Nature as Marx intended
[a review of Lifelines: Biology, Freedom and Determinism by Steven Rose]
Dialectical materialism may have been the method used by Marx, Engels, Lenin and Trotsky to understand how the world works and how to change it, but it has a bad name among scientists, and understandably so.
As the official ideology of the corrupt Stalinist dictatorships, "dialectical" gobbledegook was used to justify anything and everything, as long as it satisfied the parasitic needs of the bureaucracy, whatever the cost in terms of human lives or culture.
The most tragic example of the havoc wrought by this approach was the use of "dialectics" by the Stalin clique and their charltan scientific spokesman, T. D. Lyssenko, to denounce genetics as a "bourgeois science" and to wipe out the scientific study of heredity in the USSR for more than a whole generation (roughly 1935-1975).
Steven Rose has written an ambitious and important new book which aims to do nothing less than to rehabilitate a dialectical materialist understanding of nature, of the role of heredity and its consequences for a vision of human reality, and in particular of freedom.
Rose does not use the term "dialectical materialism" - wisely, no doubt, as his target audience would probably go no further - but that is the message that comes off every page as he pounds away at the limits of static and categorical thought and the need to understand phenomena in their historical, changing complexity. And, to be clear from the outset, the result is a resounding success.
Rose is a practising scientist and has succeeded in showing the average reader the fundamental importance of modern biology for everyday life, and the reason why a dialectical vision enables that biology and its discoveries to be liberating rather than oppressive.
Rose’s starting point in this work was his growing irritation at the use of what he calls "neurogenetic determinism" to describe complex social phenomena. You know the kind of stuff - the Sunday papers are always full of it: "The hunt for the gay gene", "gene for aggression discovered", "US scientists discover gene for compulsive shopping" .
Rose’s argument is that the advances in genetics and of molecular biology, that have been the fundamental feature of science over the last half-century, have led to, or been paralleled by, a steady growth in the grip of reductionist ideology.
The ultimate consequence of this has been the rise of what Rose calls "ultra-Darwinism", which takes a variety of forms - sociobiology, "selfish DNA" or neurogenetic determinism - but which all contain the same methodological error: they reduce complex social phenomena to a simple, one-sided (and therefore false) explanation: it’s all in the genes.
While this would be merely wrong and unfortunate in, say, the study of the sex-life of the fruit-fly, it becomes positively dangerous in investigations of violence in the inner cities.
This is not only the case for clearly environmentally-influenced characteristics like behaviour. It is even the case for apparently simple bits of anatomy. Not only is there not a gene for compulsive shopping, there is not even a gene for a finger.
Rose makes his position clear right from the outset :
"Humans are not empty organisms, free spirits constrained only by the limits of our imaginations or, more prosaically, by the social and economic determinants within which we live, think and act. Nor are we reducible to ‘nothing but’ machines for the replication of DNA. We are, rather, the products of the constant dialectic between ‘the biological’ and ‘the social’ through which humans have developed" (p6)
And it is this "constant dialectic" and the role of development (in all senses) that is the theme of his book. To carry out his major re-interpretation of the natural world, Rose has to venture into two domains which are not his own - evolutionary biology and development.
The reason for this is simple: because they deal with history and its implications, they contain the keys to the present. And in turn, because their fundamental subject is that of change, they are probably the two subjects in modern biology in which the dialectic can most clearly be seen at work, even if most scientists do not recognise the fact.
Evolutionary biology - and in particular its most mathematical and abstract form, population genetics - deals with possible and observed changes in populations.
By its emphasis on change and stability, on the individual and the population and, in its very best (and hideously complicated) forms, on the myriad interactions between genes and environment, population genetics expresses the dialectic of nature in an extremely sharp form.
Similarly, the science of development, which has undergone an astonishing renaissance over the last 15 years because of the triumphs of molecular biology, deals with the way in which individuals become something else in becoming themselves. Even apparently simple subjects like the study of how a cell in a developing embryo "knows" what it has to do, are in fact highly complex and interactive.
The cell receives genetically coded, but environmentally induced, chemical information from its neighbours that informs it of its position and it, in turn, on the basis of its genes (which it shares with the other cells) provides them with information. This spatial information also has a signalling function, inducing the cells to do certain things.
This exchange of information changes over time. The interaction of these pulsating fields of information exchange provides an important part of the "plan" that enables the miracle of development to take place. (And that, in passing, is why there is not a gene for a finger.) To put it simply, an organism is not a machine: it’s alive.
Rose’s emphasis on these two subjects has a straightforward basis. If we wish to fully understand an organism it is not sufficient simply to take it, break it up, describe its component parts and perhaps establish a correlation between one of these component parts and a previously observed character (e.g. a behaviour).
As Rose points out the form and function of an organism are a consequence of several histories: its evolutionary history, which explains why and how a given species has appeared together with its particular genetic composition; its developmental history, which, together with its social history, explains why and how the given individual has turned out the way it has.
This approach is fundamentally different from that of the determinists, for whom genes, in their purest, abstract and unreal form, are quite sufficient to explain everything. The ex-physicists such as Max Delbrück who were at the origin of molecular biology and the discovery of DNA focused on the question of life’s autoreplicative properties.
Although by concentrating only on this side of life, the founders of molecular biology found what they were looking for - DNA, the molecule that carries the information required to reproduce organisms - it was at a terrible price, as we can see from modern expressions of this philosophy, such as today’s "ultra-Darwinists".
The organism, as an entity, was effectively written out of science. It was reduced to a bag of chemicals that could be broken up and thus reveal all its secrets. Behind this reductionist step lay the utterly illusory promise that even this complexity could one day be reduced to physics.
This reductionist arrogance makes itself felt everywhere. For example, when Mozart was composing, his brain was certainly characterised by a unique pattern of neuronal activity which, had the technology been available (it still doesn’t exist) could be captured for all time.
This neuronal activity can, in turn, be characterised by the transfer of chemicals along and between neurons, and the movement of these chemicals will one day be able to be understood in terms of the interaction of atomic particles.
But it is impossible to explain the merits of the Marriage of Figaro in terms of the laws of physics. And not because it is today impossible given the state of the science, but because it will never be possible.
The level of explanation is insufficient. The tune in Mozart’s head expressed itself at the level of thought, and thus of some complex distributed neuronal processes involving different structures of the brain, not in terms of electrons whizzing around, even if it was ultimately composed of such electrons.
Rose provides us with an alternative answer to the question, what is life? than is offered by the molecular biologists: "the central property of all life is the capacity and necessity to build, maintain and preserve itself" (p18).
By putting the emphasis not on simple reproduction, but on the need to preserve a stable internal (cellular) environment faced with the chaos of the external environment (fluctuating temperatures, chemical composition etc), and then on the need to preserve (and thus extend) this property, both in historical and developmental terms, Rose not only provides a richer manifesto for science than the founders of molecular biology, he also provides some intriguing pointers for future studies of the origin of life.
The difference can be seen in the varying approaches to DNA. Most molecular biologists think that the origin of life lies with the origin of DNA, or its precursor, RNA. And much effort has been put to spontaneously generating RNA in the test-tube, as an analogy to what might have happened in Earth’s eårly seas.
But as Rose points out, you can create as much RNA as you want, it still just sits there. It doesn’t turn into "life". Even less so could RNA molecules swishing around in the prehistoric ocean have just happened to get together and turned into something living.
Rose’s solution is to start one step before the appearance of RNA, with the development of the cell. With some very simple - and plausible - hypotheses he raises the possibility that cells and some of their associated internal machinery existed prior to RNA.
Whether he is right or not, we may never know, but this approach is intuitively more attractive than the reductionist’s unstated position that isolated RNA molecules worked everything out for themselves.
To provide an easy way for the non-specialist reader to understand his central idea of the role of history in biology, Rose explains his approach as follows: he provides "an alternative vision of living systems, a vision which recognises the power and role of genes without subscribing to genetic determinism, and which recaptures an understanding of living organisms and their trajectories through time and space as lying at the centre of biology. It is these trajectories that I call lifelines." (p7)
In one particular chapter, Rose uses this idea to re-examine the argument originally raised by Steven Jay Gould and Richard Lewontin in 1979 that certain features of organisms are not the result of natural selection, but are simply the only way of doing things, given the constraints of physics and the extremely narrow range of chemicals used by life.
In his discussion of this question - which still excites controversy among evolutionary biologists - Rose in fact approaches one of the arguments of one of his key opponents throughout this book, Richard Dawkins, author of an unfortunately influential sociobiological pot-boiler The Selfish Gene.
In defending natural selection against the excesses of the likes of Gould, Dawkins pointed out in his generally excellent book The Blind Watchmaker that previous evolutionary "choices" close off subsequent ones. For example, no human can give birth to a child with a bird’s wings on its back. There are no angels.
For Gould, natural selection is effectively written out of the story, and evolution becomes largely a matter of "contingent" chance factors. "Replay the tape of life", he famously wrote in Wonderful Life", "and you will not get the same result".
Dead wrong. Replay the tape of life under the same environmental conditions and you will get more or less the same result. That is what natural selection is all about, and it is the fundamental (but not the only) factor determining organismic form and function, even extending to those bits that are "the only way of doing things".
For Dawkins, however, natural selection operating on "selfish DNA" is all there is to life. Not only is this crass reductionism, it also accounts for the strident and sterile arrogance that characterises virtually all his work. Rose’s description of him as an "ultra-Darwinist" is spot on.
Rose points out that one of the key consequences of reductionist ideology is that:
"attention and funding is diverted from the social to the molecular. If the streets of Moscow are full of vodka-soaked drunks, and the rates of alcoholism are catastrophically high among native Americans or Australian aborigines, the ideology demands the funding of research into the genetics and biochemistry of alcoholism.
And it becomes more productive to study the roots of violent ‘temperament’ in babies and young children than to legislate to remove handguns from society. The point is that (...) for any phenomenon in the living world in general, and the human social world in particular, one can offer multiple forms of explanation, of which the reductionist one, properly formulated, is legitimate.
But for any such phenomenon there are also determining levels of explanation - those that account most clearly for the specificity of the phenomenon, and also indicate potential access-points for intervention into it." (p297)
Rose, however, both attempts and succeeds in providing a genuinely interactive and multi-level approach to the problem, allowing for natural selection and factors such as genetic drift, the role of development, of individuals and populations, and of the external and internal environment. Rose’s book should be read by anybody with even a passing interest in biology. They will be enriched and stimulated by it.
Unfortunately, Rose is tragically out on a limb faced with the overwhelming might of the neurogenetic determinist establishment, which is utterly hegemonic in the powerhouse of world science, the USA.
But also because Rose is not afraid of bringing the political to the forefront of the stage, and rightly so.
For example, he gloomily recalls seeing a TV programme in which the whole of criminality was "explained" by two scans of a brain, one labelled "criminal" the other "normal", showing different chemical activity.
"It is not made clear", he continues in somewhat more combative vein, "whether a similar finding would apply to scans of the brains of the war heroes who have been responsible for some of the greatest massacres of modern times, Stormin’ Norman and the killings of the fleeing Iraqi troops on the Basra Road in 1991 . .. " (p291).
Some readers of scientific journals may use this kind of continual contrast between science and politics as a pretext to rubbish Rose’s books. Readers of Trotskyist International, however, can conclude that here is a scientist who is aware of how science interprets the world and, fundamentally, can see how to change both of them.
