Incomplete Nature Part 21

CHAPTER 14: EVOLUTION.

1. See D. Batten, Stanley Salthe, and F. Boschetti (2009), p. 27.

2. Peter A. Corning (1995), p. 112.

3. James Mark Baldwin (1896), Sect. V.

4. Less well known is the fact that for much of his career, Pasteur himself was convinced that life could be spontaneously generated. He just believed that others working on the problem were less careful about contamination and had missed what he considered to be the crucial factor: something he had discovered in his effort to understand the cause of problems in the winemaking industry-the asymmetrical left-handed twist of organic molecules, like the sugars produced by grapes. He had discovered this by virtue of the way that sugar crystals from healthy wine barrels rotated light in one direction as seen through polarization filters. After exploring this phenomenon in other contexts as well, he came to the realization that despite the lack of an obvious inorganic preference for this way of contorting molecules, those which were formed by organisms invariably exhibited crystalline forms producing this same one-way twist. The cause of this universal asymmetric "chirality" (i.e., handedness, like the mirror difference between left and right hands) of biologically generated molecules remains somewhat of a mystery, and is not irrelevant to understanding the origins and nature of life. To Pasteur, this looked like the key to the "secret of life." His notebooks turn out to be filled with elaborate techniques for introducing twists into chemical processes, hoping to produce the left-handed chemistry of life from otherwise sterilized and sealed chemical soups.

Today, most biologists a.s.sume that the left- as opposed to right-handed twist of biologically produced sugars is not an essential feature of life. Rather, because of the necessity to pa.s.s molecules around a circuit of synthetic and catalytic metabolic steps, mixed chiralities would be far more likely to produce incompatibilities and compet.i.tive interactions that would in effect get in each other's way. With such a mix of nearly similar but incompatible small building blocks, complex webs of metabolic processes would be far less likely to evolve. Why left and not right twists? Perhaps just an accident of evolution-a consequence of a slight asymmetry of percentages of molecular forms present in the initial conditions in which life formed; perhaps because of a slight bias in nature that makes the left forms slightly more probable in prebiotic synthesis; or maybe, as Pasteur thought, there is something else that is special about life that requires molecular left-handedness. For our purposes, however, coming to a conclusion about this mystery will not be necessary, since it is likely contingent on a strictly chemical explanation, not one that should affect an account of the emergence of ententional properties in general.

5. The republication of many Bastian's books and papers, along with commentaries by his contemporaries, has rekindled interest in many aspects of his work, especially in areas that have only recently again become of scientific interest as representing certain over-simple dogmas concerning the nature of life, the causes of disease, and the role of inorganic processes in the origins of life.

6. In fact, I will argue that conditions on the primordial Earth may not have been conducive even to autogenic emergence. The problem is also the solution: water. Water is the ideal solvent for biochemical reactions, but it poses a barrier to one of the crucial requirements for protolife to emerge, whether in autogen form or any other form. The problem is that large organic polymers tend to break down in water, and it is hard to get them to form, because they require dehydration reactions. Ultimately, I think this forces us off the early Earth to explain the first steps toward life.

7. Although, due to the remarkable conservatism of many genes, the result is surprisingly often not noise; however, it may be a very different sort of consequence than would be produced in the donor organism.

8. There is a trivial exception. Alternating sequences of ATAT or GCGC, etc., will produce replicas, but note that the information-carrying capacity is nil, except for length difference and alternation redundancies.

9. I am less satisfied with my effort to map Peirce's object terms onto this process.

10. See Margulis and Sagan (1995), and Dyson (1999).

11. See Deacon (2006a).

12. Some of the implications of this argument are that we should expect to find diverse forms of extraterrestrial protolife in planetary and even extraplanetary environments quite different from those on Earth. Consequently, we will need to significantly expand the scope of what we consider astrobiology (or exobiology). I have elsewhere suggested that autogenic, non-template-based replication will be widespread and diverse, whereas template-based, informational replication and control of organism development will be rare because of the much more limiting requirements. I have given the name Autaea to all protolife and life forms, and Morphota to those like autogens that replicate via holistic molecular dynamic constraints, and have designated those, like Earth life, that use information-based reproduction and morphogenesis Semeota. Modern fossils of ancient autogenic mechanisms are not likely present except as aspects of still more complex organisms, or else parasitic on them. Thus viruses and structures like microtubules still utilize processes characteristic of autogenic chemistry.

CHAPTER 15: SELF.

1. Daniel Dennett, "The Origin of Selves," Cogito 3 (Autumn 1989), pp. 16373.

2. The story is even more complicated for plants, since besides mitochondria, they house organelles called chloroplasts (which carry out photosynthesis) that have yet a different bacterial origin and bacterial genomic structure.

3. This is a quote from the well-known, very sad case of an anterograde amnesic patient named Clive Waring, about whom a number of video doc.u.mentaries have been made.

4. This catch phrase has been attributed to Maslow by many authors in slightly different forms, though I have searched in vain for a published citation. I first came across a mention of it decades ago in the introduction to Robert Ornstein's The Psychology of Consciousness (1977).

CHAPTER 16: SENTIENCE.

1. From William James' essay "The Will to Believe," in The Will to Believe and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy (1897), Cambridge, MA, & London: Harvard University Press, 1979, p. 198.

2. See Alan Turing's 1950 paper on "Computing Machinery and Intelligence."

3. First presented in John Searle's 1980 article "Minds, brains and programs."

4. Terry Bisson, "They're Made Out of Meat," Omni (April 1991).

5. These are no more than guesses. It is not obvious how one would actually go about a.s.sessing such a problem. The idea that a good deal of neural signal transduction is highly stochastic is strongly implicated by the spontaneous resting firing rates of many neurons, the highly unstable nature of the resting potential, and the molecular variability intrinsic to cellular metabolism.

6. For example, it involves the comprehension of symbols-a capacity that is uniquely complex in itself, and distinctively human.

CHAPTER 17: CONSCIOUSNESS.

1. Jerry Fodor in the Times Literary Supplement, July 3, 1992, p. 5.

2. I would even venture to speculate that there could be emergent levels of sentience above the human subjective level, in the higher-order dynamics of collective human communications-sentience that we large-brained, symbolically savvy individuals would never be able to experience, even though our sentient conscious interactions happened to be its necessary const.i.tuents. Of course such a sentience could only arise if these human interactions const.i.tuted a higher-order teleodynamic individual; a reciprocally organized, self-perpetuating complex of morphodynamic processes.

3. See Gregory Bateson (1972), "Form, Substance, and Difference," in Steps to an Ecology of Mind: Collected Essays in Anthropology, Psychiatry, Evolution, and Epistemology, pp. 45761.

4. In vertebrate brains, these neural regulatory centers for vegetative processes function nearly as deterministically as simple cybernetic control circuits, and yet they still typically tend to involve homeo- and morphodynamic processes generated in local neural networks. But they have evolved such strict constraints that they essentially simulate the deterministic predictability of cybernetic dynamics.

EPILOGUE.

1. From Friedrich Nietzsche, "Good and Evil, Good and Bad," in On the Genealogy of Morals (1887/1967), Vol. 1, Part 1, Sect. 17, p. 798. The original four-volume Schlechta edition in German includes this text as a note (Anmerkung) in small print. The original German sentence reads: "Alle Wissenshaften haben nunmehr der Zukunfts-Aufgabe des Philosophen vorzuarbeiten: diese Aufgabe dahin verstanden da.s.s der Philosoph das Problem vom Werte zu loesen hat, da.s.s er die Rangordnung der Werte *zu bestimmen hat."

2. The philosopher Ruth Millikan's discussion (1984) of the thought experiment in which an exact living replica of a lion instantaneously materializes was intended to explore the role that prior natural selection history plays in our understanding of biological function. Because she, along with Fred Dretske (1988), explains functionality in terms of prior selection history, the duplicate lion's various organs are not considered to have functions (except by reference to being copies of evolved lion organs). Here I take a view, also expressed by Mark Bickhard (2003), that function is not created by natural selection but is rather preserved and tested by it. Function emerges instantaneously as an alignment with the dynamical tendency of some process (e.g., the beating of the heart) with the teleodynamic tendencies of the whole system of which it is a component.