot like organisms do, you know, they have a lot of the same attributes and things like this and this is one of the things that you know sort of drives people, including me, crazy a little bit about you know, just what are our fundamental assumptions here, you know, and and and you know That's the thing that opened my eyes that there's really a broader array of philosophical questions here that we don't really have a good handle on right now. And in part the reason why we don't have a good handle is that is that the narrative is a controlled by one particular narrow, metaphysical, epistemological view of the world, that is atomist, reductionist, materialist. and I think that's one of the reasons why purposefulness, which Bernard was a an an avatar of, is banished from our modern discourse. speaker-1: And and and when when when the conversation does arise about the the history of of evolutionary thought, particularly when it arises within the context within a Darwinian context, they almost invariably pit Darwin against William Paley. So you have Dar Darwin's a brilliant development of of of Evolution through natural selection against William Paley's rather silly and benighted species fixism with God acting as you know waving his magic wand and creating birds and you know cows and whatever. And so you always have this simplistic dichotomous narrative that sort of stacks the deck against any serious thought about. alternatives and more sophisticated views of evolutionary development. You almost hardly ever hear in the classroom talk about organicism, let's say, championed by Hal Waddington and Joseph Needham and a host of others. Very little talk about orthogenesis, which you talk about in your in your in your course. n the actual narrative itself is so dumbed down that you walk away with very little historical knowledge of what really transpired or is transpiring. it's yeah, you're right. Yeah. speaker-0: Ian thoughts. speaker-1: I don't know I'll ask Ian this. speaker-0: But think of how this sort of materialism has spread in the sense that the this this dichotomization, if you will, right, has gone into pretty much every field. And not only that, I mean even without that, it's it there's very little incentive or ability for scholars to cross pollinate in any meaningful way without winding up in ridiculous sort of subfields that that don't really go anywhere. it's it's it's almost as if the the the academy, the professionalization is actually fighting the pursuit of truth now as opposed to trying to facilitate it. You know, I'm thinking of of someone like you know Albert Schweitzer in the early mid-20th century who had wa a PhD in music, he was an MD and he was also a PhD in theology. you just don't see that anymore. you don't see that cross pollination. And you also don't get that without that metaphysical overarch. And it it's I think that raises a bigger question about the future of the academy in general, and not just in biology, but also the sciences, etc., where is that pursuit of truth really gonna start to take place somewhere else, or is something or or is there actually a room for innovation to to bring these things back into dialogue with each other? And I d that's that's I that's that's the big question for me. speaker-1: Yes, and it's an important question and it's it's unclear what direction that's going to take. The one bright spot I would say is that overall publishers seem to be interested in maintaining a free marketplace of ideas. And so those of us who want to write and publish our own views like Scott or myself or guy I'm reading r right now, interesting fellow Simon Conway Morris, can get published. the problem is they can get published, but somehow it doesn't translate into the academy. In other words, these books can get out there, they can get bought, they can get reviewed, they can get talked about, but they never get Into the classroom. Or if they do as a sort of, well, a tangential, well, you know, he's, you know, he's off in left field. Now, onto the real study. and I don't know when that shift is gonna take place, if it will take place. I hope and pray that it takes place. I don't see much evidence of it. If anything, I I I almost see the academy becoming even more hardened. digging its heels in as it were. and it's not that the alternative ideas aren't out there and it's not that they're not getting published, it's that they're not making their way into the halls of academia. speaker-0: Yeah, one long march turns into another, doesn't it? It's all about power, not the search for truth. We had a a guest on an earlier version of this of this podcast, Nick Spencer, who who is with the Theos Institute in the UK and and he's written a a very interesting book titled Magisteria, and of course he derives that title from this famous claim by Stephen J. Gould that science and religion exist in two non overlapping magisteria, usually abbreviated as NOMA. And and it's it's an interesting analogy in the sense that's it illustrates exactly the kind of point that we're talking about. That is if you have a magisterium, it's it's literally a vehicle for promoting orthodoxy and and these are epistemically closed universes. You know, you don't admit religion which is over in its own magisteria into science because somehow one will pollute the other. And of course the irony of Stephen J. Gould's initial thing was he said, well, okay, religion is okay because the Pope had just put out something saying that, well, maybe there's something too human evolution after all, And so it's okay, religion, if you agree with us then we're o okay. But Spencer's thesis, and it was an interesting one, a fascinating book, is that well, actually no, nothing progresses. Neither science nor religion progresses or or or is very responsive to the world is trying to explain as long as those magisteria are non overlapping. That that when you have a a fairly cordial relationship between church for example and scientific endeavor, of course exemplified by Galileo versus working in the context of the Catholic Church, you get an incredible flourishing of intellect and advancement of both science and and religion. You know, they both can adapt to the findings of one another. as long as you open up an interface between them. and that's kind of a long segue into the figure of Alfred Russell Wallace, who was of course the he was also a field naturalist, I would argue probably a better naturalist than Darwin was, you know, was able to delve into the actual natural history more deeply than Darwin was. during the voyage of the Beagle, he was Darwin was of course constrained by the schedule of the Beagle's mission and could only spend a little bit of time on on on on s you know various places. he did a lot of collecting which he then had to make sense of when he was back in England. But but Wallace was actually developing his thinking about evolutionary theory as a continual conversation between himself and the nature that he was observing out there in the Melee archipelago. and of course, Wallace and Darwin, they both claim to have been the discoverer of natural selection. but Wallace has sort of been eclipsed, if you will. he's been described as Darwin's moon. You know, okay, he was lucky he came up with this idea, but it's to Darwin that really all the credit goes. But Wallace was actually a much deeper and more interesting figure philosophically than Darwin was. And of course there's this famous tendency of dar of Wallace to become interested in spiritualism and talking about the the human mind as somehow not really susceptible to natural selection, that that there had to be something different operating at at the level of the mind that that would be an important factor in evolution. And that thing is just eclipsed behind this trope that, well, Wallace deserves credit for this, but then he went a little crazy because he started going to seances and things like that. Again, a a total caricature. And and of course Wallace has been a really important figure in your own writing. And you know tell us something about Wallace, the actual real thinker as opposed to how he's usually portrayed. speaker-1: Yeah, Wallace is really The man who really set me off on this whole trajectory of teleology. Many years ago, when I was Associate Director for Historical Collections at my institution at UAB, we had a large collection there, mostly devoted to the history of medicine, but also in general to the history of science. And at that time I fell upon a book. Called The World of Life. It was published in 1910, written by Alfred Russell Wallace, and I began, you know, reading through it and sort of digesting its comment contents, and I thought to myself, well, this is teleology through and through. this is remarkable. And coming from the man. Co-discovered the theory of natural selection. So, while Huxley was talking about Darwin getting rid of teleology altogether, here we have its co-discoverer showcasing it as a matter of fact. So then I got to read more literature on Wallace, and I saw how so many of the biographers of Wallace, in one way or another. want to cast him either in Darwin's image or dim diminish in some way or another his accomplishments, or just consign him to sort of the loony bin of heterodoxy. You know, Michael Shermer kind of does that in his in his biography of of Wallace. But what I come to find out was that On a couple of points, I can see where Wallace took his trajectory. Now, it's widely believed that Wallace was an atheist, but he started out as an atheist. He told his biographer, James Marchand, at the end of his life, that the completely materialistic mind of my youth and early manhood has been slowly molded. into the socialistic, spiritualistic, and theistic mind I now exhibit. And he told this to Marchant about the same time he was writing the book The World of Life, which I regard as Wallace's Magnum opus. Now if we think that well an another way of diminishing Wallace's contribution is to say, well this Trajectory he took toward teleology was was just drawn from his spiritualism. Well, let's let's wait a minute on that. Wallace attended his first seance, and you have to understand, you bring this out in your course too, that in its day, spiritualism was a a very Prominent exercise, shall we say, held to by many scientists of the day. even William James was interested in spiritualism. So that being said, Wallace didn't even attend his first seance until he was invited to attend one by his sister Fanny on july twenty second, eighteen sixty five. But when I look at Wallace's writings, I see that trajectory toward teleology emerging well before that. I'll give you an example. In eighteen fifty-six, Wallace wrote an essay about the orangutan. And he felt, I guess, especially quick to do that because he had actually killed the mother to get the pelt and then had this. Baby orangutan, which he kept as an as a pet. And he watched its behavior and, like Wallace always did, being a careful observer, took notes and all the rest. Well, drawn from those notes and from his experience of dealing with orangutans in the wild in the Melee archipelago, he wrote this essay on the orangutan. Then he for the end of that nineteen fifty eighteen fifty six essay, remember, well before his first seance, he says, looking at the the life and the activities of the orangutan and comparing it with the apes intellect with the human intellect, he was struck by what he called the human form divine. And that's his quote. human form divine. Well this was well before he'd ever gotten into spiritualism. He was already seeing something that struck him in terms of human exceptionalism, which is exactly what Darwin was denying, difference in degree but not kind, that Wallace was sort of taking a a latch to. Then in eighteen sixty nine, in the pages of the quarterly review Wallace is writing a review of Charles Lyell's, I don't know, sixth or seventh edition of his a book on geology. And he says at the end of that review, or toward the end of that review, that we know while while we can talk about all these geological features and structures and so forth. The the one thing we can't account for by purely naturalistic means, and this is just this is Wallace writing now, and he knew that Lyell agreed with him on this because he had had many conversations with Charles Lyell about this. The one thing we can't ascribe to just simply naturalistic law like activities is the mind of man, which we can only explain By an overruling intelligence. Now that's his phrase, not mine. Overruling intelligence. When Darwin read that, and we we have his copy of the Quarterly Review, he underlined it and wrote a wow no with great exclamation points in the margin. And he wrote back to Wallace to the effect that. You, the writer of the greatest essay on on biology ever writ written recently, I have to depart from you on the question of man, and he said he ends it with EU EU EU. I mean he wanted nothing to do with Wallace's march toward human exceptionalism. So if we wonder why Wallace was pushed to the background. Some of it was probably Darwin himself. there's a very good biography of of of Wallace written by Ross Slaughton called Darwin's Darwin's Heretic. The the heretic in Darwin's Court. And the heretic in Darwin's Court was published about two two thousand nine. but it N once you read that biography you can see how how Wallace got marginalized. speaker-0: Yeah, I've I've I've I've been fascinated by Wallace myself and I've had the opportunity to actually correspond with with the kind of Wallace culture, if you will, you know. Th there's this there's quite an amazing community of of de defenders of Wallace that has grown up kind of informally and and you know These guys are real scholars, They they they delve into all the source material, as you have done, by the way, you're part of that. And yeah, you know, it's speaker-1: The problem with a lot of Wallace scholars, not all of them, speaker-0: Okay. speaker-1: a lot of Wallace scholars want to cast Wallace in Darwin's image. speaker-0: Cast Wallace into what, I'm sorry? speaker-1: They want to cast Wallace into Darwin's image. Yes. In other words, they want to take all those things that that Wallace did that coincide with Darwin's theory of natural selection, and even his his theory of artificial selection, which by the way Wallace never agreed with. But they want to take those pieces and highlight those and push to the side any of Wallace's teleological work. And they'll even some of even suggest he had a sp split personality. It's crazy. speaker-0: It has to be crazy, right? It doesn't agree with Darkness. speaker-1: Yes, of course. Yeah. speaker-0: Ian, you're from outside the world of biology and evolution, you know. Have you heard about Wallace? You know, what are your thoughts on what Michael has just been saying? I mean it's can't help but wonder if you brought them to the present both Darwin and and Wallace and and also Owen, how they would How our efforts at AI would strike them? For example, if we're talking about human like an overarching human like overarching intelligence, how would that affect if you brought them to today and and they saw all of what we're trying to do, the things that we have achieved in the past twenty five years? Who would actually be vindicated? Interesting question. speaker-1: It's hard to say. I suspect and again we're this is hypothetical. I suspect if Wallace and Owen were brought in today, they would be very wary of AI. I think they would view it as mankind's brilliant. ability to create tools in his own service, but perhaps tools toward their own destruction. I I I could be wrong, but if if AI is the is the going concern and AI is what everybody wants to do and everybody's on the AI bandwagon, I can almost guarantee you Wallace would be thinking otherwise. He was such a contrary. speaker-0: I was just about to jump in to disagree with you, Michael, but then you actually said your actual words and I I actually do agree with you now, you know. And and and this is this is one of the w one of the things about artificial intelligence that I think is actually very neglectful neglectful of the unique nature of life, you know, the the The whole push is toward artificial general intelligence, that is to have machine intelligence that rivals or exceeds the ability of of abilities and capabilities of human intelligence. And that's totally wrong in my view, because they are using computational models of intelligence, whereas in actual human brains, brains are not computers, you know, they're they're They're something entirely different. And the the the kinds of things that give rise to our own artificial not artificial, well s in some cases I suppose it is, our own general intelligence, they will never be mimicked in a computational machine because brains are not computers. You know, brains are driven by desire to, you know, do something, to regulate the brain environment or to process, you know nerve impulses in a certain way. And and so I think I agree with you that you know, Wallace would actually be very wary of of AI, in fact skeptical of the of the ability of AI to actually do anything but be a useful tool in our hands. speaker-1: And and actually your description of AI and and your wariness over, you know, the brain is not the computer, is precisely what perhaps the greatest mathematician of the twentieth century said, Kurt Girdle. Kurt speaker-0: Yeah, yeah. speaker-1: Girdle's incompleteness theorems, two of them he had, pointed out that that you know, whatever can develop in terms of a machine model, it's not going to be a human model. speaker-0: Yeah. And you speak about that about Goodle and Free Spirits, as I recall and and speaker-1: He's he's another fascinating character. speaker-0: Well, the well just to break in there, didn't he basically think himself to death too? We were talking about the human mind. I I read a biography about him and that's the gist of it, is that he basically thought himself speaker-1: He refused to eat. He refused to eat. He starved himself to death. He died in Princeton Hospital in nineteen seventy eight. speaker-0: Well, I think we're gonna have to have you on when Free Spirits comes out again because that's a whole other dimension that I think is worthy of its own its own discussion. so we're we're getting towards the end of our time right now. I I I just wanted to follow up w with you something that Ian hinted at earlier, which is that, you know, you have a and you as well, Michael, that that you have all this interesting discussion going on outside the halls of academia actually and it should be there. There's no two ways about it, but it seems to not be very prominent in the halls of academia where it should be. So how do you how do we get this kind of broad thought back into the universities? speaker-1: Well, this is one way we're doing it right here. by having conversations, by having podcasts, by getting things, you know, there's a lot of ways. It it's not just the print culture anymore. It's it's YouTube videos, conversations like this, made so much easier with the different kind of utilities we have to to connect and discuss discuss things face to face. and and so I think that's one way of doing it. And and I'll just put a plug in for the National Association of Scholars. I I I think like-minded individuals who want to see our educational system maybe redirect a little, and and head in some more fruitful directions. certainly organizations like that need to be fostered and and I think that's another way to do it. I don't know that there's any one single grand thing, but maybe a lot of individual things will have a cumulative effect. It's unfortunate when you know we have meaningful conversations like this and it gets out there and people can follow them and so forth. But then you'll get you'll get one prominent person who makes some off-the-wall comment or write a book in some particular context that gets all the media attention. So, for example, you'll get somebody like Stephen Hawking. writing a book that says, well, philosophy is dead. We d we don't have to deal with philosophy anymore. And and all of a sudden that that that's that's, that's on the internet, that's that's in Facebook, everybody's talking about it. And, you know, you think, well now wait a minute. I mean I I'm not sure that I'm not sure that it warrants that much attention. to me he can say what he wants to say, of course He's passed on now, but I I I don't see why that should why that should create such a media sensation, let's put it that way. And maybe if we continue to have meaningful conversations like this that really delve into the deeper questions, you know truth usually wins out in the end. It may take a while. But I think at the end, and I think our young people are interested in the truth. I I I I think students coming up now, of course I've been retired for ten years now, so I don't get around students like I used to. But my impression is is that th they are they they are interested and and are reading some of the contrarian literature as it were. and and are starting to take note. So I'm I'm still hopeful. you know. speaker-0: Yeah, I'd love for us to have the press agent that Richard Dawkins has, for example. Yeah. I think that would go a long way towards towards getting these things out there. But I g I agree with you. You know, in the meantime there's this whole alternate culture of intellectual ferment, which is what the university should be doing and that's our that's our path right now. And you know, it's it's unfortunate, but it's maybe it's good for us, you know, we can hash out these things without having to worry about student enrollments and things like that. speaker-1: what we can do is keep doing what we're doing. speaker-0: That's right. Ian, do you have any thoughts on the question of the hand? How do we get this stuff back into the universities? I think I think well, I I think what we have to keep doing what we're doing. And just to put a plug out there, if you like content like this, if you like these deeper questions and you're seeing our stuff for the first time, do consider becoming a member. You do not have to be a professor to join. But going back to the education aspect of this, I just wrote a thing that came out like earlier this week about just the educational trajectory in the US at least. And our schools are are making people dumber. This is put a this to be fr to be blunt, they they really are. If you look at the reading and the math scores and and civics, etcetera, you just break it down subject by subject. our students are Our students are not okay. The young people may be on a better trajectory, but our students are not okay. If you look at the OE the OECD countries, just the way that we're we're teaching everything and also in higher ed, a lot of institutions seem to be banking on their nameplate and the letterhead or to anything else, and that's kind of where the value begins and ends. They're really not teaching anything anymore. And I I think We're at a critical juncture in terms of how I think there's an appetite, certainly among younger people, for these questions, and I see the need for it beyond just education itself. you know, there's people that are very heavily advocating trade schools. you know, there was a thing, there was an interview with Mike Rao, for example, who's a big advocate of trade of going into the trades. In the interview is really kind of striking. He said that people ne we need welders who study philosophy and civics. And then at the f at the other end we have people in AI that are like, we need we need to hire philosophers and and and these different things. And they're all kind of talking about the same thing in that in the sense that this general intertwined organic growth of knowledge of the pursuit of truth that the Academy should be doing and our civilization should be doing. The fact that we're not doing that is being noticed in very different corners of our culture. And I think that that signals an appetite to create something new. and that creates a lot of entrepreneurialism. I I I can't help but think of of different eras, you know, in the past where education had to reinvent itself, you know, either in the Renaissance, for example, or in different periods or the Industrial Revolution here, where we have to bring these classics back, we have to bring this this interdisciplinary dialogue back. And and at least at the baseline that there is an objective truth. And science would actually point to that, especially in math and math and the heart sciences. And it's I the background of this whole conversation, there was a a study that came out several years ago about about religiosity or at versus atheism. And biologists tend to be The most atheists per capita in in these in the different sciences, while physicists, all you know, the majority of physicists believe in some sort of higher power. And I think that that's that that's interesting, but it also points to the way forward in the sense that we need to start bringing the assumption that an objective truth exists back into all of our fields, whether it's literature on the one end or biology, Certainly our our social sciences, because we're studying human beings, if the human being is something divine or in a divine image or has a higher intelligence, then that's a relevant thing to keep in the background as you're doing social science. and I think that presumption has to become the norm again for us to not just dumb ourselves down into natural selection and barwin ourselves as a civilization, but actually transcend that. speaker-1: I was just wondering if students read the classics anymore. the Republic, the Timaeus. y you know, if you asked a sophomore in college what those were, would they know? speaker-0: So well i i it's interesting. So there's a there are places that are starting to teach that. Again, because people people want that. And you're even seeing independent thinkers, if you will, who didn't didn't really buy into academia. You know, Charlie Kirk read a lot of things, for example, and he was one figure like that among the younger of the younger generation who is certainly interested in those things. So there's a desire for it. I think it comes back to the academy that we don't want to teach those things. Okay, on that note of tempered optimism from the both of you, let's let's draw things to a close here. Michael, when is Free Spirits coming out? speaker-1: I I think they're looking to bring it out this fall speaker-0: This fall. Okay. All right. speaker-1: I I maybe misspeaking. I I think it was on a a long track. I think maybe even next fall, but yeah. speaker-0: Yeah. And who's publishing it? speaker-1: it's gonna be the Discovery Press, this the Discovery Institute Press. Yeah. Okay. and and so they always do some interesting things. And speaker-0: Yeah, yeah. speaker-1: I know nothing's happening with it this summer, so I'm not sure what when they have it slated to come out, but sometime after this summer, sometime. speaker-0: Yeah, yeah. Okay. Well when it does come out, we want to have you back because you know, it sounds like a fascinating book and carrying on with what you've been doing to actually clarify a lot of the myths surrounding the role of teleology in our thinking and how know how we are kind of impoverished intellectually by ignoring its very important role and how we think about the world. So Anyway, Michael, thanks very much for fascinating discussion. I had a great time talking with you and yeah, we'll we'll have you on again. And thank you for being a guest on One University. Thank you for speaker-1: The invitation and it was a pleasure to meet Ian in particular and I thoroughly enjoyed the discussion. speaker-0: Thanks, Ray Great. Thank you. So Ian, that was very interesting. what are your thoughts on what we just heard from Michael Flannery? I I think it raises some of the bigger questions that we've been talking about this whole series. And one of the underlying themes is how do we reconnect these different disciplines to each other and how do we use the big questions to do that? as well as we haven't really gone into ethics yet, but this would be a natural follow up question to that. What is how do you bring ethics into science with it without an overarching ethical superstructure? that only philosophy or religion can provide. And I think that's that's a success and that, w what we talked about raised bigger questions and new questions. So with that, that's a it's a it's a success. It's a takeaway. Yeah I was struck by well in in all of his writings actually by the by the gap between and and this is kind of a parochial thing focused on evolutionary biology. The the the gap between the kind of rich ferment of of intellects in actual evolutionary biology versus what we teach students about evolutionary biology. that kind of rich r richness just doesn't seem to get through to s students of science. And of course after you've done that for two or three generations and the old generation has died out or gone quiet or whatever, that that narrow focus on on on that narrow focus which basically ignores that very rich tradition has died. And you know that's that's that's worrisome to me. I was also sorry, go on. One thing just to echo that, I think what this episode brought was that history actually matters even in the hard sciences. Because without that perspective of time, you don't actually ask the questions that you could be asking, and you don't necessarily see the implications of what you've been asking when you actually, you know, try new experiments, when you try new research avenues. and that's and that's really critical because it makes you not knowing it actually makes you a better and quicker scientist and gives you perspective that accumulates over time as opposed to just being stuck in a eternal presence of the experiment at hand. Yeah, yeah. I was also struck by by the connection that you were drawing with artificial intelligence, you know, and I've been I've been looking at various articles about artificial intelligence and its emergence and so forth, and it's almost like, you know, we're we're back looking for the soul but at our computer terminals now and and you know we think that the the tech bros that are building artificial intelligence are building a new kind of soul, if you will. and I thought that was kind of an interesting thing and and you brought up that point mostly a couple of times. What do you think? Yeah, I think, we've we've we've tried to suppress the very fact that we might have a soul. And I think that kinda goes back to what what we're we've been talking about with Darwin and this sort of shift to materialism and guys like Richard Dawkins who seem to be so hostile to this idea of reopening science to philosophy and the metaphysics of it because it's it it's very threatening to the ego for the lack of a better term. And And the if you if you push that aside, if you if you have no if you allow no possibility or humility for the possibility of being wrong, that you're part of something much bigger, what does it all mean, etc., these bigger questions that metaphysics fills the gap for, then you you eventually suppress the very notion that you might have a soul and ultimately you end up trying to build one in replica of what you would want it to be, and you end up looking for it in your computer. Which it in some ways is kind of the height of of of of human achievement so far and also kind of the depths of it at the same time. Yeah. There's one author at the spectator here, Catherine D, I think her name is, and you know, she's made the argument, well maybe we're not looking for a soul, but maybe we're looking for sprites and fairies and goblins out there in the in the digital world. Who knows? We'll see. All right, so that was this episode of One Universe Two Books. Thank you for joining us. again, this is a podcast of the National Association of Scholars. if you enjoyed this content and you're already a member, thank you for your support. And if you are not a member and you enjoyed it, join us. And even if you didn't enjoy us, send us your thoughts and your comments on the on the on the discussion in the comment section. On the YouTube video. Okay, until next time, the next episode of One Universe Two Books. we will see you later.