I DON'T REMEMBER if I had transcribed this part of the Q and A from James Shapiro's Linus Pauling Lecture (2012) before and used it some time in the past but I'm doing that now.
Question: About half-way through your lecture where you use the term "cells know."
James Shapiro: Well, I was quoting Barbara McClintok but . . .
Questioner: OK. But just the term . . . um. . . you know, I guess I have trouble with the idea of a cell being so self-directed that it would - fundamentally it's all bio-chemistry - that they would know . . . in a cognitive sort of way. Cause that's sort of how I understand the word . . .
James Shapiro: "Cognitive" is the word I like to use and cells are always sensing what's going on inside of them and outside of them. And responding to that sensory information. And they do it pretty well.
Cell division is a pretty complicated process, more complex than any human manufacturing enterprise. Hundreds of millions, maybe billions of different events have to be coordinated, sometimes very quickly. E coli replicate its DNA two thousand base-pairs a second and make less than one in a billion mistakes because it has sequential proof-reading mechanisms which are based on monitoring the DNA and picking up those errors and correcting them.
So this is a form of cognitive behavior and I know we're taught not to anthropomorphize though I do it all the time, It's the only way I can understand what my bacteria are experiencing.(*) And I think what McClintok is trying to tell us is we have to realize both that the cell is a sensory, sentient entity and it's using that sentience for its own needs and requirements and functions and sometimes that involves changing its genetics, changing its DNA. But there's a whole school of study one of the pioneers of it is at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center, Lee Hartwell who got the Nobel Prize, I think about seven or eight years ago for studying the control of how the cell cycle progresses. And you may know about that. And the cell cycle, the eukaryotic cell cycle involves lots of different things that have to happen and they all have to happen in a coordinated way. And the cell is monitoring how all of those things are happening.
Here the recording has a drastically degraded audio quality,** making it too difficult to try for a close to verbatim transcription. But, from what you can hear, James Shapiro went into how much more complex the division of a eukaryotic cell is. Before hearing that, though, with all of the biology courses I took in college when a lot of that information was known, I never before had anyone present just how complex the divison of any cell is but, especially, eukariotic cells, such as human beings and many other creatures from Algae up to dinosaurs and sperm whales bodies are composed of is. It's long, long ago been known that those cells have obvious complexities that have to be reproduced as the entire cell replicates itself - which, as my first biology teacher in high school pointed out to me leads to the problem of saying which of the resulting cells is "the original cell" as both of them are, then, a product of the original one splitting. The way we talk about things and think about things on that basic a level fail to consider such things. Which should have always been a warning against over-simplifying the situation and using that over-simplification ideologically as well as scientifically.
All of those separate DNA containing entities within them would have to have their contents replicated, including DNA but, also, the enormously complex cellular structures and chemistry containing and comprising, as well as the nuclear DNA and the supporting very complex cellular structures and their supporting molecules would have to be EVERY TIME THAT THOSE CELLS DIVIDED. In the case of single cell organisms, that is done to produce a functioning, viable organism, and in multi-cell organisms, to create the billions of times more complex bodies of multicellular creatures made of interacting cells, organs, organ systems etc. And those would have to almost, in every single case, have to do it to effective perfection almost every time. The idea that random chance or non-directed, non-teleological "bio-chemistry" as presented in the simplistic modeling of that questioner, which is so inadequate it barely deserves to be called a "cartoon-presentation" of what happens is at least as absurd as "young-earth creationism." Yet that is the foundation of the most widespread of scientific ideologies dealing with such questions, certainly on the popular level but, also, at the level on which the likes of Richard Dawkins have sustained eminent careers in science at some of the major universities in the world.
The way that just cellular replication alone is generally presented is like that famous cartoon of some professor writing an enormously long equation on a black board and in the middle of it it says "then a miracle occurs." Though that's supposed to mock religion, that is really how the imagination of cells dividing in most Peoples' minds is, including many professional biologists, because they skate over how enormously complicated all aspects of that are. Even picking out different aspects of it as if those are separable from the whole life of the cell, such as my formerly favorite one of how a cellular membrane splits and repairs itself so as to enclose two cells instead of one, is grotesquely simplistic because that wouldn't happen without the entire range of happenings within, first the first cell, then in both of them, for that to happen. It can't be isolated from the entire act of cellular reproduction with all of its myriad of complex events happening successfully. Starting with the cell obtaining enough of the exactly necessary molecules to produce two cells from one. Which inevitably involves the enormously complex matter of the cellular activity in taking in molecules from outside of it, and so the "environment" in which the cell lives.
I remember the vicious attacks on James Shapiro from his colleague at the University of Chicago, the new atheist fanatic, Jerry Coyne about the same time he gave that lecture, one joined in by a lot of the science bloggers run by university faculty and their commentators who were stalwarts of the then fashionable new atheism. A lot of that was centered in the insistence that there were huge parts of the then recently mapped DNA that were nothing but "junk" something which Shaprio mentioned pained him during that lecture because scientists like him had already shown that it was anything but superflous but was vitally important, literally, life depending on its functions and on the matter of evolution which has such incredibly outsized importance to materialist-atheist-scientistic ideology. I was certain that the "junk DNA" arguments were entirely made in service, not to science, but to atheist ideology. One of the things I heard Shaprio point out is how little of our DNA is dedicated to that thing which you'll generally hear is "the only thing it does," make proteins - presumably why those with a simplistic naive view of micro-biology would imagine the rest of it as mere "junk."
I thought then and I think now that insistence on a simplistic cartoonish view is maintained from the motive of supporting an ideology most often accepted by the lay public on the basis of ignorance. Or, more typically in the uncommitted agnostics, just out of a lack of teaching and learning time and the condescending idea that most high school and even college students taking basic biology are too stupid to understand how complex it is. I have a strong feeling that a lot of it is science teachers and even working scientists being too reliant on long ago surpassed ideological science which they were too lazy to realize had been surpassed. No doubt if they did understand more of what is known about those complexities, today, that would raise all kinds of questions that those acculturated into materialism-atheism and scientism would be afraid of. I think that realization that such complexity as was being revealed even back into the 1930s and certainly by the 1950s when Barbara McClintok was warned by her colleagues that the kinds of discoveries she was publishing would hurt her career would harm the materialist-atheist-scientistic view of reality was the dominant reason for that. I think that professional harm to the progress of science came because a lot of them realized or vaguely intuited that the discovery of that level of complexity in the "simplest" units of life would obliterate the traditional ideological use of biology that really got going in a big way with the invention and promotion of natural selection with its random-chance changes and gradual development that, it was imagined, could happen without anything but random-chance as its basis. That is why I think the ideologues have suppressed such knowledge in science and it's clearly not got little behind it but that non-scientific ideology.
I think that as much as such ideological materialist-atheist-scientistic partisans would use their assumptions of extreme simplicity about these matters to reject the idea that intelligence was needed to guide the "bio-chemistry" to originate and continue life, their practice of doing that certainly, in light of the utter inadequacy of their foundational assumptions about that "simplicity," that the seeming necessity of "cognitive" behavior for cells to do what they do and to get that right as often as they do justifies someone coming to the conclusion that more than mere random chance within physical causation is necessary for it to happen. That is, they are justified as long as they do what the materialists never have admitted, that their conclusion on the basis of scientific demonstration, isn't, itself, a scientific conclusion. That doesn't mean that it is any less valid than many of the conclusions that might fit into the very specific specifications of what should be allowed to be considered science.
The more I learn what recent science has found about the enormous complexity of knowable life on Earth, the more vanishingly improbable it seems to me that even the sustaining of life now can be on the basis of the old, tired and inadequate formulas of materialist-atheist-scientism, not to mention the gargantuan improbabilities of life arising spontaneously AND SUCCESSFULLY on the early Earth. I haven't looked it up for this post but I recently read one cosmologist who said on the basis of the improbability of life arising anywhere in our life-permitting universe, he doubts that there is any extra-terrestrial life anywhere else in our universe. I have no idea if that's true but I am increasingly doubtful that life arises anywhere without there being some kind of cognitive intent being involved in it.
James Shapiro's admission that he thinks of that in terms he can understand, what would be described as "anthropomorphically" is far more honest than what you generally get from scientists who would reject that even as they so obviously do it themselves. I don't think huge areas of science, especially in life science, can possibly avoid doing that even as they deny they do it. I think it would be far safer for them to admit that's what they do instead of denying it. Every single thing about the alleged science of the observation of behavior is saturated with anthropomorphism because there is no other way to do that. Scientists couldn't possibly reason themselves into a model of things that can't be observed, small molecules, atoms, subatomic particles, etc. without human imagination being involved. The dismissal of "imagination" in modernism, allegedly a scientific ideology, is one of the stupidest things about it, made, quite often by those quite ignorant of science, out of inconsideration of reality or profound ignorance.
I will try to get around to seeing if I can process the sound from the rest of the recording to see if I can make an accurate transcription of it because what he says beyond what I transcribed above is extremely interesting and important. The last question on the recording deals with the implications that cells are not only capable of demonstrating cognitive behavior but are conscious. The brief answer that James Shapiro gives doesn't deny that but it does say that there would have to be a lot more known about the relationship of cognition to consciousness (I'd like someone to explain how you could have one without the other) but most interesting in his answer is that it would cause a firestorm of objection, no doubt among his ideological colleagues, to even raise that issue. Given the attack on consciousness and freedom of thought in mammals, birds, etc. in science and pseudo-science and, for Pete's sake, philosophy, that hesitation is understandable. That attack on consciousness is entirely in the service of materilaist-atheist ideology, though, as I've said before, such an ideological assertion entirely impeaches the validity of the science which such scientists make their claims from. If consciousness is an illusion, if free thought is an illusion on the basis of physical causation then every single thought every human being, including scientists have is as illusory. You can't claim that human beings are nothing but involuntary automatons without science, mathematics, the entire curriculum of academia and human culture being impeached, It is a sign of the decadence of academia in our time that you can hold a faculty position within some of our most reputable of universities while denying that human beings are conscious and that the credentialed graduates of those universities feel that they need to promote that anti-intellectual, ultimately anti-democratic holding of materialist-atheist-scientism. The social, legal and political results of such a belief have murdered scores if not hundreds of millions and have oppressed and enslaved billions of human beings, not to mention the even greater totals of those tortured and killed among our fellow sentient creatures. Materialism inevitably leads to treating human beings and other living creatures as objects for use and disposal. It is a more depraved ideology in effect than many of the worst human and animal-sacrificing religions were in that regard, they do it casually and daily to millions.
I have come to appreciate just how dangerous the philosophical incompetence that characterizes current science is. I'd include within philosophy though most people don't take that nearly as seriously. It is dangerous because of the incredibly outsized reliance of competence and honesty is whenever something is published under the guise of it being the product of honestly applied scientific method, which is alleged to produce disinterested information. A lot of that comes from the absurdity of much of what is deputed to be "science" when it doesn't follow anything like scientific methods. The unthinking, uncritical assumption that because a scientist says something that that comprises reliable information. If that is less or more dangerous than the reliance on the American judicial system, the judgements of judges, up to and including the Corrupt Court, I don't know but I know it is plenty dangerous for it to become an issue.
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But there is one area in which materilist-atheist-devotees of scientism constantly and consistently and insistently anthropomorphize and that's when they are thinking about God and God's motives or how God thinks. If it is considered inappropriate to call such complex cellular behavior and its controlling, unseeable motivation "cognition" or "knowing" because it is "anthropomorphic" then it is even more absurd to then believe that the infinitely (effectively) more complex control of physical reality and more on Earth, in life, in the universe could happen through some form of cognition which any human being could imagine to refute its "necessity." Such claims of non-necessity as if that is refutation is not based on any kind of hard evidenced analysis but is merely an appeal to seeming probability. Though, since it's not really possible to know if any of it is possible without intelligent intention or content, there is no real or valid means of determining if the alternatives that we imagine in some scheme of improbability is, in fact, possible. In the case of the existence of life on Earth, in the universe, the kind of life we know of and which science has learned some little about, its existence without intelligent behavior doesn't seem to be possible. The idea that a purely mechanical model of the "simplest" of life is even adequate is entirely unevidenced.
Those old materialist-atheist-scientistic models of reality were based on two things, human technological processes and products and human imaginings of how objects move and interact, frequently based on ideas derived from human manipulations of materials. As James Shapiro notes, every viable, changing, living and reproducing cell outstrips even our most modern of technological operations and organization every second they are alive. Clearly the old line materialist models and imaginings of such things are grotesquely inadequate to account for even what has been observed. Materialism should be a dead ideology on that basis, alone. Atheism based in materialism should be as dead and scientism, an ideology that can't be true unless it is false, should never have gotten off the ground. But it not only has but is sustained by the philosophical and rational decadence of modern life and modern academia. The journalistic and show-biz promotion of that by an especially degraded establishment is done entirely on the basis of sheer non-intelligence.
* The necessity of "anthropomorphizing" as even the possibility of coming to an understanding of other organisms is probably inescapable and the sooner scientists are honest about that the sooner they'll be being honest about what they're doing. No statement has ever been made about the behavior, even the observed behavior, of a non-human organisms which isn't saturated with "anthropomorpizing." If that's the case with the observable actions of cells, it's many, many times more true of behaving multi-cellular organisms, the behaviors of which are far more complex because they are the product of far more complex multi-cellular actions. The worst of those dishonestly claimed "objective" presentations of that, such as ethology, are far more junk than any part of DNA would seem to be.
** If there is one thing I really hate it's listening to an interesting scientific or technical lecture that shows that the sciency-tech guys who organize and arrange such things are so much less apt to produce an audio recording of it competently than the religious lecture organizers I listen to do. The talks of such evangelicals as William Lane Craig, on the high end, and those who are far more of the Trumpzi variety tend to be entirely audible and understandable and easily transcribed. I haven't found a lecture by James Shapiro online that doesn't have major problems, and those are hardly the only ones given by even such eminent scientists that can be said about. In none of those was he at fault for that lack of clarity, his content proves that he more than did his part in that regard. You'd think that they'd go to the bother of having such important lectures be understandable to the largest numbers of those who would like or need to listen to them THOSE WHO WILL BE LISTENING TO THEM ON RECORDINGS DAYS OR YEARS AFTER THEY WERE GIVEN. It's really amazing how sloppy and slipshod some even well funded, eminent lectureships in the sciences are. You'd think, if anything, they'd be the ones that did a great job with the technology.