Mirages Instead of Marriages

Following up on the previous post, on Ex Machina (2014), one remarkable aspect of the film is the ease with which Caleb accepts the possibility, and even desirability, of an amorous relationship with Ava. Even if you've only seen photos, Ava is quite evidently a machine. It's her face with its realistic expressions that is human enough to traverse the uncanny valley and convince Caleb that he is forming a personal connection.¹ (I use the personal pronoun "her" out of convenience.)

There's another man-machine relationship in Solo: A Star Wars Story (2018). Lando's paramour is L3-37, a vaguely humanoid robot. L3 is quite evidently mechanical, lacking a human face or any apparently human features, but is typed as "female" with wide, mechanically inefficient hips and the adequately feminine voice talents of Phoebe Waller-Bridge.

An interesting contrast is the Twilight Zone episode "The Lonely" (S1E7, 1959) in which a prisoner stranded on an isolated planet is given a robot that appears convincingly as a woman. He develops an attachment to her. In the end, he is able to claim his rightful freedom only by realizing that she is but a simulacrum. The middle of last century was a healthier age, where men could still see that real women were goods in themselves (in their essence) and not merely because they presented a pleasing appearance or satisfied their needs.²

And of course we can trace the faux-women of cinematic science fiction back to Metropolis (1927). But there at least the men who were clambering over each other for fake Maria and her lascivious dance had no way of knowing that she was not a real woman, the transformation of the robot into Maria's likeness having taken place out of their sight. But one wonders in retrospect if knowing that fact would have made a difference to their crazed frenzy.

But all the self-deception these days can hardly be surprising. So many confused men in this age use pornography rather than cultivate relationships with real women. Especially confused men convince themselves that enough hormones and surgeries will make them become women. (Where that leaves the definition of "woman," no one can say apparently.) Ultimately, the fact that so many men in this confused age satisfy themselves with the mere images of women says it all.³ Ours is an age satisfied with falsehoods and lacking the courage to aspire to the high call of truth.

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1. It's significant that Caleb's desire is not erotic in the conventional, restricted sense: notice how he eschews relations with another android with a more convincingly human appearance. Rather, his motivation seems to be something in the neighborhood of being the White Knight to the Damsel in Distress. The savior complex of would-be do-gooders is a plausible route for all manner of mischief.

2. I wrote similarly about the latter two films in December 2020.

3. All this self-deception is quite clearly insanity. But perhaps there is a silver lining. Whatever heritable component there is to being satisfied with falsehood and illusion is being strongly selected out like so much wasted seed corn. Perhaps we should look at this crazy moment as a sort of evolutionary gate. As ever, the concern is the vast collateral damage, both human and cultural, in the meantime.

Technology vs. Motherhood

Today is not only Mothers Day, it is ironically also the 50th anniversary of the FDA's approval of the Birth Control Pill, that technology that allows women (and men) to prevent birth in order to avoid control... and motherhood (to take a liberty with Chesterton, who had some other choice words on birth control.)

Time magazine has a pretty thorough review of the history of the Pill, though you have to wonder about a writer who cites the Kinsey Report as anything more than science fantasy authored by a sex maniac (also uses the usual whitewashed biography of Margaret Sanger).

There's one provocative passage about John Rock, one of the Pill's inventors, who was a Roman Catholic:

Would Catholics object and boycott the company's other products? While maintaining its view that contraception — or "sterilizing" the act of intercourse — was morally wrong, the Catholic Church in the 1950s had accepted the rhythm method as a valid approach to family planning; since women were fertile only during certain days around the midpoint of their menstrual cycle, the idea was that couples would limit intercourse to the woman's "safe" period. But this was by no means foolproof, especially for women with irregular cycles.

Rock thought the Pill provided an exquisite chemical escape hatch. With the Pill, there was no barrier preventing the union of sperm and egg; all the Pill did, Rock argued, was mimic naturally occurring hormones to extend the safe period, so that sex was safe all month long. The church wouldn't need to change its historic teaching, he suggested; the Pill just fell outside its definition of contraception.

Yet mimicry, no matter how convincing, is not nature. Rock's argument grew from the classic mechanistic conception of nature: that nature is a somewhat arbitrary assemblage of parts that can be manipulated at our convenience. What's missing is a larger consideration of embodied man as a moral agent. As C.S. Lewis wrote:

There is something which unites magic and applied science while separating both from the wisdom of earlier ages. For the wise men of old the cardinal problem had been how to conform the soul to reality, and the solution had been knowledge, self-discipline, and virtue. For magic and applied science alike the problem is how to subdue reality to the wishes of men: the solution is a technique; and both, in the practice of this technique, are ready to do things hitherto regarded as disgusting and impious—such as digging up and mutilating the dead. (The Abolition of Man, ch. 3.)

Of course pharmaceutical companies have also had to redefine when life begins in order to avoid the Pill being legally categorized as an abortifacient. One of the Pill's secondary effects is to prevent implantation in the uterine lining of a newly conceived child. So big pharma redefined implantation instead of conception to be the beginning of life. (This is not unlike the redefinition of death as "brain death" in order to facilitate the harvesting of organs.)

The Time article is right that the Pill itself did not unleash the sexual revolution: the demand for sexual pleasure without ties that bind has always been a part of human psychology, especially that of men (women as a group tend to desire primarily the relationship sexual relations foster). The Pill is as much a symptom of our societal illness as a cause. The drive to manipulate nature, without accepting the givenness of the world's boundaries, is uniquely modern. The modern project is blind to the sacredness of nature, in particular of human nature. The Pill is a product of this mindset.

The flagship of the modern project is modern science. All of science rises or falls on the experimental method. But take a look at the summit of this method: controlled experimentation. It's about control. Things fall within the purview of modern science to the extent they can be controlled. They fall outside to the extent they transcend control. Thus the "scientific" picture of man is necessarily truncated to that of a being who can be controlled, manipulated at convenience by some unexamined controller:

The expressions ‘the order of nature’ and ‘the biological order’ must not be confused or regarded as identical; the ‘biological order’ does indeed mean the same as the order of nature but only insofar as this is accessible to the methods of empirical and descriptive natural science.... The ‘biological order’, as a product of the human intellect which abstracts its elements from a larger reality, has man for its immediate author.¹ (Karol Wojtyla, Love and Responsibility, pp. 56–57)

Man is the manipulator, so man is the author of the scientific order. But in the case of the Pill, man is also the object of study. As Lewis expresses it so well:

Each new power won by man is a power over man as well. Each advance leaves him weaker as well as stronger. In every victory, besides being the general who triumphs, he is also the prisoner who follows the triumphal car.

....what we call Man's power over Nature turns out to be a power exercised by some men over other men with Nature as its instrument. (The Abolition of Man, ch. 3.)

Lewis points out how the Pill manipulates future generations. But it also manipulates the women who use it. Feminists like Carolyn Merchant rightly point to the latent anti-feminine agenda of Bacon's experimental method, but fail to raise the alarm about how the products of that method, like the Pill, damage women.²

For the modern project, the dignity of being called human (in the best sense) is only granted to the extent that a person is the controller, not the controlled. Thus women are only considered fully human to the extent they approximate the attributes of the male: power and independence. This is most visible in Enlightenment philosophers such as Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau, whose hypothetical states of nature depict men as atoms of force and leave no room for the family, children, or what is distinctly feminine. Women as such are a nullity to the modern project. Feminists accept this premise and seek to exalt women by conforming them to the male archetype.

The Pill is a great boon to playboys and womanizers: having excluded the natural ends of sex, a man may enjoy as many women to enjoy as he desires, with no ties, no limits. The AP article says sardonically, "After all these years, a male equivalent to the birth control pill is still five to seven years away." Contraception is above all about men manipulating women.

The Pill is a great boon to social engineers. What good is motherhood anyway? We need a society of homogenized individuals who can be moved and manipulated for economic exigency, so let's do away with intermediate institutions like the family: in the future children will come from central factories and every man will stand naked before the power of the State. Motherhood doesn't count toward Gross Domestic Product, so what good can that institution be? We need more (immediate) productivity, so turn women out into the work force.

For many purposes the Pill effectively turns a woman into a man: a man who may be more verbal, more social, and adorned with pleasing curves, but still a compact economic unit unencumbered by larger allegiances outside the centrally planned State.

Fulton Sheen wrote, "If parents surrender responsibility to their children, the state will take up the slack. State power is the effect of the breakdown of family authority. Mothers more than politicians are the preservers of freedom and democracy."

So thank your mother today for your life and her love: it means much more for all of us than we may realize.

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Notes

1. The fuller context of the quotation, which is probably the most important part of Love and Responsibility:

The order of existence is the Divine Order, although existence is not in itself something supernatural. But then the Divine Order includes not only the supernatural order but the order of nature too, which also stands in a permanent relationship to God and the Creator. The expressions 'the order of nature' and 'the biological order' must not be confused or regarded as identical; the 'biological order' does indeed mean the same as the order of nature but [the order of nature] only insofar as this is accessible to the methods of empirical and descriptive natural science, and not as a specific order of existence with an obvious relationship to the First Cause, to God the Creator.

The habit of confusing the order of existence with the biological order, or rather of allowing the second to obscure the first, is part of the generalized empiricism which seems to weigh so heavily on the mind of modern man, and particularly on modern intellectuals, and makes it particularly difficult for them to understand the [not theological but philosophical] principles on which Catholic sexual morality is based. According to those [philosophical] principles sex and the sexual urge are not solely and exclusively a specific part of the psycho-physiological make-up of man. The sexual urge owes its objective importance to its connection with the divine work of creation of which we have been speaking, and this importance vanishes almost completely if our way of thinking is inspired only by the biological order of nature. Seen in this [biological] perspective the sexual urge is only the sum of functions undoubtedly directed, from the biological point of view, towards a biological end, that of reproduction. Now, if man is the master of nature, should he not mould those functions—if necessary artificially, with the help of appropriate techniques—in whatever way he considers expedient and agreeable? The 'biological order', as a product of the human intellect which abstracts its elements from a larger reality, has man for its immediate author. The claim to autonomy in one's ethical views is a short jump from this. It is otherwise with the 'order of nature', which means the totality of the cosmic relationships that arise among really existing entities. It is therefore the order of existence, and the laws which govern it have their foundation in Him, Who is the unfailing source of that existence, in God the Creator. (pp. 56–57)

It should be noted that our access to the natural order is not restricted to that small slice of human experience that is experiment (the basis of modern science). To restrict oneself to exploration of the controllable world is a priori to exclude the possibility of discovering anything beyond experimental control, most especially something as transcendent as the Creator. If a person opens himself to the whole of human common experience and reason, he comes to realize that he is not the author of the world's order, but that it must be given by a transcendent author.

2. Not to mention families and the children they nurture. Also not to mention the many unhealthy side effects, like heightening susceptibility to HIV/AIDS; not to mention damage to the extra-human environment. More health side effects at this link.

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Nancy Gibbs, "The Pill at 50: Sex, Freedom and Paradox," Time (Apr. 22, 2010).

Carolyn Merchant, "'The Violence of Impediments': Francis Bacon and the Origins of Experimentation," Isis 2008, 99:731-760.

Carla K. Johnson, "America's favorite birth control method turns 50," Associated Press (May 7, 2010).

Fulton J. Sheen, "Women Who Do Not Fail," Life Is Worth Living, Second Series (New York: McGraw-Hill Book Company, Inc., 1954), 176-177.

Getting U.S. Space Exploration Back on Track

President Obama has recently announced a new budget for NASA with radically shifted priorities. The space agency would get out of the business of manned space exploration (leaving this task to the private sector) and focus on developing new space technologies. You won't often find me praising Obama, but I have to give him credit on this.

As I've written before, NASA is terribly inefficient at manned space. Government agencies are necessarily politicized; they tend to approach ambitious endeavors as opportunities to spread tax booty and their priorities have less to do with achieving the goal than satisfying constituencies, often for politically correct reasons, with fatal results.

Here's a short, interesting evaluation of the proposal—an interview with MIT's David Mindell, professor of the History of Engineering and Manufacturing, as well as professor of aeronautics and astronautics, and director of MIT’s Program in Science, Technology, and Society.

Machines vs. Biomachines

Last week I went with my father and brother to see James Cameron's Avatar—in 3D no less. I have to say it was a well made film. The visuals were amazing and the plot well drawn if cliché: highly entertaining. The characters weren't all that deep, but then one doesn't see an action film for deep characterization. Technically this is what a Hollywood action film should be. (No spoilers in this post, with the exception clearly labeled below of the single paragraph on the final scene.)

From a philosophical point of view however, the film was highly deficient. Conservative commentators will no doubt remark on the rather overt environmental, anti-capitalist, and even anti-human message of the film.¹ (As one might expect from Hollywood, there are even a few allusions to U.S. tactics in current Middle East conflicts.) Frankly if the cruelty in the service of greed depicted in the film were typical of humans, it would be rather difficult to be pro-human.

But below the message about the relationship of rational (humanoid) creatures to their environment is a subtler message about their relationship to the world, in particular to their bodies. The human-wielded machines are clearly departures from nature, but Cameron's conception of "nature" is a far more insidious danger to the natural world.

The film sets out a conflict typical in science fiction: an advanced, technological civilization attacking a primitive, nature-loving society.² The humans are exploring exoplanet Pandora first of all to exploit its mineral wealth, but secondly to scientifically investigate its flora and fauna, including the indigenous Na'vi people. The main protagonist, Jake Sully, is a veteran marine (now paraplegic) sent to take the place of his recently deceased twin brother, who was part of a scientific mission to Pandora. The planet is hostile to humans, including an unbreathable atmosphere, so the scientists explore through remote-control "avatar" bodies. The bodies need to be hybrids of indigenous Na'vi and the human operator/driver (the actual words used in the Pandorapedia) so that a mental link can be established for full immersion into the Na'vi body's world. (The genetic hybridization makes it plausible for each avatar body to physically resemble its driver, conveniently linking the bodies/characters in the audience's mind.)

So effectively, these bodies are puppets. Immersive puppetry has disturbing consequences brilliantly spelled out in Charlie Kaufman's Being John Malkovich. Naturally what is true of immersive puppetry extends to the relationship between our own (human) bodies and souls: our bodies aren't really "ours" in the sense of being essentially connected (one body-one soul: anima forma corporis), but "ours" in the sense of possession, that is, demonic possession. Likewise, Avatar has a strong theme of mind-body dualism: thanks to modern science, bodies are somehow interchangeable and what defines a person is the untouchable, invisible and wholly transcendent mind or "personality." Cameron conceives of ourselves as having very little to do with our particular bodies: really our identities must have a broader corporeal basis than a few DNA similarities.

It would seem that the film is opposing nature and technology: humans use mechanistic technology, while Pandorans are close to nature. But look again. The "nature" of this world is likewise created in the image of the machine. For one the neuronal "linkages" between the Na'vi and the mounts (direhorses, mountain banshees) via the Na'vi rider's queue and the mounts' antennae is a simple reflection of the linkages that typify the internet age. The connection between the mount and the rider is different from that of the Amplified Mobility Platform (AMP) suit and its operator (cf. the power loader in Cameron's Aliens) only by being through neurons instead of mechanical sensors and electronics.

Pandoran bodies are likewise similar to machines. The mountain banshees have "air inlets, or spiracles, face forward at the front of the chest cavity, like the engine intakes of a jet fighter" with "unidirectional flow, venting aft through gill-like slits." The Na'vi are about twice the height of humans. It would be reasonable to attribute this fact to gravity half as large as Earth's, but the gravitational difference makes no noticeable visual difference to physical motion in the film. To overcome the scaling problem and make such oversized and extraordinary creatures structurally plausible, Cameron invokes "naturally occurring carbon fiber" to strengthen the bones of Pandoran animals.

Nature seems to take a back seat to politically correct doctrine as well. In Na'vi society, both women and men participate in the warrior culture. One has to wonder who takes care of the children (ironically, the ones whose lives the humans are supposedly so careless about late in the film). Of course it is possible that the grandparents or other relatives care for the children. But still, has it ever been known for a primitive society to disregard sex roles? If anything these differences tend to be more pronounced in more primitive societies: childbearing here is essential to community survival. It is only rich, "advanced" societies that can (apparently) afford to blur sex roles.

**SPOILER** Most morally troubling is the final scene, in which Jake, through the power of Eywa (the Na'vi diety) in the sacred tree, "uploads" his consciousness into his avatar body.³ Note that, unlike the earlier similar attempt with Dr. Augustine, Jake is not dying. Clearly then in this transfer, Jake (his body) is put to death so that his "mind" can "live on" in the Na'vi dummy. Notice that Jake's only physical problem is his paraplegia. Aside from the euthanasia in the simple sense of putting someone to death, there is a disturbing overtone that a handicapped person's life is less worthy of living.⁴

The final verdict is the movie's opposition of machine vs. nature is a false facade. The "nature" the film presents is a mechanical reconception of nature along mechanical, dualistic lines. The result is a technological view of the world as infinitely open to human manipulation and a consequentialist take on ethics.

Now, one might object that the film is surely to be understood as a work of fiction and not meant as a reflection of reality, especially with the world of the film clearly a fantastic, mechanical playground of the imagination. Whatever the intention, the photorealistic computer imagery, not to mention the 3D and souped-up audio undermine any audience detachment. Art, but particularly visual art, is very good at forming the imagination, especially of children, but very much of adults as well. Given the widespread currency of mind-body dualism, this film can only cement the dominance of this paradigm into our cultural mindset.

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Notes

1. Similar to the "straining a gnat and swallowing a camel" of criticizing the lyrics of rock music while passing the music itself.

2. Here is an insightful (if politically correct) piece on how the film represents a privileged white male perspective. Speaking of PC, the MPAA rating says, "Rated PG-13 for intense epic battle sequences and warfare, sensuality, language and some smoking." Yes, it's fine to saddle young people with a fallacious worldview that it will make it impossible for them to find happiness—just as long as they don't smoke!

3. From an Aristotelian perspective, it seems nearly inevitable that the driver would eventually "go native"—that the soul is the form of the body means it's not so much our souls that control our bodies (as if from far away), but our bodies and their senses, desires, and habits that dominate our souls, that in some sense constitute our souls. To be immersed in a world is to take that world as real.

4. Equally, Jake's paraplegia could also be a symbolic statement about the human condition, one that feeds into a gnostic view of the body as a prison. Such a view would explain Cameron's anti-Christianity, as evidenced by his 2007 film The Lost Tomb of Jesus.

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James Cameron, Avatar (Twentieth Century Fox, 2009).

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Update January 20, 2010: David Brooks has an insightful and superbly written piece on the film in the Times: "The Messiah Complex." Here's one particularly well written passage: "The peace-loving natives are at one with nature, and even have a fiber-optic cable sticking out of their bodies that they can plug into horses and trees, which is like Horse Whispering without the wireless technology. Because they are not corrupted by things like literacy, cellphones and blockbuster movies, they have deep and tranquil souls." The bottom line:

[The White Messiah fable the film embodies] rests on the stereotype that white people are rationalist and technocratic while colonial victims are spiritual and athletic. It rests on the assumption that nonwhites need the White Messiah to lead their crusades. It rests on the assumption that illiteracy is the path to grace. It also creates a sort of two-edged cultural imperialism. Natives can either have their history shaped by cruel imperialists or benevolent ones, but either way, they are going to be supporting actors in our journey to self-admiration.

DNA: Not the Master Molecule

Before I begin, let me wish everyone a safe, happy Thanksgiving celebration.

In researching a piece I'm working on, I read Richard Lewontin's "The Dream of the Human Genome." Like all of us, Lewontin has his ideological baggage, but his assessment of the limitations of genetics is excellent. Even when he's not exactly right, he's close enough to be a stimulating interlocutor.

Lewontin does an excellent job debunking the fallacies that have grown up around DNA. First he targets the language of DNA as somehow autonomous and self-reproducing: "The process of copying a photograph includes the production of a complementary negative which is then printed, but we do not describe the Eastman Kodak factory as a place of self-reproduction." After more superb material along this line, he next moves on to the conception of DNA as an active agent or "maker":

Not only is DNA incapable of making copies of itself, aided or unaided, but it is incapable of "making" anything else. The linear sequence of nucleotides in DNA is used by the machinery of the cell to determine what sequence of amino acids is to be built into a protein, and to determine when and where the protein is to be made. But the proteins of the call are made by other proteins, and without that protein-forming machinery nothing can be made. There is an appearance here of infinite regress (What makes the proteins that are necessary to make the protein?), but this appearance is an artifact of another error of vulgar biology, that it is only the genes that are passed from parent to offspring. In fact, an egg, before fertilization, contains a complete apparatus of production deposited there in the course of its cellular development. We inherit not only genes made of DNA but an intricate structure of cellular machinery made up of proteins.

It is the evangelical enthusiasm of the modern Grail Knights and the innocence of the journalistic acolytes whom they have catechized that have so fetishized DNA. There are, too, ideological predispositions that make themselves felt. The more accurate description of the role of DNA is that it bears information that is read by the cell machinery in the productive process. Subtly, DNA as information bearer is transmogrified into DNA as blueprint, as plan, as master plan, as master molecule. It is the transfer onto biology of the belief in the superiority of mental labor over merely physical, of the planner and designer over the unskilled operative on the assembly line. (143-144)

Lewontin touches on an excellent point in the last sentence.¹ There's a strong (Cartesian) dualism at work in the mechanical conception of the cell popular in biology these days. One landmark of genetics is Francis Crick's "Central Dogma" (1958) that postulates that genetic information flows only one direction: from DNA to RNA to proteins, and never in reverse. The only way the DNA can change is through random mutations. Thus we have a Master Molecule, like the Cartesian mind, enthroned in splendid isolation from the cell it governs. The Master Molecule cannot be modified except by Chance, which assumes the role of the machine's extrinsic designer (cf. ID theory). In reality, thanks to the work of Barbara McClintock and others, we know that while this picture of information flow is largely true, there are major exceptions. But the important point is not so much that the unidirectionality of information flow is wrong, but that what is wrong is the conception of this information as the all-important determination of the cell (or organism). Lewontin discusses this in the next selection:

Unfortunately it takes more than DNA to make a living organism. I once heard one of the world's leaders in molecular biology say, in the opening address of a scientific congress, that if he had a large enough computer and the complete DNA sequence of an organism, he could compute the organism, by which he meant totally describe its anatomy, physiology, and behavior. But that is wrong. Even the organism does not compute itself from its DNA. A living organism at any moment in its life is the unique consequence of a developmental history that results from the interaction of and determination by internal and external forces. The external forces, what we usually think of as "environment," are themselves partly a consequence of the activities of the organism itself as it produces and consumes the conditions of its own existence. Organisms do not find the world in which they develop. They make it. Reciprocally, the internal forces are not autonomous, but act in response to the external. Part of the internal chemical machinery of a cell is only manufactured when external conditions demand it. For example, the enzyme that breaks down the sugar lactose to provide energy for bacterial growth is only manufactured by the bacterial cells when they detect the presence of lactose in their environment.

Nor is "internal" identical with "genetic." Fruit flies have long hairs that serve as sensory organs, rather like a cat's whiskers. The number and placement of those hairs differs between the two sides of a fly (as they do between the left and right sides of a cat's muzzle), but not in any systematic way. Some flies have more hairs on the left, some more on the right. Moreover, the variation between the sides of a fly is as great as the average variation from fly to fly. But the two sides of a fly have the same genes and have had the same environment during development. The variation between sides is a consequence of random cellular movements and chance molecular events within cells during development, so-called "developmental noise." It is this same developmental noise that accounts for the fact that identical twins have different fingerprints and that the fingerprints on our left and right hands are different. A desktop computer that was as sensitive to room temperature and as noisy in its internal circuitry as a developing organism could hardly be said to compute at all. (147-148, emphasis added)

The organism cannot be reduced to its DNA. The DNA is not the Master Control Molecule, but is more like a library of recipes for making different things an organism's cells need in order to function. It's not that the DNA runs the cell, but that the cell uses the DNA as conditions (internal and external) demand.

Where Lewontin goes wrong is in his implicit acceptance of the conception of life as a machine (i.e., mechanism). Certainly he is right that the random variation of developmental noise is a sign that the organism isn't determined by its genetics and its environment. But more important than chance is the reality of the internality of the organism with which he begins the paragraph. No matter how good we get at explaining organismic activities with our reductionistic science, it will never do away with the fact that organism is not just a bunch of parts, but is a real self-determining whole. By "self-determining whole," I mean that it seeks to fulfill goals that belong to none of its parts separately. To see this, one has only to reflect on the fact that the parts of an organism are all replaceable: this or that protein or DNA molecule, or organelle can be swapped out for another of the same, but the organism retains its identity (in fact organisms continually renew themselves in this way). The drive to metabolize in order to remain living belongs to the organism as a whole, not to any of its parts (as such), which come and go. Whereas the organism must strive if it is to continue to exist, how it fulfills this demand is freely determined from within: the relative freedom of the internal milieu from external coercion is the source of its freedom.²

Another highlight of the article is that Lewontin makes clear the self-serving nature of geneticists' many outrageous claims. It's a tradition dating back to Galileo: scientists attract attention and funding through self-promotion. This point becomes painfully clear in an Evelyn Fox Keller article that Lewontin repeatedly references, "Nature, Nurture, and the Human Genome Project."

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Notes

1. I will refrain from pointing out that the planner is superior to the laborer in a real way. Lewontin may be confusing dignity (in which all honest work is equally good) with value (in which the planner is more indispensable than the laborer). The problem is not the conception of difference in value, but the conceptualization (which he aptly observes is widespread) of the parts' differentiation as analogous to planners and laborers.

2. For more on the subject of this paragraph, see my post Four Levels of Teleology, especially the parts on the work of Hans Jonas and Lenny Moss.

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Richard Lewontin, It Ain't Necessarily So: The Dream of the Human Genome and Other Illusions (New York: The New York Review of Books, 2001).

Evelyn Fox Keller, "Nature, Nurture, and the Human Genome Project" in The Code of Codes: Scientific and Social Issues in the Human Genome Project, ed. Daniel J. Kevles, Leroy Hood (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 1992), 281-299.

Hans Jonas, The Phenomenon of Life: Toward a Philosophical Biology (Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 2001/1966), esp. p. 126. See this previous post.

CONTEST: Name this Creature

Let me describe a hypothetical creature, a thought experiment to clarify the distinction between a machine and an organism, and perhaps you can come up with a name for it. It is based on the observation that flames share certain characteristics with living things: they have a “hunger” for food or fuel, and in some sense, they are constituted by what they consume. So why can’t we harness these characteristics to make a “living” machine?

Presumably we'd construct from metal, or from some sort of non-flammable material a body for our creature, something that houses the flames and channels them to create reactions more characteristic of an organism.

CONTEST QUESTION: What name would best capture the essence of this creature?

Also, I'd appreciate hearing you explain why this creature would NOT be living. What separates it from organisms?

Please submit your answers in comments to this post. Winners get special honors announced in a future post. I know nobody reads this blog, so maybe I'll set a deadline of one month, maybe two weeks if by some miracle I get a lot of good responses. We'll see how it goes....

Note: the photo of a mechanical soldier from Hellboy II: The Golden Army is just for interest. I'd be surprised if the creature I'm describing was what Guillermo del Toro had in mind, but images from the film did help me come up with this idea.

"You Shall Be as Gods"?

I was down at MIT yesterday and paid a visit to a campus feature that I'd long heard about, and never seen myself—there being no photographs of it on the web. I'd heard that MIT was so high on the power of technology that a building on campus featured the empty promise of the serpent in the Garden of Eden, "You shall be as Gods," inscribed on a wall.

Well I discovered that it is true that serpent's words are painted on a wall (in Latin), but their significance is not so clear.

Through some web research, I found that the inscription is in the Walker Memorial Building (MIT building no. 50) at 142 Memorial Drive, facing the Charles River. It's in the central food court; if you'd like to orient yourself, you can see a 360-degree VR of the entire room here.

Here's the online description of the mural from the campus paper, The Tech:

The murals in Walker Memorial have been enjoyed by diners since their completion in 1930. The murals were painted Edwin Howland Blashfield¹, who graduated in 1869. Everett Morss, after whom the hall is named, financed the venture. The following is a description of the murals printed in The Tech [“Alma Mater central figure in murals,” April 24, 1963] which was originally in a pamphlet written by James R. Killian '26 in 1935.

...

“Ye shall be as gods”

The left panel on the south....

The symbolic figure of the scientist stands between two great jars containing beneficent and maleficent gases, or constructive and destructive possibilities. the group below represents diplomats and officers at the council table of the world. In the upper section of the panel a figure of Hygeia is depicted placing a crown on the head of the scientist.

Animal figures symbolic of the dogs of war lurk beside the evil gases, while in the background may be seen the figure of Famine. The large figure standing in the shadow of the tree of knowledge represents Nature.

At the foot of the panel two children support an inscription from Genesis: “Ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil.”

I omitted the beginning of the description of the mural, which sets it up as presenting a definite moral:

The left panel on the south wall conveys the thought that chemistry has given mankind almost unlimited power and raised the question: shall the power be used to build up or demolish civilization?

In other words, the mural doesn't re-offer the serpent's false promise, but warns against using our technological powers to accept that promise, the Latin inscription of the promise being the "punch line" of the warning.

If only more MIT students read Latin.

But then you have to ask yourself: why reproduce a lie without clearly demarking it as such? The mural itself seems to be rather more ambiguous than the description. Is the emphasis on the dangers of technology to man and creation, or on the crowning of man as a god? The original empty promise is itself ambiguous, and what keeps its larger meaning from ambiguity in the Bible is the God's judgment of man: "There is a real God and you aren't he."

On the other hand, almighty God is absent from the mural, the closest replacements being the metaphorical Hygeia and the personification of Nature.² Certainly, the scientist is not exactly crowning himself, but it is not clear that Nature, in light of man's growing power, can maintain the superiority implied in the mural. (Lacking a creator god of some brand, Nature has no principles that originate in anything above man, so why shouldn't man manipulate natural principles at will?)

Certainly there is a dualism between the left and right sides, but is man portrayed as the master of good and evil, or is he also their recipient? The mural doesn't even carry any reminders of man's mortality per se (e.g., a skull).

In short, it is not clear that the mural isn't exalting the scientist and his power to dispense good and evil as he wishes. The mural could just as well be a celebration of man's supposed apotheosis as a warning against technological hubris.

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Notes

1. It turns out the artist, Edwin Howland Blashfield, also did the central mosaic of St. Matthew in St. Matthew's Cathedral in Washington, D.C.

2. Perhaps the artist could depend on the monotheistic cultural background of the audience at that time, but no longer. Maybe we should thank God more MIT students don't read Latin!

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"Walker Murals," The Tech 120:25 (May 5, 2000). [article in online edition only]

A Womb, Not a Factory

Movie Morphogenesis

Way back in 2005 when I reviewed The Island, I left off a discussion of the film's hypothetical technology for "manufacturing" human clones (a process that fills in some of the details for a fictional cloning process hinted at in Blade Runner).

In the film, the clones are grown to adulthood in plastic wombs. This process is interesting to examine. As good film-making practice recommends, it is not so much discussed as shown.

(I found a couple of those photos in a thorough review of the film; h/t Gamespot.com via Google image search)

They look like the plasticized cadavers from Body Worlds, don't they? The first shot inside the Incubation Silo shows clones at various stages of development. The plastic wombs are fed by umbilical tubes. The succeeding shots show successive stages of development. (You can click through some of the images to see larger versions.) The premise seems to be that if you're going to produce immediate adults, that you have to grow them from the inside out, starting with the circulatory system then moving to the skeletal system, the muscular system, and finally the skin.

Since the whole point of life is achieving the mature, adult form, doing so as quickly as possible would certainly be advantageous. We get a hint that there's something wrong with this movie morphogenesis for the reason that, if such a process existed, nature would have discovered it.

Before we get to a more precise analysis of the reasons this movie morphogenesis is purely fictional, we need to look more closely at what makes a living thing different from a non-living—even animated—thing.

An Organism, Not a Machine

A well-written article in latest issue of Touchstone elaborates on the point of how organisms are not human constructions or artifacts. A machine, like a Corvette, is constructed piece-by-piece by an external agent.

In construction, the form defining the entity arrives only slowly, as it is added from the outside. In development, the form defining a life (that which a major Christian tradition calls its "soul") is within it from the beginning....

Life is not formed or defined from the outside. Life defines and forms itself. Its form or nature is there, in its activated genes, and begins to manifest itself from the very first moment of its existence. The only things embryos need are food, oxygen, and protection from external hazards, not form. They don't need to be molded into a type of being. They are already a definite kind of being.

In other words, the womb doesn't assemble the new organism, but gives it the proper environment to allow it to develop itself. He defines development "as the continual presence but gradual appearance of a being." In other words, the being already exists but slowly unfolds or manifests itself fully.

Excellent. The only reservation I have is his implication that the embryo's form resides (exclusively) in the genes. No, the form resides in the whole of the zygote, with the genes being the primary organ of the form. (Most notably, maternal determinants, factors already present in the cytoplasm of the ovum, play a significant role in development.) Similarly, the human being is the whole of the body, with the brain and nervous system simply being the primary organs of the body's humanity.

It's worth contrasting the modern knowledge of ontogeny with the ancient speculation. Aristotle thought that the male's semen formed the embryo, which only acquired life after it had reached a certain point of development ("quickening"). We now know that development is much more organic than Aristotle thought (and thus more faithful to Aristotle's core ideas like natural form and matter).

The article illustrates the idea of development with an apt analogy.

Suppose you have taken a Polaroid picture of a jaguar darting out from a Mexican jungle. The jaguar has now disappeared, and so you are never going to get that picture again. As you are waiting for it to develop, I grab it and rip it open, thus destroying it. When you get angry with me, I just say blithely, "You're crazy. that was just a brown smudge. I cannot fathom why anyone would care about brown smudges." You would think I was the insane one. Your photo was already there. We just couldn't see it yet.

That is just what pro-lifers think when people say, "How can a microscopic dot have the same rights as a reader?" That microscopic embryo is a human being in the first stage of its development. We each started off looking like that. But we each have been the same organism and the same kind of being at every stage of our development.

The author points out that some object to abortion only because of the idea that it destroys something that will become valuable, not because it destroys something that is already valuable. The former and latter positions coincide with regard to late-term abortion, but diverge as the hypothetical intervention becomes earlier, and are most at odds at life's earliest stages, when issues like implantation and cloning are important. Some abortion opponents' fail to appreciate that a living thing is not like a machine.

Analysis of the Hypothetical Development Process

The fallacy in The Island's version of morphogenesis is evident in the observation that life is dynamic: it is as much as about the concrete process of development as it is about the end product. You can't carve an organism out of marble. Each part of your body is alive because it was formed through a concrete process of morphogenesis (body formation). Indeed what makes an organ an organ is that it is part of an organism. To bring about that body part (or a whole body) through a different process would make it something quite different. I suspect that it would be different even if the result looked the same, as the interaction of the parts in morphogenesis speaks to how the parts interact in the mature form: the organism is a whole not only at any given time, but throughout its life. Organisms are characteristically renewing their parts constantly; the process of forming the parts is of a piece with what allows the organism to maintain itself and renew damaged parts.

As we've seen, an organism is not a machine. It is the same being through every stage of its development, and all the various tissues in an organic body develop together interdependently. Think about it: not only do bones need the circulatory system to bring them nutrients for growth, but also the circulatory system cannot retain its shape without bones (for tissues to grow appropriately, nutrients need to be moved to the appropriate places). It's impossible to grow one without the other. The film treats the human body as if it were a machine that can be assembled in discrete parts or tissue types. It becomes more human as more is added, just like a car becomes more a car as parts are added.¹

In a real organism, its form precedes any of its component parts. The particular parts (this cell or this molecule) are irrelevant: the organism only needs particular kinds of cells or molecules. Notice that you existed as you before your body had any of the cells in your present adult form. In movie morphogenesis, the parts precede the form, just as they do for a machine.

At the very least, to get a body to develop in this way would require major tinkering with the genetic signaling pathways that lead to the development of the adult. In actual morphogenesis, the original or stem cells begin completely unspecialized, but their daughter cells increasingly specialize in successive generations (e.g., central or endodermal cells differentiate into various digestive organs, and to the specialized tissues of each organ). In movie morphogenesis, it seems that cells begin as specialized (circulatory) and then bring forth tissues with different specializations (e.g., bone, muscle, skin). Or else there's some sort of reservoir of undifferentiated cells that are gradually fed into the plastic womb and somehow figure out where to settle and how to differentiate without a complete corporeal context.

The film apparently treats the organism's cells as passive and only capable of growth. Animals cells are famously mobile in early stages of embryogenesis, and are known to migrate around the developing blastocyst: they aren't simply delivered, or just grow from pre-existing tissue. The film treats the human cells more like plant cells, which in their passivity are similar to components of a machine.

The screenplay draft by Caspian Tredwell-Owen (completed writing credits shared with Alex Kurtzman and Roberto Orci) posted online is rather different from the film. In it, the doctor making the sales pitch comments on the early failures in cloning:

So what do we learn from our mistakes? That human parts cannot grow outside a human body. That human bodies cannot grow outside nature's grand design.² (20)

Exactly. Nature's grand design: a womb, not a factory.

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Notes

1. In The Island, the customers (and the government) refrain from protesting the cloning process because they are told that the (adult) clones are kept in a vegetative state. The natural question to ask: why would this make any difference? Does someone's lack of consciousness make them less than human? If lack of consciousness impaired a person's rights, anesthesia would make murder legal. But equally neither should age or state of development: the organism is the same being at all stages of its development.

A less obvious question to ask: if the clones are grown like machines, to what extent are they truly organisms and thus truly human?

2. It may be significant that the doctor's name is Sanger. The sequel to these comments makes provocative sci-fi reading:

SANGER: I said the problem with a clone is it doesn't survive infancy. The solution is to find a different starting point. Why sow the seed when you can create the fruit? Or what we like to call... an "agnate".

An agnate is sequenced from a point on the cellular timeclock. It is spawned post-maturate. It is `created' adult. Of course, its brain is still vestigial so for the first three years we keep it in suspension. During which time we use data impression to supply a template for functionality - a process we call "foundation" . After foundation we transfer the agnate into "containment" where it enters the conditioning process . An ongoing series of quality controls designed to test and maintain its functionality. After a minimum of two years conditioning, the agnate becomes eligible for harvest...

What any of this actually means is anyone's guess. "Sequenced" sounds scientific, but what does it mean? Can one "sequence" the state an entire cell? No. The assumption seems to be that the DNA represents completely the state of development of the cell... and of the whole organism!

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Richard Stith, "Arresting Development: Human Beings Don’t Roll Off an Assembly Line," Touchstone 21:1 (Jan-Feb 2008), 32-35.

Michael Bay, The Island (Dreamworks SKG, 22 July 2005).

Also of interest: Jonas on Philosophical Biology

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Note: I'm headed to the March for Life in DC this week and probably won't get a chance to post again until I'm home. Hopefully the posts from last week will be enough to keep you busy.

Nanogenerators—for Good or Ill

I'm rather late reporting on this, but it's such an important development, that it cannot go unnoted. Scientists have developed a way to power nanodevices off ambient vibrations. The device consists of zinc oxide nanowires whose movement generates a tiny electrical current via the piezoelectric effect.

The salutary uses are the most obvious, and of course the ones touted by the inventor:

But Wang believes the nano-generator could be ideal for powering tiny devices, including those that may be implanted inside the human body. "Imagine self-powered force-sensors implanted in blood vessel walls, taking your blood pressure. Or generators in your shoes that can charge devices while you walk," he says.

Almost any device that could use a wireless, mobile power source could potentially use the nanogenerator, Wang says: "I have full confidence that within three years we will have something that is useful commercially." (New Scientist)

Whether or not Wang's prediction proves true, the fact of this technology marks a decisive change in the possibilities for the kind of technology we can implant in the human body. No longer will machines in vivo be limited to bulky external power supplies or the chemical dangers of miniature batteries.

But imagine the harm that could be done if someone designed a malicious device that could be implanted in your body. Perhaps a self-replicating nanomachine—essentially a human-made micro-organism. As always, technological development expands the possibility not only for good, but also for unparalleled mischief.

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Kevin Bullis, "Nano-generator could power tiny devices," Technology Review (April 27, 2006).

Michael Reilly, "Free Electricity from Nano Generators," New Scientist (05 April 2007).