Is There Purpose in Biology?: The Cost of Existence and the God of Love. By Denis Alexander,

Chapter 5- The Christian Matrix Within Which Biology Flourishes

We are reviewing the book: Is There Purpose in Biology?  The Cost of Existence and the God of Love. By Denis Alexander.  Chapter 5- The Christian Matrix Within Which Biology Flourishes.

Alexander returns to the point he made in the beginning discussions in this book. That is that Purpose (with a capital P) is consistent with the evolutionary story, even though it cannot be directly derived from it; it must be imposed upon it by human reflection and interpretation.  He notes that Darwin’s own worldview was Christianity as he puzzled over the vast amount of observation and data that came from his famous voyages on the Beagle (even if Darwin later came to a more agnostic view).  He goes even further and says that evolution has a particular affinity with Christianity via its nurturing within natural theology.  He cites as evidence for that assertion that many of Darwin’s Christian contemporaries were quick to incorporate evolution into the Christian faith.  He quotes Scottish evangelist Henry Drummond (1851-97) who maintained that natural selection was “a real and beautiful acquisition to natural theology” and that the Origin was “perhaps the most important contribution to the literature of apologetics”.  Aubrey Moore, another Victorian cleric, maintained that Darwin’s theory had done the church a great service in helping to get rid of the more extreme forms of natural theology and claimed that there was a special affinity based on the intimate involvement of God in his creation as revealed in Christian theology.  Moore said:

“There are not, and cannot be, any Divine interpositions in nature, for God cannot interfere with Himself.  His creative activity is present everywhere.  There is no division of labor between God and nature, or God and law… For the Christian theologian, the facts of nature are the acts of God.”

The American historian George Marsden reports, “… with the exception of Louis Agassiz, virtually every American Protestant zoologist and botanist accepted some form of evolution by the early 1870s” (Marsden, 1984, Understanding Fundamentalist Views of Science. In Science and Creationism, ed. A. Montagu, Oxford: Oxford University Press, p. 101).

That trend held fast among scientists in Protestant congregations until the rise of the Fundamentalist–Modernist controversy in the 1920s.

Alexander’s next point is that the Bible contains no concept of “nature” as referring to the natural world apart from God’s creation.  Robert Boyle, one of the founders of modern chemistry, wrote a book entitled, “Free Inquiry into the Vulgarly Received Notion of Nature” (1685) where he attacked the notion that nature had any autonomous existence, or that it acted as a mediator between God and his works.  God has not appointed a “vicegerent called nature” wrote Boyle, and if there were such a “Lieutenant she must be said to act too blindly and impotently to discharge well the part she is said to be trusted with.”  Alexander says that in the hands of Boyle, and indeed of the biblical text, the idea of nature as a quasi-independent entity has been demythologized, as Aubrey Moore said above, “…the facts of nature are the acts of God.”

Alexander says this is why the arguments for God based on biological “designs” so loved by the natural theologians of previous centuries, and those of today who portray God as an engineer who occasionally designs bits of living things, represented such hostages to fortune – once the idea of adaptation by natural selection came along, what need was there for God as an explanation?  He again quotes Aubrey Moore:

The one absolutely impossible conception of God, in the present day, is that which represents him as an occasional visitor.  Science has pushed the deist’s God further and further away, and at the moment when it seemed as if He would be thrust out all together, Darwinism appeared, and, under the guise of a foe, did the work of a friend… Either God is everywhere present in nature, or He is nowhere. (Moore, A. 1891, The Christian Doctrine of God, p.73.)

So how does God act in the world, in Alexander’s view?  Denis has tried to avoid the scenario where God ends up like the divine tinkerer with the world, rather than the author and sustainer of the whole created order.  Once again he quotes Aubrey Moore, who hits the nail on the head:

The scientific evidence in favour of evolution as a theory is infinitely more Christian than the theory of “special creation”.  For it implies the immanence of God in nature, and the omnipresence of His creative power.  Those who oppose the doctrine of evolution in defense of a “continued intervention” of God, seem to have failed to notice that a theory of occasional intervention implies as its correlative a theory of ordinary absence. (Moore, A. 1891, The Christian Doctrine of God, p.184.)

Instead, Denis likes to highlight the language of top-down causation used by the Bible when it refers to the activity of God in creation, which is the theological language of God speaking.  There is the language of Genesis 1 where God speaks on every one of the six days to bring order and beauty into the world that is formless and void.  Once you start looking for it the idea of God speaking to create is all over the place in the Bible, especially in the Psalms.  Psalm 33:6, “By the word of the Lord the heavens were made, their starry host by the breath of his mouth.”  Psalm 29:3, “The voice of the Lord is over the waters; the God of glory thunders, the Lord thunders over the mighty waters.”  But even in the Gospels, Luke 8:25, “In fear and amazement they asked one another, “Who is this? He commands even the winds and the water, and they obey him.”  And the epistles, Hebrews 11:3, “By faith we understand that the universe was formed at God’s command, so that what is seen was not made out of what was visible.”

Denis says: “Speaking expresses power, mind, intelligence, and will.  Through top-down causation, even we ourselves exert dramatic influence through our language over the behavior of those around us.  “Please pass the salt” we say to someone at the dinner table and our invisible words are causally effective in bringing about the desired result, with no breaking of scientific laws in the process.”

Denis is also clear that such reflections do not somehow “explain” divine action.  He points out the metaphor of “God as designer” is actually not found in the Bible.  Of course, all who believe in God as creator see the intelligibility of the created order in some overall sense as being “designed” to be that way by God, so that we can speak sensibly of the intentions and purposes of God being fulfilled in creation, but that is a very different concept from the idea that God is actively designing some particular aspect of a living organism, for example.

Denis’ understanding is that evolutionary biology is consistent with a God who has intentions and Purposes for the world, so he now lists what those Purposes might be.  The first Purpose of biology that we note as we start reading the Bible is the intrinsic value of the great riot of biological diversity that we see all over the planet. A careful reading of the biblical text reveals God as creator reveling in the living diversity of his own created order, not because it has some utilitarian purpose for human use, but simply because it was there.  “The earth is the Lord’s, and everything in it” says Psalm 24:1. “God saw everything that he had made, and it was very good” Genesis 1:31.  Denis says:

Such a reflection becomes all the more relevant when we come to the second main Purpose of biology, which is equally clearly written all over the Bible, namely, that God’s intentions and Purposes for biology are that creatures like ourselves should emerge that have the capacity for free will, and so moral choice, creatures with complex minds that enable the use of language, the appreciation and investigations of the properties of the created order, reflection on the meaning of life, and engagement in loving relationships.

The third Purpose of God for biology that is expressed in different ways in many parts of the Bible is that the end of our own planet does not entail the end of life as we presently know it.  Denis admits this is the aspect of Purpose that those not within the Christian community find most difficult to accept.  Yet it is central to the preaching of Jesus in the New Testament.  Christ came to die for the whole cosmos; the coming of the Kingdom that starts right now as his reign begins in the hearts and lives of all those who follow him.  Yes, individuals enter the kingdom as they put their trust in Christ, but his redemption extends to the whole created order, that is “groaning” in its anticipation. Denis says this is no ethereal existence, but rather far more real than our present existence, with people with resurrected bodies, and biological organisms with resurrected bodies, in intimate continuity with the present created order, yet now transformed in to a totally new kind of created order.

Now this is all good, and I appreciate what Denis is trying to do. He wants to make a Theology that is consistent with reality.  Which is a hell of lot better than trying to twist reality to comport with one’s theology.  That’s never going to work.  If your interpretation of inerrant scripture doesn’t line up with what are clearly the facts of life (bios), then despite your protestations that scripture is inerrant, your interpretation is… has to be… errant.  As Aubrey Moore said earlier, “Either God is everywhere present in nature, or He is nowhere… and, “…the facts of nature are the acts of God.”

But there is a fly in Denis’ ointment; how can such a Christian narrative of Purpose possibly fit with the observation that the evolutionary process is marked by such a huge amount of pain, suffering, and death?  After all, there were 5 major extinctions in the biology of this planet; one in which at least 90% of all life was extinguished. Was that “very good”?  Were those facts of nature indeed also the acts of God?

Is There Purpose in Biology?: The Cost of Existence and the God of Love. By Denis Alexander,

Chapter 4: Biology, Randomness, Chance and Purpose (Part 2)

We are reviewing the book: Is There Purpose in Biology?  The Cost of Existence and the God of Love. By Denis Alexander.  Chapter 4: Biology, Randomness, Chance and Purpose, Part 2 is the continuation from last week.  In the first part of Chapter 4, Denis defines the terms “random”, “chance”, and “chaos” as they are used in the scientific community as opposed to the common parlance.  Denis begins this part of the chapter by recounting the story of a medical student coming up to him after a lecture on evolution and religion.  This student wanted to know, given evolution, how the first anatomically modern human could be born out of an ape.  This is a common misconception – evolution means, at some point, an ape couple gives birth to a human baby because of genetic mutations. However, he states the basic idea of evolution can be stated as:

·         GENETIC VARIATION HAPPENS

·         INDIVIDUALS ARE SELECTED

·         POPULATIONS EVOLVE

It’s this third aspect that trips up so many, like Denis’ medical student.  Most people do not understand how evolution purports to work.  They think it involves substantial changes in multiple organisms in the same generation for a change to pass down over time.  Such changes are wildly improbable and so they conclude evolution is wildly improbable.  If evolution worked that way, they’d be right.  But evolution involves the shifting of average characteristics of populations over long periods of time.  Individuals DO NOT evolve, populations do. 

The answer to the question, “So how did we go from zero (humans) to thousands” is that we didn’t.  There was always a population of thousands.  As the average characteristics of the ancestral population to humans and chimpanzees changed, the group of thousands that eventually became human became more human-like generation after generation. The change from one generation to the next would not be immediately recognizable as it would be a subtle shift in the AVERAGE characteristics of the population as a whole.   It is a continuum over millions of years, and most people cannot imagine the time frame.  There was NO one point where daddy and mommy were apes and the little baby was a human.  Dennis Venema, in the book Adam and the Genome, gives a very useful analogy in the evolution of the Anglo-Saxon language to Modern English.  You can find a description of that analogy in my review of the book here .

That being said, in the present context, it is the first and second aspects of the process that are the most relevant if we are to address satisfactorily the claim that “evolution is not a theory of chance”.  Genetic variation provides the “raw material” of evolution.  It generates much of the innovation involved in the process.  Most people do not realize how much genetic variation there is in different living organisms, much less within our own human species.  Denis notes that we all vary from each other in around 0.5% of our total 3.2 billion genetic letters – that’s around 16 million letters.  New mutations come into the human population at every new birth.  This has been demonstrated most clearly in large family studies in which whole genomes from individuals within families – father, mother, and child – were sequenced and compared.  He cites a Dutch study (Francioli et al., 2015) where 250 families had their DNA sequenced.  For each offspring in this study, there was an average of 38 mutations.  That’s a lot, even if many of the mutations were neutral – neither deleterious nor beneficial.  Denis says it is worth considering how many ways there are for a genome to vary, because only then can we begin to address the question as to whether any given change that occurs is random or happens by chance.  He notes:

1. Point mutations. Changes in a single nucleotide (SNPs)
2. Indels. Insertion or deletion of a short section of DNA.
3. Transposons. The so-called “jumping genes”. A transposable element is a DNA sequence that can change its position within a genome, sometimes creating or reversing mutations and altering the cell’s genetic identity and genome size.
4. Gene duplication. It can be defined as any duplication of a region of DNA that contains a gene. Gene duplications can arise as products of several types of errors in DNA replication and repair machinery as well as through fortuitous capture by selfish genetic elements.
5. Structural mutations. This kind of chromosomal mutation usually occurs during larger errors in cell division than indels.

Gene flow is the second mechanism for introducing genetic variation into an interbreeding population.  This refers to the flow of new genetic variants that comes into a population when exposed to another population of the same species from which they have been separated for some time by barriers such as mountains or rivers.  Lateral or horizontal gene transfer is the movement of genetic material between unicellular and/or multicellular organisms other than by the (“vertical”) transmission of DNA from parent to offspring. 

Retroviral insertion: a retrovirus is a type of RNA virus that inserts a copy of its genome into the DNA of a host cell that it invades, thus changing the genome of that cell. Once inside the host cell’s cytoplasm, the virus uses its own reverse transcriptase enzyme to produce DNA from its RNA genome, the reverse of the usual pattern, thus retro (backwards).  Viruses are everywhere – 6,000 feet below the surface of the earth, in the sands of the Sahara desert, and in icy lakes.  An estimated 10³¹ viral particles live on the planet (there are roughly 10²² stars estimated in the universe).  A kilogram of marine muck was found to contain up to a million genetically variant viruses.  Our own guts may contain as many as 1,200 different viruses.

Import of organelles (the term organelle is derived from the word ‘organ’ and refers to compartments within the cell that perform a specific function) containing their own DNA represents a fifth and indeed rather dramatic way in which genetic variation has come into the genome at various critical moments in evolutionary history.  This occurred when bacteria that had probably started living symbiotically inside cells then became permanent residents and developed into the mitochondria and chloroplasts that we see in cells today.

Denis says that given this extensive and rather bewildering array of different mechanism for generating variant genomes, it might seem surprising that genetic variation between individual of the same species is no more different than it is.  However, with background information in place, we are now in a better position to ask whether the generation of genetic variation is truly random or not.

It will be remembered that there are two distinct meanings of the word “random” in the context of biology.  The most commonly used meaning simply refers to the fact that genetic variation comes into the genome without the good or ill the organism in view.  This is a banal and obvious definition, how could it be otherwise?  It is trivially true.

The second and more interesting meaning involves the mathematical question as to whether each nucleotide in the genome, or each section of the genome, is equally likely to be mutated.  This is what would need to be the case if mutations were truly random in the second sense.  Denis says the short answer to this question is: NO. He then proceeds to give the long answer – and cites numerous studies that show mutation clustering occurs and that there are sequences of DNA, “mutational hot spots” is how he puts it, that are more likely than others to be the site of changes. It is a complex and detailed discussion beyond the scope of this post and likely for most of you to be eyes-glazing-over in detail.  I will spare you the detail, as well as spare myself the task of recounting it, which would involve pretty much typing it out word for word. 

With all that as background, Denis can now assess the processes involved in generating genetic variation according to the 3 understandings of “chance” outlined in the previous post.  To recap:

1.       The first is sometimes called epistemological chance because it refers to all those events that are perfectly lawlike in how they happen, but about which we have insufficient knowledge of their antecedents to make predictions.

2.       The second main type of chance we can call ontological chance, because there are no antecedents that could possibly be known that could enable a prediction, even in principle.

3.       The third type of chance we might call metaphysical chance.  This is the idea that chance somehow rules over everything, almost as if it were an agency or metaphysical principle.

Clearly there is plenty of epistemological chance going on here.  The systems are too complex to make any specific predictions as individual mutations are concerned.  However, once we start averaging large numbers, well-justified generalization can be made about such items such as mutation rates, where mutations are more likely to occur, and which chromosomes are more likely to undergo structural changes.

What about ontological chance?  The emission of radioactive particles, as previously noted, displays quantum uncertainty and is not predictable even in principle.  But ionizing radiation causes mutations in DNA and, by the law of averaging large numbers, their average outputs and consequent average effects on DNA can likewise be predicted.  But it is impossible, even in principle, to predict the timing of individual mutation events. Could this then contribute to the idea that evolution is a theory of chance?  Denis says not really, because natural selection acts as the stringent sieve that selects which mutations will be maintained in a population and which will be discarded. 

What about Jacques Monod and the “Lady Luck” personification of metaphysical chance?  We now know that many types of mutation are not really random in the mathematical sense in terms of their clustered distribution through the genome.  The lack of randomness in the origins of genetic variation highlights the risk of hitching one’s philosophy to scientific theories or understandings.  Science moves on very fast and so the philosophy in question can be quickly widowed.

Which brings us to the second main phase of the evolutionary process – natural selection.  Natural selection is the process by which heritable traits increase an organism’s chances of survival and reproduction. These traits are favored than less beneficial traits. Originally proposed by Charles Darwin, natural selection is the process that results in the evolution of organism.  When genetic variation does make a difference for good in the organism, the organism will, over many generations, have greater numbers of offspring – reproductive success, which is what “survival of the fittest” actually is.  The key point about natural selection is the successful reproduction which ensures that an individual’s genes are passed on to the next generation. 

Natural selection is a rigorous filter that reduces the amount of genetic variation in a population.  It is a very conservative mechanism.  The reason for this is that the great majority of genetic changes, if not neutral, are likely to be deleterious and will be removed from the populations after some generations.  The few beneficial changes will readily pass through the filters of natural selection and quickly spread throughout an interbreeding population as they bestow reproductive benefits on their recipients.

An example of this conservative nature is cytochrome c.  Cytochrome c is a highly conserved protein across the spectrum of species, found in plants, animals, and many unicellular organisms. Humans share 97% sequence identity of cytochrome c with rhesus monkeys, 87% with the dog, 82% with the bat, 67% with the fruit fly, 64% with the moth, 44% with yeast, with which we last shared a common ancestor about a billion years ago.  44%!!! Natural selection is a really conservative process. Denis says:

“The conservative nature of natural selection may also be seen in the types of convergent evolution that were surveyed in the previous two chapters.  The same or similar adaptations keep popping up in evolutionary history in independent lineages for the simple reason that these happen to be the best that you can get under a given set of circumstances.  When similar ecological niches occur again with similar environmental properties, natural selection ensures that similar adaptive solutions will found to life’s challenges.

“It should by now be clear why it doesn’t really matter whether variation comes into the genome via the pathway of epistemological chance (most of it) or ontological chance (as in radiation effects), as in both cases the winnowing effects of natural selection are what have the upper hand in bringing about certain constrained outcomes.”

It is a common assumption that a chance process cannot at the same time be one with a purpose.  This chapter highlights the implausibility of that suggestion.  Two out of the three kinds of chance discussed above have clearly been critical in the evolutionary process.  Yet individual animals and plants exist for the purpose of being alive, of feeding, of procreation.  Their existence is teleological albeit purpose with a small “p”.  The giraffe has a long neck for the purpose of reaching food on high branches; the whale rises to the surface for the purpose of breathing; the polar bear has white fur for the purpose of camouflage; and so on.  You cannot avoid telos in biology.

Still, Purpose with a big “P” is not something that can be derived from biology.  We’ve critiqued Monod for his attempt to imbue lack-of-purpose by metaphysical extrapolation.  By the same token, we cannot infer Purpose simply from the fact that the evolutionary process is highly organized, constrained and, to a limited extend, predictable.  Biology is simply not up to the task of providing some overall Purpose and meaning in life that everybody can agree on.  It is above evolution’s pay-grade to play that kind of role.

On the other hand, Denis says the evolutionary process is perfectly compatible with having some overall Purpose (which he considers in the next chapter) despite having chance mechanisms involved.  Consider, for example, the lottery.  All those little balls with numbers bouncing around in the machine are fulfilling their Purpose.  The Purpose, designed by the government, to take money from poor people, make a few people rich, and generate a healthy tax for said government.  A chance process is used to generate outcomes that are absolutely certain.  If someone doesn’t win this week, then they’ll win the next, or whenever, someone will win.  Chance processes are by no means incompatible with determined outcomes.  Denis says:

“What should be equally clear from this and the previous two chapters is that the claim that evolution is necessarily Purposeless is now looking simply irrational.”