Protein Synthesis and Kant Scholarship: My Father Replies
I post this response from my father from Charles de Gaulle airport, where I'm waiting for my luggage to arrive.
The beautiful video posted on Ricochet serves an important function: It inspires awe. No one doubts that the local dynamics of protein synthesis are governed by the laws of chemistry. Not me, in any event. But no one doubts that on the level of its elementary constituents, a digital computer is governed by the laws of physics. Given appropriate initial conditions, the laws of chemistry explain the first, Maxwell's laws of electrodynamics, the second.
This leaves open the question of those initial conditions – the starting place. Evolutionary biology is an attempt to drive that starting place back into the past, step by inexorable step, so that evolutionary biologists can then imagine the system springing forward, the inexorable steps reversed.
Whether transfer RNA evolved as a whole or whether its modern structures – there are two, one to fetch the nucleotides, the other to bind to the amino acids – had an independent history, why these are interesting speculative questions. Who knows? No matter the answer, a deep sense of uncertainty remains.
If it is very difficult to understand how the machinery for protein synthesis emerged as a single system, it is equally difficult to understand how the machinery for protein synthesis emerged as two independent systems. How did one system emerge, how did two systems combine?
The point of perplexity shifts. The uneasy sense that neither of these trajectories is adequate to the facts in front of our face – that remains.
Within philosophy, Kant scholarship is an activity that rather resembles the attempt to link together a series of live grenades. Survivors are very very careful about what they say, and there are few survivors. In graduate school, I tried to do what was required and that was to gain a certain superficial understanding of the Critiques. Having understood very little of what I read, I then endeavored to explain it to the undergraduate section I was then teaching. Parents of my students at Princeton might well have sued me for a form of malpractice. Since then, I have regarded Kantian philosophy as one of those monuments that I am forever promising myself I will shortly ascend. I never have.
If I understand Mr. Gawron correctly, he is arguing in favor of the Kantian thesis that teleology is an ineliminable intellectual category – we cannot do without it, especially in biology – but one that properly belongs to the understanding and not to nature itself. It could be. But how would we know, I wonder, if Kant was on this point correct? Perhaps teleology is as fundamental as causality itself in the sense that objects in nature must be understood in terms of their cause and they must be understood in terms of their purpose. Kant's arguments are provocative on this point without being persuasive.
"If then we introduce into the context of natural science the concept of Gd, in order to explain the purposiveness in nature," Mr. Goward writes in quoting Kant, "and subsequently use this purposiveness to prove that there is a Gd, there is no internal consistency in either science [i.e. either in natural science or theology]; and a delusive circle brings them both into uncertainty, because they have allowed their boundaries to overlap."
I think I know what Kant means. From Black Mischief: Language, Life, Logic, Luck:
– Why'd he eat them nails, man?
– He thought they were nutritious.
– How'd you know he thinks them nails are nutritious?
– Well, he's eating them, man.
This is not good so far as circles go, but at the end of The Dead, Joyce draws precisely the same circle to considerable effect, Gabriel, disappointed in love, noticing that it is snowing outside because "snow was general all over Ireland."
Then there is Kant directly:
The existence of God is the explanation of design in nature.
The design in nature is evidence for the existence of God.
Let me see if I understand this. If we introduce the concept of the electromagnetic field to explain the phenomenon of electricity in nature, and subsequently use the phenomenon of electricity to prove that there is an electromagnetic field, then this is a bad thing.
But far from being a bad thing, this is what we do some of the time.
That's Kant for you, I suppose. Very tricky.
And where is my luggage? I wonder.
See you soon, Pop! Thanks! See you soon, Mischa and Leo!
Where is my luggage?
- Comment (26)
- · Quote
- · UnfollowFollow (5)
- Pages:
- 1
- 2
- Pages:
- 1
- 2
Comments :
Mar '11
Re: Protein Synthesis and Kant Scholarship: My Father Replies
Kinshasa. Don't ask.
Apr '11
Re: Protein Synthesis and Kant Scholarship: My Father Replies
Facts explain nothing. Everything is decided by theories and interpretations. In this empiricist age, in this scientistic (not scientific) paradise, in our dogmatic slumber, those two claims seem wrong. They aren't, though.
It's been years since I've read the Critique, but I re-read the Prolegomena a few months ago. I traverse the Western Canon (as I think it) every five years. It's my own liturgical calendar.
Kant distinguishes between explanation and evidence. Interpretations and theories explain. Facts evince. Kant argued against the Empiricist claim that facts are explanations in themselves. Kant says reason is a "self-appointed judge." She brings evidence for her case and sits in judgement of all cases.
We see this as a problem. Kant didn't. Kant means to justify reason but also to establish her limits. He uses the antimonies of reason to establish what a justification must accomplish. He's very aware that his reasoning is still Reason sitting in judgement of herself.
In any case, I don't think Kant unintentionally begs the question.
Aug '10
Re: Protein Synthesis and Kant Scholarship: My Father Replies
This is a bit tangential, but it is a point regarding evolution that I think is often overlooked. When we look at any process, feature, or behavior of a living thing we tend to ask how it could confer an advantage to the organism assuming that evolution is a process of constant improvement. However, it is not and cannot be. If one considers the problem of global optimization, finding the best possible solution to a problem, one finds that algorithms that continuously improve fail miserably. The get caught in local maxima. Imagine the mountain climber who tried to scale Everest by only ever going up. He would reach the top of the first hill and have no where to go. To get to the peak he will have to occasionally go down into a valley before finding the way up higher. So it is with evolution. Organisms must often become maladapted to build up changes that may ultimately come together to improve beyond the orignial form. If evolution were just a process of continual optimization, it would have halted when the optimal paramecium was found. It isn't survival of the fittest, merely extinction of the most unfit.
Feb '11
Re: Protein Synthesis and Kant Scholarship: My Father Replies
Just in case it might be useful:
“to explain means to derive from a principle” (Critique of Judgment, §78, 5:412).
Jeff, I hope you consider the Third Critique canonical. (Which is to say I hope you aren’t some sort of schismatic.)
Another minor point (which might deserve an apology, but I can’t give you one): For Kant, efficient causality is grounded in the understanding, since it is one of the categories, and therefore every event — every single event we can possibly experience — has some efficient cause. But final causality (when it applies to biology) is not grounded in the understanding but in the reflective power of judgment. (And final causality when it applies to rational beings is grounded in reason).
Re: Protein Synthesis and Kant Scholarship: My Father Replies
Here at Casa Berlinski we've moved on to the Play-Doh jungle extruders.
Apr '11
Re: Protein Synthesis and Kant Scholarship: My Father Replies
Andrew Alain: You make very good points. The current view of evolution as I understand it is that it is not a directional process. Rather it is viewed as a kind of dynamic stability, wherein all things are always changing and maintaining a kind of equilibrium. So things not only evolve to become better or more complex but also to become simpler. A lot of confusion in the lay understanding of evolution is that the word evolution does imply a kind of unidirectional progression towards a more optimal state. This is a holdover from Lemarckian evolutionary views which posited a directed evolution of animals towards a perfect form (in this case man).
Claire: Play-Doh is a lot of fun...kids have all the best toys...
Jun '10
Re: Protein Synthesis and Kant Scholarship: My Father Replies
Relativism is the only state that man's mind can comprehend. Reason has its limits.
It is only in the higher mind, what the Hindus call the "Buddhi" and the Christians and Westerners call "Intellect" (properly understood), that reason can be grounded to any aspect of absolute Reality.
I said before that a Yogi's criticism of Descartes' "I think therefore I am" is that the correct statement is "I am therefore I think."
Identity precedes thought.
God's breath creates reflected identity (sense of identity) in a lump of clay. This is because that's what God is: Identity => "I am that I am."
Here's a thought experiment: Think how you can explain that it is one or the other definitively. Did identity precede thought or did thought precede identity? My position is that neither is provable. And that this is a proof of the path of circular reasoning that the mind's little hamster is forever scampering around.
Apr '11
Re: Protein Synthesis and Kant Scholarship: My Father Replies
What if you have created a false dichotomy? What if thought and identity are the same thing, or identity is a subset of thought? So that thought comes into being and with it come identity, reason, imagination, and all sort of other things...like how Plank proposed the light is both a wave and a particle...by removing the distinction between the two you eliminate the need to prove causality between the two.
Edited on Dec 13, 2011 at 12:01pmJun '10
Re: Protein Synthesis and Kant Scholarship: My Father Replies
Look up the definition for the terms and you find you cannot equate them.
If you can equate these two terms, then prove this. I still maintain that it is not provable.
Apr '11
Re: Protein Synthesis and Kant Scholarship: My Father Replies
SMatthewStolte:
Jeff, I hope you consider the Third Critique canonical. (Which is to say I hope you aren’t some sort of schismatic.)
[...] efficient causality is grounded in the understanding [...]t final causality (when it applies to biology) is not grounded in the understanding but in the reflective power of judgment. (And final causality when it applies to rational beings is grounded in reason). · Dec 13 at 7:40am
A theory in the modern sense and in Kant's sense is a derivation from a principle. Thus, only theories explain. An inference formally reducible to two judgements is of the understanding; otherwise it's of reason. Efficient cause is inferred by formal reduction; a final cause by syllogism.
Mar '11
Re: Protein Synthesis and Kant Scholarship: My Father Replies
I did not understand enough of Kant when I read him as an undergrad 11 years ago, so I will not venture onto that terrain.
Instead, I pose a question to skeptics of unguided evolution/common descent based on this quote:
Claire (David) Berlinski, Ed.:
The major criticism of evolution theories is summarized above: the explanations given do not sufficiently explain our observations, thereby discrediting the theories.
My questions are:
- What evidence is sufficient to prove the claim that random mutation is not sufficient to provide the diversity of life we observe today?
- How can irreducible complexity be proven?
As a scientist, I am accustomed to hearing that either a theory is contradicted by evidence, or that the evidence is insufficient. Due to the nature of scientific research, these two critiques will always stand, and evolution critics will never be satisfied.
However, the jump to an alternative explanation (such as directed evolution) requires the same burden of proof. Otherwise, the answer to the question "how did all this stuff get here?" must be "we have no idea."
Mar '11
Re: Protein Synthesis and Kant Scholarship: My Father Replies
Maybe you could extrude some of those famous "intermediate" animals that are lacking from the fossil record?
Feb '11
Re: Protein Synthesis and Kant Scholarship: My Father Replies
This may correspond with where the phenomenologists took Kant. Identity means what it means in math--something that is exactly the same. In my philosophy class, we referred to that thing as consciousness. Whatever you call it, it is the same thing that thinks, perceives, remembers and feels. Identity is what creates continuity through time and perspective in space, joining experiences to memories, conceptualizing from the memories and building thoughts out of the concepts.
Identity is what combines the memory of reading Claire' post with the experience of reading this one. So you have it a little backward, insofar as thought is a manifestation of identity, rather than identity being a subset of thought.
Feb '11
Re: Protein Synthesis and Kant Scholarship: My Father Replies
I don't have time to dig out my copy of the Critique of Pure Reason, but Google appears to confirm my recollection that teleology was not one of the transcendental categories. Cause and effect was such a category, because supposing that one object can effect another is necessary to the synthesis of experience by reason. But reason can contemplate an object being used for a purpose without supposing the object to be designed for that purpose. (No one watching me try to work with tools would ever suppose the tools were designed for any useful purpose.)
The evolutionary theory I've read (mostly Gould) does not suppose there is any purpose to biological structures. Rather, most structures can (or can be changed by mutuation) to perform a variety of functions. Natural selection emphasize uses that are most beneficial in the current environment; as the environment changes, so do the structures and uses selected.
A self-replicating chemical process did not evolve to do anything. But it will, by definition, repeat the process indefinitely. During these iterations, new processes will occur, and so it goes.
Apr '11
Re: Protein Synthesis and Kant Scholarship: My Father Replies
I see...so "Identity" is consciousness (if ShellGamer is correct) then and thought is defined as what exactly Larry? Kant and most of philosophy is way out of my area of knowledge, but it is always fun to learn.
What struck me about Larry's post is that it sounded like a Chicken and Egg problem. You know. Which came first? Where seemingly neither can exist without the other so neither could come first and the whole thing goes round and round...the resolution to that question to me has always been. An egg is a chicken (assuming it is a chicken egg). They both arrive together then...
So that is what I was trying to get at in a manner of speaking. Why can't identity and thought arrive at the same time? Are they viewed as separable? I'm curious to know...
Jun '10
Re: Protein Synthesis and Kant Scholarship: My Father Replies
Valiuth: I see...so "Identity" is consciousness (if ShellGamer is correct) then and thought is defined as what exactly Larry? Kant and most of philosophy is way out of my area of knowledge, but it is always fun to learn.
What struck me about Larry's post is that it sounded like a Chicken and Egg problem.
...
Well, I thought I tipped my hand when I brought up the Yogi's position above (#7). I believe that identity precedes thought and experience. But, this is a matter of faith. This is the role that faith really plays for us. Faith is our intuitive connection to the unknowable realm that we believers call heaven or at least the source or substrate supporting this world.
The chicken and egg thing (identity vs thought) -- that was intentional to show that it is not solvable by the mind. One's faith helps to make the choice. You, Valiuth, probably choose Descartes' claim. The materialist's mind works in this fashion. Perfectly understandable.
To understand why a theist believes in the supernatural, the notion of an "encounter" is supplied to address the many claims of religious experience wherein one breaks through the perceptual veil.
Dec '10
Re: Protein Synthesis and Kant Scholarship: My Father Replies
Dear Dr. Berlinski,
I do hope you have found your luggage. I hate that feeling myself. I am very sorry it has taken so long to get back to this as I have had to sleep, eat, and work again. The last one is also a necessity if you are an adult and don't work for the government.
Kant has been my hobby for a long time. I see him as the last best hope for intellectual life in Western Civilization. The Philosophers before are just too crude. The Philosophers that come after are often narrow and manipulative. I make a few exceptions. Hegel is broad and wrong. Kirkegaard is very interesting and has the same opinion of Hegel that I do. However, I find him too caught up by 19th Century Romanticism. Most of his strength comes from following Kant. Martin Bubar is also very interesting but he is too caught up in 20th Century Linguistic Analysis. Again, most of his strength comes from following Kant.(cont)
Dec '10
Re: Protein Synthesis and Kant Scholarship: My Father Replies
As for Protein Synthesis, my dear father has been gone for 20 years now. He was a biochemist and did pure research. He would have loved to discuss your statements in depth. He did work on the enzymes of the Krebs Cycle. I can remember him telling me of discussions with his students in his Graduate Seminar about whether the mitochondria had formed independently and was taken over by another larger cell from the evolutionary standpoint. I miss my father dearly and not only for the intellectual stimulation.
I add that my argument 'Darwin is a Cult of Personality and a failed scientist' is very solid. My father got very testy around grant time. The Strict Darwinians capacity to play fast and loose with both data and theory simultaneously would have disgusted him. He was never aware of "punctuated equilibrium" and I was the History Major (with many philosophy courses). He was not interested in the Historical - Philisophical. He had too much work to do. When I was 9 he had two grants concurrently from NSF and NIH. Later they made him Graduate Dean of the University. He would have loved your post.
Dec '10
Re: Protein Synthesis and Kant Scholarship: My Father Replies
Claire,
I hadn't noticed your post. Play-doh Jungle Extruders! Obviously, those who are playing with such wonders have no idea what it is to pipette HCL at age 9. It makes your teeth feel all spongey if you miss. Hmmmm..perhaps I shouldn't have revealed that. Anyway enjoy Paris. I as usual am trapped on 'The Island'. I will explain this statement at another time.
Dec '10
Re: Protein Synthesis and Kant Scholarship: My Father Replies
Oh, I think I should respond to Dr. Berlinski's comments on Purposiveness. I agree that much of the time we use a theory to predict an outcome and then use an outcome to prove the theory. However, usually new Data is in the loop and the loop is ever more reinforcing on each circuit. By the way Data can be considered equal to Intuitions in Kantianese. Our many senses are the 'Manifold of the Intuitions'. The instantaneous unification which our brains perform on these senses is called Synopsis. Next, as time is added comes Synthesis as Concepts are applied to Intuitions. (cont)