8
The analogy between biological and cultural evolution can be further substantiated if we turn our attention to one of the fundamental attributes of living organisms: their power of self-repair, and to the dramatic manifestation of that power in the phenomena of regeneration (which Needham called 'one of the more spectacular pieces of magic in the repertoire of living organisms').* It is as fundamental to life as the capacity for reproduction, and in some lower organisms which multiply by fission or budding, regeneration and reproduction are often indistinguishable. Thus if a flatworm is transversely cut into halves, the head part will grow a new tail, and the tail-end will grow a new head; even if cut into half a dozen slices, each will regenerate a complete animal. Flatworms, hydra, sea-squirts and starfish, all of which can regenerate a whole individual from a small fraction of the body, could be called biological holograms.
* See Insight and Outlook, Ch. X.; The Ghost in the Machine, Ch. XIII.
Higher up on the evolutionary ladder, amphibians are capable of regenerating a lost limb or organ; and once more the magic is performed according to the undoing-redoing formula; the tissue-cells near the amputation stump de-differentiate and regress to a quasi-embryonic state, then re-differentiate and re-specialize to form the regenerated structure.*
* A classic case of such 'metaplasia' is the regeneration of the crystalline lens of the salamander eye: 'If the lens is carefully removed with fine instruments, it is replaced by a new lens that originates at the upper margin of the iris; the latter is the pigmented part of the eye, enclosing the pupil. The first change, following lens extirpation, is the disappearance of the pigment in the upper iris; that is, a process of de-differentiation. Next, the two tissue layers that comprise the iris separate and expand at the rim where they are continuous, and form a small vesicle. This vesicle grows downward to assume the normal position of a lens; eventually it becomes detached from the iris and differentiates into a typical lens.' [22]
Now the replacement of a lost limb or eye-lens is a phenomenon of a different order from ordinary wound-healing. The regenerative potential of a species provides it with an added safety device in the service of survival -- a method of self-repair which relies on the genetic plasticity of uncommitted embryonic cells. But it signifies more than a mere safety device, for we have just seen that the major evolutionary novelties were brought about by a similar retreat from adult to embryonic levels. Indeed, the major steps on the line of ascent which led up to our species could be described as a series of operations of phylogenetic self-repair: of escapes from blind alleys by the undoing and remoulding of maladapted structures.
As we continue our ascent toward the higher animals, from reptile to mammal, the power of regenerating bodily structures decreases, and is replaced by the increasing power of the brain and nervous system to reorganize the organism's pattern of behaviour. In the first half of this century, K. S. Lashley, in a series of classical experiments, demolished the notion of the nervous system as a rigid reflex-automaton. He demonstrated that brain tissues which in the rat normally serve a specialized function can, in certain circumstances, take over the function of other, injured brain tissues. For example, he taught his rats certain visual discrimination skills; when he removed their optical cortex, the skills were gone, as one would expect; but contrary to what one would expect, the mutilated rats were able to learn the task again. Some other brain area, not normally specializing in visual learning, must have taken over this function, deputizing for the lost area. Similar feats of what one might call meta-adaptations have been reported in insects, birds, chimpanzees, and so on.*
* See The Act of Creation, Book II, Ch. III.
Lastly, in our own species, the ability to regenerate bodily structures is reduced to a minimum, but compensated by man's unique power to re-mould his patterns of thought and behaviour -- to meet critical challenges by creative responses. And thus we have come full circle through biological evolution back to the various manifestations of human creativity, based on the undoing-redoing pattern, which runs as a leitmotif from paedomorphosis to the revolutionary turning points in science and art; to the mental regeneration at which the regressive techniques in psychotherapy are aimed; and finally to the archetypes of death-and-resurrection, withdrawal-and-return which recur in all mythologies.
9
One of the basic doctrines of the nineteenth-century mechanistic world-view was Clausius' famous 'Second Law of Thermodynamics'. It asserted that the universe was running down towards its final dissolution because its energy is being steadily, inexorably dissipated into the random motion of molecules, until it ends up as a single, amorphous bubble of gas with a uniform temperature just above absolute zero: cosmos dissolving into chaos.
Only fairly recently did science begin to recover from the hypnotic effect of this gloomy vision, by realizing that the Second Law applies only in the special case of so-called 'closed systems' (such as a gas enclosed in a perfectly insulated container), whereas all living organisms are 'open systems' which maintain their complex structure and function by continuously drawing materials and energy from their environment. Instead of 'running down' like a mechanical clockwork that dissipates its energy through friction, a living organism is constantly building 'up' more complex substances from the substances it feeds on, more complex forms of energy from the energies it absorbs, and more complex patterns of information -- perceptions, knowledge, stored memories -- from the input of its sensory receptors.
But although the facts were there for everyone to see, orthodox evolutionists were reluctant to accept their theoretical implications. The idea that living organisms, in contrast to machines, were primarily active, and not merely reactive; that instead of passively adapting to their environment they were, to quote Judson Herrick, 'creating in the sense that new patterns of structure and behaviour are constantly fabricated' -- such ideas were profoundly distasteful to Darwinians, behaviourists and reductionists in general. [23] That the venerated Second Law, which had been so useful in physics, did not apply to living matter, and was in a sense reversed in living matter, was indeed hard to accept by an orthodoxy still convinced that all phenomena of life could ultimately be reduced to the laws of physics.
It was in fact a physicist, not a biologist, the Nobel laureate Erwin Schrödinger, who put an end to the tyranny of the Second Law with his celebrated dictum: 'What an organism feeds on is negative entropy.' [24] Now entropy is the term for degraded energy which has been dissipated by friction and other wasteful processes, and cannot be retrieved; in other words, it is a measure of energy gone to waste. The Second Law can be expressed by saying that the entropy of a closed system tends to increase towards a maximum when all of its energy will have been dissipated into the chaotic motions of gas molecules; so if our universe is a closed system, it must eventually 'unwind' itself from cosmos into chaos. Entropy became a key-concept of physics -- its alias for Thanatos; it even found its way into Freud's concept of the death-wish (see Chapter II).
'Negative entropy' (or 'negentropy') is thus a somewhat perverse way of referring to the power of living organisms to 'build up' instead of running down, to create complex structures out of simpler elements, integrated patterns out of shapelessness, order out of disorder. The same irrepressible building-up tendency is manifested in the progress of evolution, the emergence of new levels of complexity in the organismic hierarchy and new methods of functional coordination, resulting in greater independence from, and mastery of, the environment.
A few pages earlier, I referred to 'the active striving of living matter towards the optimal realization of the planet's evolutionary potential'. In a similar vein, the veteran biologist and Nobel prize winner Albert Szent-Györgyi proposed to replace 'negentropy', and its negative connotations, by the positive term syntropy, which he defines as an 'innate drive in living matter to perfect itself'. He also called attention to its equivalent on the psychological level as 'a drive towards synthesis, towards growth, towards wholeness and
self-perfection'. [25]
What all this amounts to is, frankly speaking, a revival of vitalism, which the reductionist orthodoxy had branded as a dark superstition. The origin of the concept dates back to Aristotle's entelechy, the vital principle or function which turns mere substance into a living organism and at the same time strives towards perfection. Since Aristotle, the concept of a vital force which infuses life into inanimate substance was taken up by various authors in various guises: Galen's and Kepler's facultas formatrix; Galvani's 'life force', Leibniz's 'monads'; Goethe's Gestaltung, Bergson's élan vital. At the beginning of our century, the term entelechy was adopted by the German biologist Hans Driesch, whose classic experiments in embryology and regeneration convinced him that these phenomena cannot be explained by the laws of physics and chemistry alone, while the opposite school of 'mechanists' claimed that they could be so explained. Owing to the rapid advances in biochemistry, vitalism kept losing ground as an unnecessary hypothesis with a mystical flavour -- until the pendulum started to swing in the opposite direction. Schrödinger's revolutionary concept of negentropy, published in 1944, which found such universal acclaim, reintroduced vitalism through the back door, as it were.* But it should be called neo-vitalism, to distinguish it from its pre -- scientific forerunners. Its basic message has been summed up with admirable simplicity by Szent-Györgyi (who can hardly be accused of an unscientific attitude):
If elementary particles are put together to form an atomic nucleus, something new is created which can no longer be described in terms of elementary particles. The same happens over again if you surround this nucleus by electrons and build an atom, when you put atoms together to form a molecule, etc. Inanimate nature stops at the low level of organization of simple molecules. But living systems go on and combine molecules to form macromolecules, macromolecules to form organelles (such as nuclei, mitochondria, chloroplasts, ribosomes or membranes) and eventually put all these together to form the greatest wonder of creation, a cell with its astounding inner regulations. Then it goes on putting cells together to form 'higher organisms' and increasingly more complex individuals, of which you are an example. At every step new, more complex and subtle qualities are created, and so in the end we are faced with properties which have no parallel in the inanimate world, though the basic rules remain unchanged. [26]
* Other terms were coined which amounted to reinstating vitalism in a respectable disguise: thus the German biologist Woltereck proposed 'anamorphosis' for the trend in nature towards the emergence of more and more complex forms, while L. L. Whyte called it the 'morphic principle'.
By the 'basic rules' he means the laws of physics and chemistry which retain their validity in the realm of biological phenomena but are insufficient to explain them, because they 'have no parallel in the inanimate world'. Hence the postulate of syntropy (or negentropy or élan vital) as an 'innate drive in living matter to perfect itself' -- or towards an optimal actualization of its evolutionary potential.
In the present theory this 'innate drive' derives from the integrative tendency'. It is more specific than the terms I have just quoted, because it is inherent in the conception of hierarchic order, and manifested on every level, from the symbiosis of organelles within the cell, to ecological systems and human societies. Its opponent, the self-asserting tendency, is equally ubiquitous on every level. It provides a clue to the puzzling conservativeness of the evolutionary process as reflected in the phenomena of homology, the stability of species, and the slow rate of change, the survival of 'living fossils' (also known as 'persistent types'); and lastly, when not held in check by the integrative tendency, in the blind alleys of stagnation and over-specialization. For we have seen (Chapter II, 4) that the self-assertive tendency is indeed conservative, intent on preserving and asserting the individuality of the holon '. . . in the here and now of existing conditions, whereas the integrative tendency has the dual function of co-ordinating the constituent parts of a system in its existing state, and of generating new levels of organization in evoloving hierarchies -- whether biological, social, or cognitive. Thus the self-assertive tendency is oriented towards the present, concerned with self-maintenance, whereas the integrative tendency may be said to work both for the present and towards the future.'
Evolution has been compared to a journey from an unknown origin towards an unknown destination, a sailing along a vast ocean; but we can at least chart the route which carried us from the sea-cucumber stage to the conquest of the moon; and there is no denying that there is a wind which makes the sails move. But whether we say that the wind, coming from the distant past, pushes the boat along, or whether we say that it drags us along into the future, is a matter of choice. The purposiveness of all vital processes, the strategy of the genes and the power of the exploratory drive in animal and man, all seem to indicate that the pull of the future is as real as the pressure of the past. Causality and finality are complementary principles in the sciences of life; if you take out finality and purpose you have taken the life out of biology as well as psychology.*
* Even the elusive Waddington, in one of his later books, argued in favour of a quasi-finalistic view'. [28]
If this be called vitalism, I have no objection, and shall quote in reply a profound remark by that arch-vitalist, Henri Bergson:
The vitalist principle may indeed not explain much, but it is at least a sort of label affixed to our ignorance, so as to remind us of this occasionally, while mechanism invites us to ignore that ignorance.
But the last word in this chapter belongs to Professor Grassé:
The joint efforts of paleontology and of a molecular biology purged of dogmatism, ought to lead eventually to the discovery of the precise mechanism of evolution -- but possibly without revealing to us the causes which determine the direction of evolutionary lineages, and the purposefulness of structures, functions and vital cycles. It seems possible that confronted with these problems, biology is reduced to helplessness and must hand over to metaphysics. [27]
PART FOUR
New Horizons
XII
FREE WILL IN A HIERARCHIC CONTEXT
1
'If Cleopatra's nose had been shorter,' remarked Pascal, 'the history of the world would have been different.' And if his contemporary, Descartes, had kept a poodle, the history of philosophy would have been different. The poodle would have taught Descartes that contrary to his doctrine, animals are not machines, and hence the human body is not a machine, forever separated from the mind, which he thought to be located in the pineal gland.
A diametrically opposite view is summed up in another unforgettable aphorism of Bergson's: 'The unconsciousness of a falling stone is something quite different from the unconsciousness of a growing cabbage.'
Bergson's attitude is close to panpsychism: the theory that some rudimentary kind of sentience is present throughout the animal kingdom and even in plants. Some speculatively inclined modern physicists would attribute a psychic element even to sub-atomic particles. Thus panpsychism postulates a continuum extending from the growing cabbage to human self-awareness, while Cartesian dualism regards consciousness as an exclusive possession of man, and places a kind of Iron Curtain between matter and mind.
Panpsychism and Cartesian dualism mark opposite ends of the philosophical spectrum. I shall not go into the various elaborations to which they have given rise -- interactionism, parallelism, epiphenomenalism, identity-hypothesis, and so forth; instead I shall attempt to show that the concept of the multi-levelled holarchy is well suited to shed some new light on this very old problem. As we shall see, the hierarchic approach replaces the panpsychist's continuously ascending curve from cabbage to man by a whole series of discrete steps -- a staircase instead of a slope; and it replaces the Cartesian single wall separating mind from body by a series of swing-gates as it were.
To start with, everyday experience tells us that consciousness is not an all-or-nothing affair but a matter of degrees. There are levels of consciousness wh
ich form ascending series from the unconsciousness under an anaesthetic, through the drowsiness induced by milder drugs, through the performance of complex routines like tying one's shoelaces automatically with an 'absent mind', through full awareness and self-awareness to the self's awareness of its awareness of itself -- and so on, without hitting a ceiling.
In the downward direction we are also faced with a multiplicity of levels of consciousness or sentience which extend far below the human level. Ethologists who have a close rapport with animals generally refuse to draw a line indicating the lower limit of consciousness on the evolutionary ladder, while neurophysiologists talk of the 'spinal consciousness' in lower vertebrates and even of the 'protoplasmic consciousness' of protozoa. To mention a single example: Sir Alister Hardy has given us a vivid description of Foraminfera -- single-celled miniature sea-animals related to amoeba, which build elaborate microscopic 'houses' out of the needle-like speculae of dead sponges -- houses which Hardy calls 'marvels of engineering skill'. [1] Yet these primitive protozoans have neither eyes nor a nervous system and are but a gelatinous mass of flowing protoplasm. Thus the hierarchy appears to be open-ended both in the upward and downward direction.
Janus: A Summing Up Page 25