topics: |  science | philosophy | biology

Monod shared the 1965 Nobel (Medicine) for working out how genes express
themselves in replicating mechanisms, and how cells synthsize proteins.  This
book however, looks at the philosophy of biology, while dealing out a good
bit of molecular biochemistry.  The central theme for me is the contingency
of human life - how we are products of a cosmic accident, and not necessary
ingredients of God's universe.

Begins with an interesting discussion of the distinction between natural and
artificial categrories [that which also informed Bishop Berkeley's attack on
evolution, see Dawkins' Blind Watchmaker].  We use subjective criteria,
e.g. a knife or a car is "purposive" to distinguish these from objects like
rocks or trees which are created by the "free play of physical forces to
which we cannot attribute any design or purpose" (p.3).  However, can we
have non-subjective measures for this distinction?  Monod suggests two such
criteria:
  a) regularity: natural objects are almost never geometrically simple, and
  b) repetition: artificial objects "materialize a reitereated intent" and are
	more "closely similar"
of these Monod thinks that repetition is the more decisive.
[
     AM: But is it? isn't similarity a function of distance?  To a westerner,
     Chinese people all look alike.  All red-vented bulbuls look alike to us,
     but they of course, can distinguish each other, and are complete
     individuals with behavioural traits, mating preferences (expressed in
     song?) social hierarchies and all other accoutrements of social
     creatures.
	So, isn't a pellet of masur-dAl just like any other? in what way are
     their repeatability or regularity and less or more than say, the lumps
     of charcoal briquettes?
]

Goes on to discuss some aspects of reproducing /self-constructing systems,
and then launches an attack onobscurantist positions involving vitalism or
animism (approaches to evolution from dialectical materialism to Teilhard de
Chardin.

    We would like to think ourselves necessary, inevitable, ordained from all
    eternity. All religions, nearly all philosophies, and even a part of
    science testify to the unwearying, heroic effort of mankind desperately
    denying its own contingency. (p.44)

The main theme is that biological change - introduction of new features -
occur by chance.  The necessity - what Monod calls "the machinery of
invariance", comes in because of fitness, which duplicates the
chanced-upon pattern. It is this game of chance and necessity that has made
us what we are; far from the contingent creatures proposed by these
obscurantist theories.

Chapter 8 deals with the probability of life emerging:
	Among all the occurrences possible in the universe, the a priori
	probability that any particular one of them verges upon zero.  Yet the
	universe exists; particular events must take place in it, the
	probability of which (before the event) was infinitesimal.  At present
	time, we have no legitimate grounds for either asserting or denying
	that life got off to but a single start on earth, and that, as a
	consequence, before it appeared its chances of occurring were next to
	nil. 145

    The later chapters delve deeper into biochemistry - the role of proteins
in controlling cellular development (esp. catalytic), and their ability to
self-assemble.  This view sees the proteins as ontologically primary to the
genome, which is just a particular type of protein.

   Chapter 7 deals with evolution and its irreversibility - argues for this
as an instance of the 2nd law of thermodynamics - and the role of chance
(probability).  Talking about language evolutio, he attacks the position that
the language "phenomenon attests to an absolute break in evolutionary
continuity - that human language has owed nothing whatever, at the very outset, to
a system of various calls and warnings like those exchanged by apes -- this
would seem to me a rather difficult step... "  How human language seemed, to
so many brilliant minds, to be completely removed and not evolutionarily
derived from other communicative-emotive systems bears resolute testimony to
the human need to see ourselves as unique, non-contingent creatures in God's
universe.

    On the whole these ideas predate many that are current in early 21st c.
discourse.  The contingent nature of humans (and our minds, and culture)
is largely accepted.  With it, the humans-only "language faculty" theory also
is largely discredited, or survives, at best, among a minority.  Given that
these ideas were articulated in 1972, this book deserves much wider reading
than it has obtained.  - AM, Nov 2008