Intelligent Design advocates buy into Platonic nonsense

The Discovery Institute’s “Evolution News” is always a great place to look for tenuous and dubious arguments against evolutionary biology. Lately they have been touting a book by EN journalist David Klinghoffer, published by Discovery Press, the DI’s house publisher. The book is “Plato’s Revenge: The New Science of the Immaterial Genome”. Emily Sandico, a DI staff writer, has a piece calling attention to the book.

The book by Klinghoffer describes the views of Richard Sternberg. Sternberg has two Ph.D. degrees, one in molecular evolution and another in systems science. His own web page (here) explains that, in his view

Evolutionary genetics leaves open the central issue of how the one dimensional genotype can specify the four dimensional phenotype. The approach I am taking to this problem is a variant of structural realism, by which I mean that biological phenomena are manifestations of logico-mathematical structures. This perspective is orthogonal to the origins debate, if you will, because all historical actualities are understood to be space-time instances of pre-existing non-temporal possibilities. Within this context one can accept all that is empirically valid in evolutionary biology, while not axiomatically dismissing the position that structures as well as their “real” instantiations have an intelligent cause. My position asserts that the cosmos is fundamentally intelligible in such a way that it can be logically, mathematically, and scientifically recognized to be such; and moreover–following Proclus–that the universe emanates from Nous (mind). In this sense my thinking is compatible with intelligent design broadly defined.

Sternberg’s site also links to a PDF explaining in more detail how he came to his views.

To Klinghoffer, as quoted by Sandico’s post

When Dr. Sternberg thinks of ID, he’s thinking of the here and now. With echoes in the ancient philosophy of Plato, which pointed to immaterial “forms” shaping life, he finds scientific evidence of agency at work in the formation of every embryo, the development of every organism in the womb, and in the ongoing operation of every cell. The genome is not a material entity alone — DNA — but one that transcends space and time, employing DNA as an instrument, right now.

which he calls “intelligent design in real time”. Andrew McDiarmid, EN’s head of podcasts, has interviewed Klinghoffer (here) about his book on Sternberg’s views.

To me this all sounds a bit strange. Plato argued that real organisms were but imperfect reflections of ideal forms, which existed in some other realm. What evidence do Sternberg, Klinghoffer, Sandico, and McDiarmid have that this is so? Let’s look at an example …

The example is explained by Daniel Witt, in an EN post (here), where he explains and interprets the views of Michael Levin, a biologist at Tufts University who works on developmental algorithms. According to Witt’s explanation,

There is important information in the DNA, of course. But organisms seem to develop with a goal in mind, so to speak, and are able reach that goal in spite of shifting and inherently unpredictable circumstances. This is significant, because if the circumstances and the developmental pathways necessary to adapt to them are unpredictable, then those pathways cannot have been programmed into the organism in advance. They have to be invented on-the-fly.

Another, more recent EN post about Levin’s views is by cancer researcher Steven Iacoboni (here). Levin gives his own summary of his views in a preprint available from the Open Science Foundation site.

Levin does invoke Platonism, and proposes that “mind” rather than physical entities are fundamental in nature. Andreas Wagner, in his book “The Arrival of the Fittest” also ends up invoking Platonism and proposes that there may be “a library of forms” in nature.

Telos?

The Evolution News posters view Levin’s and Wagner’s views as evidence for “telos” (goal-directedness) in nature, and argue that this is evidence for supernatural processes. Levin and Wagner do not go that far. A central argument at EN seems to be that if an organism can compensate for developmental accidents, and end up changing so as to achieve a desirable form, then this is only possible if there is telos, teleological change. In particular, if organisms can anticipate the future and correct accidents of development, to these platonists this cannot be the result of mere physical changes in DNA sequences.

No nous

But it could, and it’s not hard see how such a capability could evolve, without any overall plans that refer to platonic ideals. Organisms exist in populations. Owing to processes such as mutation, recombination, and some types of natural selection, the members of the population vary genetically. Consider a worm developing, and an individual suffers damage around its mouth. Different genotypes will differ in what happens after that. Some of them will change in a direction thst brings the worm closer to having a functional mouth. many others will lead to an increasingly less functional mouth. So different genotypes will vary in how fit the organism will be when affected by that damage. Natural selection will of course favor the genotypes that are more fit when damage like that occurs. No need to look up the ideal form in the Platonic encyclopedia in a supernatural realm.

Whenever organisms develop to anticipate future environments, ID advocates tend to regard this as evidence for supernatural intervention, or plans inserted into the species by Design.

Because, they argue, a material organism can only react to present conditions, and thus could not in principle develop so as to predict future environments, and how well various forms could cope with them. But this is not necessary. Consider a plant that sprouts from a seed in the spring, and grows for some months before flowering at an appropriate time in the summer. Does doing that require supernaturally inserted algorithms, which push the plant towards its Platonic ideal life cycle. No. All that is necessary is some feedback from fitness to the genotypes. And that of course is what natural selection does.

So no Nous is good news.

A library of forms in the real world?

The biologists that the DI platonists refer to are less clearly referring to any supernatural processes. Michael Levin comes closest:

(1) instances of embodied cognition likewise ingress from a Platonic space, which contains not only low-agency patterns like facts about triangles and prime numbers, but also higheragency ones such as kinds of minds; (2) we take seriously for developmental, synthetic, and behavioral biologythe kinds of non-physicalist ideas that are already a staple of Platonist mathematics; (3) what evolution (and bioengineering, and possibly AI) produces are pointers into that Platonic space –physicalinterfaces that enable the ingression of specific patterns of body

and

To recap, the first pillar of the proposed framework is that Platonic forms inject information and influence into physical events, such as the growth and form of biological bodies. The second is that this latent space contains not only boring, low-agency forms such as facts about integers and geometric shapes, but also a wide range of increasingly high-agency patterns, some of which we call “kinds of minds”. Thus, I propose that minds, as patterns that ensoul somatic embodiments, are of exactly the kind (but not in degree) of non-physical nature as the patterns that inhabit and guide the behavior of biological tissue.

Andreas Wagner instead proposes that to understand evolution, a conceptual collection of all possible genome sequences, with the forms each sequence produces, is fundamental to understanding evolution:

So nature’s libraries and their sprawling networks go a long way towards explaining life’s capacity to evolve. But where do they come from? You cannot see them in the glass lizard or its anatomy. They are nowhere near life’s visible surface, nor are they underneath this surface, in the structure of its tissues and cells. They are not even in the submicroscopic structure of its DNA. They exist in a world of concepts, the kind of abstract concepts that mathematicians explore.

Does that make them any less real?

and

Nature’s libraries are the fountains of biological innovation that Darwin was looking for. And unlike the realm of abstract forms that Plato envisioned, they are richer, more diverse, and more complex than the visible world. They harbour enough innovations for all the species Darwinian evolution has created – and could create. No planet would be large enough to explore all of them. The legless lizard and the rest of the living world, in all their glory, are just faint shadows of this Platonic realm of the possible.

Stuart Kauffman has also insisted that evolutionary theory should incorporate descriptions of the connectedness of graphs describing organisms, in order to understand which complex structures might come, not from natural selection, but instead from random happenstance.

Platonism?

Levin and Wagner make the connection to Plato, but they do not seem to be describing a supernatural realm, rather a reconceived or extended reality.

The Discoverosphere at Evolution News takes their views as endorsing a dualism which has a supernatural world directing the natural world. It is less than clear whether Levin or Wagner would agree.

For a blistering rejection of neo-platonic ideas as relevant to biological evolution, see also Massimo Pigliucci’s 2016 essay.

There is more to say about this, but others are better at the philosophy of biology, so I will look forward to what our commenters have to say, below. The authors from Evolution News are of course welcome to participate.