God enough

We should see the ceaseless creativity of nature as sacred, argues biologist Stuart Kauffman, despite what Richard Dawkins might say.

By Steve Paulson

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Nov. 19, 2008 | Biologist Stuart Kauffman has plenty of experience tilting at windmills. For years he's questioned the Darwinian orthodoxy that natural selection is the sole principle of evolutionary biology. As he put it in his first book, "The Origins of Order," "It is not that Darwin is wrong but that he got hold of only part of the truth." In Kauffman's view, there is another biological principle at work -- what he calls "self-organization" -- that "co-mingles" with natural selection in the evolutionary process.

A physician by training, Kaufmann is a widely admired biologist; in 1987, he was a recipient of a MacArthur "genius" award. He's also one of the gurus of complexity theory, and for years was a fixture at the Santa Fe Institute, the renowned scientific research community. A few years ago, he moved to the University of Calgary to set up the Biocomplexity and Informatics Institute.

If this sounds heady, it is. And getting Kauffman to explain his theory of self-organization, "thermodynamic work cycles" and "autocatalysis" to a non-scientist is challenging. But Kauffman is at heart a philosopher who ranges over vast fields of inquiry, from the origins of life to the philosophy of mind. He's a visionary thinker who's not afraid to play with big ideas.

In his recent book, "Reinventing the Sacred," Kauffman has launched an even more audacious project. He seeks to formulate a new scientific worldview and, in the process, reclaim God for nonbelievers. Kauffman argues that our modern scientific paradigm -- reductionism -- breaks down once we try to explain biology and human culture. And this has left us flailing in a sea of meaninglessness. So how do we steer clear of this empty void? By embracing the "ceaseless creativity" of nature itself, which in Kauffman's view is the real meaning of God. It's God without any supernatural tricks.

Kauffman is now approaching 70, and his advancing age may partly account for the urgency he seems to feel in grappling with life's ultimate questions. When I spoke with him, I found him in an expansive mood as we ranged over a host of big ideas, from the prospects of creating life in a test tube to the need for a sacred science.

You've suggested we need a new scientific worldview that goes beyond reductionism and incorporates a religious sensibility. Why?

The first thing to say is that the current scientific paradigm has done extraordinarily good work for at least 350 years. The reigning paradigm of reductionism takes a little bit of explaining.

It goes back to the Greeks in the 1st century A.D., and then it explodes at the time of Newton, who had three laws of motion and a law of universal gravitation. With Newton comes the idea of a deterministic universe. In fact, he took himself to be doing the work of God. The theistic god who reached into the universe and changed its course gave way during the Enlightenment to a deistic god, who wound up the universe at the beginning and let Newton's laws take over. It was the clockwork universe.

So the idea is that if you understand the laws of the universe, you can plug in all the variables and predict what the outcomes will be. 

Exactly. It finds its clearest explanation in the French mathematician Pierre-Simon Laplace, at the time of Napoleon, who said if you knew the masses and velocities of all the particles in the universe, then you could compute the entire future and past of the universe. As the Nobel laureate physicist Steven Weinberg says, once all the science is completed, all the explanatory arrows will point downward from societies to people to organs to cells to biochemistry to chemistry to physics.

And if you can explain the laws of physics, Weinberg thinks you can explain everything else.

Right. He also says we live in a meaningless universe. Those are the fruits of standard reductionism. And the majority of scientists remain reductionists. It's comforting in that the entire universe is seen to be lawful; we can understand everything, from societies to quarks. Yet a number of physicists, including Nobel laureates Philip Anderson and Robert Laughlin, feel that reductionism is not adequate to understand the real world. In its place, they talk about "emergence." I think they're right.

Can you explain what emergence is?

There are things that we just can't deduce from particle physics -- life, agency, meaning, value and this thing called consciousness. The fact is that we can act on our own behalf and make choices. So agency is real. With agency comes value. Dinner is either good or bad. There's consciousness in the universe. We may not be able to explain it, but it's true. So the first new strand in the scientific worldview is emergence.

And that new scientific view has no room for reductionism?

Right. In physics, and in the meaningless universe of Steven Weinberg, there are only happenings. Balls roll down hills but they don't do anything. "Doing" does not exist in physics. Physics cannot talk about values because you have to have agency to have values. So let's talk about agency for a moment.

You and I are having an interview right now. We're acting on our own behalf and we're changing the world as we do so. The physicist Philip Anderson has a charming way of putting it. He says if you doubt agency, just look at the anguished expression on your dog's face when you say, "Come." When I used to call my sweet dog, who died recently, he would give me a sidelong glance. I think he was thinking, "Well, I've got more time here." Finally, I'd say, "Come, Windsor!" And he'd come.

I don't doubt agency in my dog Windsor. And once you've got agency -- and I think it's sitting there at the origin of life -- then you've got food or poison, which I call "yuck" and "yum." And once you've got food or poison, it is either good or bad for that organism. So you've got value in the universe.

Are you rejecting Weinberg's famous comment? "The more we comprehend the universe, the more pointless it seems."

I profoundly believe that Weinberg is wrong. I also happen to think that Weinberg is utterly brilliant. He's one of the best defenders of the pure reductionist stance. But once you've got agency, you've got meaning. This is the beginning of a change in our scientific worldview. Agency is real, so meaning is real in the universe. Value is real, at least in the biosphere. And these things can't be talked about by physicists.

So the reductionist model breaks down when we're talking about how life evolves.

Absolutely. This idea is frightening at first, but then utterly liberating. For 3.8 billion years, the biosphere has been expanding from the origin of life into what I call "the adjacent possible." Once we're at levels of complexity above the atom, the universe is on a unique trajectory. It's doing something that it's never done before.

To take one example, I argue that the evolutionary emergence of the human heart cannot be deduced from physics. That doesn't mean it breaks any laws of physics. But there's no way of getting from physics to the emergence of hearts in the evolution of the biosphere. If you were to ask Darwin, what's the function of the heart? he would have said it's to pump blood. That's what Darwin meant by adaptation. But there may be other causal consequences of the heart, or any other part of you, that are of no functional significance in the current environment, but may become useful in a different environment.

Isn't this called a Darwinian pre-adaptation?

Yes. And when a pre-adaptation happens, a new function comes to exist in the biosphere and can change the history of the planet. We just don't know ahead of time what the relevant selective environments are. This is just stunning when you think about it. We cannot say how the biosphere will evolve.

The same is true for our technologies, our economy, our culture. We didn't have the faintest idea what would happen with the invention of writing or the invention of tractors. These were Darwinian pre-adaptations at the technological level. This is the creativity of the universe that we're participating in right now. We literally don't have the faintest idea what the biosphere is going to invent in the next million years, or what technology is going to invent in the next 40 years. Who foresaw the Web 50 years ago?

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