Episode 107 - Organisms

Transcript

David: 0:04

Hello, and welcome to Overthink.

Ellie: 0:16

The podcast where two philosophers take ideas you didn't know were philosophy and show you that philosophy has a lot to say about them.

David: 0:24

One discipline to rule them all, baby. I'm Dr. David Peña Guzman.

Ellie: 0:31

I'm Dr. Ellie Anderson.

David: 0:34

Ellie, today I want to begin by telling you a little story about the biological world. And it's a story that I'm getting from the biologist Lewis Thomas, who writes about it in his book, The Medusa and the Snail. And it involves two species, two animals that live in the Bay of Naples in southern Italy.

Ellie: 0:54

Ooh, prime real estate.

David: 0:56

Yeah, so I'm going to call them Swirly for the snail and Medusa for the jellyfish. These creatures live in a symbiotic relationship. And I want you to visualize the following scene because it's a little bit convoluted and so it will require you to try to picture it: we are at the bottom of the ocean and we have our little friend Swirly dragging itself around on the ocean floor. And if you close in on Swirly, you'll realize that he has a little bump attached to the side of his mouth. It could look like a pimple if he were a human being, but it is in fact a parasite.

Ellie: 1:35

As somebody who has a pimple by the side of my mouth right now, this is, personal. You're seeing it on Zoom, aren't you?

David: 1:42

You, you are Swirly, my friend, you are Swirly.

Ellie: 1:45

So I was really your Medusa.

David: 1:47

Yeah, so Swirly has a little thing on the side of the mouth that is actually a parasite. But it is not a typical parasite. It's a little tiny jellyfish that is attached to its body. Or rather, to be more exact, it is what remains of a jellyfish that the snail has previously fed on.

Ellie: 2:09

Okay, so I just went from imagining a very cute little tiny jellyfish to picturing this like decomposing flesh of a jellyfish leg.

David: 2:19

that's correct, with the exception that it's not a decomposed body part. It's actually a parasite that is technically still alive. It cannot live on its own apart from the snail. But, and this is the really bizarre thing, it can reproduce. It can have babies, the parasite.

Ellie: 2:38

Wait, with whom?

David: 2:39

By itself!

Ellie: 2:41

Oh. See, I'm, the limits of my knowledge of jellyfish reproduction and the fact that I just said jellyfish leg is really revealing a lot here.

David: 2:50

I know. Flesh and bones for the jellyfish. And so the parasite can have babies. And in fact, it does. It releases them onto the ocean, and those babies then go on to become normal adult jellyfish that live in the Bay of Naples. the parasite has its own babies. But the snail does too. The snail has its own offspring. And when those are really, young, because they share an environment with all these adult jellyfish, occasionally they get mopped up by the jellyfish, they get trapped in their tentacles, and eventually they get lodged inside of the jellyfish's umbrella body.

Ellie: 3:34

So we've got all these Swirly Juniors who are now all up in Medusa Junior's body.

David: 3:40

Yes, and so it seems as if the tables have turned, and now Swirly is trapped on the body of Medusa, whereas before it was Medusa that was attached to the body of Swirly.

Ellie: 3:54

Medusa and Swirly the first.

David: 3:57

Yes, so now we're talking about their descendants.

Ellie: 4:00

The next generation.

David: 4:02

Yeah, but in fact, it's not the case that the tables have turned, because even though the new Medusas trap the new swirlies inside of their larger bodies. It's not as if they kill them or digest them. Rather, the snail is just living there. Swirly is just hanging out under Medusa's body, and it starts eating Medusa from the inside out.

Ellie: 4:26

Gross!

David: 4:26

And so this new relationship emerges, whereas Swirly is eating Medusa from Inside it starts growing and Medusa starts slowly, shrinking because it's literally being chomped on by this little Swirly underneath it.

Ellie: 4:44

so ultimately does Medusa Jr. suffer the same fate as her mother, which is that now she's going to be reduced to a pimple on Swirly Jr.'s side?

David: 4:54

That's exactly what happens. She gets reduced to a vestigial parasite, to use the biological term, that is attached to the side of the mouth of the Swirly that feeds on it, and it ceases to be an individual. It becomes a parasite. It cannot live apart from Swirly's body, but again, it can reproduce. And so this creates a cycle that goes on and on with each of these two animals. Effectively becoming a stage in each other's reproductive cycle. And the biologist Lewis Thomas, whom I just mentioned, who tells the story, says that this is a really powerful illustration of the fact that some organisms live in such close symbiosis with one another in nature, that it's actually impossible for us to tell where the boundaries of one end and the other one begin. So it's about the limits of the concept of self and individual when we're talking about the animal kingdom.

Ellie: 6:00

Today we're talking about organisms.

David: 6:03

How has our understanding of organisms been shaped by German philosophy?

Ellie: 6:08

Why do some philosophers critique the idea of the organism?

David: 6:12

And what should be the role of organisms in biology today?

Ellie: 6:24

So listeners might be like, what do philosophers have to say about organisms? Aren't organisms a matter for the sciences, especially biology? We're here to tell you that philosophy has a lot to say about organisms. And I want to say, All due respect to our science colleagues, in fact my friend Charlotte is a biology professor who loves Overthink and is probably listening to this episode, but the episode will not be about how biology views organisms because there's a whole subfield of organism biology and we are not experts in that field. David, you do specialize in philosophy of science and you'll talk about philosophy of biology later in the episode, but I just want to be clear from the jump that this is about how philosophers understand the concept of organisms.

David: 7:09

Yeah, exactly. The emphasis will be on the concept. And you could actually say that a lot of how biology understands organisms is deeply indebted to the history of philosophy, but we're not going to be focusing on that claim necessarily on this episode.

Ellie: 7:25

Yeah, if you're a bio major, then you can be drawing those conclusions on your own. Because I want to start by talking about a thinker who developed a very influential view of organisms in 1790, our guy Immanuel Kant. And it's actually quite beautiful. So for those of you who like me are more art girlies than science girlies, I think you'll still really like this. I hope you actually started this episode rather than being like, what is this topic? Because in fact, Kant's account of the organism is found in his Critique of the Power of Judgment, better known as the Third Critique, which is where he develops his philosophy of nature as well as his philosophy of art. So for Kant, there are some real similarities between the domain of nature and the domain of art. Kant says here that organisms, or what he calls organized beings, in the translation, are self generating and internally organized. So organisms have formative power, and this makes them different from mechanisms. Mechanisms, like a watch, say, have the power of movement. The watch can tick on its own once it's programmed to do so. But they're not self forming.

David: 8:32

Exactly. And in developing this view, Kant was influenced by Georges-Louis Leclerc, Conte de Buffon, who was an 18th century French naturalist, who observed that organisms must be self synthesizing forms - because there is no way that they could be mechanistic. And the reason for that has to do with the logic of development. Organisms develop, of course, we go from being tiny little zygotes to full blown adult creatures. And according to Conte de Buffon, you simply cannot contain the larger in the smaller. The little zygote cannot contain all the information that is needed for the development of the adult form. So they must somehow unfold internally from within in a non mechanistic way. And so Kant picks up on this idea, which ultimately led the Conte de Buffon in a vitalist direction to assert this essential life principle that separates the living from the mechanic, which is a direction that Kant does not actually follow in his own thinking.

Ellie: 9:43

Yeah, although a lot of other people after Kant, following the Romantic tradition that we'll talk a little bit about later, do pick up on that vitalism.

David: 9:49

Exactly. Yeah. Yeah.

Ellie: 9:51

Related to this as well, for Kant it's really important that the organism is understood as a whole. The whole is more than the sum of its parts. Technically speaking, the idea of the whole precedes the idea of its parts. So leaves make sense only as part of a plant, for instance. And in addition, in organisms, all the parts are mutually causes and effects of one another. So it's wrong to say that the brain causes a response in the hand, for instance, because all parts of the organism are so mutually constituting that we could equally say that the hand causes a response in the brain.

David: 10:29

Yeah, and the language of something being simultaneously cause and effect is something that appears a lot in writing about how organisms are not the same as machines and where the difference between those two exactly lies. And it really hinges on the idea that there is a kind of reciprocal causation at work in living beings whereby they have to synthesize the very materials out of which they are made, right? The organism in developing produces bone, produces muscle tissue, produces neurons, and they have to do that without the aid of some external principle. They cannot get muscle from somewhere else, in the same way that we might add parts to a machine from without. And just to be clear, This emphasis on organisms being cause and effects of themselves is precisely what makes Kant a biological exceptionalist. He basically thinks that physics cannot explain certain aspects of reality, and those aspects are living organisms. So biology in many ways is irreducible to physics, which is a little bit strange, I think, given that the whole reason behind the Kantian architectonic was for Kant to defend Newtonian physics and to explain how Newtonian mechanics is possible in the first place. And yet in the third critique, in the critique of judgment, here we have Kant saying that in fact, Newtonian mechanics faces a limit of explanation when it comes to living organisms. And there's a very famous passage in the Third Critique where Kant basically says that this non mechanistic nature of living beings is the reason why there will never be a Newton of a blade of grass. In other words, there will never be a scientist who will do to biology what Newton did to physics, which is explain all the mechanistic laws that exhaust it.

Ellie: 12:30

I had my bio professor friend Charlotte in my head a moment ago, and now I have my brother in law in my head, who's a physicist, who recently published an article on his lab research, which had to do with applying a model from physics to the experience of dreaming and what's happening in the brain during dreaming. So I feel like he would majorly take issue with this idea that physics and biology are fundamentally different realms. I do think we're living certainly in a day and age where methods from not only physics but also from the computational sciences like cybernetics even, have been applied to the brain such that now it seems really natural for people to talk about the brain causing a response in the hand and not vice versa to go back to that example that I used before. But yeah, I think a lot of scientists would also take issue with this idea that we can't think about physics and biology in tandem.

David: 13:24

Yeah. And of course, biology has evolved quite a bit since the 18th century when Kant is writing, but so has physics, right? So even within physics, now we have new methods and new frameworks for thinking about inert matter that are not consistent with Newtonian mechanics, right? Think about the sort of fuzzy logic of quantum mechanics. Think about the emergence of nonlinear emergent dynamics, so on and so forth. And so even within physics, there has been the creation of new ways of thinking that push the boundary beyond this more classical Newtonian framework. But even there are people who believe that whatever methods physics is using to understand matter and motion will never suffice to give a full account of life.

Ellie: 14:12

Kant's reasoning for this is that the purposiveness in an organism is distinct from the chain of cause and effect as we understand it in physics. He thinks that nature, here we're talking about organisms, in this context, has a unique causality. The organization of nature isn't analogous with any other causality, let alone being the same as any other causality, and he thinks that the human mind just can't wrap its head around how the whole can be both cause and effect of its parts. The human mind tends to want a unidirectional comprehension of causality. We want to see a cause and then an effect. But that's just not how the causation of nature works. Like I said, it's not that the brain causes the hand to move, it's that we could equally say that the brain causes the hand to move and that the hand causes the brain to move because there's just this unique, different kind of causality. And this also has to do with this idea that nothing in the organism is purposeless. Nothing is merely a means to an end. Any means is also an end, specifically an end of nature. So he says it might always be possible that in an animal body, there could be things we could conceive as effects of merely mechanical laws. But just because we can conceive of something in the body as the result of a merely mechanical law doesn't mean that it is. In fact, everything we experience as cause or effect, means or end, has to be considered as organized in relation to the whole, itself. And even though Kant is in some ways very much a rationalist, he also emphasizes the limits of the human mind. And he says that one thing that happens when we study nature itself, beyond just individual organisms, is that we actually have to treat nature as if it is an organism. Because nature, like individual organisms, seems to have a rational purpose. Nature appears to us as though there's some design behind it, but we can't actually know whether there is some design behind it. We can't know whether nature has indeed a rational purpose. So we simply must act as if nature is an organism. And after Kant, some of his successors in the tradition of Romanticism take this further and they remove the as if. They're like, actually, no, we don't just have to act as if nature is an organism. We just want to say nature is an organism.

David: 16:36

It's just forget the pretense there. Although the language of the "as if" is really important for understanding Kant, because it is pervasive in his writings, it's there in his It's moral theory. We act as if we are free moral agents, as if we have free will, but we cannot really know it, right? It's an idea of reason. It's not something that the categories of the understanding can really help us with. And in religion, we can also act as if the world was created by God and had a beginning in time, but we don't know that for a fact. And moving from morality and religion, then over to biology, as you point out, Ellie, we act as if nature has a purpose because that pretense helps us make judgments about nature. It helps us try to understand nature, but we have to keep in mind that this is not in fact known. So there is that element of pretending for the sake of understanding or not understanding, but of gaining some kind of knowledge and getting our grip on the natural world. And down the road from the perspective of the later romantics, in fact, Kant's philosophy of the "as if" is really limited and limiting because it doesn't actually break down what they take to be the perceived difference between mind and nature. The romantics really want to blur that distinction and in fact assert the identity of the two. And from their perspective, the Kantian move of saying, Oh, we simply act as if nature has a rational purpose of teleological structure that just reeks of dualism because it maintains reason and nature as separate domains.

Ellie: 18:16

Yeah. And one of the thinkers in the Romantic tradition, Schelling, develops the idea that identity, so not just nature, but identity, including the identity of the mind, has an organismal structure. Because the organism is what transforms everything internal, but other to it, into itself. Mechanism and matter in an organism are no longer just mechanism or matter, but integral parts of the whole that is self determining. That's what we talked about before. And there's a way that anything that might seem to be mechanical in the body or in the organism gets transformed into part of the overall purpose. And so the same is true for Schelling of the human mind. The organism and the mind transform effects into purposes, and anything in them is integral parts of the whole, where the whole is self determining.

David: 19:05

I haven't read Schelling in a very long time, but this analogy between mind and organism would depend on whether we agree that things like identity and mind are structured like an organism in the sense that they also have internal components or organs? Does a mind have like its own compositional forms in the same way that like an organism has livers and hearts and limbs? So I don't know. I don't know about that. I wonder about the analogy.

Ellie: 19:37

Yeah. certainly people who are, like, obsessed with equating the brain and mind today would say yes. oh, we have the amygdala and we have this and that, but even though I'm not a substance dualist, I do think that there is something really different about the structure of the mind relative to the material structure of the body in the sense that one has parts and the other does not.

David: 19:57

And from what you said a minute ago, it seems like the reason why Schelling makes this analogy is because he sees organisms as essentially appropriating things that are external to them. So for example, when I eat something that is not David, like a plant, my body transforms that eventually into part of itself, right? It turns into tissue, it turns into blood, it turns into whatever my body is made of. And so there is a transformational power of the organism of turning difference into identity. And I wonder whether we want to say the same thing about mind. And I find that idea very intriguing and titillating. The idea that the mind itself, whenever it latches to something, probably through thought or through perception, turns it into stuff of mind and then can put it to do its bidding. Now, independently of what we think about this Schellingian approach of using the organism largely as a framework for thinking about other things like the mind, this model does become quite common in the 19th and later 20th centuries with all kinds of philosophers and theorists defending organismal interpretations of all kinds of things, right? There are organismal interpretations of history where history is an organism, or of language, or of the nation state. And at that point, you really have to pause and consider whether the model itself may be adding a lot more conceptual and metaphorical baggage than maybe we want a model or framework to add.

Ellie: 21:35

Yeah, we wouldn't have the modern concept of organizations without this notion of organism, but one question is how far we can actually take this biological metaphor or not. I don't want to like shamelessly plug our bonus episode, but this question of the potentially like political implications of the organism as applied beyond biological organisms is something that the Marxist philosopher Lukács talked about and that's something that I have saved for our bonus segment.

David: 22:09

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In their book, A Thousand Plateaus: 22:32

Capitalism and Schizophrenia, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari draw a distinction between two modes of thinking about reality that they call the arborescent and the rhizomatic mode. The arborescent modality foregrounds unity and entities with clear spatial-temporal boundaries. While the rhizomatic emphasizes connection, flows, multiplicity, and sees individuality as something that can exist in reality, but it's ultimately derivative of a perhaps more fundamental reality that is composed of connections, currents of desire, and forces that flow in a field of immanence, much like a rhizome, which is a biological structure that is created by fungi. And this amounts to a difference between a mode of thinking that, as Deleuze and Guattari say, territorializes, and one that deterritorializes.

Ellie: 23:31

And as coauthors, Deleuze, by the time he started to write works with Guattari, he was already an established philosopher. He'd written a lot of very interesting books on his own, and Guattari was a psychoanalyst, who some people think brought the unhinged character of some of their coauthored works to the table. I think this mode of collaboration mimics this idea that there is not some sort of singular center or organizing principle to what they're trying to explain. They're trying to deterritorialize, I think, also by simply coauthoring.

David: 24:12

No, their book definitely feels like a rhizome, and like some fungi, it gives you a psychedelic trip.

Ellie: 24:18

some people like that more than others. I will say I much prefer Deleuze's solo-authored works to his co-authored And actually, we might've talked about this a little bit in the trees episode where we talked about the arborescent and rhizomatic model. I don't see so much wrong with the arborescent model, to be honest. Like I think this idea that it's associated with, that it's like honestly cringe or not trendy or associated with bourgeois capitalism. I just think that's really an overstatement. Yeah, like I'm not really down with all the deterritorializing that they're trying to achieve.

David: 24:50

So I was totally into Deleuze and Guattari when I was in grad school and into A Thousand Plateaus, and I went back and reread large portions of that book, and I am not on that bandwagon any more.

Ellie: 25:02

Why not?

David: 25:03

I really do think it's disordered thinking. I think it's hard to follow their point and it demands too much of a reader.

Ellie: 25:13

Disordered thinking, David! You sound like such a normie!

David: 25:17

I know.

Ellie: 25:17

You're like obsessed with destabilizing the line between the normal and the pathological and you're just like, Deleuze and Guattari have a writing disorder.

David: 25:26

No, maybe I should just say it's too experimental. That's the better term for it, because the way they wrote it is they would just write a little and then the other person would take over and then the other person would take over. So they, really tried to be rhizomatic in their approach and it shows.

Ellie: 25:40

Yeah, my sense is that Deleuze's strength is also his weakness, which is that he's extraordinarily creative. And I think that is part of what makes him such an interesting philosopher. But I also think that creativity for creativity's sake is not a virtue. And sometimes it's we've been using the arborescent model, but we need to break out of that. Or just his desire, he talks in Difference and Repetition about needing to break out of the traditional image of thought. And I'm just like, yeah, but for, to what end? Like, why? and where should we be going? I don't see creativity for creativity's sake as something to really valorize.

David: 26:16

Yeah. And so here you see it in this book with the proliferation of concepts and neologisms...

Ellie: 26:21

Is this the one where they say that God is a lobster?

David: 26:23

Yeah, God is a lobster because it's a point of articulation, right? Like it, can go one way or the other. So it's a binary logic or a digital logic. So yeah speaking about organisms, God is an organism and it's a crustacean.

Ellie: 26:37

But, I don't think they would say the lobster is even an organism, right? So, tell us where you're going with this. Okay.

David: 26:43

Yeah. The reason we're talking about this is because they filed the concept of organism under the arborescent model of thinking. And as a way of going beyond organismal thinking, they propose this counter concept, which is their infamous body without organs. And the body without organs. A lot has been written about it. Some of it is good. Some of it is not so good, but it doesn't really mean what it sounds like it means. It doesn't mean an organism literally without internal structures like lungs or stomachs. It rather should be read as a body without fixed organization. So the body without organs is a plane of existence that enables life to experiment with the boundaries and the forms of the possible and to enter into ever new assemblages, much like their own writing style. And while the concept has been critiqued by a number of people for being weirdly abstract, I actually don't think that's a fair criticism because they do give a lot of examples in A Thousand Plateaus of what they mean by the body without organs. And revealingly, most of those examples are biological. But they are examples specifically of animals whose mode of life you would not be able to understand if you apply to them the classical conservative biological model of the organism as a bounded solitary subject with clear self other distinctions.

Ellie: 28:22

They would love Swirly and Medusa.

David: 28:25

Yeah, exactly. Exactly. And so they don't talk about Swirly and Medusa, sadly, but they do talk, for example, about ants, which form colonies, and that's how they live their social lives. And so in order to understand ant behavior, you have to think about not just organisms, but super organisms.

Ellie: 28:43

But wait, a super organism would still be an organism, right? What's the difference between an organism and a super organism?

David: 28:51

So a super organism would be like an ant colony, but we cannot really say that the ant colony as a whole is sentient or has a mind, even though it does show intentional behavior. And so that's where it keeps some elements of the traditional model, but it also challenges some of them because we cannot really say that it's alive.

Ellie: 29:12

So an organism has sentience and a mind, but super organisms do not.

David: 29:17

Yeah, so for instance, you could think about a flock of birds as a super organism because of the flock phenomena of all the birds moving at once. So the whole shows seemingly sentient conscious behavior. Yeah.

Ellie: 29:30

Sure. But I'm just trying to get clear on why we wouldn't just call an ant colony and, a flock of birds an organism. I'm not saying we should, but I'm just trying to get clear on that because the flock of birds and the ant colony do seem to exhibit intentional behavior to me. So I actually, and I actually think some philosophers of mind, if you're interested in extended mind theories might say, yeah, an ant colony and a flock of birds do have minds. And it also seems to me that there are plenty of organisms that do not have minds, like a lot of plants.

David: 30:04

But it's because they are decomposable and recomposable, right? You can pull all the ants apart and the superorganism disappears, but then you can put them back together and it reemerges. But we can't do that with our limbs, right? We'd be quartered to death.

Ellie: 30:19

Okay. That, makes sense to me. So there's something about the internal organization that is required for organisms, but not for super-organisms.

David: 30:27

Yeah, and the stability.

Ellie: 30:28

So why are they so anti internal organization? You mentioned the word conservative. It doesn't strike me that, affirming internal organization as a feature of what it is to be an organism, is a bad thing.

David: 30:38

No, it's not a bad thing, but it does prevent you from understanding the natural world. Because if you just take the conservative model, then you would only look at ants individually. And you would not really understand why they do some of the things that they do. And that requires a shift in perspective, which is why in this book, they also give a bunch of other examples. They talk about packs of wolves, there's a very famous passage where they talk about the symbiotic relationship between wasps and certain orchids, where they say that the union of the two is the rise of a new assemblage that is irreducible to its components. So they, really like things that create new formations.

Ellie: 31:20

Okay, but then why not just say that there is a place for organisms in philosophy and in biology, but they can't tell us the whole story? Why isn't it just, we need to supplement the notion of organism? Why is it let's actually talk about body without organisms or without organization?

David: 31:36

So yes, because for them, once you start shifting from the organism to these other forms of assemblages, you start to get a sense of the fact that what you're looking at are shifting flows of life and desire. So it leads you towards their metaphysics of movement and becoming. And so, surely there is a purpose that the concept of organism has to play in biological thinking. Because in fact, for them, the arborescent mode is something that emerges out of the rhizomatic, right? there are all these flows that are bubbling up with possibilities. And occasionally they give rise to some stable structures, much like a rhizome gives rise to a mushroom. But the point is that the mushroom or the organism is not ontologically primary, as biologists and philosophers typically will argue. So it's about ontological primacy.

Ellie: 32:32

Yeah, and this way of thinking about what we thought of as primary as actually not primary is a really common move in French philosophy from this period. I think indebted to Heidegger, but that's another story. And so it seems to be that, yeah, in trying to destabilize the notion of unity or organism from primacy. They're emphasizing a different mode of connection that I was going to say organization, but I can't say that

David: 33:02

No, and at one point in A Thousand Plateaus, they described their way of thinking as connectivist, because they do want to foreground relationality and complexity in webs of existence, rather than individual nodes in those webs. But I have to say, in light of what you said earlier about, whether or not we keep the concept of the organism, that Deleuze and Guattari also say that, look, even the classical concept of the organism doesn't really live up to itself, because if you think about what an organism in the more classical sense is, like you and I, Ellie, we're both organisms. We still blur the line between inside and outside through phenomena like respiration and metabolism, which is why they argue that we should not think of living beings as structures, but rather as structurations. So living beings are verbs rather than nouns.

Ellie: 34:00

What is the difference between a structure and a structuration? That just sounds semantic to me.

David: 34:04

No, it's not a thing. That's why they say it's an activity rather than a substance. And a structuration, by definition, can always change in the moment.

Ellie: 34:17

Okay. Cause I've just, I've never heard the word structuration.

David: 34:19

Yeah, they use that term. That's their word, that organisms are structurations.

Ellie: 34:25

I guess I would say then that if we're thinking about even the classical notion of the organism as always already in an exchange with what is outside of it, which I do think is very compatible with what we talked about with Schelling earlier, who thinks that what distinguishes mechanism from the organism is or the organism's ability to internalize or appropriate what is outside it, then I just don't see why we need to do away with this concept or even destabilize it. And I will say, one thing that I always struggle with in thinking about this notion of the body without organs from Deleuze and Guattari is when we're talking about structuration, we still need an agency doing that structuring. And even if agents and structures are not exactly analogous - we do need agents for the act of structuration.

David: 35:16

I don't agree.

Ellie: 35:17

Acts need actors.

David: 35:19

Yeah, maybe, but an act is not the same as a structuration. So if you think about the process whereby crystals crystallize, that is the formation of a structure, but I would never argue that crystals are agents. I would also argue that the formation of a double helix DNA strand through replication is a structuration. It's life taking a particular form, but there is no agent necessarily in the sense of a subject. So I think there is form giving activity in nature that is not the cause of a minded being.

Ellie: 35:56

So I'm with you on that. I just was understanding you to be talking about structuration as an act. Did I misunderstand that?

David: 36:03

No, I think it's, so for them, I think it's an event. there are things that happen and organisms are such events, which is why they often get read in the tradition of process philosophy. And one thing to point out here is that in the same way that life has, they don't use this language, but I'm going to use it. An impulse to certain forms and structures, it also carries within itself the seed of those structures' very demise, because it's in the very logic of life to undo the things that it creates. And they give the example of genetics, right? We know that we cannot predict what particular mutations will happen when organisms reproduce, but we know as a matter of fact, that mutations will happen because error is part of the essence of life. And there is a quote in A Thousand Plateaus where they say, there is no genetics without genetic drift. And so life generates, but it also deviates. While Deleuze and Guattari rail against the supremacy of the organism in biology, the analytic philosopher Denis M. Walsh complains about the exact opposite: about what he perceives to be the disappearance of organisms from biological discourse over the last 100 years, which he talks about in his book Organisms, Agency, and Evolution. And Walsh begins by Essentially saying that organisms have always posed a challenge to the natural sciences precisely because they resist mechanistic reduction. We have already discussed that in connection to Kant and in relation to the Comte de Buffon. But recently, biology has moved in a direction such that organisms have effectively dropped out entirely from its radar.

Ellie: 38:20

Okay, so this is something I know absolutely nothing about. So I'm curious to know, yeah, what this means, because as somebody who doesn't know about this debate, I would assume that, due to the definition of biology, studies living beings, and I think living beings are often considered in terms of organisms. I guess I don't get, if they're not studying organisms, what are biologists studying?

David: 38:55

So that's Walsh's point, like, what are you guys doing? You're supposed to be studying organisms, but it all has to do with the historical evolution of biology since the middle of the 19th century. And nowadays, if you ask your friend in the biology department what the essence of contemporary biological science is, they are likely to tell you that it's what is known as the modern synthesis. And the modern synthesis is just basically the unification of two ways of thinking about nature. Darwin's theory of evolution from the 19th century and modern genetics. So in the 1930s, there was this effort to reconcile them and to say, Oh, actually these two work really well together and they explain the diversity of life forms that we see in the world. Now, the problem here, and this is where Walsh articulates his critique quite convincingly, he says, If you're a Darwinian and you're interested in evolution through natural selection, the thing that you're studying is not individual organisms. You're studying populations. You're studying those kind of like large scale phenomena that are supraorganismal, that are above the organism, like species and populations. Whereas those biologists that are a little bit more interested in genetics, they don't really study organisms, they study genes. And a really common refrain in 20th century genetics has been that organisms are just like the passive vessels of the activity of the genes and that the genes really are the heroes of evolution. And so the modern synthesis has crushed organisms out of existence and either sublated them into populations on the side of Darwinism or reduce them to genes on the side of genetics.

Ellie: 40:50

So maybe biology has gotten so into the flocks of birds that it's forgotten about the individual bird or it's gotten so Interested in the evolution of the Medusas over time that it's forgotten about our individual Medusa friends? And if so, what kind of drawbacks might there be to biological knowledge and practice that we're seeing? Is it just maybe that biology realized that studying individual organisms wasn't what it should be doing?

David: 41:16

So you're right that biology is losing the tree for the forest or for the genes, like up or below.

Ellie: 41:23

Losing the... Oh, yeah!

David: 41:26

Yeah, it's losing the tree for the forest.

Ellie: 41:28

Nice inversion there. I was like, what?

David: 41:30

Yeah, and his worry really is that biology is losing pretty significant explanatory power, and it ultimately misunderstands its object, which is the living world, right? What the Greeks called bios. Now, if we just focus on gene pools, or population dynamics, it means that we stop asking questions about individuals, their mode of life, and we fail to see the role that individual organisms play in shaping, not just evolution, but even their own genetics. And so he wants to move away from a passive view of organisms, where organisms are just like passively picked off by nature in terms of deciding who lives and who dies, to an active one where organisms are through their activity as subjects, guiding and directing evolution in all kinds of intelligent ways.

Ellie: 42:26

But how do they do this then? The idea of an organism directing its evolution is interesting but is definitely not how I learned biology in high school. Because it's not as though an organism can decide which genes it will pass on to its offspring, right? I know there have been, like, I hear whispers from my friends who work more in this space that there have been some real advances in genetics recently. They are opaque to me, I haven't studied them, so I don't know quite how far they go, but I do know, with our fancy genetic technologies like CRISPR, we can edit genes, but that requires, this outsourcing of technology, and that's not on the table for non-human animals.

David: 43:08

Yeah, so you're right, we cannot decide which genes we pass at the moment of procreation, but there are things that we do that have evolutionary impact according to Walsh. So one example of the things that organisms do is niche construction, right? Organisms mold the world. They don't just fit themselves into existing gaps in nature. So you can think about classic examples of niche construction, like literally the creation of nests. But you can also think about any activity by which an organism makes itself at home in the world, or rather makes a world digging, building dams, building colonies.

Ellie: 43:49

My favorite example is prairie dogs' little underground homes, like their little networks of tunnels, and they have a lot of rooms. Anybody who grew up in L. A. knows that the L. A. Zoo has an exhibit of prairie dog homes, or at least they did when I was a kid, that's tricked out like a dollhouse. Like they have human furniture, but doll sized for the prairie dogs. It

David: 44:09

sounds like a very accurate depiction of their habitats. a more technical example that's actually super important for Walsh is that organisms actually can program their own genes. We do that. And the answer here has to do with the nature of development and epigenetics. So we know that genes are not static, right? So you inherit a set of genes from your parents, but we have learned over the last 50 years that experience and development can actually alter your genes. You see this again in research on epigenetics, where certain environmental stressors and triggers can induce changes in the genome that then get passed down to your offspring. And you also see it on research in developmental plasticity, according to Walsh, where organisms show this ability that's almost magical to change the way in which they are developing in response to stressful conditions. And then that new mode of development gets inherited by their offspring. And so we're learning that there is a much more intricate connection between evolution, development, and experience than, we used to think maybe when you and I, Ellie, were back in high school learning the central dogma of biology, which is that once you are born, your genes are fixed and there is nothing you can do about that.

Ellie: 45:42

What would be an example of an organism being able to change its own development, whether it's in response to the stressful conditions that you mentioned or something else?

David: 45:52

Yeah, so one of the most frequently cited lines of research has to do with rats. And we know that rats that are exposed to extremely stressful situations early on in their childhood, like conditions of high stress, conditions of famine and scarcity, display certain genetic changes that alter which genes ultimately get expressed. Now, the story here would be more complicated if I were to go into detail, but because it doesn't actually change the genes. It rather changes operator genes, which are genes that determine which other genes get expressed and which ones do not. So it's almost as if there, there are these genes that decide you're on, you're off for other genes, and that's where epigenetics often thrives. And so in these cases, when the organisms are exposed to famine, they start turning on and off certain genes that would make them more resilient in that circumstance. And then that turning on and off gets passed down to the next generation. But it's something that was acquired. from experience rather than from their genotype at conception.

Ellie: 47:05

And obviously Kant was writing well before we knew what genes were, but I wonder whether this might add further support to his view that organisms are the kind of thing where cause and effect are mutually constitutive, now just including the genes, right? We're made by genes, but we also make them.

David: 47:28

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