Andrew J. Wells Rose's homeodynamic perspective is not an alternative to Neo-Darwinism Article (Published version) (Refereed) Original citation: Wells, Andrew J. (1999) Rose's homeodynamic perspective is not an alternative to Neo- Darwinism. Behavioral and brain sciences, 22 (5). pp. 911-912. ISSN 0140-525X DOI:10.1017/S0140525X9951220X © 1999 Cambridge University Press This version available at: http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/12103/ Available in LSE Research Online: August 2012 LSE has developed LSE Research Online so that users may access research output of the School. Copyright © and Moral Rights for the papers on this site are retained by the individual authors and/or other copyright owners. Users may download and/or print one copy of any article(s) in LSE Research Online to facilitate their private study or for non-commercial research. You may not engage in further distribution of the material or use it for any profit-making activities or any commercial gain. You may freely distribute the URL (http://eprints.lse.ac.uk) of the LSE Research Online website. BEHAVIORAL AND BRAIN SCIENCES (1999) 22, 871–921 Printed in the United States of America Précis of Lifelines: Biology, freedom, determinism1 Steven Rose Biology Department, Brain and Behaviour Research Group, Open University, Milton Keynes, MK7 6AA, United Kingdom. [email protected] Abstract: There are many ways of describing and explaining the properties of living systems; causal, functional, and reductive accounts are necessary but no one account has primacy. The history of biology as a discipline has given excessive authority to reductionism, which collapses higher level accounts, such as social or behavioural ones, into molecular ones. Such reductionism becomes crudely ideological when applied to the human condition, with its claims for genes “for” everything from sexual orientation to compulsive shopping. The current enthusiasm for genetics and ultra-Darwinist accounts, with their selfish-gene metaphors for living processes, misunderstand both the phenomena of development and the interactive role that DNA and the fluid genome play in the cellular orchestra. DNA is not a blueprint, and the four dimensions of life (three of space, one of time) cannot be read off from its one-dimensional strand. Both devel- opmental and evolutionary processes are more than merely instructive or selective; the organism constructs itself, a process known as autopoiesis, through a lifeline trajectory. Because organisms are thermodynamically open systems, living processes are homeodynamic, not homeostatic. The self-organising membrane-bound and energy-utilising metabolic web of the cell must have evolved prior to so- called naked replicators. Evolution is constrained by physics, chemistry, and structure; not all change is powered by natural selection, and not all phenotypes are adaptive. Finally, therefore, living processes are radically indeterminate; like all other living organisms, but to an even greater degree, we make our own future, though in circumstances not of our own choosing. Keywords: autopoiesis; developmental trajectories; evolutionary theory; homeodynamics; human behavior; metabolic webs; neuro- genetics; reductionism; self-organisation; ultra-Darwinism Preface of its reductionist claims, we have not offered a coherent alternative framework within which to interpret living pro- In the last decade, especially in the context of dramatic ad- cesses. We may reply that we have been too busy attempt- vances in the sciences of both genes and brains, the stream ing to rebut the determinists, but sooner or later it becomes of ultra-Darwinist and biologically determinist claims has necessary to spell out more coherently our contrasting bi- become a torrent. First the Human Genome Program and ological case. Lifelines (Rose 1997) originated as an at- then the Decade of the Brain have not merely offered vastly tempt to meet that challenge, first, to try to convey what it greater knowledge of aspects of human biology, but they means to “think like a biologist” about the nature of living have also held out the promise of further technological processes, second, to analyse both the strengths and limi- power to manipulate both genes and minds in the interests tations of the reductionist tradition which dominates much of individual health and greater social tranquility. of biology, and, third, to offer a perspective on biology Techniques of intervention barely imaginable a decade which transcends genetic reductionism, by placing the or- ago, at best the stuff of science fiction, now rate stock mar- ket quotations and turn academic researchers into entre- preneurial millionaires. To judge from headlines in daily steven rose is Director of the Brain and Behavior Re- newspapers, or the titles of academic papers in major sci- search Group and Founding Professor of Biology at The entific journals, the issues of a decade ago have been set- Open University. His laboratory research centres on tled. Vulgar sociobiology may be out, but what I have called elucidation of the molecular and cellular mechanisms of “neurogenetic determinism” is strongly entrenched. There memory formation, using a simple model, one-trial pas- are genes available to account for every aspect of our lives, sive avoidance learning in the chick. The Group is from personal success to existential despair: genes for funded by the BBSRC, MRC, Wellcome Trust, and The health and illness, genes for criminality, violence, and “ab- Royal Society. As well as his many research papers and normal” sexual orientation – even for “compulsive shop- reviews in neuroscience, he is author or coauthor of nine books, all of which have been translated into sev- ping.” And genes too to explain, as ever, the social inequal- eral languages, including The Making of Memory, the ities that divide our lives along lines of class, gender, race, Science Book Prize winner for 1993. Also, he has edited ethnicity; and where there are genes, genetic and pharma- some 15 others. Coming to Life, a collection jointly cological engineering hold hopes for salvation that social edited with the sociologist Hilary Rose, will be pub- engineering and politics have abandoned. lished in 2000 by Crown in the U.S. and Cape in the The challenge to the opponents of biological determin- U.K. ism is that while we may have been effective in our critique © 1999 Cambridge University Press 0140-525X/99 $12.50 871 Rose: Lifelines ganism, rather than the gene, at the centre of life – this is physics through chemistry, biology, and the human sci- the perspective that I call homeodynamic. To stress my pos- ences. In this convention, physics is seen as the most fun- itive case, it has also in places been necessary to set it damental of the sciences to which the others must aspire, against the counter-case made at its rhetorical strongest. To or be reduced. But biological science raise themes which do so, I have had to choose appropriate foils. The two au- cannot be reduced to physics. To show why, consider a frog thors who have most clearly served me in this way are the jumping into a pool. The cause of the jump may be de- sociobiologist Richard Dawkins, whose several books speak scribed as the contraction of the leg muscles, preceded by with a single ultra-Darwinist voice, and the philosopher nerve impulses, and so on. Or one could explain the jump Daniel Dennett, whose Darwin’s Dangerous Idea (Den- in terms of intention – to escape a predator – or in terms of nett 1995) carries ultra-Darwinism to the furthest reaches ontogeny, or of phylogeny – or in terms of the actin and of excess. myosin fibres of which the muscle is composed. All are nec- Because Lifelines is written for a general audience, sev- essary and valid parts of description; only the last is reduc- eral sections, notably those on genetics and development, tionist. Which explanation one finds satisfying depends on include a substantial amount of explanatory material which the purposes for which it is intended. will be familiar to most readers of this journal, and I have therefore omitted them from this précis, or abbreviated 1.2. Themes: Time. The concept of time and the direction them to summary statements of the examples employed. of “time’s arrow” are central to biology. Living processes are complex, often irreproducible because historically con- tingent, and hence also practically irreversible. Dobzhan- Chapter 1: Biology, freedom, determinism sky (1973) asserted that “nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution.” I claim that nothing in bi- The power of western science derived from its capacity to ology makes sense except in the light of history – the his- explain and later to control aspects of the non-living world tory of life in general, of individual development, and of studied by physics and chemistry. Only subsequently were our own science and its concerns. The past is the key to the the methods and theories shaped by the success of these present. older sciences turned towards the study of living processes themselves. The past successes of science have been based 1.3. Themes: Space. The second deep theme with which not so much on observation and contemplation but on ac- biologists are concerned is that of structure. To the three di- tive intervention into the phenomena they wish to explain. mensions of space must be added the dimension of time. Biologists are now beginning to lay claims to universal Organisms have forms which change but also persist knowledge, of what life is, how it emerged, and how it throughout their life’s trajectory, despite the fact that every works. Throughout all life forms and all living processes, molecule in their body has been replaced thousands of certain general principles hold; certain mechanisms, cer- times over. How is form achieved and maintained? Cells, tain forms of chemistry, exist in common. But intervention organisms, are more than simple lists of chemicals.