Atheist Logic Loops and Lapses #3

Life Essence...Denied

In June of this year, Massimo Pigliucci wrote an article for Philosophy Now. Dr. Pigliucci is Professor of Ecology & Evolution and of Philosophy at Stony Brook University on Long Island (New York). He is the author of Making Sense of Evolution: Toward a Coherent Picture of Evolutionary Theory (Chicago Press, 2006).

Dr. Pigliucci is a well known evolutionary biologist, with credentials that got him into the “Altenberg 16” conference this summer. That conference was by invitation, and included the big dogs of evolution. The purpose was to define evolution using the latest research information. Dr. Pigliucci posted his conference notes on his website, an abbreviated precursor of the Oxford release to be made next year.

In his article titled, “A Transcendental Philosophy of Science?” , Dr. Pigliucci acknowledges two things. He acknowledges that, as a philosophy, he is a “naturalist”, ie. that which I prefer to call a Philosophical Materialist. I don’t think he would object to that.

He also said,

”Moreover, I don’t know of any biologist who is attempting to understand ‘the essence of the living’ – partly because it is not at all clear what sense that phrase actually makes. On the other hand, there are plenty of (essential?) characteristics of living organisms that one can, in fact, know objectively, or as close to objectively as it is humanly possible (as Kant himself could have reasonably put it). For example, no transcendental twist or turn can do away with the fact that the hereditary material of living organisms comprises a particular macromolecule known as deoxynucleic acid, and that it is made of two strands running in opposite directions, normally coiled in the form of a double helix; and that it is this particular spatial arrangement of the molecule which immediately explains how DNA is replicated and passed on to the next generation. [emphasis added].

In essence, Dr. Pigliucci states that he does not know what the essence of life is, and that DNA physical mechanisms - "the hereditary material" - satisfy any need for describing a living thing. For Dr. Pigliucci and other Philosophical Materialists, these molecules are life, according to the article.

But this misses the point entirely, which I am sure that Dr. Pigliucci knows full well. The point is not the molecular structures that are in place. The point is well beyond that, and is at least two fold: What animates and directs these structures as a coherent unity once they are in place? And, Why should they be in place and animated under intentional coherent rules, at all?

The denial of any knowledge of life essence or life force is a clumsy dodge of the obvious. A newly dead corpse has all the molecular structures that it had when it was alive, just moments before. What it lacks is life; the essence that gave it capacities beyond the minerals of the universe. Life is a force that inhabits the molecular structure, keeping its incredible complexity coordinated and moving. It is not hard to understand that.

Life: n. 1. That property of plants and animals which makes it possible for them to take in food, get energy from it, grow, adapt themselves to their surroundings, and reproduce their kind; it is the quality that distinguishes a living plant or animal from inorganic matter or a dead organism.
Webster’s Deluxe Unabridged Dictionary, 2nd Edition, 1979.

Life is defined more technically by the Origin of Life Foundation, which offers one million US Dollars to anyone who can create it:

"By sustained, free-living "life," the Foundation [see below] means any system which from its own inherent set of biological instructions can perform all nine of the following functions:
1. Delineate itself from its environment through the production and maintenance of a membrane equivalent, most probably a rudimentary or quasi-active-transport membrane necessary for selective absorption of nutrients, excretion of wastes, and overcoming osmotic and toxic gradients,
2. Write, store, and pass along into progeny prescriptive information (instruction) needed for organization; provide instructions for energy derivation and for needed metabolite production and function; symbolically encode and communicate functional message through a transmission channel to a receiver/decoder/destination/effector mechanism; integrate past, present and future time into its biological prescriptive information (instruction) content,
3. Bring to pass the above recipe instructions into the production or acquisition of actual catalysts, coenzymes, cofactors, etc.; physically orchestrate the biochemical processes/pathways of metabolic reality; manufacture and maintain physical cellular architecture; establish and operate a semiotic system using "signal molecules"
4. Capture, transduce, store, and call up energy for utilization (work),
5. Actively self-replicate and eventually reproduce, not just passively polymerize or crystallize; pass along the apparatus and "know-how" for homeostatic metabolism and reproduction into progeny,
6. Self-monitor and repair its constantly deteriorating physical matrix of bioinstruction retention/transmission, and of architecture,
7. Develop and grow from immaturity to reproductive maturity,
8. Productively react to environmental stimuli. Respond in an efficacious manner that is supportive of survival, development, growth, and reproduction, and
9. Possess relative genetic stability, yet sufficient diversity to allow for adaptation and potential evolution.
All classes of archaea, bacteria, and every other known free-living organism, meet all nine of the above criteria. Eliminate any one of the above nine requirements, and it remains to be demonstrated whether that system could remain "alive."
RNA strands, DNA strands, prions, viroids, and viruses shall not be considered free-living organisms, since they fail to meet many of the above well-recognized characteristics of independent "life."

The Origin-of-Life Prize ®
is offered through
The Gene Emergence Project ®
of The Origin-of-Life Foundation, Inc. ®

It is unimaginable that Dr. Pigliucci is unaware of the essential characteristics of life, and that these characteristics are not the same as the molecular structure that supports them. So Dr. Pigiliucci might be thinking that these are either inconsequential or that they are Material.

Looking through the life essence descriptions above, one finds verbs that describe actions that are required for an entity to perform, if it is to be thought of as alive. These actions are not inconsequential, they are the “things” of life. So maybe they are all material.

But verbs describe, not material entities, but actions. Nouns describe material entities. The changes in material entities that are described as life are not “expected” of minerals, of inorganic compounds or elements. Even in organics they are only “expected” because they already exist, not because any law requires them to exist. In fact they exist despite some laws, like that of entropy, never mind the fable of “eddys in the stream of entropic decays”. If we were living outside this universe, looking in using only material criteria, we would not expect to find organic molecular structures that exhibit the characteristics outlined above.

So this is what must be denied, if the Philosophy of Materialism is to be kept: One must deny that life is anything at all, much less anything special. Moreover, the secondary characteristics of life must be either denied or reclassified as “material” artifacts: the mind; the design; the essence that animates, controls and regulates the anentropic, regulated, and self-contained activities of the living organism.

Are these things material? Of course not, no more than philosophy itself is material. Denial that a living thing has an essence that is not found in inorganic minerals and dead, previously living things is a position that is absurd.

Once again, Philosophical Materialism fails in its attempt to preserve the conclusion, at the expense of logic and rationality in its premises.