“Purpose and Desire”: a misguided biology book that got a starred review on Kirkus

On November 7,  I called attention to a new book by biology professor J. Scott Turner, “Purpose and Desire: What Makes Something ‘Alive’ and Why Modern Darwinism Has Failed to Explain It,” and how the book got a starred Kirkus review despite its avowed intent to put teleology (goal-directed evolution) back into biology.  Turner works at the State University of New York’s College of Environmental Science and Forestry in Syracuse, New York, so he’s got biology cred. But he also admits he’s a Christian, the book’s production was funded by the Templeton Foundation, the book defends intelligent design pretty strongly at the end, and Purpose and Desire was endorsed on the Amazon page by Discovery Institute IDers Douglas Axe and Stephen Meyer.

I questioned the book’s credibility based on these summaries and a bit of other stuff I read, but since Turner beefed about my criticisms, saying I hadn’t read the whole book, and because Kirkus gave it a star, I broke down and read, at great expense to my digestion, the whole damn thing, and finished it last night.

I stand by what I said then: this is a wonky, mushbrained attempt to put the notion of an external “purpose” back into evolution, and I suspect that that purpose comes from religion. Turner’s endorsement by luminaries (rather, “darkinaries”) from the Discovery Institute, its touting by the Discovery Institute as “a riveting instance of intellectual and scientific rediscovery,” its funding by Templeton, and Turner’s avowal of Christianity, makes me think that there’s an agenda behind the arguments. But never mind that, the arguments can be refuted on their own, and I’ll take up just a few of them here.  Also, Kirkus SUCKS, because they couldn’t even get a decent biologist to write the summary. It got a STAR! What a world!

Now Turner is canny: he won’t admit that God is the motive force that imparts a purpose to the organism’s evolution; rather, he says it’s “homeostasis”, which basically comes down to his claim that an organism’s evolution, and that includes microbes and plants, is directed by its striving. Birds, for instance, evolved wings and feathers not because natural selection favored those features, but because protobirds wanted to fly.  Turner defends this viewpoint by citing homeostasis, which is a well-accepted biological concept that organisms have systems to keep their bodies and surroundings constant. They regulate their temperature by behavior or metabolism, they tend to hew to particular environments, mechanisms exist to keep blood pH constant, and so on.

But that kind of homeostasis can be easily understood as a product of natural selection, not as some instantiation of a numinous “striving”. In fact, we can artificially select for organisms to increase or decrease the amount of constancy in various traits, showing that there is selectable genetic variation for homeostasis. There’s no need to evoke some “will” of the organism to explain how it evolves. “Homeostasis” is, I suspect, Turner’s code word for “God.”

A huge section of Turner’s book is devoted to the history of ideas that evolution involved striving, will, and teleology, but it fails to convince anyone but the already-convinced of Turner’s notion that Darwinism is not only flawed, but completely outmoded. Although he mentions the theory of evolution lots of times, what’s missing is any recognition that it was a genuine intellectual advance. Rather, he finds it full of holes, many of them being our current failure to understand how life originated (true, but that doesn’t mean we default to teleology), the fact that neo-Darwinism is based almost entirely on mathematical models rather than data (he’s dead wrong here), the fact that evolutionists are simply close-minded and won’t even consider teleology (not true; if there were evidence for it, the finder would become famous), and so on. These are simply gussied-up creationist arguments, worded so as to avoid sounding creationist. No wonder Templeton gave the guy dosh!

Now you might be asking yourself, “How can a plant or a bacterium have any striving since they’re not conscious?” Turner gets around that with a word salad like this (p. 221):

“The extended organism, defined as it is as a focus of homeostasis, is actually a cognitive organism, cognitive in the same sense that the coalition of sulfur-breathing bacteria and spirochetes from the previous chapter constituted a cognitive entity. Homeostasis involves coupling information about the state of the environment on one side of an adaptive boundary to the matter and energy flows across the adaptive boundary. Now the notion of what individuality is becomes clearer: the individual is a cognitive being that has a sense of itself as something distinct from the environment.”

Well, you can define “cognition” that way, just as I can define my aunt to be my uncle, but it doesn’t add any teleology, self-awareness or striving to evolution.

In fact, from the outset Turner seemingly doesn’t understand evolution by natural selection, and uses the argument below to say that whole idea is simply a tautology (that’s another creationist tactic). From page 8:

“In reality, our conception of adaptation rests on a very shaky foundation.  To illustrate, consider how a recent (and admirable) textbook of evolution put it: ‘Adaptations are the product of natural selection, while adaptation is the response to natural selection.’ This demonstrates, in one short and elegantly crafted sentence, The Problem: our current conception of this core evolutionary idea is essentially meaningless. What is adaptation? The product of natural selection! What is natural selection? The outcome of adaptation!

This type of reasoning is formally known as a tautology. . .”

Turner makes this argument over and over again, but it’s flat wrong. This is an updated version of the creationist argument that evolution is tautology because it posits “survival of the fittest,” but then judges the fittest to be those who survive. And that truly is a tautology, but that’s not how evolutionists ply their trade. Our working theory is that adaptations evolve because their constituent genes improve survival and reproduction. And that idea is not tautological, but can be tested.

If we think, for example, that mimicry evolved because mimetic individuals avoid detection by a predator, or warning coloration evolved because it scares off predators, we can (and have) tested these ideas. If evolution were simply a tautology in the way Turner posits, there wouldn’t be experimental evolutionary biology. Think, for instance, of how recent experimental work militated against the hypothesis that zebras evolved stripes because it helps camouflage them or confuse predators, and in favor of the view that stripes deter biting flies. That’s how one scenario was refuted and the other supported. You couldn’t do that if adaptation were simply a tautology.

Further, there is a nonadaptationist theory of evolution: the neutral theory. This theory is testable, has been confirmed for some bits of DNA, and posits that those bits evolve nonadaptively, by random genetic drift. That predicts that nonfunctional genes (pseudogenes) would evolve rapidly, with changes in the once-coding sections, and that’s been confirmed. The fact that Turner flaunts the “tautology” argument over and over again mystifies me. It’s not any kind of flaw in modern evolutionary theory, but he acts as if it is.

I won’t go on; the book is full of mistakes and misunderstandings of modern evolutionary biology (he says, for example, that “the gene is an agent of stasis, not of change, and this means the gene cannot be an agent of Darwinian evolution”, which is arrant nonsense). I’ll just give you his version of how flight evolved in birds. First Turner points out problems with existing scenarios for flight (I think these problems are grossly exaggerated for scenarios like “top down” flight in which feathers originally evolved for thermoregulation and then were coopted for gliding), and then offers his own “solution” on pp. 288-289, which pains me to type out. The emphasis is mine:

“And so we are left again tied in knots, necessitated by the need of modern evolutionism to exclude the one thing that could cut through it all: the ‘cauliflower’ type of agency—that form of agency driven by intentionality, striving, purpose, and desire. Could it be that birds fly, not because they were beneficiaries of lucky exaptations that enabled them to fly, but rather because, in a deep sense, the ancestors of birds wanted to fly? They wanted to glide from tree to tree, or chase after a tasty lunch, or launch themselves up trees to avoid being lunch themselves. And those wants have dragged the genes into the future in their tumultuous intentional wake. And this makes evolution at root a phenomenon of cognition, of intentionality, of purpose, of desire—of homeostasis.”

Yes, and bacteria evolved resistance to antibiotics because they wanted, in a “deep sense”, not to be killed by drugs. Gag me with a spoon.

I’m sorry, but Turner has written a dreadful book, and Kirkus misjudged its quality entirely. He will defend it, of course, by criticizing this review on his website, but he’ll only meet with the ultimate signs of failure: his book has (and will be) accepted by creationists and ID advocates, while being roundly rejected by evolutionists. Of course, we’ll do that, he’ll say, because we’re sworn to dismiss any evidence of teleology. And so Turner will age, raging against the dying of his thesis without admitting—or even perhaps recognizing—that his book is simply deeply and cleverly disguised creationism. It’s a sophisticated exercise in wish thinking and confirmation bias.

Is it a surprise that this book was published by HarperOne, the religion and “spirituality” arm of Harper Collins publishing?