Duane Salmon once wisely observed:

I couldn't agree more. What is interesting is that while reductionism leads biologists to think biology reduces to chemistry ("bascially biology stems from chemistry which stems from physics", as one nonteleologist once claimed in a forum), some insightful physical scientists see it differently. In fact, as far back as 1944, Schrodinger saw the writing on the wall:

The arrangements of the atoms in the most vital parts of an organism and the interplay of these arrangements differ in a fundamental way from all those arrangements of atoms which physicists and chemists have hitherto made the object of their experimental and theoretical research. Yet the difference which I have just termed fundamental is of such a kind that it might easily appear slight to anyone except a physicist who is thoroughly imbued with the knowledge that the laws of physics and chemistry are statistical throughout."

What makes life fundamentally different from chemistry and physics is specified complexity, where because of such information-rich states, entailing specific conformations, locations, and positioning, energy and material are channeled as to prevent the vast number of more likely alternatives from occurring. Without these specifications, it is not clear that life could exist, as there are no known examples of life (among the millions of known forms) that lack such specificity. And the very thing that separates life from non-life also happens to be a fingerprint of design as suggested by people ranging from Dembski to Paley.

Perhaps it because of this that many have insisted on tying life as close to reductionism as possible. Or perhaps its just an attempt to make break complex problems into simpler problems. Yet such efforts have led biologists to embrace a concept that may not be as relevant as many think. That concept is simple diffusion.

Diffusion is taught as an important concept in such topics as cell biology and physiology. It involves the random movement of molecules from a region of high concentation to low concentration. Thus, it might come as a shock to hear me question to relevancy of diffusion, but this is the very point Paul Agutter, P. Colm Malone, and Denys Wheatley have been making in a series of published papers over the last decade. I will simply draw from two:

Agutter, PS, Malone, PC, Wheatley, DN. 2000. Diffusion theory in biology: a relic of mechanistic materialism. J. Hist. Bio 33: 71-111.

Agutter, PS, Malone, PC, Wheatley, DN. 1995. Intracellular transport mechanisms: A critique of diffusion theory. J. Theor. Bio. 176: 261-272.

They write:

The inapplicability of diffusion theory to transport processes within the living cell is well established, because of the difficulties in applying physico-chemical principles in general to the crowded, heterogeneous and highly organized interior of the cell. (2000)

While diffusion theory assumes "a dilute, homgeneous suspension of rigid, non-interacting and elastically colliding particles, a monophasic system with the solvent (largely) unbound, and a tendency towards equilibrium," the cell "contains a highly concentrated and heterogeneous assembly of deformable, interacting and inelastically colliding particles; much of the solvent (water) is bound to solid structures which, although not necessarily long-lived, have huge surface areas; and in any case the conditions only tend to thermodynamic equilibrium after death."

Ponder the implications of this description of the cell:

"Cells are highly ordered structures...At all levels of analysis from the light-microscope to the molecular they are high information content (low thermodynamic probability) entities. So far as their internal dynamics is concerned, this means that most physicochemical processes are channeled or "directed" rather than random and suggests that little occurs in the cell on the basis of chance or as a simple consequence of the law of mass action. Diffusion theory assumes random molecular events: as the discussion in this paper makes clear, any departure from randomness creates difficulties for the theory that cannot always be overcome even by sophisticated mathematical and computer-assisted approaches. Seen in this way, diffusion theory should not be expected to apply in cell biology, and the conclusion reached in this paper should occasion neither surprise nor skepticism amongst biologists."

While the authors focus exclusively on the inapplicability of diffusion as a transport mechanism, I'm more interested in the meaning of this inapplicability. Put simply, when you pull back the covers to look inside the cell, it does appear more like Paley's watch than Darwin's warm little pond. In fact, in another paper, one of the above authors writes, " The possibility exists that the cell internum is far more highly organised right down to the molecular level than was hitherto appreciated, to the point where ideas of a relatively solid-state chemistry model have been entertained."

So let's draw out some implications.

Reductionism can lead to blindness.

When Mike Behe asserted in his book that the complexity of the cell was a surprise to biologists, his critics pooh-poohed this claim. For example, one of Behe's critics, Clare Stevens, wrote:

"I don't believe there's any evidence that Darwin or any serious scientists of the time thought of the cell as a 'blob of protoplasm' as claimed by Behe- the cell is Darwin's Black Box of the title."

But as biologists began their quest to understand the cell, largely guided by biochemistry, they often turned their backs on the evidence of complexity. Instead, they attempted to understand the cell as simple chemistry (i.e., the cell was a soup of molecules randomly bumping into each other - an unstructured bag of solution). First of all, the light microscope showed internal structures. But these were dismissed as artifacts caused by fixing, drying, and staining.

In 1912, Warburg showed that the cell's oxygen utilization required structural elements in the cell (what we now know as the mitochondria). Yet this was ignored. For example, in 1930 a Nobel Prize-winning muscle physiologist wrote, "so long...as membranes are not present to interfere with the free play of molecules and ions...electrolytes will ionize, buffer substances will react, reversible reactions will proceed to equilibrium, just as they do in vitro." And even though in 1919, it was found that much of the cell's water was bound, leading scientists still proclaimed that practically all of the water inside the cell was unbound.

However, scientists did begin to appreciate that the cell was not a dilute solution. Yet the cytoplasmic organization they envisioned amongst so many molecules was that of a gelatin gel or colloid. This randomly arranged gel-like state was assumed to exist up to the 1970s. Consider the following quotes:

"We have always underestimated cells. Undoubtedly we still do today. But at least we are no longer as naïve as we were when I was a graduate student in the 1960s. Then, most of us viewed cells as containing a giant set of second order reactions: molecules A and B were thought to diffuse freely, randomly colliding with each other to produce molecule AB - and likewise for many other molecules that interact with each other inside a cell...But, as it turn out, we can walk and we can talk because the chemistry that makes life possible is much more elaborate and sophisticated than anything we students had ever considered....Indeed, the entire cell can be viewed as a factory that contains an elaborate network of interlocking assembly lines, each of which is composed of a set of large protein machines." [Alberts, B. 1998. The Cell as a Collection of Protein Machines: Preparing the Next Generation of Molecular Biologists. Cell 92; 291-294.]

Speaking of bacteria, Lucy Shapiro and Rich Losick write:

"When the authors were graduate students in the late 1960s, the bacterial cell was generally viewed as an amorphous vessel housing a homogeneous solution of proteins." [ J. of Bacteriol.8; 4143-4145]

Donald Ingber writes:

"At this time, the late 1970s, biologists generally viewed the cell as a viscous fluid or gel surrounded by a membrane, much like a balloon filled with molasses." [Sci Amer, Jan 1998].

The reductionist notion of the cell as a balloon filled with molasses, where diffusion dominates as the primary transport mechanism, still persists. Muscle physiologist Peter Hochachka wrote a book (Muscles as Molecular and Metabolic Machines, 1994) reviewing muscle cells as machines, where "the system is being driven more and more by highly efficient interaction between machine components, less and less by diffusion-based processes proposed to be dominant in traditional paradigms." Yet in writing his book, Hochachka adds:

"One of the unexpected spinoffs of writing this book was the recognition, which all scientists probably consider from time to time, of how powerful are the constraining forces of prevailing paradigms in shaping thinking and research in science. When first introduced, new theories expand insight and are intellectually liberating, but the exact opposite can occur, especially in problem areas that are relatively intractable for prolonged periods of time (well illustrated in the field of regulation of muscle energetics). In such cases, prevailing paradigms become prevailing dogmas which tend to stifle creativity and to imprison the imaginative mind."

What do we make of all this? Agutter et al. write:

"It is fascinating to observe how the organic-chemical perspective of the biochemists successfully excluded all uncongenial findings: they dubbed the light microscopic studies as artefacts; the requirement for solid structures in biological oxidation was reduced to a parenthetic acknowledgement; they ignored evidence for bound intracellular water, and likewise ignored studies on diffusion through gels (and the difficulties to which they gave rise). Such selectivity imposed by their theoretical perspective proved, as it so often does, a key factor in the historical development of scientific beliefs about diffusion. There is indeed a "veil of theory over the face of nature."(2000)

The Utility of ID

A "veil of theory" is indeed inherent in science and more often than not, the veil is shaped by reductionism. Now, it is often said that ID is useless to science. It is sometimes asked, "how would science look any different if ID was included?" In this case, reductionism falls where ID stands. That is, if ID was considered as a serious scientific explanation at the time the quest to understand the cell began, I think there is a good chance that our science of cell biology would be much more highly advanced.

I'm thinking of ID as a parallel, alternative approach and not as a replacement. To appreciate this, consider Christan Bohr, an outstanding physiologist at the turn of the century.

According to Agutter et al.:

"In his view, it was necessary to consider both the physical explanation for a phenomenon and its biological (functional) role at the same time, explanations in physiology had to involve both mechanistic and teleological viewpoints, despite the frequent (apparent) incompatibility of these two perspectives."

The debate about ID often revolves around either/or thinking - either ID is true and should serve as the basis of science or it is not true and should continue to be excluded. But why can't we take a both/and approach? It's not a question of the teleological view replacing the mechanistic view, it's a question of using both perspectives in parallel (such a both/and perspective could be used by individuals and/or a community). That is, just as light is best understood when viewed as both wave and particle, might not the origin of biological complexity involve both teleological and non-teleological explanations?

I introduced this line of thinking in an earlier essay on Teleology and Science (which made generous use of Barrow and Tipler's book, "The Anthropic Cosmological Principle."). I wrote:

Let me now quote a long portion from B&T that helps set the context of the current debate:

"Kant's notion of teleology had an enormouse influence on the work of German biologists in the first half of the nineteenth century. Like Kant, for the most part these biologists did not regard teleology and mechanism as polar opposites, but rather as explanatory modes complementary to each other. Mechanism was expected to provide a completely accurate picture of life at the chemical level, without the need to invoke 'vital forces.' Indeed, Kant and many of the German biologists were strongly committed to the idea that all objects in Nature, be they organic or inorganic, are completely controlled by mechanical physical laws. These scientists had no objection to the idea that living beings are brought into existence by the mechanical action of physical laws. What they objected to was the possibility of constructing a scientific theory, based on mechanism alone, which described that coming into being, and that could completely describe the organization of life....In Kant's view, a mechanical explanation...could be given only when there is a clear separation between cause and effect. In living beings, causes and effects are inextricably mixed...ultimate biological explanations require a special non-mechanical notion of causality - teleology - in which each part is simultaneously cause and effect. Parts related to the whole in this way transcend mechanical causality."

B&T continue:

"The limitation of explanation in terms of mechanical causality can perhaps be best understood by comparing a living being to a computer. As Michael Polanyi has pointed out the internal workings of the computer can of course be completely understood in terms of physical laws. What cannot be so explained is the computer's program. To explain the program requires reference to the purpose of the program, that is, to teleology. Even the evolution of a deterministic Universe cannot be completely understood in terms of the differential equations which govern evolution. The boundary conditions of the differential equations must also be specified. These boundary conditions are not determined by the laws of physics which are differential equations."

B&T then write something that I think nicely summarizes the where the modern ID movement stands:

"The universal boundary conditions are as fundamental as the physical laws themselves; they must be included in any explanation on par with the physical laws."

So how might the inclusion of ID have allowed our understanding of cell biology to be more advanced today that it currently is? I think teleological scientists might have been largely influenced by Paley's writings (as Behe has obviously been). And what did Paley do? He compared life to a machine (a watch):

"when we come to inspect the watch, we perceive - what we could not discover in the stone - that its several parts are framed and put together for a purpose, e.g., that they are so formed and adjusted as to produce motion, and that motion so regulated as to point to the hour of the day; that if the different parts had been differently shaped from what they are, or placed after another manner or in any other order than that in which they are placed, either no motion at all would have been carried on in the machine, or none which would have answered the use that is now served by it."

This description of the innards of a watch maps much, much more closely to the internal workings of a cell than that bag of molasses. Thus, we could expect teleologists to be highly attuned to any data that would indicate the cell was watch-like. They would thus have been unlikely to ignore the uncongenial findings mentioned by Agutter et al. On the contrary, they would have pounced on them and sought to further explore this type of evidence, which would have accelerated our understanding of the complexity and sophistication of the cell. In other words, unlike Alberts and others, teleologists would not have underestimated the cell nor viewed it as an " amorphous vessel housing a homogeneous solution of proteins." Molecular machines might have been uncovered much earlier and the notion that diffusion dominates inside the cell may never have become entrenched. By focusing on the boundary conditions, a teleological view would have provided a nice counter-balance to the raw reductionism of the biochemists.

 But because science excludes teleological thinking, it has no such balance as it seeks to understand biology in a manner that is easily misled by reductionism. Thus, as an engine that attempts to understand origins, it works with only half of its cylinders firing. Science is not wrong for excluding teleological thinking, only unbalanced.

A lesson for ID?

Returning to the issue of diffusion, Agutter et al. write:

"Considering all the criticisms in our analysis in this article and elsewhere, there is certainly no reason to suppose that classical diffusion theory, or any of its offspring, will play a significant role in our understanding of biology in the future."

Yet how is it then, that the concept of diffusion has become so entrenched in biology? Agutter et al. write:

"Our contention is that Fick's Law was an outcome of its author's commitment to explaining all living phenomena of the principles of physics and chemistry that apply to non-living matter and, equally, to isolated parts of an organism. Implicitly and explicitly, it was anti-vitalist in regard to both theory and expeirment."

The authors then ultimately offer five reasons why the concept still persists to this day in biology:

1. It's easy to teach
2. It's intuitively plausible (little more than a mathematical formulation of common sense).
3. It has had success.
4. It involves minimal assumptions (Occam's Razor)
5. It is indeed encountered in the artificial setting of the biochemists' test tubes.

What strikes me is that all these reasons for maintaining a prominent, but illegitimate, role for diffusion in biology are quite similar to the reasons Darwinian evolution (DE) is maintained at the expense of ID. I think DE remains so entrenched largely because it is anti-teleological and an expression of reductionism. And the same five reasons (a-e) also equally apply. It's easy to teach; it has had success (the spread of antibiotic resistance, for example); it seems so intuitively persuasive; unlike ID, it seems to involve minimal assumptions; and it is encountered in artificial settings (seen more and more in virtual reality these days).

This is all very instructive, for if biologists can embrace diffusion for so long, then a fortiori reasoning should lead us to expect that DE would be even more strongly embraced, even if it (analogous to diffusion) is largely irrelevant to the origin of complex structures. One reason for the a fortiori reasoning is that unlike the debate about diffusion, the debate about origins carries tremendous socio-political implications (the debate almost always comes back to what we teach kids) and implications about how we define science. Apologists from both sides have a stake in the origins debate. But if the misguided notion of diffusion can remain so entrenched in biology, we have even more reason to think DE would remain entrenched (even if it is just as misguided) because of these extra-scientific considerations.

What to learn from the lesson?

What can an ID proponent learn from all this?

Don't expect any data to cause any sudden paradigm shift among the non-teleologists. If something as mundane as diffusion can remain entrenched for 150 years (despite its inapplicability), DE is unlikely to be any less entrenched. Paradigms don't change immediately as a consequence of sensational evidence, they change gradually in a manner that is correlated with generational changes.

But be encouraged. The data are indeed gradually moving to a Paleyian perspective. The raw data are forcing more and more scientists away from the "bag of solution" mentality, to be replaced by a highly organized infrastructure entailing numerous, carefully linked molecular machines. In fact, I will now make a prediction:

If the cell is designed, we will find that they look more and more like Paley's watch. Agutter et al.'s claim that "Cells are highly ordered structures... So far as their internal dynamics is concerned, this means that most physicochemical processes are channeled or "directed" rather than random and suggests that little occurs in the cell on the basis of chance or as a simple consequence of the law of mass action." will ring more and more true with new discoveries.

On the other hand, ID will be falsified if this "highly ordered state" is really an illusion. That is, if further examination actually returns us more closely to the "bag of solution" view of the cell, the design inference behind the origin of the cell will be discredited.

And there is one more significant implication. The perspective of the cell as a highly organized factory, where "little occurs on the basis of chance," essentially (IMO) refutes abiogenesis. For all abiogenesis models rely on an outdated understanding of the cell as a "bag of solution." This explains the failure of abiogenesis, as it's easy to imagine a pool of solution becoming a bag of solution, but it's a huge and fundamental discontinuity between a pool of solution and a factory. And this will also explain why more and more abiogenesis research will turn to virtual reality and rely on simplistic models - for only here is life a bag of solution.

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