Is There Purpose in Biology?

The cost of existence and the God of love

Denis Alexander

• Publisher: Monarch Books
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9780857217141
• eBook ISBN: 9780857217158
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion & Science

Atheists assert that the natural world has no meaning or purpose. Dr Denis Alexander, Emeritus Director of The Faraday Institute for Science and Religion at St. Edmunds College, Cambridge, draws a different conclusion.

Not only do recent evolutionary biological data appear inconsistent with the claim that the world is purposeless, but the Christian doctrine of creation has provided and continues to provide both context and stimulus for the study of the natural world. Christians started biology!

However, is a belief in an omnipotent, benign Creator consistent with a world of pain and suffering? From a lifetime's study in the biological sciences, Denis Alexander believes that whilst the cost of existence is extremely high, it can nonetheless be squared with the idea of a God of love whose ultimate purposes for humankind render that cost more comprehensible.

1

The Historical Roots of Purpose in Biology

The investigation of Final Causes is barren, and like a virgin consecrated to God produces nothing.

Francis Bacon, De Augmentis Scientiarum (1623), Book III, Chapter 5

Providing a complete overview of changing ideas about purpose in biology over the centuries would require a book rather than a chapter. The aim of this chapter is therefore more modest: to highlight some of the main changes in perspectives on the topic that have taken place over the years. In the process we will take a look at some of the key figures who have contributed to the thinking in this area.

First a word about the word “biology” (from the Greek word bios, life, and the suffix -logia, study of). In earlier centuries, the “study of life” was subsumed under the term “natural history”. This was to distinguish it from “natural philosophy”, which was deemed, at least until the late seventeenth century, to be superior to natural history because it provided causal and logical demonstrations, whereas natural history was seen as purely descriptive (Harrison, 2010). The word “biology” does not start appearing until the eighteenth century when the Swedish natural philosopher Carl Linnaeus, famous for his classification system of plants and animals still in use today, used the word in Latin in his Bibliotheca botanica (1736). Its first known use in English was by the physician Thomas Beddoes who wrote that “biology is the foundation of ethics and pneumatology” (the study of the mind, in his terminology), maintaining that such knowledge was a prerequisite to “progress in genuine morality” (Harrison, 2015, p. 166). Clearly the nuances of the term are somewhat different today. But it was only in the nineteenth century that the term came into regular use in English and other languages, associated with the emergence of the more specialized study of the natural world.

By the late nineteenth century science was becoming more professionalized, and biology developed further as a distinct discipline in the early twentieth century with its own array of journals and professional societies. The frequency of the term “natural history” still dominated in 1900 in English texts as compared to “biology”, but by 1920 the frequency was reversed, and by the year 2000 “biology” dominated over “natural history” in a ratio of 3:1 (Harrison, 2015, p. 166). Already by the late nineteenth century natural history was beginning to be viewed rather disdainfully as a pursuit for amateurs compared to the increasingly specialized discipline of biology.

Irrespective of these various labels, the “study of life” goes all the way back to the Greek philosophers, and it is with them that we should begin. In this book, the word “biology” will be used to encompass any serious attempt at a “study of life”, remembering that such usage is somewhat anachronistic when referring to the pre-1800 era.

Aristotle (384–322 BC)

No account of purpose in biology could possibly exclude the writings of Plato’s student Aristotle, whose ideas still do much to frame the discussion right up to the present day. In 343 BC Aristotle became the tutor of Alexander, the 13-year-old son of Philip II of Macedon, later known as Alexander the Great.

Aristotle famously taught that there are four causes of things: material, formal, efficient, and final. The “efficient cause” provides the focus for modern science – what makes something happen to something else and how does that work? But Aristotle would have thought such a description by itself to be very impoverished without the telos, the final cause, which asks the question “why”? From telos we derive our word “teleological”, meaning “having an end or purpose”, a word that still leads to weighty tomes of essays in which philosophers of biology discuss its various nuances (Allen et al., 1998).

Aristotle made some wonderful biological observations, several of which are described in his On the Parts of Animals (written around 350 BC), an investigation into the anatomy and physiology of animals. As Aristotle writes:

The causes concerned in the generation of the works of nature are, as we see, more than one. There is the final cause and there is the motor [efficient] cause… Plainly… that cause is the first which we call the final one [telos]. For this is the Reason, and the Reason forms the starting-point, alike in the works of art and in works of nature.

To avoid any doubt, Aristotle’s punchline is that “everything that Nature makes is means to an end” (Aristotle, 2001). Telos, for Aristotle, was thoroughly man-centred. As he wrote in his book entitled Politics, “If therefore Nature makes nothing without purpose or in vain, it follows that Nature has made all the animals for the sake of man.”

Aristotle’s other well-known work on biology is entitled On the Generation of Animals, again produced sometime in the latter half of the fourth century BC. It is in fact five books each containing multiple chapters, and again the biology is set within a teleological framework, although overall the work is less taken up with such matters in comparison with On the Parts of Animals. Much of Book Two consists of embryological observations and discussion, setting the scene for the further study of embryology over the next 2,000 years.

It should not be thought that Aristotle’s teleological arguments derive from a belief in God because Aristotle’s philosophy contained no room for a creator God. Instead matter is without beginning and its properties are due to its own internal necessity. Much of Aristotle’s biological discussions centre around the distinctions between living and inanimate matter: only the former is “ensouled”, Aristotle perceiving the soul not in its more Platonic sense of an entity distinct from the body, but more as the “internal energizer” which should be identified with a living body. Although Aristotle did invoke the idea of an “Unmoved Mover”, which was the source of all the motion in the universe, this was quite unlike the creator God of Judeo-Christian thought, and certainly not the kind of involved personal Being that might bestow a telos upon some biological organism. Final causes for Aristotle are intrinsic principles of intelligibility, not in any sense active agents of anything. Later commentators have not always been careful enough to distinguish between Aristotle’s own writings and the use to which some of them were later put in western Christendom.

The Stoics

The Stoic philosophers who flourished from the beginning of the third century BC are not generally looked on as a source of great biological insights. True though that is, they are mentioned here because of their promotion of the argument from design, an argument that was later to become thoroughly entangled with teleological arguments.

The Stoics drew their prime examples of design not from biology but from the great contemporary feats of engineering. One Stoic argument was a precursor to the metaphor used by Archdeacon William Paley more than 2,000 years later when Paley compared the world to a watch, thereby inferring design by a watchmaker. In its ancient Stoic form, the machine was the wonderful astronomical model built by Posidonius representing the celestial rotations of the sun, moon, and planets. As Sedley summarizes the Stoic argument:

Suppose some utterly remote barbarians (the British, for example) were shown one of these sophisticated mechanisms which precisely replicate the motions of sun, moon and planets: would they doubt for a moment that this was the work of an intelligence? Yet what is the world itself, with its celestial motions, if not a vastly superior and more complex version of that very same machine? (Sedley, 2007, p. 207)

Yet Stoic arguments did not ignore biology altogether, noting for example, the carefully designed structure of animals in which

the mouth, through which animals ingest the objects of their appetites, has been located near the eyes and nose, whereas, because excrement is unpleasant, they have diverted the ducts for this and discharge it as far away as possible from the sense organs. When these things have been done in such a providential fashion, are you in doubt whether they are the products of chance or design?

The interlocutor in the text responds “Indeed not, but when I look at that way they seem like the contrivance of some wise craftsman who loves animals” (Sedley, 2007, p. 215).

The Stoics were pantheists who believed that a divine reality pervades the whole universe. There was no creator – the world has neither beginning nor end. The Stoic philosophy found an effective expositor in the Roman lawyer Cicero (106–43 BC). In his book The Nature of the Gods Cicero describes the various ways in which animals catch their food, defend themselves, and reproduce, including the wonderful way in which human physiology and anatomy are designed to make humans at home in the world, seeing all as evidence for design. Cicero was a polytheist, writing that:

When we see a mechanism such as a planetary model or a clock, do we doubt that it is the creation of a conscious intelligence? So how can we doubt that the world is the work of the divine intelligence? We may well believe that the world and everything in it has been created for the gods and for mankind. (Emerton, 1989)

Cicero’s arguments were taken up by early Christian thinkers such as Tertullian (AD 160–225) as a way of promoting belief in the one creator God to the surrounding pagan world. Some pagans even wanted Cicero’s The Nature of the Gods suppressed because it was used so successfully by Christian writers such as Tertullian!

Galen of Pergamon

Galen is remembered more for his medical writings than for his biology, but like many writers of antiquity, his voluminous works cover many biological topics in addition to medicine, philosophy, and what we would now call psychotherapy. Born as a Greek in Pergamon, Asia Minor (modern day Turkey) in AD 129, Galen later moved to Rome where he fell in love with Roman culture, even changing his name to the more Roman sounding Claudius Galenus. Galen studied medicine, first in Corinth and then in Alexandria, eventually becoming the personal physician of the Emperor Marcus Aurelius.

The reason for mentioning Galen here is his strong promotion of a teleological framework for his medicine and biology which was still influential in Europe in the early modern period following its translation into Latin from Greek in the 1530s. The polytheist Galen was widely read in Greek philosophy as he defended Platonic and Aristotelian philosophies against the atomists who wished to deny the providential activities of the gods. In his teleological treatise On the Usefulness of Parts, Galen repeatedly points out the excellence of divine craftsmanship. Galen was particularly keen on Plato’s Timaeus in which a “craftsman demiurge” (not to be confused with the creator God of Judeo-Christian monotheism) forms the often recalcitrant matter of the world into the shapes and forms that we see today, much as a carpenter uses materials to bring about his creations. Galen appears to have had some contact with Jewish thought, since he remarks rather disparagingly that whereas the God of Moses was able to create matter by mere fiat, the demiurge worked skilfully with the properties of his materials, which was more to be praised. For example, the demiurge embedded along the rim of the eyelid a hard layer of cartilage which prevented the eyelashes from growing too long. Only a really good technician would accomplish such a feat (Sedley, 2007, pp. 239–42).

Indeed, in On the Usefulness of Parts Galen demonstrates a certain fascination with the teleological roles of hair, pointing out that certain bodily residues result in facial hair which, in the case of beards, also have the aesthetic advantage of providing a dignified adornment for men, appropriate to the character of their souls. Providentially, however, women have been spared beards since their indoor lifestyle does not require this extra protective layer and, in any case, beards are inappropriate to women’s souls. Armpit hair, Galen points out, is worthless, a bit like the weeds growing alongside the crops in a field. Teleological explanations have their limits.

While we may smile today at such curious examples, the trope of the divine craftsman proved to be a powerful one, cropping up repeatedly in scientific and medical literature for the next 1,500 years. Here was purpose, not as some ultimate telos, but as biological functionality.

Biology in early Muslim sources

Islam’s Golden Age of learning began in the ninth century under the rule of the Abbasid Caliphs based in Baghdad. The city became a hive of translation as the texts of the ancient Greek philosophers were translated into Arabic and Syriac (Masood, 2009 pp. 44ff.). The wealthy city, with a population estimated at around 1 million people, by far the biggest city in the world at that time, soon became a centre for trading ancient manuscripts. The Banu Musa brothers, a family of mathematicians and astronomers, paid translators as much as 500 dinars a month, more than £24,000 in today’s money.

Muslim thinkers, like their Christian counterparts in Europe several centuries later, both assimilated as well as reacted against this torrent of new learning as it flooded into the majalis (salons) in which scholars came together to discuss the latest religious and philosophical ideas. Today, ancient texts are looked upon by scientists mainly for their historical interest, but for those of a previous era the texts themselves revealed the wisdom of the ancients, rather as scientists today would look upon new scientific discoveries. The House of Wisdom in Baghdad of the Caliph al-Mamun centred around a great library: there was a remarkably free exchange of ideas.

It should not be thought that the Islamic world was merely a preserver of Greek natural philosophy through translation. By the end of the heyday of Islamic science from the ninth to thirteenth centuries, great discoveries had been made in mathematics, astronomy, physics, mechanics, and other fields. And some of the writings on medical and biological topics also demonstrated the authors’ remarkable abilities in observing and ordering the living world.

Not all the translations were carried out by Muslims. The head of the House of Wisdom in the ninth century was a Nestorian Christian named Hunayn ibn Ishaq (808–73), an Arab descended from an Arab tribe that had converted to Christianity long before the days of Islam (Lindberg, 1992, p. 169). Hunayn and his wider family were brilliant linguists, and many of the translations were collaborative efforts: one might translate a work from Greek to Syriac whereas another might then render the Syriac into Arabic. Most of Hunayn’s translations were medical, with an emphasis on Galen and Hippocrates. Altogether Hunayn translated around 90 of Galen’s works, thereby transmitting them not only to the Muslim world but eventually to Europe as well. In his spare time, Hunayn produced a Syriac version of the Old Testament. Hunayn and his family provide but one example of dozens of translators who were active in Baghdad and later on in Andalucia as the Islamic world extended into the Iberian Peninsula. As Lindberg reports: “By the year 1000 AD almost the entire known corpus of Greek medicine, natural philosophy, and mathematical sciences had been rendered into usable Arabic versions” (Lindberg, 1992, p. 170).

Hunayn, as with some other translators, did not just translate texts literally, but instead improved them as he saw fit. For example, he expanded on Galen’s descriptions of the anatomy of the eye. Hunayn also wrote a brief summary of Galen’s work in a question-and-answer form – one of the first Arabic texts to be translated into Latin in the eleventh century, thereby becoming a standard medical text for many centuries (Masood, 2009, p. 47).

Indeed, medicine was of great interest in the Islamic world. Ibn Sina (Avicenna) was born in 980 in Uzbekistan (as it is now) at a time when the Islamic world was no longer under the control of a single Caliph, so he moved around a lot depending on his changing political fortunes. By the age of ten he had memorized the Qur’an and much Arabic poetry. By the age of 16 he had become a physician and established his credentials by successfully treating the Samanid ruler of the eastern Islamic caliphate for a severe diarrhoeal infection (Masood, 2009, p. 103).³ Ibn Sina was a polymath, his most famous work being The Canon of Medicine, a multivolume encyclopedia of medical knowledge amounting to half a million words. Later translated into Latin, it became a standard medical text in Europe for six centuries, with around 60 editions being published between 1500 and 1674. The Canon of Medicine contained many novel insights, including the observation that nerves transmit pain and pass signals leading to muscle contraction.

The extent to which design arguments were brought into play v...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Copyright
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Figures
• Preface
• Introduction
• 1. The Historical Roots of Purpose in Biology
• 2. Biology’s Grand Narrative
• 3. Biology’s Molecular Constraints
• 4. Biology, Randomness, Chance, and Purpose
• 5. The Christian Matrix Within Which Biology Flourishes
• 6. Death, Pain, Suffering, and the God of Love
• Postscript
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Figure Acknowledgments