The ‘Biological Order’
The second type of explanation: emergence precedes teleonomy. In other words: the structure of DNA varies as a result of fortuitous events (chance), but once these variations are inscribed by nature, they propagate according to inflexible laws (necessity).
This conception has been imposed by Darwin. The decipherment of the genetic code, by allowing us to identify the physical support of emergence and to establish its structure, provides confirmation of this. ‘It appears to us today’, writes Monod, ‘as the only rational, the only possible one’.
There is thus a ‘biological order’, but this order does not reflect any predetermined intention. Evolution indeed has a meaning, and yet there is no reason to abandon the basic postulate of the scientific world, according to which ‘nature is objective’. Jacques Monod makes a comparison: ‘In an automobile, the power of the engine is necessarily related to the transmission ratios in the gearbox. The car will only operate if there is a consequential modification in the power of the engine. And any mutation acting in one direction, at a certain level, can only be positively selected if it is mitigated by another mutation acting on another level. We will therefore see the automobiles evolve with a fairly constant ratio between their gearbox and the power of the engine. And we will say it is admirable, it is orthogenetic. In fact, it is controlled by the very structure of the system.
‘Today’, adds Jacques Monod, ‘the physical support of emergence is identified, its structure established, and this structure accounts for its function’.
But can we consider as resolved the problem that philosophers and scholars have always clashed over: what is life?
According to some researchers, there is no fundamental difference between physical systems and living systems. There is only matter, more or less complexified, more or less differentiated according to the localities of space-time. Ultimately, they say, the question of the ‘nature of life’ is devoid of meaning. ‘Life, as such, does not exist’, says biologist Szent-Györgi. No one has ever seen it. The name of life has no meaning, for no such thing exists’.
According to other scholars, there is, on the contrary, a radical difference between the two great kinds of systems contained in the universe. Some ‘revolutionary’ characteristics make their appearance in the living cell. This is the problem of resistance to entropy.
The ‘Counter-Selection’
Since Clausius, we know that matter is doomed to entropy, that is to say, to a progressive degradation of energy (second principle of thermodynamics). Now, as Stéphane Lupasco has written, ‘starting from the molecule, certain atomic systems evolve towards a progressive homogeneity. Others differentiate themselves more and more. The first are physical systems. It is to these that the second principle of thermodynamics is applied, or the principle of entropy, as articulated by Clausius. The latter are living systems.
‘The higher one climbs in the order of multi-cellular organisms’, adds Lupasco, ‘the greater the differentiation. It may well be said, therefore, that living matter possesses an anti-Clausius principle. Life is but increasing inequality’.
There is, however, an entropy that threatens evolved species: it is the peril of genetic degradation, a true ‘qualitative entropy’ attributable to the fact that natural selection has disappeared.
In the past, emphasises Monod, ‘tribal or racial war played a very important role as an evolutionary factor. It is quite possible that the brutal disappearance of the Neanderthal man (around 35,000 years ago) was the result of a genocide committed by Homo sapiens, our ancestor. This pressure for selection may have favoured the expansion of races better endowed with intelligence, imagination, will, and ambition’.
Today, writes the biologist Jean Rostand, ‘medicine, surgery, hygiene, philanthropy, social assistance, have consequently enabled the survival and procreation of multitudes of people who, from the genetic point of view, are unfit and would have otherwise been eliminated or in any case excluded from reproduction. Therefore, inevitably, by the channel of heredity, it contributes to an increase in the proportion of bad genes, and to their accumulation in the hereditary legacy. Since the species is no longer cleansed of poor mutational influences, its genetic level can only be lowered. Whether we like it or not, medicine cultivates disease. There is an essential contradiction between individual well-being and the genetic good. Civilisation, soft on unfit genes, increases the biological root of harm. Genetically, we pay dearly for medical and social progress’.
Anthropologist Ernst Mayr, former director of the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard University, also insists on the danger of ‘counter-selection’ in his book Populations, Species, and Evolution (Hermann, 1974).352 In the conception proposed by Lwoff, Jacob, and Monod, life is no longer the ‘opposite’ of death, as the Encyclopaedia would have it. Death becomes a ‘necessity’, prescribed by the genetic program from the ‘chance’ of birth. It is because organisms are mortal that there is evolution, that the atoms and molecules that form living systems can ‘return to the mass, or ground’, thus making possible new, more evolved expressions of the protoplasm. (Death, according to Maurice Marois, founder of the Institute of Life, is the ‘servant’ of life).
Yet if, in Chance and Necessity, life holds a special place, according to Jacques Monod, it is nevertheless almost a ‘miracle’. In the beginning, he asserted, the chances that life would appear on earth and take the form it did were comparable to a monkey with a typewriter producing the works of Shakespeare — or water freezing in a hot saucepan.
‘The universe was not pregnant with life, nor the biosphere with man. Our number came up in the game of Monte-Carlo.353 Is it surprising that, like the one who has just won a million dollars, we should feel the strangeness and unreality of our condition?’
These remarks on ‘improbability’ of life have been exploited by some of Monod’s opponents. Who could be persuaded, wrote the Jesuits Pierre Leroy (Ecclesia, Project) and François Russo (Etudes), that is it ‘by chance’ that the human machine, in all its complexity, has finally come to see the light of day?
One may also believe that Jacques Monod sins only by excessive pessimism. Why would the human phenomenon be a unique phenomenon? Millions of solar systems exist in the universe. Is it not reasonable to think that life has appeared and developed on worlds other than our own?
A Chance for Each Type of Necessity?
We now know that organic life exists outside our planet.
A few years ago, researchers from NASA examined a meteorite that had fallen in Australia in 1969. This meteorite contained amino acids (including five of the twenty amino acids present in living cells), the extraterrestrial origin of which could be established. They were 50% dextrorotatory and 50% levorotatory, that is to say, half of them deflected polarised light to the right, and the other half to the left. And yet, this proportion does not correspond to the amino acids constituting the proteins that we find on Earth.
Astronomers, for their part, have identified ‘clouds’ in interstellar space that contain the first specific constituents of living structures: formations of polymers corresponding, in sum, to anti-Clausius zones.
Under these conditions, one may wonder if the appearance of life, far from being chance, does not also emerge from a form of necessity. In this case we would be situated, as it were, at the ‘intersection’ of two universes, one governed, with necessity, by the expansion of matter into space, and the other, with equal necessity, by the expansion of life in time. Living structures should be considered simultaneously in terms of invariance and differentiation. The structure of the gene would appear, like that of the quantum, as both identitary and heterogenising;354 it would be relatively antagonistic and contradictory, and so the notion of ‘chance’ should be revised.
Referring to the logic of Lupasco, Marc Beigbeder, author of Contradiction et nouvel entendement355 and a study entitled Le contre-Monod (Grasset, 1972),356 writes in Nouvelle Ecole (Nr. 25–26, winter 1974–
75): ‘Instead of chance, a notion that should be placed in the plural, since there would be a type of chance corresponding to each necessity, it seems more scientific, not only for words but for their content, to speak of relational indeterminations relevant to the antagonism of two contradictory determinisms always coexisting, according to a quantity of variable antagonism. (And we will say that each of the necessities here is the efficient, antagonistic cause for the indetermination of the other). On the level of logic, therefore, it seems entirely possible, and even recommended, to dispense with the word as well as the notion of ‘chance’, especially for the genetic phenomenon considered — and we can in part attribute the grip of traditional logic on the path of Jacques Monod, however highly scientific his mind, to the mythic structure of an absolute chance-contingency’.
If man is a pure product of chance, as Jacques Monod claims, should he despair the ability to give meaning to life? If he is a phenomenon which the evolution of life could have done without, how should he conceive his place in the universe?
Monod has not evaded this difficulty. ‘It must be recognised’, he said, ‘that it is impossible to establish or deduce an ethic of objective knowledge, and that it is impossible to live without ethics, and so, consequently, one must be formulated axiomatically’.
This new ethic is the ethic of knowledge, the true ‘asceticism of objectivity’, driven by research but not confused with it. ‘The sole aim, the supreme value, the “sovereign good” in the ethics of knowledge’, writes Jacques Monod, ‘is not, let us admit, the happiness of humanity, still less its temporal power or its comfort, or even the Socratic “know thyself”; it is objective knowledge itself’.
What is the possibility of such an ethic?
Jacques Monod readily admits that it will be difficult for all men to adopt it, and that it presupposes values of reference that are far from universal. (Most are closely linked to the rise of Western Civilisation.) At the very least, he hopes scholars will support it.
This shows a ‘naïve idealism’357 taking place in the scientific world, replied Mr. Alfred Fabre-Luce in La Revue des deux-mondes.358 For as experience has proven, scientists are far from being independent of fashionable ideologies.
Following the inaugural lecture given at the Collège de France by Monod, Fabre-Luce had already noted in Le Monde: ‘Scientists remain men, and if they obey the ethics of knowledge in their laboratories, they are frequently inspired by other values as soon as they step out of them. In 1945, one such physicist, the inventor of the atomic bomb, permitted and prepared its use against certain yellows (the Japanese). In 1950, he no longer allowed it against other yellows (Koreans or Chinese), following another aggression. This distinction was not of a matter of professional morality, but of political conception’.
Another example: ‘In 1951, a group of anthropologists and biologists gathered under the auspices of UNESCO launched a “declaration on race”, which denied the existence of hereditary genetic differences. For the signatories, the differences between human groups were explained entirely by environment, culture, and history. But in 1964 another meeting of anthropologists and biologists formulated the ‘Moscow Propositions’, where, on the contrary, the idea of a ‘genetic capacity for intellectual flourishing’ was admitted. Between the two documents there had been no scientific discovery, but only a change of atmosphere. In 1951, the concern was to respond to Nazism and colonialism. In 1964, nascent pride (notably ‘négritude’)359 began to be taken into account, which asserted the existence of certain racial differences rather than denying them.
No Imperative Criteria
Professor Kastler, Nobel Prize winner, declared: ‘I only conceive of the world with a creator, therefore a God’. François Jacob, Nobel Prize winner, asserts: ‘God is no longer a problem for science’. Jacques Monod, Nobel Prize winner, remarks: ‘God is a hypothesis that no longer concerns science’.
Pasteur said: ‘When I open my laboratory, I close my oratory. When I open my oratory, I close my laboratory’.
Even when they agree in their work, researchers do not agree on the general conclusions to be drawn from it. Scientific knowledge strives to be objective, but how can we build a positive ethic upon it if something subjective always intervenes in behaviour? How can one objectively assess the world by being both judge and judged?
‘The real debate’, adds Alfred Fabre-Luce, ‘is this: can simple objectivity provide the scientist (even a perfectly honest one), with the reasons for his choices outside his laboratory? The knowledge that science procures does not provide compelling criteria for any action. Let us suppose, for example, that we are able to intervene as we please in the mechanisms of heredity. What on earth would we do? What purpose would we follow?
He concludes: ‘There is in Jacques Monod a Nietzschean who is unaware of himself!’ The work of Monod nevertheless has the merit of clearly posing the problem. The solutions he proposes, the ethics he seeks to define at the dawn of the ‘biological revolution’, may not seem satisfactory. This is because they are already situated in a system of values. At the very moment that he speaks of ‘objective knowledge’, Monod has implicitly made a choice. But the system that he has built is necessarily incomplete, since, in scientific matters, one is never finished. When one closes a door, another soon opens.
*
Le hasard et la nécessité, a study by Jacques Monod.360 Seuil, 212 pages.
*
Jacques Monod died on May 31, 1976, in Cannes, after a long illness. On March 10, 1971, he took over the direction of the Institut Pasteur, without renouncing his philosophical and scientific work. On several occasions he had expressed his views in specialised publications. He had also signed various manifestos, including that of the American Psychologist, in favour of Arthur R. Jensen and research into psychological heredity.
At the 14th Nobel Symposium, held in Stockholm from the 15th to the 20th of September 1969, he explained his conception of an ‘ethic of knowledge’ in a presentation entitled On Values in the Age of Science. This appeared in: Arne Tiselius and Sam Nilsson (eds), The Place of Value in a World of Facts (Almqvist & Wiksell, Stockholm, 1970).
The publication of Chance and Necessity has given rise to numerous polemics, which are far from over. Religious circles, in particular, were incensed to see their beliefs reduced, like Marxism, to the common denominator of ‘animism’. Some authors have endeavoured to reply to Jacques Monod from a strictly metaphysical point of view. Such is the case of Etienne Gilson (D’Aristote à Darwin et retour. Essai sur quelques constantes de la bio-philosophie. J. Vrin, 1971),361 Emile Callot, (Les limites de la philosophie naturelle de la biologie modern. Pensée universelle, 1972),362 Madeleine Barthélémy-Madaule (L’idéologie du hasard et de la nécessité. Seuil, 1972),363 Georges Salet (Hasard et certitude. Le transformisme devant la biologie actuelle. Tequi, 1972),364 Jean Martel (Dieu, cet inconnu. Emmanuel Vitte, Lyon, 1972),365 and Joseph Chiari (The Necessity of Being: A Philosophical Reply to Jacques Monod. Paul Elek, London, 1973). The scientific value of these works is generally fairly low.
More interestingly, the essay by J. L. Boursin and P. Caussat, Autopsie du hasard (Bordas, 1970),366 shows that the notions of absolute chance and absolute determination have a paradoxical tendency to become confused. It can be deduced that the most completely determined is also the most completely denuded of necessity; in other words, it is a kind of chance of the second degree.
History/Logic of Life
‘A bacterium, an amoeba, a fern, what fate can they dream of, except to form two bacteria, two amoebae, two ferns?’
Punctual, faithful, patient, relentless reproduction. The logic of the living, says François Jacob, is to grow and multiply. There is a primordial operator in the world of life. A kind of biological Eternal Return. The scientists call it invariance or reproduction.
François Jacob, fifty-six year old professor of cellular genetics at the Collège de France, has been with the Institut Pasteur for twenty years. In 1965,
with André Lwoff and Jacques Monod, he received the Nobel Prize in Medicine for his work on the genetics of viruses and bacteria.
To write the ‘history of heredity’, is to trace its evolution. François Jacob attempts to do this by distinguishing four major phases of knowledge, which he compares to ‘Russian dolls’, nesting into each other and revealing each time a further ‘level of reality’. To these phases, in which the world was intellectually decomposed and then recomposed according to new data, he assigns key names: visible structure, organisation, time, gene, and molecule.
The Laws of Heredity
The first stage is that of the ‘visible structure’. It extends to the Renaissance. Biology is restricted to anatomy; the living being, to what one sees. We know that there is a strong chance that children will resemble their parents, but heredity is still the subject of the most fanciful assertions. Ambroise Paré speaks of ‘the mare that bred a foal with the face of man’ [la jument qui pouline d’un poulain à face de l’homme]. One believes in the existence of ‘homunculi’ and ‘animalcules’, or ‘preformed’ men and animals.
The second period: that of classification. It is realised that heredity has a memory, and one observes the lineages to discover its hidden architecture. Linné, Cuvier, Daubenton define the families, the orders, and the branches. Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire calls the sectors or areas that appear common to several species ‘regions’.
We then realise that these species, described by anatomists and classified by naturalists, have not coexisted for all eternity, that we can compile the genealogical tree. This is the third major step: the discovery of evolution.
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