Well, my neurologist cannot talk me out of reading Discovery Institute books. He asked me to investigate hobbies with a lower risk of neural injury, like kickboxing and skydiving and rodeo, but I am a bit old for those things and I can probably deal with a certain amount of loss of brain cells anyhow.
So I picked up one of the latest DI publications, Plato’s Revenge, by David Klinghoffer. This is a weird little book which apparently exists because Richard Sternberg doesn’t feel like writing up his own views and has allowed Klinghoffer to characterize them. As everyone knows, when the Discovery Institute starts appealing to philosophy, a certain smell wafts up out of every vent and it’s probably time to head for one’s country home to avoid the cholera. No exception here. The basic idea is that the genome must be mostly made up of ghosts. I wish I were kidding. Draft review follows:
I’m glad I did not waste my time reading that book. I did see posts by Klinghoffer and others at the DI blog. Just reading the first paragraph or two was enough to see that the idea is nonsense.
At Panda’s Thumb, on May 6, I have a post reacting to that endorsement of Platonism by Klinghoffer and Sternberg. I argue that there is an alternative way that evolution can achieve a form. It involves variation and natural selection and uses successful function, rather than looking up the shape in a Platonic catalogue which is located in a supernatural realm. There are many comments by others there (some of which, alas, are just off-topic arguments with a sockpuppet of PT’s usual banned crackpot troll).
I saw that – in fact, it seemed to be the only non-DI commentary on the book I could find anywhere, perhaps because they are now down to selling very few books to anyone other than true believers.
I thought there was something really odd about this particular book because it really seemed like it merely presented the mystery which evolutionary theory more or less solves. I think that’s why the weird little bits about the embryo not having the ability to compute a cell-fate map of the developed organism and that sort of thing are in there – there’s not really any basis for thinking the physical genome is somehow incapable of doing what it does, but by naming things it doesn’t need to do and then pointing out that it can’t do them, it creates the impression (well, at least it does for their typical reader, who hasn’t thought or read about any of this at all) that somehow there has to be a mysterious force orchestrating it all.
I couldn’t help but think: what the heck is the mechanism? I “get” the whole idea of Plato’s cave and archetypes of all things that might exist, as a kind of philosophical analogy for the notion of archetypal states, but I’ve never known a biological phenomenon that has a purely abstract analogy like that as a mechanism. Hard to see how that would work. Do the embryos phone Plato (last I knew, the long-distance rates for phoning the dead were quite high), ask him to go into the cave, and ask him questions about how the cell types are constituted and arranged in the archetype?
If we could be taught this mechanism, it would be way more valuable in other fields. Knowing how to contact Plato would easily be worth a yearly subscription, like adding a new streaming channel.
Very true. Unfortunately, an increasing number of people these days seem to think that chatbots pretty much ARE that mechanism, and at lower cost, too.
Something’s wrong here. Shouldn’t it be Darwin’s revenge?
Unless they’ve started a new series, and we can look forward to Plato’s Paradigm, Plato’s Prophecy, Plato’s Planet, Plato’s Platitudes, Plato’s Potatoes, ad infinitum…
I am a former Idaho resident and take great umbrage at your denigrating the potato by any potential association with the DI. Plato’s Potatoes wouldn’t even be consumable–with or without “the fixins’”– because they would only be perfect forms of potatoes floating in the ether, right? Or whatever Platonic things are–I never quite grasped that in philosophy class….
I just sent my daughter, in her sophomore year at Haverford, a couple of cases of Idaho Spud bars to terrify and bewilder her clsssmates. Alas, potato-free.
Perhaps biogeography could be explained in Platonic terms. Perhaps there was some archetypal ideal “Europe” which was potato-free, then the goddamned Enlightenment and global trade got involved, proving that nothing post-Plato is worthwhile. And now there are rabbits in Australia, which Plato surely would have disapproved of, mocking the locomotion of kangaroos through weak imitation.
If you’ll all forgive me for being serious for a moment, how does Platonism relate to biological structuralism? This is concept that is, yes, advocated by ID loon Michael Denton, but I believe it also has some more respectable roots in biological theory.
Well, the thinking in this book is, as usual, sloppy as all get-out. And I’m not sure he explicitly mentions structuralism along the way. But the idea that forces outside of the genome are involved in shaping organisms is what he’s generally getting at, and if you use a bit of Scotch tape and Elmer’s Glue, you can use structuralist notions – especially the wackier, Dentonesque ones – to argue that the universe is in some way trying to make organisms come out a certain way, and that this reflects the underlying Platonic Whoozawhatsit (apologies for the obscure technical term).
I think the term is too big a tent to characterize. It seems to mean something different for each proponent, all the way from simply acknowledging physical constraints on developmental mechanisms and evolution to claims of mysterious controlling forces.
Most notably, I think, with D’Arcy Thompson; I have an abridged On Growth and Form in my library, and first got acquainted with him after reading an essay by Stephen Jay Gould*, who wrote the Forward to that abridged version. Gould wrote a longer scholarly piece on Thompson in 1971, “D’Arcy Thompson and the Science of Form,” which I don’t have (but it’s on the list).
*The essay was probably “Double Trouble” in The Panda’s Thumb.
