The conceptual foundations of decision-making in a democracy

(2003)–Peter Pappenheim– rechtenstatus

Part Two
Life and Information.
Part Two A
What Is Life?

2a.1 Introduction.

As long as they are smaller than a galaxy and larger than an electron, inert objects are comfortably predictable, while living creatures are still full of mysteries. But we did in the last fifty years make enormous progress in the various fields of biology, especially in biochemistry. While many links are still missing, a basic image has emerged which seems to be confirmed by every new discovery, and which is logically so consistent that it is hardly possible to doubt its validity. Certainly it is admitted by the majority of those biologists which are not bound by any dogmatic belief, religious or otherwise. Its basic principles were summarised in 1972 by Monod in his famous essay ‘Le Hazard et la Nécessité’. In accordance with the ubiquitous but nefarious tendency to focus on differences, Monod is mostly quoted from his last chapter which he explicitly presented as a personal and tentative excursion into the realm of philosophy. Focussing on these emotionally charged (non-)issues has conveniently eclipsed the conclusions which are relevant for the science of man and which require a revision of many tenets of philosophy and of academic practice. The main conclusion is that we can define and understand information only if we have defined and understood the basic process of life.

This chapter is not intended as an introductory course of biology; I have selected only those aspects which are required to deal with the main subject, social decision-making and social science. In that context it is not necessary that the exposition be exhaustive nor correct in all its details. It meets its objective if the conclusions to which the information presented here will lead are the same as we would have reached on the basis of a more precise and comprehensive, in short more professional, exposition. If I have mentioned ‘consensus amongst biologists’, it is limited to that restricted level of precision and generality.

2a.2 The Main Features of Living Beings.

To define the bare essentials of what it means to be a living being, we will determine the main features that distinguish such a being from the rest of the material world. This turns out to be a combination of four features, one of which - complexity - seems of second order importance and has practical rather than philosophical consequences.

1) Functionality and purpose. Most parts of any living being clearly perform a function: mitochondria, arms, our brain etc. Functionality may also be a property of inanimate objects such as an automobile. But in all cases except living beings this functionality has been imposed by

exterior forces. Only with living beings is this functionality generated by and for the being itself. In philosophy, the concept of functionality (also called telenomy) is controversial; we will revert to it in a separate chapter (2a.7) to make sure that it is well understood and to show that I am not guilty of the sin of teleological thinking, the notion that everything must have a function, or that the function preceded and was part of the creation of a thing.

2) Living beings are ‘self-made’, they ‘construct’ themselves, they develop - using materials available in their environment - in a process in which a kind of blueprint, template, (the genes) interacts with its surroundings. That template is the only contribution from an outside agency (its progenitor) which is both absolutely essential and common to the conception of every kind of living being, to the process by which living beings are able to spontaneously ‘reproduce’ themselves. Crystals also are capable of spontaneous multiplication, but lack the functionality mentioned above. On the other hand, all non-living objects which show functionality, for instance automobiles, lack the ability to reproduce spontaneously.

The word blueprint evokes a metaphor not intended here, namely that of a construction plan, a model. That would be a grave error: the genes are not at all a representation of the future being. They are records in which information is stored, namely the information which was involved in the development of the progenitor of the being in question. This record determines the kind of materials, proteins and nucleic acids, which the being will produce to grow and propagate, as well as their quantity and sequence. Just calling the genes a record or - as has been suggested - a template does not do justice to these functions. ‘Blueprint’ seems better suited to express the combination of a record with the function of that record, provided we remember that genes do not contain a ‘picture’, an end-state, of the being in whose development they participate.

3) Genetic invariance. The blueprint, according to which the living being ‘constructs’ itself, is almost totally - certainly in its essential parts - identical to the one from which its parents arose. Life shows large series of replications of almost the same forms. A property shared by both man-made machinery and by crystals. ‘Almost’ : the replication of living beings is not perfect: there are flaws, called mutations. And in sexual reproduction the offspring's genes are an unpredictable mixture of those of his parents. The variability amongst living creatures immensely surpasses that of any inert phenomenon.

4) Complexity. The structure of a living being is so complex that a very large amount of information is required to replicate it. It takes the most complex of human creations, say a spacecraft with all its cybernetic steering mechanisms and its computerised information processing apparatus, to match the complexity of even the simpler living creatures.

The first three features are necessary and also sufficient for distinguishing the living world from the inert one. Complexity becomes a distinctive feature only in a quantitative mode; it does not introduce a new concept into the discussion. Its main relevance is that this complexity prevents us from devising any simplifications and shortcuts for escaping the necessity to develop concepts and methods of scientific enquiry - in addition to those used in physics and chemistry - for dealing with the living world. The necessity of concepts and methods designed specifically for the living world is a major proposition of this book.

We will then retain as relevant characteristic features of living beings:

-	functionality
-	reproductive near-invariance
-	autonomous development and reproduction.

Why distinguish these three features? Might not all three be different facets, different off-springs, of one single underlying principle? Apart from other considerations which go beyond the scope of this work, there are two good reasons for making this distinction. First, functionality and invariance are, by their very nature, properties of the beings concerned, while autonomous development and reproduction is a process through which the two others arise. Secondly, the distinction between functionality and invariance is not purely conceptual; these two properties are mostly brought to life - literally - by two different kinds of molecules: functionality is in the majority produced by proteins formed from amino acids, while invariance is ensured by nucleic acids.

What we see as the creature (the tree, the butterfly, the bacteria, the man), all that makes a living being function, we will call the functional apparatus: the totality of organs, blood, bones, muscles, brain etc. which are built from proteins. It is through this apparatus that the functionality embodied in the creature becomes apparent.

2a.3) The Language of Life.

To ensure reproductive invariance, there must be a record of this apparatus, and this record must be preserved. Such a record exists. It is written in a ‘language’ of which all ‘words’ and ‘punctuations’ are three ‘letters’ long. A letter (called nucleotide) is embodied by a combination of four nucleic acids: Adenine, Guanine, Cytosine and Thymine. The words are strung along in a long chain, a chromosome, divided into phrases by a kind of punctuation. Such a three-letter word can describe, can identify (is a code for) an amino acid. And these amino acids combine to form the building blocks of the being, for instance proteins.

For the subject of this book, we need not know how nucleic acids identify an amino acid. Suffice to say that this process is based on some features shared by the molecules of both the nucleic and the amino acids, mainly a complementary surface structure, as well as physical and chemical bonding properties, a common ‘fit’.

Al living beings, all proteins etc., are built from one or more of these twenty amino acids. The chromosomes contain words for all these twenty amino acids, often more than one word for the same amino acid. They also contain words which regulate the internal functioning of the ‘blue-print’, such as punctuation, which do not define any amino acid (and some words which as yet seem to have no function). The sixty-four possible combinations of four letters therefore are totally sufficient for the chromosomes to ‘describe’, to record, the whole functional apparatus.

A protein is made up from a large number, more than a hundred, molecules of amino acids. The words in a chromosome are grouped by punctuation into phrases (genes) whose number of words

corresponds to the number of amino acids which are required to form the molecule, the protein, for which it codes. There are may be thousands of such genes in a chromosome, and man has 46 chromosomes. His genetic information is contained in what could be called a library of 46 books, each containing thousands of phrases composed of a hundred or more three-letter words.

Twenty words seem a paltry number for describing something as complex as all living beings in all their variety. But consider: from twenty words, we can make:

20 different phrases of 1 word

400 different phrases of 2 words

8 000 different phrases of 3 words

160 000 different phrases of 4 words

3 200 000 different phrases of 5 words

64 000 000 different phrases of 6 words

1 240 000 000 different phrases of 7 words

With ten words, we exceed a trillion; yet one protein is usually described by a chain (a phrase) of more than 100 amino acids (words). The number of different sentences of 100 ‘words’ that can be formed with a vocabulary of 20 words is a number of 130 positions, a number which far exceeds our faculty of imagination. The twenty words of three letters each, strung along in sentences of some hundred-plus words, is for all practical purposes totally sufficient to describe any possible living being: it places no limits on the imagination of nature.

Let me repeat that the term blueprint or program is not quite applicable to the genes because they neither contain nor presuppose any information about the end product to which they contribute. The genes are just some records describing a sequence of amino acids. That sequence might have arisen from a successful replication of the sequence recorded in the genes of the parent; it also might have arisen by pure chance, for instance by a mutation: a flaw imparted to the genes of the parent during its life, or a mishap during reproduction. With sexual reproduction, an even larger chance element is involved in the combination of genes of both parents. The actual coding of a gene is a point in the time-dimension of a process: it has the nature of a record if, from this point, we look backwards and of a plan if we look forward. It obtains meaning only within a specific process. Only within that process do genes contain meaningful information, does any semblance of order arise.

2a.4) Life Is a Process With a Direction.

LIFE IS A PROCESS. Let us have a look at the life of a relatively simple being like the bacteria escherria coli which we all have in our bowels. The life of an individual bacterium starts somewhere between the beginning of the splitting of its parent's chromosomes and the completion of the reconstitution of its two descendants. The exact point at which their life as an individual starts is an arbitrary and subjective decision: life is a continuous process. For reasons of convenience, it will be defined as the moment at which the chromosomes of a parent bacterium have split into two halves.

A chromosome is composed of two adjoining strings of genes. It is a sequence, a string, a polonaise, of couples of nucleic acids walking side by side: each of these nucleic acids has an affinity to only one partner. Guanine and Cytosine always pair off with each other; Adenine has Thymine as preferred companion.

The two halves of the chromosome thus are mirror images of each other. When they split lengthwise, each single string is composed of the partners of the nucleic acids of the other single string. Each of these nucleic acids, while still bonded to its neighbours, is now ‘divorced’ and is searching in its surroundings for a ‘free’, unattached, partner of the same type as the one it had before. Once found, it bonds with it, forming a new couple. As soon as all nucleic acids of the original strings have found new partners, two new, double-string chromosomes have been formed, which - except for mishaps - are totally identical to the original one. Each of the two new chromosomes takes with him half of the original bacteria's cytoplasm, mitochondria etc., thereby reconstituting two new bacteria half the size of their common parent.

Obviously, that endeavour will be successful only if sufficient ‘free’ nucleic acids are floating around in the parent, and if the rest, the ‘functional apparatus’, also is of sufficient size and constitution to sustain a bacterium when split in half. The offspring must inherit from its progenitor not only the genes but also all other elements such as mitochondria necessary to perform vital functions.

The halves then attempt to extract from their surroundings what it takes to become a mature bacterium which has accumulated all the materials necessary to successfully complete a new round of splitting. In this process of growing and preparing for a new round of splitting, the chromosomes function as a blueprint, not of the bacteria, but of the various products it has to make (proteins and enzymes) for that activity.

If that were all there is to it, the process would be very dull and stationary. It would result in some kind of machine which would continue to live as long as the circumstances in which it prospered remain unchanged. But the surroundings of the bacteria, inert and living, are continuously changing, if only because of the activity of the bacteria itself which has to exploit, and thus change, its surroundings to grow and multiply. Such a process will come to an end sooner or later.

Fortunately, perfection is not part of the vocabulary of nature, certainly not of the living world. A lot can happen to a chromosome, both in between two ‘splittings’ and in the process of splitting and reconstituting two new chromosomes: errors from the point of view of perfect replication, but also opportunities for the creation of new types of living beings. Given the set of circumstances, such a new creature can, compared to the original, be better, less or equally well suited.

Suited for what? There is only one criterion, and that is its de facto survival and reproduction. If we know a lot about the being concerned and its circumstances, our guess as to whether a certain error is likely to be to its advantage or disadvantage will probably be correct. But every now and then our argument, of impeccable logic, will tell us that the creature has to die, yet it

does in fact prosper, usually because of some unforeseen and possibly unforeseeable circumstance. Any conclusion as to its viability which we might draw from past knowledge of the bacteria can only be tentative. As for any prediction, the actual outcome is the only decisive ‘proof’ of the effect of the ‘error’, of the mutation.

Many of the new, mutated bacteria will die off immediately. Others may survive and propagate and will then live concurrently with the strain from which they derived. The record embodied in the mutated genes will be retained by the living world only if successful in propagation. The fact that the genes serve both as a record and as a blueprint for a ‘functional apparatus’ thus gives this whole process a built-in bias towards survival and reproduction: it retains for admittance into the ‘memory of the living world’ the records of beings which have proved to be at least as capable of survival and propagation as the creatures from which they are derived. For if they were substantially less well suited, they would soon be displaced by the non-mutated descendants of their parent. That, in a nutshell, is evolution. Note that it does not contain the notion of fittest, only fit enough, and that it does not specify the means by which that is achieved.

Back to the process of life. As said, to beget a viable offspring, a parent cell must not only split and transmit its genes, it must bequeath on its offspring all the elements required to keep the process going (active cytoplasm, mitochondria etc. plus all necessary external substances such as food, oxygen etc.) until the offspring is able to provide for itself. That process cannot usually be interrupted for one single instant. Sometimes an interruption occurs, for instance by long periods of freezing or dry spells of the local climate. If so, this interruption must be provided for in the genes and that provision will have to include not only the ability to weather those circumstances, but also the trigger for resuming active life after they end.

All this requires an enormous amount of activity. Clearly living creatures can do it, and science by now can explain ‘how’ they do it. But a full explanation also requires an answer to the question ‘what makes them do it?’. To actually occur, there must be a motivation - in the literal sense of ‘setting into motion’ - built into the process. Inertia is not enough, for the second law of thermodynamics tells us that in open systems - and life is an open system - all processes will entail an increase of entropy (see next page) and tend to ‘run out’. There being no perpetual motion, something must constantly give new impulses to the living world, must ‘move’ it towards exploiting energy from the outside world in order to keep its own process going. For want of a better expression, I shall call this motivation the ‘will to live and to reproduce’.

That name does not at all imply that this ‘will’ is conscious, nor does it appeal to a divine creator. It expresses how that ‘motivation’ appears to us and how it takes form in human beings. If applied to other creatures, it stands for the more correct but unappealing locution of ‘bias towards survival and reproduction’. Nor does it imply that this motivation itself has to be encoded in the genes. But the genes must contain some information which, together with other inherited elements, results in developing a being having this motivation. The ‘will to live’, the motivation, does not appeal to any universal purpose external to the being and has no metaphysical implications. We will revert to it further on.

It is current practice to talk on one hand about genes and the ‘information’ which they contain (nature) and on the other hand about a process by which a being develops in interaction with its environment (nurture). Let me emphasise that such a division is primarily and at best a means of apprehending and talking about living beings; it is not intended to suggest that we can factually separate the one from the other: the ‘meaning’ of genetic information becomes apparent, can be understood, becomes information, only within this process. (See Volume Two, Nurture versus nature).

THE DIRECTION OF LIFE. Being a process, life means change, motion. Now change and motion are not particular to life: everything is changing. The universe is exploding, mountains are eroding, seasons come and go. Can we find a direction in these changes? In the inert world there is an underlying direction to all changes: from diversity, from energy potential, from order, to amorphousness, distension, chaos. The well-known second law of thermodynamics reigns everywhere: all motions of physical systems tend in the end to increase entropy. (For want of a better word ‘neguentropy’ will be used as an opposite to entropy even though some physicists object to it).

Can a direction also be found in the process of life? Creationists would deny it. But all information we have gathered about the history of life on our planet points to a very old age and to profound changes. The evidence suggests that in the living world these changes have gone in a direction which is opposite to that of the inert world. Life seems quite clearly to have developed towards greater diversity and complexity, increased its inner energy and order, moved towards greater neguentropy. The very success in survival and multiplication is contrary to the second law of thermodynamics: the living world seems to reverse within itself the general tendency towards degradation which rules the inert one.

Evolution refers to a type of motion, development, where the new state has its roots in the old one, and the passage from one state to the other is a continuous process. ‘Continuous’ means ‘without interruption’, not ‘at uniform speed’. Stable periods may alternate with periods of rapid change. The essence of biological evolution is that new species, new forms of life, are modifications of existing forms, that these modifications proceed step by step and not necessarily in all individuals of the original form, so that both will for a longer or shorter period exist side by side.

A new species can arise from the modifications of genes only if the new type is successful in survival and reproduction. This sentence of course is a tautology which would apply to the establishment of a new species from any kind of process. Yet it is essential for a correct understanding of evolution as an open-ended process (see next paragraph). The direction of life is the result of the simple ‘mechanical’ process of generating gradual change and simultaneously recording it in beings motivated to survive and reproduce. In the phenomenon of the living world, this introduces a tendency, a bias, towards beings having ‘proved’ their ability to survive and multiply by having done so.

Both this last point and the relevance of the theory of evolution are illustrated by bacteria that became resistant to penicillin through the above process. Yet the mutations which lead to the

resistance to penicillin were due to ‘chance’ in the sense that each mutation was individually unrelated to the resultant resistance. The mutated strain prospered only after these changes had proved their value in an environment now enriched (or, from the point of view of the bacteria, degraded) by penicillin.

Suppose we accept evolution as one of the basic facts of life. What does that mean for us? Can we deduce in what direction evolution will take us? The answer is no.

LIFE IS AN OPEN-ENDED PROCESS. One of the reasons why the word evolution is suspect to many is because to them the notion of a ‘direction’ has a ideological, goal-directed connotation. That is not at all implied by the word itself nor by the use made of it here: the direction we talk about becomes evident only ex post. Until an adequate term is available to replace ‘evolution’, we will have to stick to it.

Let me repeat: that theory (that life is a continuous process with a direction towards neguentropy) is just a description of what we know about it from observation. That knowledge is gained by hindsight: it does not mean that life had to develop the way it did, nor that it will continue to go that way. Today's state of life did not follow from the realisation of any blueprint, or from striving towards a specific end-state. It resulted from the nature of the above-mentioned process. There is no guarantee that this process will continue, that it will not come to an end. We only know that if it is to continue, it must go in one general direction: the one opposite to the direction of the second law, that it must perpetuate its bias against chaos which appears to us as the will to live and propagate.

The mutations which are at the core of change must be ‘new’ and therefore must originate in something outside the currently existing information contained in life. Any such event, a photon arriving from the sun or cosmic radiation, is undefined until it has been registered. All possible events can function as a source of change; by that very characteristic the events generating mutations are both unpredictable and infinite in numbers: from the point of view of the being concerned, they are chance, random events. If the history of our solar system had been different, had shown some extra magnetic storms on the surface of the sun, many living creatures might have evolved in a different way. Where evolution will take us, depends at any given moment on the total situation, not on any ‘necessity’ inherent to life itself.

As will be explained in the Volume Two, chapter ‘Determinism versus free will’, causality for a living being has two dimensions:

-	the past, which appears deterministic
-	the future, which seems at least partly a chance event.

Fortunately, we usually can assign probabilities different from 50% to these chance events and act accordingly, which is enough for life as a whole to obtain an extremely high probability of survival. But, certainly for the individual, there exists no certainty.

While that uncertainty might put a stress on the individual, it increases the probability of success for life itself. By accepting as cause for change any kind of event, life taps, as source for adaptation, all possible events of our universe. Any definition and thus limitation of events which are

acceptable as a source of change would ipso facto eliminate others and thus reduce life's scope for change. Everything has its price: tapping of all sources of adaptive change by life as a whole is paid for by the uncertainty for the individual about how life, certainly his life, will proceed.

There is one direction of which we can be certain; that is the direction which life will take if the bias of its creatures, their ‘will’ to row against the current of the second law of thermodynamics, disappears: it will follow the direction of the second law towards death, chaos. La Rochefoucauld probably had a different picture in mind, but his words were prophetic: ‘Life is one long struggle against death’.

The human race today presents a perfect example of this indeterminacy. We have developed a technology which can be an enormous help in adapting to the changing circumstances of nature. But we also can and do use it to destroy the human race, either in war against each other or degradation of our environment by pollution, exploitation to exhaustion or by destroying other forms of life. Nothing in the theory of evolution gives us any clue as to which of these two uses will prevail. It is precisely the belief that the outcome does not depend on any inherent direction of life, but on our will and effort to perpetuate life in general and humanity in particular, which made me devote my time to this study instead of going fishing.

If life has progressed in its struggle against chaos, then this has been - as my first book is titled - a ‘Progress without Blueprint’. By itself progress is a purely topographic notion without any implication of value, of ‘better’. It obtains its ‘value’ component only by the subjective act of attaching such a value to a direction or a destination, in the case of life against the direction of the second law.

As evolution is an open-ended process, the question about the direction which life will take cannot be answered. For beings endowed with a will but not with the gift of prophecy, the correct question is: ‘in what direction do we want evolution to go, and what do we have to do to get there?’. If we have accepted life as a struggle against chaos, and if we feel it is worth fighting for, then we know where we want it to go: towards an increased chance of survival of our living world, including ourselves.

PERFECTION AND ‘THE BEST’ ARE NOT CONCEPTS OF LIVING SYSTEMS. ONLY ‘ADEQUATE’ AND ‘BETTER’ ARE. Even within a sort, very different individuals can be successful at survival and reproduction. Their ability to do so depends on a number of capabilities which are unequally distributed. Provided the individual correctly assesses his strengths and weaknesses, and determines his strategy in concrete situations in accordance with this assessment and a correct representation of the situation, he can be successful even if he is physically weaker or less ‘intelligent’ than another. Also, what is an advantage in one situation may be a handicap in another.

As will be further explained in the chapter about the holistic nature of living systems, we cannot even conceptually define any optimum for such a system, we cannot determine the qualities which qualify a creature as the best, the fittest. Even if we consider the group of all individuals of a sort that were successful in survival and reproduction, and call that the fittest group, such a

qualification would not provide any enlightenment. For there may well have been individuals which scored higher or equally well on all aspects deemed relevant, but who died through some spurious accident before being able to reproduce. If penicillin had been able to kill off all bacteria of a certain type before it had time to develop a penicillin resistant strain, the whole type would have disappeared. As said, a new species will at least for a certain period exist side by side with the one from which it descended.. As long as they do, there is no answer to the question: ‘which one is the fittest?’.

We must forego any notion of optimum as well as any end state towards which we want a society to proceed. We can however - given today's environment - determine which are the minimum conditions for a society to be viable and make a reasonable guess at what we can do to improve what we have.

2a.5) How Does Life Do It?

As part of the material world, living creatures are subject to the same laws of physics and chemistry that govern the inert world, including the second law of thermodynamics' increase of entropy, of chaos. Life increases its own order, its own neguentropy, by the only means possible, namely by increasing entropy around it: LIFE EXPLOITS THE UNIVERSE TO ITS OWN ENDS.

The process involved is illustrated by the famous ‘demons of Maxwell’. Imagine two adjacent receptacles communicating through very small practically weightless sliding doors, so small that they let molecules pass through only one by one. One receptacle is filled with hot gas, the other with cool. Within the receptacles, molecules are shooting around in a random way. Their average speed within the hot gas is much higher than within the cool gas, but in each of the receptacles the speed of the molecules is far from uniform. If you open the doors, molecules from one receptacle would move into the other and vice versa. After a while this exchange will reduce the difference in average speed of gas, and thus in the temperature, between the two receptacles, and with it the energy potential embodied in this difference. The entropy of the system would increase.

Now suppose that some creatures, demons, operate the doors and that they are able to see the molecules aimed for the doors and to judge their speed. If they let only the faster moving molecules from the cold receptacle into the hot one and only the slower moving from the hot receptacle into the cold one, the demons would increase the difference in the average speed, and thus the temperature and the energy potential, between the two receptacles; the process would run against the direction of the second law.

Would entropy then have decreased? Only within the system of the two receptacles. For estimating the speed of the molecules, processing this information into a decision and operating the sliding doors will consume energy, more energy than is gained within the receptacles. We only have a transfer of energy potential from outside the system of the receptacles to the inside, with a net loss to the universe: the second law is vindicated as always.

I have chosen this illustration because it closely parallels the process by which life uses external energy: it exchanges an increase of its own neguentropy against a bigger increase of entropy in its environment through the SELF-ORIENTED USE OF INFORMATION. The basic mechanism generating the bias against entropy is the specialisation of the elements of living creatures into ‘information’ and ‘action’ elements. Both are necessary for the continuance of the process of life.

The information process illustrated in PART TWO B is at the base of all activities of living beings, biasing these activities towards the objectives - basically survival and propagation - of these beings. Processing information is one of the least energy-consuming activities one can engage in. It always entails an element of search. That is a specific activity which must be built into the subject which processes information: it must be programmed to look for.... yes, for what?

In some cases, the information to look for can be exactly defined, for instance the presence of a specific food molecule required by a bacterium. In the primitive system of a bacterium, the built-in motivation may take the very simple form of the affinity of a gene for a certain molecule indicating the presence of such specific food molecules. The simplicity of such a process is an asset because very few things can go wrong. It is also a liability, for such a creature is totally dependent on one element of its surroundings. If the specific food molecule it has been programmed to look for is absent, the creature will die. Quite possibly the surroundings might contain another kind of food molecule which could also do; but such a primitive creature would not recognise it as such.

The environment of a living being changes continuously. The probability of survival of a creature is better served if it is less dependent on very specific conditions, if it is motivated and able to search in a less specific way. Besides survival, such flexibility will also increase its opportunities for colonising environments different from the one in which it came into being.

THE WILL TO LIVE AND TO REPRODUCE provides the maximum of flexibility, is the pinnacle of universality of the ‘motivation’ towards the objective to survive and reproduce which is pervasive over the whole phenomenon of life. In its simplest form, this motivation is just a bias built into a process; how that bias is introduced is explained in more detail in the chapter about information. In its most complex form we call it a will.

The very exceptions to this general pervasiveness illustrate its nature and necessity. For instance we often find that death follows reproduction. This only means that maintaining the process of life, sort and gene takes precedence over the life of a single individual. Suicide also has been quoted as a refutation of the will to survive. A curious misconception: suicide perfectly illustrates that the will to live is not an expression of some general law of nature but that it is a precondition for survival. Either man - as a living being - accepts this objective of survival and reproduction as the highest to aim for in the material world, or he opts out of the living world. Because of the relentless erosion implied in the second law, not to fight is to loose. One cannot be neutral: either one is for life, or one is - explicitly or by default - against it. (This is not a fundamentalist pro-life stance on abortion: that refers to the choice of a mother about whether or not to give birth to an offspring.)

It cannot be repeated too often that:

-	such a will, such a bias, can be understood and proved only ex post and in a tautological way
-	such an objective does not imply any teleological view of man; it does not say anything about a meaning of life. It does not even imply that life has a meaning or a purpose. It implies no ‘law of nature’ such as an ‘élan vital’.

In the example used in the next part, the regulation of the digestion of milk sugar in a bacterium, we find that the action (the production of inhibitors) is started, is motivated, by an inherited process directed by a gene; its effect is to bias a purely chemical process towards the survival of the bacteria by activating this energy-consuming process only when there is sugar to digest. The ex ante explanation of that bias, that motivation, only requires the description of a process generating such a gene plus the complementary environment (cytoplasm and mitochondria).

As the number of action alternatives increases, the motivation must become more and more general, taking the form of hunger and sex. These still fall under the concept of ‘inclination towards....’. The notion of will implies that the being is conscious of that inclination and has the imagination to devise other courses of action than those deriving from instinct. The ‘will to live’ therefore does not represent a general feature of life and should be reserved for those beings, in any case man, which meet the above qualification of consciousness.

A constant in this book is the importance of correct use of words because many controversies and paradoxes originate in unwarranted connotations. That explains why, to the surprise of an eminent reader, I make no mention, even in the bibliography, of Richard Dawkins' ‘Selfish Gene’. One reason is that he did not add anything I needed. The genetic make up is not a subject of normative social decision-making.

Another reason is that what he added is contested, while my objective is to focus on those subjects for which consensus can be reached. I too have objections to his work, namely to the use of ‘selfish’ to express a property of genes and their predominance. A gene is just a record of what it takes to make a being. It comes into expression only in the correct environment (such as cytoplasm, mitochondria and an environment from which it can extract the energy and building blocks necessary for growth and reproduction): life is a continuous process. The more complex the being, the larger the role of that environment, with at its peak the human being which in addition to the above factors depends on culture. I also object to the use of ‘selfish’ to express the tendency of a being towards survival and reproduction. In terms of the process of life it adds nothing to my morally neutral ‘motivation towards survival and reproduction’, but it generates an unwarranted connotation. In common language selfish is the opposite of altruistic. To be altruistic, one must be alive and therefore selfish in Dawkins' sense: the non-existence of altruism then becomes a tautology and is not limited to the genes. Correctly used, ‘selfish’ and ‘altruistic’ refer to the two tendencies of the human individual (self-assertive and integrative, see 2b.7, Holarchy). They are moral concepts applicable only to social beings using morals as a means of coordinating their behaviour, they are culturally developed and thus cannot be adequately apprehended in terms of genes.

2a.6) Evolution Is Now.

‘Evolution’ is used in this book in its etymological sense and refers to a property of the process of life, namely that its change is evolutionary, not revolutionary. It is however also identified with Darwin's theory of evolution which attempts to describe and explain the history of life, as an answer to the question ‘Where do we come from?’. In that connotation it is immediately drawn into the whirlpool of metaphysical discussions. Questions about whether there is a God and whether he created man are a non-issue from a scientific point of view. No scientific theory will ever provide an answer. All that a scientific theory might ever pretend is to give a plausible explanation about the means that God - if there is one - may have used in creating the world. That may still rouse the everlasting wrath of some religious fanatics, but arguing with fanatics is anyway an exercise in futility. Realisation of the limited pretensions which science can legitimately have should defuse the issue amongst reasonable people, which hopefully will include most social scientists.

Even if we are here not concerned with the history of life, the evolutionary process of life described in this part must be compatible with that history and explain its mechanism if it is to be plausible. To say that all evolutionary changes are gradual implies that, if we could retrace every step of the emergence of a new species, the decision on where the old species stops and the new starts will be largely arbitrary. The appearance of totally new features, of some really fundamental changes, is not so gradual. Some of them seem to defy explanation by the process of mutation and selection. Of course, we may just not have found fossils of transitory creatures. The really puzzling aspect of such changes is that the new features, like the feathers of the archaeopteryx, seem to have no adaptive advantage until they have developed to a level where they permit flight, which requires that they have evolved simultaneously with the bone and muscle structures required to form some sort of wing. The efforts of Darwinists to develop explanations for these transitions in terms of their theory, and to find empirical evidence for these explanations are perfectly legitimate. Other scientists have developed alternative theories, and there is a sometimes quite acrimonious battle going on between Darwinists and their opponents. (See Volume Two, chapter ‘Evolution as an explanation of the origin of species’).

As this book deals with the world as it is today, it does not need to take a stand in this controversy, the more so because both friend and foe of the neo-Darwinist theory agree that whatever the origin of the major structures of the living world, the theory of evolution as used here is perfectly adequate to explain how these structures - once they have come into being - change, by what means they survive, and why they die.

There is one theory that is rejected by all scientists concerned with the matter, namely the theory that new forms emerge by revolution. The Hegelian-Marxist view that the decline, the negation, of the old, precedes - either logically or factually - the emergence, the synthesis, of the new must be rejected on the basis of all available evidence. New forms of life might have come to us from outer space, as surmised by Fred Hoyles in his ‘The Intelligent Universe’, or created by God. But whatever their origin, once they have reached earth, they take their place in life's evolution.

So the religious implications can be put to rest. The question of the ultimate source of life is largely immaterial to the significance of evolution in its practical applicability to today's problems. Social scientists can and should direct their attention to the question: what is the relevance for their science of the current knowledge about the way life works today? That is far more important than an explanation of where today's living creatures came from. For while we would like to know where we came from, what we really need to know is: ‘where are we now and where do we want to go?’.

2a.7) Some Remarks About Functionality.

Function, intention and purpose are words which will frequently appear in this book, for instance as the basis for most of its value judgements and for many concepts such as rationality. Functionality (related but not equal to telenomy) is a suspect concept in philosophy. If we say that a certain object has a function, is useful, some people tend to sense in that statement an implication that such usefulness and functionality must be a property of that object itself, or could explain its origin.

In our universe, everything seems to have some purpose, a place in the scheme of things, and seems to be related to everything else. It is hard to conceive that such a universe can be explained by just the working of the laws of natural science, without any reference to some sort of intention, some ultimate purpose. That impression is strongest when we investigate the living world in which functionality (for instance of organs) is a demonstrable fact.

As argued by Nicolai Hartman and generally accepted in philosophy, we cannot from this impression deduce that a purpose, an intention, was at the root of any phenomenon in our universe, with the exception of the actions and products of living beings. Teleological thinking (the notion that at the root of all phenomena there must be an intention, a purpose) is neither a logical necessity nor consistent with the methods, theories and findings of empirical science. Imputing to function some creative power in the emergence of phenomena of the inert or the living world (other than the actions and products of living beings) is an unwarranted anthropomorphism generated by our tendency to see the world in the terms we use to explain our own daily thoughts and acts.

It must be absolutely clear that in this book function never ever is used in that connotation. It only says that functionality, purposiveness, telenomy, is found in all living beings, for instance in their limbs, genes, etc. That does imply that we cannot make any description of limbs, genes etc. without taking account of their function. The view of life and of evolution presented in this book never explains the first appearance of any element of a living creature by its function. Functionality - both chronologically and logically - follows such a first appearance through the property of invariant reproduction of living beings; it is not its cause. Mutation, invariant reproduction and selection, the process of evolution, produce functionality which - once achieved - enhances the chances of continuity of the process by increasing the viability of the being once that functionality has been ‘experienced’. The process itself, including the ‘new’ being, must be in place first.

The correct assumption about today's genes, limbs etc. is that at their origin there was no intention, no ‘blueprint’ of any function. All functionality becomes apparent, emerges, only ex post. With the one exception mentioned above: the products of living beings like birds nests and human instruments. Even here, serendipity was at the root of many of them. When Alexander Fleming noticed the death of certain bacteria in a totally unrelated experiment involving penicillin, he was curious about how they died. Killing bacteria became a ‘function’ of penicillin only after he discovered that property by chance, and it is a ‘function’ only to human beings who are aware of it and able to produce penicillin. For bacteria, this property of penicillin is an environmental hazard. But the function of penicillin is at the root of the production facilities which we subsequently built.

Summing up: the concept of the ‘ex post’ functionality used in this book is legitimate by any prevalent standard of contemporary philosophy. This paragraph intends to make sure that the reader uses it in the same way.

The evolutionary process and this functionality may not be the only legitimate concepts we need for explaining the living world. I neither acclaim nor reject the idea that there must be more to it, as for instance suggested by Arthur Koestler in ‘The Ghost in the Machine’. Such ideas, however interesting or plausible, are neither necessary nor relevant to the arguments proposed in this book. Part of the craft of an effective decision maker is to discard all information which is superfluous for his decisions. What can be asserted is that the concepts of evolution and functionality are an indispensable minimum for any scientific apprehension of the living world as it works today and are sufficient at the level of generality and purpose of this book.

Many people abhor the concept of functionality because it seems to lead to the classic utilitarian view of our world. The above view of life and living beings does indeed lead to a ‘functionalist’ view of information, but the notion of function differs from that of utility because it involves no value. The basic function of our legs is transportation, and therefore their evaluation in terms of their ability to walk is as objective as any evaluation can be; it pertains to the domain of fact. The utility of the ability to walk is a matter of value, is subjective; high heels are a proof that sometimes we may place a higher value on other functions of legs. In the section about justice we will explain why the functional view of information which we introduce in the axioms of social philosophy will on the contrary refute those elements of utilitarianism which have given it such a bad name. (The confrontation of this functionalism with James' philosophical instrumentalism is seems a worthwhile subject for further study but is not necessary for this book)

‘Function’ refers to the way in which some element of the being concerned contributes to the objective to live and propagate, to run counter to the tendency towards chaos in the inert world, by exploiting the world around them to their own advantage. The processes through which a creature ‘does’ something are physical/chemical processes which - as stated - have no function by themselves. Burning fuel to generate the energy required to drive a car, the production of enzymes facilitating the digestion of sugar, the splitting of a cell to make two cells, they all contribute to the long-term viability of the being concerned only because these processes can be switched on and off according to circumstances. Our car should run only when we want to go somewhere, digestive enzymes should be produced only if there is something to digest, and a

cell should divide only if it has developed to a stage where each of the halves becomes a viable individual cell. Only then can they provide the creature concerned with more energy from outside than it has spent in their production.

The splitting process cannot go on ‘blindly’ on its own, it must be initiated by some ‘starter’, some kind of switch whose setting is determined by the propitiousness-for-splitting of the state of the cell and of its environment. The switch, or whatever sets the switch off or on, must ‘know’ the relevant facts about the cell and its environment. Without information, no function, and without function, no life.

SUMMING UP: The world, including the living one, just exists. Questions like ‘why it exists?’, ‘what is its purpose?’, pertain to the domain of religion. But within the living world the notions of function and purpose have a well-defined meaning as part of a scientific explanation of the process of life. It might not be able to tell us how a specific aspect of a living being or system came about, but it can explain why - once in existence - it persisted.

2a.8) Steps in Evolution.

The little we know about the history of the process of life indicates that it has moved in a specific direction in a few major steps. The first creatures could adapt to changes in the environment only as a sort and only through changes in genes. Then came species whose individuals are able to adapt as individuals, for instance predators who learn to identify and remember landmarks like clumps of grass, water-holes etc. where a prey is more likely to be found. Finally man appeared who not only can adapt as an individual to changes in environment, but can - by cooperation - actually change that environment to his perceived advantage and who can pass on to the sort what he learned as individual. At each step the creature becomes more independent from the specific conditions of their surroundings. This development seems to go hand in hand with an ever-decreasing specificity, and thus increasing generality, of the means by which the will to live can express itself. Living systems become more complex, permitting a continuous increase of the variety of means that living beings can use to adapt to and exploit their environment.

Genetic adaptation of the sort.
The only way viruses and primitive bacteria can adapt is through changes in their genes; these creatures are little more than support systems for genes which are their major, if not only memory. They can thus be extremely small and energy efficient, reproduce at a very fast rate and in a very simple way, and thus exist in gigantic numbers. Given their large number and fast rate of reproduction, they can through mutations at very short notice generate an immense number of ‘alternative’ individuals, and thus stand a very good chance, given time, of generating one which has an answer to a change in the environment such as the appearance of penicillin.

b)	Adaptation by learning at the level of the individual. Other creatures such as animals are complex assemblies, systems, of lower-level individuals (cells) and thus become endowed with a whole range of behaviour alternatives which enable them to adapt their reactions to the environment: run from danger, look for other sources of food etc. To be effective, this variety of possible behaviour must go hand in hand with an increase in their ability to process information about the environment so as to choose from the available behaviour alternatives the one which promises the best result. The second step in the evolution is a central nervous system which includes an internal memory for information gathered by the individual. What is learned during the life of an individual is retained in that memory but can be directly transmitted to other individuals only in a very primitive way (imitation), if at all. The individual can learn from experience, but the sort profits from the experience of individuals mainly if successful behaviour becomes encoded in the genes.

c)	Cultural adaptation. Cultural adaptation enables individuals to pass on what they have learned to other members of the sort. In its most primitive form (teaching by means of example and behavioural conditioning), cultural adaptation can already be found with higher mammals. But the exploitation of the full potential of cultural adaptation requires a new means of communication and of storage of experience which is not dependent on the experiencing individual: a symbolic language plus external memory, media (the memory of other individuals, books, pictures etc.). The increased potential of information puts a premium on increasing its processing capabilities; man has added the ability of reflective thinking, of reason and imagination. Virtual selection by imagination coupled to critical reason presents enormous savings in energy over actual selection by physical elimination. The faculty of reason, of conscious and analytical thought, has given man the capability to decide on the extent to which he wants to submit to the results of the process of biological evolution, and on ways to improve upon it. But his choices, even if subjective, cannot be arbitrary in the sense of random. For he always in the end faces the same judge as all fellow creatures: failure and death. He may have the power of reasoned decision, but he must use that power towards improving his chances of survival as a species and as an individual.... if he and his sort are to survive.

The self-directed processing of information, including its resulting knowledge, is unique to life, is the basic difference between the living and the inert world, is the most relevant aspect of the evolution of life. Corresponding to each of the above three stages of information processing, we will distinguish three types of knowledge, each characterised by its kind of storage:

-	storage in the genes = genetic knowledge
-	storage in the neural centres = individual knowledge
-	storage in external media = social knowledge, culture.

Each higher stage presupposes the lower one, and passage from one to the other is not completely discontinuous; for instance we have noted that some knowledge gained by individual animals may be passed on to others by demonstration. But in its totality, each stage represents a quantum jump over the previous one in the ability of life to adapt to and control its environment.

The main conclusion of the chapter on life is that life is a continuing struggle against chaos, an unrelenting struggle for an increase of neguentropy within the living world, a fight against the decay of all order implied by the second law of thermodynamics. Its main weapon is the processing of information and creation of knowledge, culminating in human culture.

Scientific knowledge is the primary contribution of culture to our ability to survive, and thus is the spearhead of the living world in its struggle against chaos. Failure to submit to the discipline required by this struggle, perversion of knowledge by succumbing to the lure of beautiful or morally high-sounding myths, is also the biggest danger confronting humanity today. Putting the abilities generated by application of scientific knowledge at the service of these myths threatens to turn our cultural achievements against us.

The prominent role played by knowledge, especially scientific knowledge, in the fight of life against chaos logically leads to the next part, an investigation into the nature of information and knowledge in general, and - in the adjoining part three - of scientific knowledge.

Before we move on to these subjects, I will briefly explain the use of ‘inert’ and ‘living’ instead of more usual ‘inorganic’ and ‘organic’.

2a.9) Living/Inert Versus Organic/Inorganic.

‘Organic’ and ‘inorganic emphasise the molecular structure of the entities we are talking about. That is not a good criterion. For organic molecules are not exclusive to the living world. The majority of scientists who assume a materialistic origin of life agree that organic molecules had to exist before the process of living could start. The distinction between the phenomenon of life and the rest of the known Universe is the process of living, not any physical or chemical property of living beings.

The property which is most specific to the process of life is the generation and use of the information process, a process which does not take place in the inert world unless it has been introduced in it by living creatures, for instance when making and programming computers.

Living creatures are systems of elements which do have physical and chemical properties. It is then tempting to describe the information processing of living systems totally in terms used in inert systems, like energy. At best such attempts are doomed to failure. At worst, by seeming to have sufficient plausibility or by riding the current fashion, they enjoy a following and thus create misconceptions. For the information process has a unique and distinctive feature totally absent in any inert system: subjectivity. We will explain it further on, but will note here that no physico-chemical system can accommodate and incorporate such subjectivity.

Energy is a property of physico-chemical systems. As Internal Energy, Hemholtz Free Energy, Gibbs Free Energy, they are used to measure (changes of) entropy which is a property of physical-chemical processes. Some theories of information pretend to measure information content,

or the’ ‘potential’ of information, in analogy to energy, and attempt to express information in terms of entropy.

Such attempts, however enlightening and useful, do in fact only measure the potential contribution of the physical, chemical or logical processes used in the information process to their function of carrier or organiser of information. They define efficiency concepts like the speed of a given information process in finding the ‘right’ solution to a given problem or its probability of finding the right solution. Such measurements never deal with information itself. If we want to estimate the energy potential of a fuel for powering cars, there is a direct relationship between the Gibbs Free Energy and this potential. There is no such kind of relationship between any of the measures currently used to appraise an information system and the information actually generated by it.

In fact, from just looking at the physico-chemical system used in an information process we cannot even decide whether it did generate or contain any information. Only if information has already been generated, only if we ‘know’ the meaning of a set of letters, can we decide whether a certain assembly of letters has a meaning or not. What we usually call information, like the meaning of a word, is completely absent in the physical-chemical or logical system investigated by the theoreticians of the quantification of information. The reader interested in this subject is referred to Volume Two, chapter ‘The quantification of information’.

The distinctive feature of living systems, the phenomenon which we find exclusively in the living world, is this giving-a-meaning-which-is-not-directly-related-to the physical-chemical properties of the medium used. Giving meaning is the exclusive property of all living systems, from the simplest virus up to man. I have not read anywhere of an example of a process of the inert world using information unless we extend the concept to cover all impulses which generate a reaction. Order alone is not information.

As the Russian physicist Landau has noted, pure energy concepts such as ‘forces’ must be man-made abstractions created to summarise interactions between particles. They therefore are not part of the reality around us, but only of our apparatus to deal with this reality. The objects of that reality all have energy and mass as one inseparable entity and are - as Kant says - in space and time. Energy and mass, space and time, are dimensions, categories, which we use to describe the world of objects, while the concept of force is designed to register, explain and - last but not least - to make the reactions between these objects predictable in terms of these categories. We will revert to them in Volume Two, chapter ‘Against the autonomous existence of Popper's world three objects’.

On the other hand, once we have introduced the notion of information and information process, of meaning and subjectivity, we can in principle deal with all information processes, including human thought. The most fundamental cleft in terms of scientific method then is not between man and the rest of the universe, but between the living and the inert world. We will revert to that subject in Volume Two, chapter ‘More than physics and chemistry’. Its main conclusions are:

The living world cannot be adequately described by only the tools we use with the inert one. In addition to the laws and theories of physics and chemistry, we need theories and (mathematical) methods specifically designed to deal with the self-centred and ‘holistic’ information process.

We do not need to introduce new entities and concepts like spirit etc. We can, and therefore we must remain within the general method of empirical science. The major change will be in the type of controlling elements and methods we have to engage. Specifically, the objectives of the living entities investigated must be integrated in our models. The predictive capability of a model will depend on the congruence of these objectives with the objectives we have in mind when using the model; that predictive capability will always remain far below the level we can achieve in the inert world. The search for congruence of objectives, the creation of allies, may prove more promising when dealing with the living world than the development of control instruments.

Vorige Volgende

Part Two Life and Information. Part Two A What Is Life?