BI 224 Dan Nicholson: Schrödinger's What is Life? Revisited

[00:00:03] Speaker A: You can think about the history of science, and this applies, I think, to any discipline as the attempt to see how far you can go with a particular framework, a particular model, a particular metaphor. Exqueeze every last drop of goodness that you can get out of it. Right. Eventually we're going to need different sets of tools to look at the same phenomena. That is the molecular biology revolution. The idea of order from order in 1944 becomes what we all learn when we study molecular biology as the idea that organization comes from information. But if you're lucky, if you're lucky, maybe once every 10 years or maybe once in your life, you'll find something, you'll discover empirically something or you'll find will come across a result, unexpected, groundbreaking. And the thrill of having that discovery is sufficient to feed you for the rest of your life of disappointments, of not anything else. [00:01:10] Speaker B: This is brain inspired, powered by the transmitter that is Dan Nicholson, assistant professor of philosophy at George Mason University, here to talk about his little book, what Is Life Revisited? Erwin Schrodinger's what Is Life? Is a famous little book that people point to as having predicted DNA, for example, a few other things that we discuss that have been a major influence, and it was a major influence and inspired many well known biologists ushering in the molecular biology revolution. But Schrodinger was a physicist, not a biologist, and he spent very little time and effort toward actually understanding biology. So what was he up to? Why did he write this quote, unquote famous little book? It turns out, as Dan writes about, Schrodinger had an agenda, a physics agenda. He wanted to save the older deterministic version of quantum physics from the new indeterministic version. When Dan was on the podcast a few years ago, we talked about the machine conception or view of biological systems, how everything these days has become a mechanism, and how that view fails to capture what modern science is actually telling us, that organisms are unlike machines in important and very specific ways. That work of Dan's led him down this path to Schrodinger's what Is Life? Which he argues was a major contributor to that machine metaphor so ubiquitous today in biology. One of the reasons I'm interested in this kind of work is because the cognitive sciences, including neuroscience and artificial intelligence, inherited this mechanistic perspective and swallowed it so hard that if you don't include the word mechanism in your research paper, you're vastly decreasing your chances of actually getting your work published. When in fact, the mechanistic perspective is one, albeit super useful perspective among Many. Anyway, we discuss all that and more. I link to all things Dan Nicholson in the show notes@braininspired co podcast224. I want to say thank you to my Patreon supporters and to the transmitter for their continued support of this podcast. The Complexity Science discussion group is going strong. I've been continuing to enjoy those discussions with we're going through the foundations of Complexity Science papers, which is a four volume thing from the Santa Fe Institute. Anyway, if you want to learn more about that and how to support the podcast and more of the bells and whistles that you get when you do that, go to BrainInspired co. Alright, enjoy. Dan. [00:03:59] Speaker A: I think that if it is read in the way that I'm hoping it is read, that it will inspire people to do different things relating to it. Right. I mean, the book looks. Is misleadingly narrow in its scope in that it looks like it's just an analysis of one book, you know, one little book on another little book. But actually it's, it's an analysis of basically the last half a century of, of research in molecular and cell biology. And I'm just making a bunch of claims about why we ended up where we are now and where we might go in the future. [00:04:31] Speaker B: Yeah, well it's also sort of a book about physics as well, in a sense. Yeah. And I mean it's on the tail of. It's in line with like the rest of your work. It's like you've gone deeper and deeper and deeper and like you ended up here at Schrodinger and I'm. So what are you working on now? Quickly, Maybe we can talk about that later too. [00:04:55] Speaker A: Well, I got a couple of things that I'm working on at the same time, but there is a direct follow up to this little book which is looking at the relationship between biology and physics more generally and how that unfolded and developed over the 20th century. So the Schrodinger case is one case of how biologists and physicists spoke to each other and drew on each other's ideas during the 20th century. And it's really exciting because physics undergoes this massive revolution at the beginning of the century and then a bunch of biologists get excited about maybe instigating a similar revolution in biology based on the new physics. And then what ultimately happens is that when the revolution finally arrives in biology in the form of molecular biology, it's a revolution that is based on the old physics. The Old Physics, 19th century Victorian deterministic mechanistic physics with a little bit of cybernetics thrown in. So it's a fascinating, it's a sort of fascinating sort of dialectic between how we think about the relationship between biology and physics. So that's maybe the most direct sort of follow up to this. And. But yeah, I mean this book also provides the sort of foundation for why I had done that earlier work looking at the machine metaphor in cell biology and molecular biology. I mean, I was sort of looking for why we ended up where we are, you know, and so that's why I was excited by this deep dive into the history. [00:06:19] Speaker B: And it's Schrodinger's fault. [00:06:22] Speaker A: I was suggesting, you know, historians hate these sort of super simplistic generalizations. [00:06:26] Speaker B: Sure. [00:06:26] Speaker A: I guess you can't really generalize like that. But maybe not entirely his fault, but I want to suggest that his influence has been sort of under appreciated. It was over appreciated for a while by biologists saying, you know, Schrodinger is awesome and we want to be like Schrodinger. And so we want to do what for biology, what Schrodinger did for physics. But the historians for about 30, 40 years have been basically saying that we shouldn't trust scientists when they say they were influenced by, by famous books. And so my book is a response to that consensus in the history of science saying, you know, you guys, you're right to point out that to some extent, right. The book was used politically for political purposes as a propagandistic tool to bring respect to the new field of molecular biology by associating with Schrodinger. But you've been wrong to dismiss the book as a scientific work. It wasn't just the name. I mean, he had an argument and that argument, I suggest, actually influenced and shaped the way we think about the cell. So that's what I'm doing. Also in the book I'm taking issue with, with everyone, but I'm on this part with the historians. [00:07:26] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. Well you mentioned the word political there and I don't think you use political. I'm not sure if you do in the actual book. And, and by the way, I love these elements. They're. It's like reading a really long chapter. [00:07:37] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:07:38] Speaker B: Like they're short enough that like you can really consume it. But man, you packed a lot of stuff in there. But yeah, I mean it's great. I think maybe I just really enjoy your writing as well, so that helps. But because there's a clarity and just ease to it. But I'm also really interested in the topic, so I'm not sure if It's a little bit muddled by that. But you use the word political just now, and I was going to ask you, because one of the things that you discuss in the book, or that a conclusion almost that's recurrent through the book, is that Schrodinger, it turns out, like, had an agenda and it was almost a political. It was like a political. He hated the new physics and he desperately wanted the old, the old physics to be true. And so, in part, this book, what Is Life? Was his way of strong arming. Maybe not. Maybe that's a heavy term, but it was kind of a political move, right? [00:08:31] Speaker A: Yeah, it was. I mean, it's not that he hated the new physics, it's just that he thought that the new physics would not look as radically different from the old physics. So you can think of him as sort of a more on the conservative side. Maybe people have refer to him as the last sort of classical or the last old of the old generation, because he's not, you know, he's younger than, you know, the Planck and others who, even though they were instigating that, they were also unhappy with the Copenhagen interpretation. But, you know, he's contemporary, he's around the same generation of people like Max Born and others who were very, quite, quite keen to develop the new physics in this new direction. And so, yeah, you can think of what he's doing in this book as his protest, not just against the new physics, but more against the way the new physics was being used in this completely objectionable way, according to Schrodinger, which. [00:09:28] Speaker B: Is. [00:09:30] Speaker A: To adopt certain positions in other areas in biology and especially in psychology. I want to suggest that this is something I did not expect to find in my research. It was completely novel to me, and I became convinced by the weight of the evidence that I discovered in the archives that the book is basically the most important part of the book, is the bit that everybody makes fun of because it's, it seems, the worst part, which is the epilogue, you know, So I, you know, I was very surprised to find myself making that case. [00:09:59] Speaker B: But describe that. What does he do in the epilogue? Why do people make fun of it and why does it seem out of place? [00:10:04] Speaker A: Yeah, because the epilogue is something that he added. It wasn't part of the original lectures, and so he added the epilogue when he wrote the manuscript. And the epilogue has nothing to do with the rest of the book. I mean, the title of the book is what Is Life? And then the subtitle is the Physical Aspect of the Living Cell, which I think is the right. If you want to know what the book is about, that subtitle is more helpful than just what is Life? Because the book is not about defining life or the nature of life. It's about the physical aspect of the living cell. And yet the epilogue at the end is about free will and determinism. And it goes into Vedanta philosophy to make the case that, that this question of determinism, of free will, can't be resolved by physics. We need to draw on philosophy and ultimately Eastern religion to solve it. And it's kind of hilarious because he added this in the manuscript and he already had a contract with an Irish publisher, Cahill & Company, and the publisher received the manuscript, and when it got to the end, it was absolutely clear to the publisher that they were not going to. That we're not going to publish the. [00:11:12] Speaker B: Book because it's so orthogonal to the rest of the. [00:11:15] Speaker A: Not just orthogonal, but it was offensive to Irish Catholic island in 1944. So I said, unless you remove this, we're not going to publish the book. And actually, at that point, they had already sort of typeset in the book. It was all ready to go to the press. And Schrodinger was given that ultimatum, was given that choice, and Schrodinger decided, okay, no, well, refused. He refused. And so the. The publication didn't go ahead. And so he found himself in a situation where he had to find another publisher. He asked a friend of his, Donnan, who was actually an important figure also, for he shaped Schrodinger's views about the cell and about thermodynamics. And Donnen had already helped Born to publish a book with Cambridge University Press or Cambridge University Press, a much better publisher than the original Irish one. And so that's what happened. So that led to a delay in publication as well, because Schrodinger insisted in keeping that little epilogue because he thought it was absolutely essential. [00:12:13] Speaker B: Why did he think it was essential? [00:12:14] Speaker A: Because if I'm right, it's essential because there is where he's saying that if it is the case that the cell is deterministic, then we can no longer jump from quantum mechanics to the brain to the mind, because now, as Darlington put it, the organism now has a say in the matter, right? He's severing the link between the quantum world and the psychological world, where others had suggested Bohr, and especially Pasquale Jordan, who was a student of or worked with Bohr and born. He's one of the Gottingen people when people developed matrix mechanics, he didn't not as well known because he then became a Nazi and his reputation was tarnished by this. But he got very excited by the idea that the indeterminacy that was suggested by Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics was amplified in the cell and was ultimately responsible for the creativity and the freedom that you find in organisms. And so that's pretty well. And so that's why Schrodinger writes that epilogue. To, say, the consequence of what I presented in this book is that you can no longer make that move philosophically. And that's why he insisted on having that epilogue. Also why he insisted on having it featured in the COVID of the book. I also mention that that's no longer appearing in, you know, new reprintings of the book. But Schrodinger insisted on having, you know, what is Life? And then with an epilogue on determinism and free will. And it's kind of funny because you read all these reviews of the book by very senior scientists and they're all, like, excited, yeah, this is good stuff. And then. And then they all make fun at the end of the epilogue, you know, Haldane says, a mechanist has to provide a mechanistic account of the theory of mind or turn a somersault, he says. And in his epilogue, Schrodinger does the latter very elegantly. [00:14:10] Speaker B: Very elegantly. Yeah, yeah, you put that in the book. It's funny. At some point, reading through your what Is Life Revisited? I started picturing Schrodinger as this, like, old school Saturday morning cartoon villain, you know, like, with like a sort of a quirky villain who's trying to meddle with things, you know, and that's a very simplistic man view. But it was also kind of helpful to frame what was going on. So I think that what Is Life? Schrodinger's what Is Life? Is probably one of the most important books ever written. I haven't read it, but. No, I'm just kidding. I have not read it and I don't think it's one of the. Based on your book. I actually have not read it. But based on your book, I don't think it's one of the most important, but it is super influential. And this is a big part of what you spend time on in the book is talking. You have direct quotes from so many molecular biologists and people in the biological fields who point to Schrodinger and who may or may not have read the book, but point to a few. I think it was like a list of three. Three main things. That people point to. Right. That they've been. That have been a massive influence in their thinking. And the claim is that this is what Schrodinger's influence has been. Right. [00:15:32] Speaker A: On the field, these three points. The first one is that there is an aperiodic crystal, the heredity substance. This is, of course, remember that Schrodinger's writing, before even DNA was identified as the material carrier of heredity, most people. [00:15:49] Speaker B: Thought genes were around, though genes were around, of course. [00:15:52] Speaker A: But the demonstration that DNA was the carrier was published the same year as the Avery, as shown in his book. And of course, this is a decade before the double helix and before information was being used in biology as well. So it comes before all of that. But he suggests that the best way, or the only way, the only plausible way to understand physically the hereditary substance is as an aperiodic crystal. And then a lot of people have picked on that particular phrase that contains within it a code script for development. And there is also the introduction of the term code. Yeah, right. That's the first one. The second one is that. [00:16:37] Speaker B: Wait, wait, let's hang on there for just a second, because there are two things. I mean, that. That is probably the main thing that I've heard is people pointing to Schrodinger as well. He basically predicted DNA without. Without there being any evidence for it, and lo and behold, it came true. And for this and for other things, like you just mentioned, the code. [00:16:57] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:16:58] Speaker B: Code is not. He didn't mean it in the same way as the way we tend to mean code. [00:17:04] Speaker A: Right. [00:17:04] Speaker B: He meant code as in a program, not a cipher. Can you unpack that? We're not going to go through every little detail in your book, but there are just a few things that I think are worth hanging on. [00:17:14] Speaker A: No, so. So a lot of people. So with regards to the periodic crystal idea, he was very perceptive in suggesting, because of course, he's like reasoning from the armchair here, that the only way to have stability, because the whole book really is an attempt by Schrodinger to resolve a paradox, which is how can something so small, like jeans, be sufficiently stable to withstand the stochastic effects of Brownian motion of thermal agitation. So that is the paradox that he tries to resolve in the book. And the way he does it is by suggesting that the structure of this hereditary material has to be a sort of crystal, because only crystals are sufficiently solid. You know, he uses the word solid here to withstand those effects, to be stable enough. But it can't be just be any random crystal. It has to be aperiodic, he says, as opposed to periodic crystals, which are most of the crystals that chemists are familiar with. Schrodinger says they have to be aperiodic so that it can contain within it the code script. Right. So that there is. And all that, as I've just described it, can be construed as something that Schrodinger essentially got. Right. Right. Because when DNA was. The structured DNA was identified, we can call it that. I mean, we can describe it as an aperiodic crystal. Then he said also that this crystal has this code script. Right. And as you rightly point out, that that has led to a lot of confusion because we use the word code in more than one way. Right. So one very common interpretation of that idea is that Schrodinger anticipated the genetic code. Right. And the problem with that, and I'm not the first person to notice this, is that a genetic. Genetic code is a cipher, which means that there needs to be some sort of correspondence rules that allow you to go from one sequence to another sequence. Right. In the case of the genetic code is you go from DNA bases to amino acids, and there's nothing like that in what is life. There is no reference or implication that there are any correspondence rules. He's talking about the specification of the message that is going to be read during development. Right. He is arguing that the order of the organism is encoded in the DNA. But he's not saying that the DNA, that there is some sort of language that is transcribed and translated in the way that we think about genetic code. Instead, he's thinking more of a code, as we talk today about a highway code or a code of conduct. So a set of rules, rules that allow you to understand what you're supposed to do. And I think that's a much better way of thinking about what Schrodinger is up to when he talks about a code script. And actually it's what leads to then the notion of a genetic program, coined independently by Ernst Meyer and Jacob and Monod at the same time, Same year in 1961, 17 years later, ends up having as much of an influence as the idea of a genetic code as a metaphor for development, for what happens in development, which is the programmatic execution of a set of. Of algorithmic instructions encoded in the genome. And I think what I suggest in the book is that that's a much better way of thinking about Schrodinger's legacy here, that he made it legitimate to think about development in this way as being preformed deterministically preformationistically as well, and also in a way that allows you to think about computability. He even mentions Laplace, Laplace's demon in the book, saying, if you have access, if you can read this code script, you can compute the embryo, which incidentally is what then developmental geneticists start saying in the 1970s and 80s, which is a very interesting connection. So that's what I suggest with the idea of a code script, that he needs to be understood in the right way to understand his influence. [00:21:02] Speaker B: And then you take some pains to say that that is. So development can't be thought of in terms of a preformation. You don't specify all of development because there is a lot of randomness and stochasticity during development. And I mean, maybe we can get later into, you know, the, the concept of organization as being important in, in its own right. Self organization and organization as a principle that these things aren't predetermined. No, yeah, exactly. So, yeah, going back to. So, so we'll get on to the, to the other two points, but I, but to linger here a little bit longer, there's the whole order from disorder and order from order principles. And so what Schrodinger claims to want to do here is to say that life is order from order being the crystalline structure, the crystal like structure. Whereas physics at the time, and maybe what he railed against, or preferred not to accept, or I don't know how to phrase it, physics at the time, statistical mechanics, showed that you can get order from disorder. So the statistical properties of large collections of entities like atoms can give rise to ordered. You can say things about their mean and emergent properties of those statistical properties, the collection of statistical properties. You can say things about the whole in an ordered fashion, even though at the smallest scale they're disordered. And what you had alluded to earlier is that Schrodinger was looking for this thing and he said the genetic material has to be so small that that doesn't apply. So therefore, like statistical mechanics, large collections of things don't apply because it's so small. It's going to be, it's going to be affected by the thermodynamics at that scale. And so it has to be this crystalline structure. Right? [00:23:03] Speaker A: That's the, that's the puz. Like he says, as a physicist, this makes no sense. This should not be right. And so that's why he, he comes up with this idea of a, of an apronic crystal, which is sort of maintained by these solidifying forces. And here he draws on the Hitler London theory of the covalent bond. So he's using the new quantum mechanics to provide determinacy, which is kind of ironic because today we think of quantum mechanics as providing the opposite. But he thought that the new quantum mechanics would provide the. Just provide a basis for. For the determinacy of life as opposed to the indeterminacy of life, which is how many others, led by Bohr, interpreted the implication of quantum mechanics for biology. So you have like a sort of a discussion about the legacy or how we should think about the impact of quantum mechanics on biology. And Schrodinger here is on his own, almost like he's fighting against this consensus view that quantum mechanics throws a spanner in the works by suggesting that there may be more indeterminacy that biologists are more comfortable with. And he wants to say, no. No, no, no. Actually, genetics gives us good reasons to think that quantum mechanics can explain the determinacy which is required by the fact that genes are responsible for the phenotype. I mean, he is having to rely on a very genocentric view of life and a very deterministic view of how genes work and essentialistic to make. To make this picture work. Okay. So it's all very construed in a way so that he can say what he wants to say, which is, don't listen to physicists when they tell you about. How about the impact of quantum mechanics on biology and psychology. Because I'm showing in this book that no matter what happens in these discussions about quantum mechanics, the cell is a deterministic entity. Development is a deterministic process. And so you can't go there from. From physics to psychology to the brain to make the case for free will. That's basically what he's trying to do in the book. [00:25:02] Speaker B: Yeah. So there's this quote from the book from Paul Ewald. Schrodinger appeared not to be interested in a thorough survey of the literature in biology, but rather wanted to know of a few articles that would corroborate his point of view. This is like not the way that you're supposed to do science, but I mean, at the same time, this was. You kind of talk about how this was almost a side project for him to, like, put his stamp on the thing and then move on. [00:25:28] Speaker A: Absolutely, yeah. I mean, people have wanted to believe that he was invested in the fate of biology, and he just wasn't. He just wasn't. This was a hobby for him to get into. Think about the implications of these ideas in biology. In fact, I also have a footnote where Warren Weaver, who's this physicist who then became super important for molecular biology because he was responsible for financing. He was financing much of the work that led to molecular biology. He was head of the sort of Rockefeller Foundation. So a lot of this, a lot of the money that went into the work that led to molecular biology was funded by this guy. And he was very excited about Schrodinger's argument. And so he came to Dublin in 1950 to meet with Schrodinger to find out, expecting that Schrodinger would be quite happy to receive money so that he could continue to work on this, on how, you know, theoretical physics can illuminate our problems in biology. And Schrodinger just said, look, I'm done, I've moved on. I have nothing else to say. [00:26:29] Speaker B: He solved it. [00:26:29] Speaker A: He solved it, he solved it and he moved on to something else. And so this is why, arguably, I think, he did not reply to Crick. You know, so Francis Crick, you know, just when he publishes with Watson the two papers in Nature that change biology in 1953, quickly writes a letter to Schrodinger, says, hey, dear Professor Schrodinger, I just want you to know that Watson and I were really inspired by your book. And you have a look at these papers because they will show to you, I hope, that your idea of an aperiodic crystal is going to be very important for the future of biology. And then Schrodinger does not reply. [00:27:03] Speaker B: Crickets. Yeah, crickets. [00:27:05] Speaker A: And I think that's because he had moved on. I mean, he was doing all kinds of different projects. I mean, as part of his job in, as the director of the Division of Theoretical Physics of the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies, part of the job entailed him giving a set of annual public lectures on different topics, Right? And so he gave a bunch of lectures series on a wide range of topics on ancient Greece, on the mind. He's got one mind and matter. He's got another one on sort of questions in the philosophy of science. So this was just one of the many sort of little projects that he engaged in. But it was an important project to him. As I explained in the book, he had been thinking about this for a decade before the lectures, I mean, in the early 30s. And I show that the archives give us good reasons to conclude that he got interested precisely because he found his colleagues making these incursions into biology in a way that he found extremely offensive and objectionable. So there's Good evidence that the whole reason why he, a decade before those lectures, he decided he was going to ultimately work on this was because he wanted to have something to say to his physicist colleagues about how one should think about the physics, biology relationship. You know, how legitimate is it for you to project onto biology the sort of ideas that have taken hold of your area, of your field of physics? That's. [00:28:32] Speaker B: Yeah, that's an interesting thing. And I don't. Maybe we can discuss this later, but I've been thinking about that in the neurosciences and in artificial intelligence research. I mean, I've had a lot of people on this podcast. A lot of people in neuroscience are, come from the physics world, right. And it's almost like, oh, come on, can't some either, like, can it not be all physicists? You know, can they not solve everything in other fields or the other. You never see like a biologist go into physics. Right. You always see physicists go into other fields and it seems to be a one way street. And I find that disappointing somehow, although they have like great tools for thinking about things. And in this case it was Schrodinger, you said, on his own, kind of. So in a sense, the rest of the physicists that were making incursions into biology were sort of on maybe what you would consider to be a more. Right track. Would that be a way to put it? [00:29:34] Speaker A: It really depends from what perspective we evaluate these things, you know, so historically, to be careful here. So I think for much of the second half of the 20th century, we would have had to conclude that Schrodinger was on the right track because molecular biologists have shown no interest and there's no appetite to consider the effects of quantum, you know, quantum phenomena on molecular processes. [00:29:57] Speaker B: But I don't care about what people are interested in. I care about like what's accurate. [00:30:02] Speaker A: Well, so, yeah, but just to clarify, what's accurate changes, I mean, what we think is accurate changes over time. Right now there's more of an appetite to take these things seriously. So people. [00:30:13] Speaker B: But what we think is accurate is influenced by who says it. [00:30:16] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:30:17] Speaker B: And in this case Schrodinger. And you, you point to the fact that a lot of molecular biologists like point to Schrodinger to sort of bolster their, their case. Right. So, and that happens all. I don't know, that sort of stuff. It's just, it bothers me all the time. In every field, my field included, you just name drop and then it gives more credence to whatever you say then. [00:30:39] Speaker A: Right. [00:30:40] Speaker B: And it shouldn't be that way. [00:30:41] Speaker A: Absolutely. And I think that's what the historians starting in the 1980s started pointing out. You know, let's not over, let's not overstate the case. These people were interested in just name dropping Schrodinger, and they did so interestingly, quite late in the day. And when they start getting Nobel Prizes, that's when you find Morris Wilkins is the first one to do this in 62. And then others follow a few years later. That's when they start saying, well, you know, I was very inspired by the great physicist Schrodinger, who had written this little book. And so, yeah, you're right. And I think that's what the historians were pointing to, that it's not enough just for you to name drop and to assume that the authority of someone who's made an important contribution to one field justifies what you're doing, even though that's arguably what happened. Right. Molecular biology dissociated itself from biochemistry and the earlier biological traditions because it was in some way different. It did not concern itself with the messy biochemical details of metabolism. Instead, it had a vision of information. And so the questions are totally different. They're not questions about energy, they're questions about information, even matter, sort of not that important anymore. You know, the stuff of the embryo doesn't matter. What's important is you've got a message that needs to be effectively transcribed and translated, and it's all. So you've got a very, very different picture. And yeah, and I think, I think that there's some truth to that, that this was something that was done. What I'm, I'm sort of swimming against the flow there as well in my book, because I'm saying that Schrodinger's argument itself was influential. It wasn't just that he was a very, very famous physicist, but what he had to say provided us a vision, a way of doing your work as a molecular biologist. And it told you what to expect to find, which was sort of this clockwork determinacy at the heart of the cell. And I think one can make a good case that that's exactly what they found. And so in that sense, Schrodinger was successful. That's why I was asking you, how do we decide who's right here? Well, I mean, yeah, for a long time people would have been quite happy to say, yeah, this is a good reconstruction, Nicholson. And Schrodinger was right, you know, but what I find interesting is in the last 20, 25 years, science never stops. The New methods that allow us to look at things in the new way, and we're discovering new things. And what's interesting to me is that now we are in a situation where there's a lot of evidence to want us to challenge that view that had been dominant for half a century. And so then the whole picture acquires a new significance, because now it's not about how we got to the right picture. It's like how we ended up being so misguided about how proteins work and all of that. Right. So it's still important, but for a different reason. [00:33:33] Speaker B: But you just said, like, the truth changes or our understanding of what is accurate changes. And, you know, so to say, well, now we've got it right for now for what we, you know, what we think. And I want to come back to that. But one of the reasons why I find what you do so valuable, and I guess the history and philosophy of science so valuable is that. So, you know, we get these stories passed down to us, and they're like legends, right? There's like, this whole Schrodinger thing. Like, Will Schrodinger did this. And when you go to the archives, dust off the books, look through the people's letters to each other, then you elucidate. Like, even when these Nobel laureates cite Schrodinger and say he was very influential, often you point out in the book that the thing that people cite, they actually have a misconception about what he was doing frequently or what the claim actually was in his book. Right. So they're taking their own sheen on what they understand it in their own modern context, importing that to what Schrodinger said. And when you dig into, like, the language used, the things that were expressed, the things that were known at the time that were understood at the time, and the things that weren't understood at the time. Like your work on just use of the term code. Right. If we just take it for whatever. You can take whichever meaning you want these days and just apply it and say, okay, well, I was influenced by that. But when you dig into how he was using it, I mean, these details kind of matter, and I just find that a very valuable exercise that you and your ilk do. [00:35:11] Speaker A: Yeah, I mean, I think there's a tension. I want to sort of pose a problem for my own. My own position here, which is that just following from what you just said. Now, if it really is the case that people read him in a way that misconstrued what he was saying, then how can I Make the case that it was influential. Right. And so the way to resolve that, which is a legitimate concern one may have about what I'm doing, is that not everybody misconstrued what Schrodinger was doing. So if you look at what the work, rather than what they said, but rather what they did, you find the influence of the ideas. I actually also did a little bit of a deep dive into one particular figure, Jacques Monod, very influential French molecular biologist and promoter of the view of the cell. He's got this super famous book, Chance of Necessity. And if you look at his particular intellectual development, you'll find that he was influenced by Schrodinger. He didn't say so, but in his unpublished lectures he mentions how Schrodinger sort of something clicked in his mind that he understood that what we needed in biology are not statistical explanations, but mechanical explanations. The regularities that are going to matter are not the kind of regularities that you find in statistical mechanics. They're going to be the ones that you find in engineering, you know, the ones that machines embody. So you can see that influence. But then, you know, I'm thinking more of the commentators. This book has been, you know, cited to death. There's like a million papers, short little things, you know, talking about how wonderful the book was and those. I went through all of them because I got this compulsive. [00:36:56] Speaker B: You're not even eye rolling right now. [00:36:58] Speaker A: I want to be careful as I went through everything. And I find, you know, the ad nauseam, what happens is everyone mentions ultimately these three things that we, that I mentioned in the book. Right. And so that's a, that's not, I say, a fair account. The book is much more interesting than just those three things. That's why I set that up at the beginning of my book and say, look, you may know just those three things. I'm going to show you in the book, that the book is much main claim is not captured by those three things. [00:37:26] Speaker B: Right. [00:37:27] Speaker A: And that the influence has been much greater, paradoxically than if it had just been those three things in the sense that he gave us a vision of what the cell is like and how the cell operates. A vision that is still with us today. A vision that sets the sort of the standards of legitimacy that we take as the. You know, the burden is on you if you want to challenge that vision. Right. [00:37:48] Speaker B: What is that vision like? How do you. What is that vision again? [00:37:51] Speaker A: The cell is a machine. The cell is a piece of clockwork that is deterministically controlled by its genes, where all of the parts sort of behave in a mechanical way and we don't. And it's all about the action of individual molecules. And what we need to care about is the structure of these molecules because the structure is rigid and the way they function is specifically. So it's all about how the, how the structure determines function. And, and that's basically the agenda of sort of protein science for, as I say, for the second half, 20th century. That's why people think, I mean, one reason why people think about proteins in the way that they do for so long, and they don't think in terms of these sort of fluid macromolecules, as we are now beginning to think about proteins as intrinsically disordered, as not even as being almost liquid, like as doing different things in different contexts, depending on what, you know, what substrate they're able to bind to. Right. [00:38:46] Speaker B: Very statistical, very stochastic. Very dependent on context. [00:38:50] Speaker A: Yeah, exactly, dependent on context. And the irony, Paul, is that that is what a physicist would be able to tell you. [00:38:57] Speaker B: Some, some physicists, most physicists, someone who. [00:38:59] Speaker A: Knows nothing about biology, you approach them and you say, hey, can you explain to me, so at this particular physical scale, how would you expect molecular interactions to take place? The likely answer that you're going to get is one which factors in the stochasticity. And that's what you don't get when you look at at least these textbook descriptions about how molecules interact. So that's the ultimate irony for me. That is a physicist that is responsible for making a whole generation of moleculars forget about the effects of physics on the, that they work on. [00:39:33] Speaker B: So the idea of, okay, here's a phrase. Genes don't determine biological organization. Or let's say DNA doesn't determine biological organization, you're on board with that, right? [00:39:45] Speaker A: Yeah, I think that the best way to think about it, if we're going to have to stick to use some metaphor from engineering or whatever, then I think it's better to think of DNA as a database than as a program. You know, that there's information of some kind, I think should not be disputed. I mean, there is a way of getting to the primary structure of proteins from the sequence of DNA. I mean, that's just the fact, an empirical fact. Right. But to go from the prime, from the amino acid sequence of a peptide chain to function, let alone, you know, what the cell does, let alone what develop what happens in development, that's where the error is. But that the idea that there is, you know, information in DNA. And that there is that. I don't think that there's anything wrong with. I mean, I don't think empirically speaking. I mean, you say I have an agenda. I do. But my metaphysical agenda is informed by the science, Paul. So, I mean, I try to go where the science leads me. And I think. And the science leads me to a processual view, but it's grounded in what I think are the empirical findings, what we've learned from looking at these things for decades. The best way to think about what happens in the cell or development about organisms is in terms of stabilized processes, not as fixed substance or fixed things. That's a much better way. Even though it's counterintuitive, I think it's a better way of understanding and thinking about what's going on. Everything is dynamic. That's the default dynamicity, change. And so we need to work out why things appear stable, which is what you asked me before. Right. Why is it that things seem stable if it really is the case that everything is dynamic? [00:41:29] Speaker B: Okay, so going back to this phrase, I mean, I wrote it down, so I'm reading it here. Genes don't determine biological organization, which is what you were just speaking to. [00:41:37] Speaker A: They don't. They provide a resource, but they don't determine the organization. That's right. [00:41:43] Speaker B: Is there something genes do determine? Like what could we say they do? [00:41:47] Speaker A: The primary sequence of amino acids, the primary structure of proteins. I mean, that was known in 57 when Crick has this, he calls it the sequence hypothesis and says, you know, they had to see the sequence of DNA is likely to be the template for RNA and the RNA is likely to be the template for protein. That was right. That's correct. So they determined that. They determined that. [00:42:12] Speaker B: But that is not the nexus of how we should understand what life is. [00:42:17] Speaker A: It's not enough to understand function, to understand organization, and not even enough to understand what proteins are doing. Like, if you have the sequence of the amino acids that make up the proteins, sort of the building blocks, you still don't really know what a protein is doing, is doing at a given time. Right. And so that's where we fill in the, fill in the gaps of our knowledge with our own ideologies. Right. And so if you think of the system as a clockwork machine, then you say, well, okay, it probably is a molecular machine. And so as a molecular machine, it's. Once it's got a structure, it has. The structure is what determines what the operation of the machine. And it does so in a regular way. That you can predict in a deterministic way. And so you fill that picture up with what you want to be true. [00:43:05] Speaker B: Right, right. [00:43:06] Speaker A: What I'm saying is that Schrodinger provides, you know, that picture. It's not the only one. But he gives us an account, based on physics, for why that picture is reasonable and plausible. The picture of clockwork fixity and rigidity, so that molecular biologists cannot have to worry about what, you know, how to interpret this stuff. They can just go to the races and say, yeah, well, that's clearly what's going on here. [00:43:27] Speaker B: Yeah. In fact, you can't. I'm thinking of Stuart Kaufman's notion of the adjacent possible. You actually can't know what a protein will do based on its sequence, because, as you were talking about in a different context, in a different environment, it can do different things. Also within just the context of the cell, it does do different things, and stochastically is switching back and forth between different confirmations. And if it's available in this confirmation, it can do this for a few nanoseconds, and then it goes back. So it's very, very fluid and stochastic. [00:44:00] Speaker A: I mean, I also want to suggest that that stuff that you just said is surprising to us, not because it's not, because. Not. Not because it's surprising, because it had to be surprising, but because the view that most people have is in that one. Right. So the reason why that strikes us as novel and weird and exciting is because we have been trained to think about those processes in a different way. That's why I was saying that a physicist that hasn't been sort of contaminated or brainwashed by those ideas may find it perfectly reasonable to say that, you know, proteins are going to stochastically switch between conformations, because that's what the physics tells you. The physics of the situation tells you that that's the more likely way in which this molecule is likely to behave. Right. [00:44:45] Speaker B: Okay, so we haven't touched on the other. Let's also just talk about the other two things that people point to in terms of Schrodinger's big influence on the field. [00:44:56] Speaker A: Yes. The second one is the idea that organisms conform to the second law of thermodynamics by feeding on negative entropy. Right. And that was picked up, and a lot of people remember shooting this book primarily for that reason. So it's an attempt to reconcile life with the second law, thermodynamics. How can life exist if entropy is continually increasing in the universe? According to the second law, thermodynamics how can you have. But you know, systems, physical bodies that don't degrade in that way. And so what Schrodinger suggests is that organisms are sort of feeding in, feeding on what he calls negative entropy, free energy. And that energy is being used in metabolism to regenerate the system, to reconstitute it, materially speaking. And this, this claim, I think it's just, it's so weird that that is something that is almost always mentioned because if you actually look at the book of what is Life, it is only like six pages on that. It's like a, not only that, but it's, it's kind of a, a side comment. Like he takes a breather and the penultimate chat says, oh, he's going to talk for a moment, forget everything I've been talking. He actually says forget about genes and chromosomes, let's just think about thermodynamics for a moment. And so he gives us this very elegant discussion about negative entropy and that's it. And so people have really made a big deal out of it. I mean, in fact I say in my book that people who really like non equilibrium thermodynamics and self organization have taken Schrodinger to be some sort of apostle, some great figure that is the first person to look with vision to a biology that will be completely founded on non equilibrium dynamics. And that's just false because that's not what he wants to say, you know, and I actually have a bunch of quotes from people who want him to say that and deconstruct them and say, you know, this is not, this is historically really inaccurate. Schrodinger isn't the first person to deal with these issues. There's nothing really original in what he's saying, although he says in a very elegant way that became influential. And he's not saying what you want him to be saying. You want him to say that the order of life is based on self organization and he's deliberately saying the opposite of that, that the order of life is based on genes. Yeah, so I think that that's, in a way, I also say that ironically, you know, when we, I told you that the historians were complaining that the biologists were using Schrodinger's name to bring respectability on Molekul Bhaji. That's I think what happened with the non equilibrium thermodynamics people. They use Schrodinger's name to bring respectability on this new field of physics applied to biology. And that case is a much more troubling one, because they're really distorting what Schrodinger is actually saying in the book. Literally putting words in his mouth that are not things that he said and not things that he would have said. Because he doesn't talk about self organization in the book. He doesn't talk about open systems. He doesn't talk about far from recurring conditions. He's simply making the point that there's no reason to suppose that organisms can't comply with the second law. And that point had been made by biochemists and physical chemists years before, including this guy Donan, who we mentioned earlier in our conversation. Donan, the guy who negotiated with Cambridge University Press for the publication of the book. He was a physical chemist. He wrote a couple of papers that influenced Schrodinger. One of them was making this case. And so I have a quote from. From that paper by donning from 1928, basically saying the same thing that Schrodinger then says in 1944 that everyone remembers. Right. So, yeah. So there's not much novelty in that. Although it seems to be indisputable that people were influenced by that. I mean, Kaufman, Terry, Deakin, Freeman, Dyson. I mean, really prominent theoreticians were influenced by that idea. Even though Schrodinger himself would not have been happy to see his, you know, his book being used to make a case which is very different from the case that he's making. That's another reason why the book has been so misconstrued. I mean, the book is an apology for the most rigid, deterministic, mechanistic, reductionistic, genocentric view of molecular biology that you can imagine. Right. And yet it has many lives. And one of the lives that it has today is as a defense of far from equilibrium thermodynamics, you know? [00:49:31] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. It's whatever people want it to be. Yeah. [00:49:34] Speaker A: Like the Bible, you know, you read, you find whatever you want in it. You know, you look at the book with your ideology, as you say, your agenda, and you find whatever you need to make your case stronger. [00:49:44] Speaker B: Come on, Dan. The Bible's true. We know. Okay, what is original in the book? The aperiodic crystal, which we've. [00:49:53] Speaker A: Yeah, the apeotic crystal is original. I mean, the distinction between order from order and order from disorder is a very nice way of thinking about organization and order. Should we think about order statistically in terms of the regularities that emerge when you consider large numbers, or should we consider regularity in terms of the structure of individual entities? That contrast. I Think, I mean, it's not necessarily new. In fact, he mentions, he cites a paper by Planck. Planck distinguishes between dynamical laws and statistical laws in physics. That distinction is this distinction, dynamical laws, like Newton's law of gravity, is dynamical. But most laws tend to be statistical laws of kinetics, also statistical in the sense that the regularity and reliability of them only emerges when you consider large numbers. And so that contrast is, I think, really influential. And also it's the way people like Mono understand the difference between biochemistry and molecular biology. It's that Paul Mono is going to want to tell you that what makes us different as molecular biologists from these older people is that they think it's all about statistics ultimately, and stochasticity and dynamics and kinetics. And we think it's about information encoded in individual molecules. And it's all about structure and rigidity and specificity. And that's the new paradigm. Right. And I think that contrast that is in the book, I think is. I don't know if it's completely new, but I think it's a really important part of what Schrodinger is doing there. And so, yeah, I mean, ultimately, I don't think it matters that much what is completely new and what is not. It's like how he, you know, what he does with the ideas that are, that are around. I mean, I take great pains to show that what he has to say about genes is influenced by geneticists like Muller, who's, you know, arch reductionist, makes Richard Dawkins look like a holist by comparison, writing already in the 1920s about how the gene is the basis of life. And those are the views which are not dominant in genetics at the time that Schrodinger picks, because those are the views that allows him to say what he wants to say, which is that the organism and development is all determined by the genes. And there's this determinacy that is not, you know, not affected by quantum effects or anything like that. There's no such thing as indeterminacy. That's all. It's irrelevant. All this stuff is irrelevant to understanding biology. And what we expect, he says, to find in biology is more of that. And in fact, we can get. That takes us to the final, the third in the list I was about to ask. [00:52:41] Speaker B: Yeah, I couldn't remember if we've already said it. [00:52:42] Speaker A: It's like we should expect new laws of physics to emerge in studying the cell. We should expect to uncover new laws of physics. Again, this has been widely misconstrued we could, I don't want, you know, there's a lot we could say. I don't want to get into the weeds there. But just to briefly say Delbruck was inspired by Bohr and did think that the development of, you know, looking more and more carefully to. Into the hereditary mechanism would lead to a paradox. He was looking for a paradox which was equivalent to the paradox that had led to quantum mechanics in physics. And that was never found, of course, because, you know, DNA, the mechanism of replication of DNA did not require any new physics. But some people have assumed, because Schrodinger talks so much about Delbruck in the book, because he talks about this paper that he wrote in 1935, they've just assumed that the idea of new laws of physics, the same as the idea of the paradox, which suggests that Schrodinger actually is an anti productionist. He's all about indeterminacy and, you know, that's lent itself to that interpretation. But when you read the book again, if you actually take the time to read this little book, you discover that what he means by new laws of physics are laws, order from order laws. Right? Laws that explain how it is that that order is effectively successfully amplified, right, from the genes to the organism. And so how should we interpret that idea from today's perspective? Well, the idea of a genetic program, the idea of the central dogma, ideas of informational and structural specificity, could all maybe qualify as what Schrodinger thought we would find. And if we think about it that way, then his program was successful. I mean, he made a prediction, it turned out to be true. We did find these order from order mechanisms and principles that allow us to understand why the cell does what it does. Now things are beginning to crumble, right? That's again, we go back to how the excitement of new science. But yeah, if we were having this conversation in 1990, my conclusion would have to be, yeah, I mean, Schrodinger got it right. [00:54:46] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. But can. So you just said that if you actually read the book, you find out that, you know, you have a different interpretation. But can you. Or do you have to be Dan Nicholson and read correspondences and go back like, how much sleuthing do you have to do? Is it available in the book? Or do you really need the historical context? [00:55:08] Speaker A: Yeah, I think that's fair. That's fair. Probably you need to do something more than the book. And in fact, the book is not. The arguments are not presented in a very clear way. They're presented in a very roundabout way. And Schrodinger apologizes to the reader, says, look, I'm doing. [00:55:24] Speaker B: This is a side project here. [00:55:26] Speaker A: He says, I'm doing it this way because that's how I. What I'm going to present to you follows how I learned about it. [00:55:32] Speaker B: Yeah, I like that, though, in principle. [00:55:34] Speaker A: So that's why he says the book is about order. Right. So the first chapter is what is. You know, so the question is, what is the source of biological order? It's not what is life? That is his question. What is the source of biological order? Chapter one. Okay, if you're a physicist, what do you know about order? And so you've got a whole chapter on statistical mechanics. That's the first chapter of the book. Order from Disorder. That's what physicists understand by order. Chapter two. Hey, the new genetics seems to suggest that something. Is something wrong. There's something wrong here because everything seems to be determined by genes. So everything that a physicist knows is not sufficient to understand what's going on in biology. That's chapter two. And so he then says, well, how do we resolve this paradox? And that's where he talks about the code script and the apronic crystal. So I have a whole chapter in my book just reconstructing the argument as clearly as I can so that the reader can understand what the argument, how it works. Right. And what follows from it. But you're right, Paul. Maybe it is the case that it's not enough just to read it. I mean, it's a kind of book that does. It's sufficiently ambiguously written that you can just interpret it in different ways. Yeah. [00:56:39] Speaker B: Oh, this goes to the notion of motif, which I just had Vicente Raja on, and he's developing this notion of a motif in the sciences. So what I was going to say earlier. Earlier is like, yeah, it's been massively influential, even though people misconstrue the intentions or, you know, what is actually being said often. And yet progress continues. You know, even if people are wrong about what they. How they're influenced by Schrodinger, science marches on. It doesn't matter if how you're influenced. If you're doing the research, new answers will come. A moment ago, you. You just, you mentioned things are crumbling now. So I want to get back to that. But anyway, Vicente's concept of motif is based around, like, how do, like, so many different scientists in the same field use the same term, but actually mean different things when they use the term? And yet, you know, they can all use that term. Well, for Vicente, he's like, okay, well I'm going to call this a motif and just say like it's okay because we can kind of mean the same thing. And as long as we kind of mean the same thing, we can still make progress as a field. And so we kind of welcome that. As opposed to the philosopher's default of nitpicking definitions. [00:57:52] Speaker A: Yeah, I'm a bit less optimistic that Vicente about that in the sense that I think this is the source of a lot of confusion. I mean information is the word that comes to my mind when you talk, the way you do it. [00:58:05] Speaker B: Well, okay, well let's. Yeah, let's dig a little bit deeper into that. Because you say that this book is also really what leads to everything is information, the modern notion of everything being information. [00:58:16] Speaker A: Yeah, it helps, I mean to be careful about how extreme I make the claims, but it consolidates particular views. It justifies and legitimizes particular views pertaining to the importance of information. Yes. Yeah. Basically the bottom line, the headline whatever is order from order becomes organization from information. That is the molecular biology revolution. The idea of order from order in 1944 becomes what we all learn when we study molegr Bhaji. As the idea that organization comes from information. I would argue a Schrodingerian inference. [00:58:54] Speaker B: So, you know, I'm interested in these topics because I'm just a simple neuroscientist person and reading your work and so many others in the philosophy of science, philosophy of biology. You realize that the molecular revolution introduced these ideas into neuroscience, into the way that we think about how brains function. I mean it's like a direct line. And I would have to do some archival sleuthing like you do to. To tease that out and in fact man. But when I get my own lab, I'm have a cross disciplinary lab. I'll. I'll ensure to hire you on some sort of. Some sort of external. Maybe you can hire me. You're ahead of me in the, in the academia world anyway. But. But it would take that. And so that's part of why I enjoy talking to you is in my own mind. I wonder where these concepts come from. And I think you can draw a direct line from Schrodinger like through molecular biology to the use of information as a. As a tool and a concept in the neurosciences. [00:59:55] Speaker A: Well, yeah, I mean, I guess the obviously right there are going to be, you know, neuro, the kinds of process that you care about as a neuroscientist have a molecular basis, cellular basis. Right. Many. [01:00:09] Speaker B: It's all in cells and neurons. [01:00:10] Speaker A: And so. So then it has to. It's going to have to influence it. Right. So how we think about neurological process is going to be influenced by what we take to be true at the cellular level, of molecular level. So, yeah, I think that's right. [01:00:21] Speaker B: But as far as things crumbling these days, from that point of view, I'm not sure what the state is in molecular biology. I mean, you began and molecular biology right before you saw the light and went into philosophy and historical philosophy. And in a sense, in neuroscience, there's a lot of questioning of those sort of fundamental principles as well, or assumptions. The mechanistic view, although the mainstream is still like, if you don't use the word mechanism in your abstract, you might not be published. Right. [01:00:54] Speaker A: The same molecular value, by the way. [01:00:56] Speaker B: It still is the same. [01:00:58] Speaker A: This is crumbling. Maybe it's a bit too optimistic, but I think we're headed in that direction. But no, I think you are. What you said applies also to molecular biology. The dominant view still is what's the. [01:01:10] Speaker B: Direction that we're headed? [01:01:12] Speaker A: A direction. Well, what I presented in this is the cell really a machine paper, a direction where the way we think about what goes on at the molecular level and at the cellular level is being challenged, like explicitly and directly, frontally challenged by empirical results. So the challenge is not conceptual in the first case. It's because we have new methods and new techniques that we're learning new things about the stuff that we study. And those empirical discoveries are then encouraging scientists to be a bit less timid about challenging the orthodoxy here. But it's being methodologically driven, which is kind of cool because the concepts are old. I also said this in that paper, that you can track those criticisms, sometimes decades, but it's only now becoming important because only now we have the evidence. And the scientists care about evidence. They're not philosophers. An idea is not sufficient. To get an idea that is cool, you need to have the evidence to back it up. And only now we have the evidence to back it up. So that's why only now it's taken seriously. We can't ignore what we are now learning about how proteins interact. We talked about that a moment ago. We can't ignore what we're learning about gene expression and what we're learning about development and differentiation. And so that's what. What is happening now. And that's why I think that we're headed in that direction, a direction where we take less for granted the notion that everything is information and we bring back to the picture, the materiality of life. Life is embodied in matter. And the physical properties of matter are going to matter as much, if not more than the message encoded in the, in the genes to understand why cells and why development operates, you know, proceeds the way that it does. [01:02:59] Speaker B: But you are a card carrying, pluralist. What's wrong with using concepts like information or mechanism, you know, as a useful metaphor, a useful model? I mean, the map is not the territory. Although I think that, that that's what Whitehead's the fallacy of misplaced concreteness, I think it's called. Right. Where you substitute the map and the. For the territory. Or the territory. Yeah, the map for the territory. But I mean, if we need multiple perspectives to understand things and you know, all models are wrong, some are useful. Man, I just spouted off like the greatest hits of those like phrases. [01:03:37] Speaker A: I'm sorry, part of your. It's like embedded into your psyche. [01:03:40] Speaker B: Well, you told. I mentioned I saw you give a talk and talk about John Dupre's influence on you. And you had mentioned that when you were. You guys had like these meetings and John would never write anything down. And he told you that if you, if you spend enough time thinking about these things, they'll kind of solidify in your mind. You don't need to write them down. I guess that's sort of what's happening. On the other hand, maybe I'm doing some like, name dropping, some like quote dropping shit that's not, you know, I. [01:04:09] Speaker A: Was completely like shocked that John was like just listening to these hours, hour long discussions every week, and I was like frantically making notes, you know, page after page. And John didn't need to. And then he would write something, just sit. I mean, I can't do that. I just don't have. Well, he's also power to just sit down in front of a blank page, Paul, and then write. And all the stuff that has been fermenting in your mind, it's all like my. I can't. I have to like write things down, you know, think about them. [01:04:37] Speaker B: I don't outline things and stuff. Is that how he does it? Is. It just comes out when it's ready? [01:04:41] Speaker A: I believe so. I believe so. Yeah. [01:04:44] Speaker B: Well, that's kind of how we talk. [01:04:45] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. [01:04:47] Speaker B: I mean, you just saw a prime example. I'm just like John Dupre. Right. But no, but, but what is like, you know. Yeah, can't we, can't we hang on to information as a metaphor? Totally fine. It's just not ontologically. The thing is that. Is that the. [01:05:03] Speaker A: Well, I mean, no, the idea where the deer is actually quite, quite more subtle than it may seem. In fact, I think that we can't do science without metaphors. The idea of distinguishing metaphorical from literal. I mean, to abandon that everything is ultimately metaphorical and metaphors are super valuable and useful. [01:05:26] Speaker B: Everything except the thing itself. Right. That you're studying like the meat. That's the real thing. [01:05:31] Speaker A: Yeah. But we conceptualize that, meet that real thing in ways that we are blurring. Even the very concepts that we use blur that. So it's a very sort of complex process and scientific discovery and learning about new. Discovering new phenomenons and then finding a way to talk about the new stuff. So it just comes handy. It's kind of handy to see something through the prism of something else that you are more familiar with because that gives you a handle on this new thing. But the problem is that because no two things are the same, there are always going to be things that are not captured in that redescription, and those are sort of put to the background, and only the things that are similar are foregrounded. And so when those metaphorical redescriptions are very successful, we forget that we're dealing with metaphors and it becomes the territory, as you say. So that's the problem. And also we, you know, the machine metaphor and information talk and all of these things have been extremely valuable in allowing us to learn about the phenomena that we're interested in. And they're valuable. [01:06:39] Speaker B: Necessary. Sorry, they're necessary. So of course they're valuable. [01:06:43] Speaker A: Yeah. But even when they fail, they're valuable because when they fail, we learn about what this phenomenon is not like. Right. So if the cell is not like a machine, we've learned what the cell is like, and namely, it's not like a machine. So it's all positive. Right. We're still learning and, you know, and there'll be, as I say in my paper, I mean, there are aspects of cellular behavior and structure and can be understood as a machine. You know, it's never black or white. It's not binary here. Some, you know, the ATP synthase rotary motor. I mean, it looks like a motor. I mean, there's nothing wrong with thinking about it in those terms. Just don't let yourself get carried away in thinking that just because you got this shiny thing that works that you can illuminate everything with that very same conceptual resource. So the way you can think about it, if you want to be a pluralist, as you say, is history is Exploring how far you can take certain metaphors. Right. Second half of the 20th century is the exploration of how far we can take certain metaphors about protein function, protein structure, protein function. We are now at a moment where perhaps those metaphors are changing or the ones that the alternative ones are becoming more influential. And so we will explore how far those can take us. So one way to think about it, I don't know if I'm. You said I'm a card carrying pluralist. I'm not sure if I am. But if you were really a pluralist and you make no commitments and you don't want to say anything about truth or reality, that's not what a pluralist is, is it? [01:08:12] Speaker B: No, I don't think that's what. [01:08:15] Speaker A: If you're an ontological pluralist, that's what it would mean to say. [01:08:17] Speaker B: But that's no, pluralism doesn't mean at anything goes. [01:08:20] Speaker A: Right. It can mean, depending on what kind of pluralism we're talking about, you can be a methodological pluralist where you say we and that's. I completely, you know, subscribe to that idea. You know, we need different ways of looking at something, but there is a thing underlying, you know, reality that we try to uncover. I don't want to say that we need to throw truth out of the window just because we, you know, we may not be able to access it, but it's still there. It's not constructed. Right. So there are many, many different positions one can take here. And I'm not saying that you're taking any here, but, but as far as I'm concerned, you can think about the history of science and this applies, I think, to any discipline as the attempt to see how far you can go with a particular framework, a particular model, a particular metaphor, exqueze every last drop of goodness that you can get out of it. Right. And then eventually. Right. If you're a Kuhnian, you think the paradigm eventually gets into a crisis and we need a different but, you know, dependent. Eventually we're going to need different sets of tools to look at the same phenomena and we will probably learn, discover things maybe that we always knew but we never took seriously because the metaphors that were dominant suggested that we shouldn't need to take these things seriously. I mean, no molecular biologist is ignorant of stochasticity. It's just not taken very seriously. No evolutionary biologist is ignorant of constraints and development, but it's not taken seriously if you're an adaptationist. So in depending on the area, there's Certain, you know, everyone purports to be a pluralist, but then when it comes, when it gets serious, people end up gravitating towards what they. What, you know, their preferred explanations for things. [01:09:58] Speaker B: Well, okay, but everything flows, right, so like the. The concept of mechanism. Right, so we're going to come back to Vicente's concept of motif. But like the new mechanists, I know you sort of didn't want to. Right, but then you had to study mechanism a lot for your ph, because that's a long road. But. But it seems like the goalposts move from. Well, okay, so here's what a mechanism is 10 years later. Well, actually. All right, so here's what a mechanism is now, where it has some different features, where one of my. What am I. How has mech. You know, I know that the concept of mechanism has changed and sort of tried to. My point is that historically, concepts change to suit the people who are using the terms and want to claim that a certain phenomena can be described with their term mechanism in this case. And I don't mean to just pick on the mechanism folks, but I just know that what a mechanism is in, like the William Bechtel sense and the, you know, there are parts that do things together that give rise to a function or something. Very, very brief way of saying it. But, you know, there are people like you who kind of push back and say, actually it works differently. But then the mechanists can come back and say, well, now we can incorporate a little bit of what, you know, your problem is with it and sort of redefine what a mechanism is. So there's that aspect historically as well. I don't know how you feel about that. Maybe what I wanted to tie it back to is like, well, what is wrong with the idea of motif? I'm not sure what you want to speak. [01:11:37] Speaker A: I mean, so I don't know the. I haven't read within this work where. [01:11:40] Speaker B: He'S still working on it. I mean, it's a work in progress. If people criticize it, then he can change it, right? [01:11:46] Speaker A: No, I mean, so I'm only. I'm only working with what you've said. And the idea of a concept being interpreted in different ways by a same community strikes me not necessarily as something that is going to be good. [01:12:03] Speaker B: Well, no, maybe not good, but here's an example, a concrete example is the term representation, which I know, you know, like, philosophically has a shit ton of baggage. And in people in the neuroscience says it has plenty of baggage there, like, no One knows what it means. People are. There are lots of fights about it. A term, because Vicente is an ecological psychology person, affordances gets used in different ways, right. By people who want to use it for their own purpose. And so there's sort of. It's saying like, okay, we don't have to operationally define a term in a very, very narrow way and still make progress. [01:12:39] Speaker A: I think that's. Yeah, okay in that Sen. I agree. In fact, I think that that applies to both the concept of mechanism and the concept of information. I mean, one can make a good case that the reason why information became so irresistible as a notion in the second half 20th century was precisely because it was being used in different ways and we didn't have to tie it all down to one particular concept. I make that case in the book. I talk about the importation of information, talk into biology, and I say it happened twice. The first one was a total disaster. The second one was a resounding success. The first one was a disaster because the initial introduction was by means of information theory. And you have people wanting to apply Shannon's notion of information and then Wiener's notion that he put forward in his book Cybernetics and Briolan as well. This notion of negentropy and all of that kind of fails because it leads to theoretical interpretations of biological data that are not taken seriously by anyone. And so those are abandoned. And so the term is then reintroduced in a much more loose way, in fact reintroduced in the second 1953 paper by Watson and Crick where they say that it's not escaped our attention, that, you know, well, when they say that there's genetical information and the term starts to be sort of shorthand to talk about what people used to talk about specificity when they said. When they mentioned specificity. And you have people in developmental biology talking about information in one way, people in cell boundaries talk about the information another way. And these are different. And it seems to be fine because within the people that you're talking to, they know what you mean. It's like a Facon de Paris. The exact same thing I've made. The case is true for mechanism, even better case, the mechanism of protein synthesis. If you try to tie that down to something very specific, it's not going to allow you to understand why the mechanism of natural selection is a mechanism. If you use the definition for molecular biology, its power lies in exactly that. That it's sort of deontologized. It becomes vague in a productive way. Right? There are certain expectations Perhaps that are common about what the phenomenon is likely to be like. If you think of it in terms of a mechanism, but you don't see it defined. It's not a word that comes up in the glossary of textbooks. Mechanism doesn't need to be defined for it to be fruitful. So in that sense I totally agree with what you're saying. [01:15:01] Speaker B: Well, and it's worse than that because things that are so narrowly defined just stopped being. Stopped being used. Right. So they disappear, they don't, they don't survive natural selection in the sciences, essentially. But if it's vague enough, it'll hang around because people can use, use the term the way that they want it and then it becomes popular and then you start putting it in every abstract that you write. [01:15:24] Speaker A: Yeah. Then the question then is what I, what I was saying in the beginning, which is, I mean, is that there is where you may have worries, right, Paul? I mean, if it really means different things, there is scope for confusion of people thinking that you overreach with it. And I think that's what happened with information, what's happened with mechanism. Yeah. Something that is useful in one context does not allow you to make the inference that's going to be useful for every context. And this move transition from something that is useful to something that is truthful. I think that's the worry that just because something is useful doesn't mean that it's telling you what's really going on. [01:16:05] Speaker B: Okay, two more subjects that I want to discuss with you and any that you also want to highlight or discuss. One is just sort of stepping back, like what lessons? Maybe as a scientist and we don't have to talk about it in such a narrow scope as like a scientific researcher. But I'm wondering what lessons to take from your study here on the Schrodinger historic work. [01:16:33] Speaker A: Yeah. What lessons to take? I think the different lessons depending if you're a biologist or philosopher or historian. [01:16:42] Speaker B: What if you're a neuroscientist, let's say you're a biologist. If you're a neuroscientist, kind of, but you deal with more abstract information type processes. I mean, maybe not. Maybe not. [01:16:55] Speaker A: Well, I don't know. Let's say, yeah, if you're a scientist, then knowing. I mean, I think what I'm hoping that the book shows is that the view that you have today about the cell or the brain is not inevitable. You haven't read it off nature. Nature hasn't given you like a truth bulletin, like, oh yeah, this is what the brain is like or this is what the cell is like. [01:17:18] Speaker B: Nature of the magazine or nature of reality? Reality. Thanks. Thank you. Just. You haven't read enough nature. I didn't want to. [01:17:25] Speaker A: Yeah, no, no, no. Good. That you, that you clarify that, not the journal. But reality is not telling you how to conceptualize it. It's limited beings like ourselves that are doing our best to make sense of little bits of it. And we are so enmeshed and embedded in those ideas that we sometimes forget that that's just one way of thinking about reality and that there's nothing inevitable about it. That it's not there's more than one way to look at things. And that the reason why we think about the brain the way that we do, or the cell is the product of a set of decisions that were made historically, many of them contingent and opportunistic and depending on that were dependent on the technology that was available and who you know, and the personalities of the authors, you know, the. In the most influential way. And so that should give you some freedom to explore other ideas. If you don't feel that you are bound to understand the brain in one particular way, it suggests that suddenly history becomes relevant. Because all the history of people who've said different things doesn't look so naive and so wrong headed and anymore because what history actually shows, not only is that what we now think is contingent, but also that we are constantly reinventing the wheel. There's nothing new under the sun. Like we're constantly rediscovering things that people have said decades, sometimes centuries before. That's why I like history. I mean, I'm a philosopher and I care about the present, about understanding. [01:19:04] Speaker B: The problem is it confirms that I have no good ideas because they've already been over and over developed. Right. [01:19:11] Speaker A: I think we are overrated. New ideas overrated. What matters what you can do with an old idea. [01:19:17] Speaker B: Oh, I like that. I like that. [01:19:21] Speaker A: So that could be one lesson for the scientists reading this. Okay. Yeah. You look at this book, everybody knows it and it turns out a million different interpretations of it. The book itself is a product of someone wanting to say something in a particular context. Right. Helping that helping, you know, if you know that that helps you put this into perspective. There's nothing inevitable about the picture of the cell that is being presented in this book. Right. So we shouldn't feel too bad if the evidence leads us to move away from that picture. Yeah. So that could be one, one lesson that one could prove. [01:19:54] Speaker B: I mean, I have my own lesson that is related to that, I think. I mean, so very specific example, I was watching a talk the other day. I'm not going to mention who it was or what it was about, but they, their entire talk was kind of, it was almost based on. It was rife with name dropping, historical people and their ideas and sort of. It was kind of the greatest hits of so and so said this and so and so said that, and it was meant so. Okay, so there's this term pseudo profound bullshit that if you say something, it doesn't matter if it's right or wrong, if it seems profound, it will be more interpreted as important or correct or something. So like in the sciences, when you give a talk and it's great to reference historical ideas and people and research, but often, I feel, often it is done in the service or without much care for whether what you're alluding to actually was the message that was trying to be conveyed, which is exactly what your work speaks to when you start digging in. That's actually not what they were referring to. Or at the time it was not even. It was known that there were other things that were correct, et cetera. Anyway, when I watch a talk like that and they're just dropping little nuggets here and there and I'm automatically very skeptical because it's, it's like they're just using it to bolster their case, to confirm their agenda. And so that's a lesson that I have is when I see these references to quote unquote, important people. Yeah, you're just trying to like bolster your, your own import by, you know, in some cases there's a fine line, I guess, and I don't know where the, the line is because it is good to couch things in historical terms because to highlight what has been known and what has been shown over the years. Anyway, that's a lesson that I've taken. [01:21:58] Speaker A: Yeah, so I mean, we talked about this at the beginning of our conversation, how historians of biology complained about that, that you had these molecular biologists, Nobel. [01:22:09] Speaker B: Laureates, saying, hey, yeah, but look, Schrodinger did this, said this. [01:22:14] Speaker A: That's why we're on the right track, because the great Schrodinger said it first. Yeah, that's annoying historians. [01:22:19] Speaker B: There's that idolatry. I hate idolatry in the science also. [01:22:22] Speaker A: It's just lousy reasoning from a philosophical perspective. You're appealing to authority instead of making a case through. [01:22:29] Speaker B: That's why I hate it. But that's how it's used. That's how idolatry is used. [01:22:32] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. So the reason, I think this has been a very interesting project. I mean, not my book, not what is Life? The book by Schrodinger, is that on the one hand, I am. It is not clear. So one of the reviewers, when this was going through peer review, was very. [01:22:52] Speaker B: Confused about whether the book, your book, goes through peer. Oh, I didn't know. Is that specific to Elements? [01:22:59] Speaker A: No, I think. I think most monographs undergo peer review. [01:23:02] Speaker B: Oh, okay. Sorry. Naive. [01:23:03] Speaker A: No, no, no, no problem. So, you know, one of the reviewers, like, what are you doing? I mean, are you. It looks like at some points in the book you are saying, you know, you are sort of criticizing Schrodinger really, really heavily. Then later, he seems to be a hero for you because you're sort of trying to explain so what's going on. And it's a fair point because. And some parts of the book. When I look at the book from the contemporary perspective, at the beginning of the. Of my book, when I look at what it's like, how you should read it today, then, yeah, I'm quite critical because we've learned so much, as you would expect. I mean, 80 years have passed. We've learned a lot. And there are good reasons to, you know, to be critical of many of the things that Schrodinger said. Right. But then later, I am sort of defending Schrodinger in the sense that I'm saying that his ideas were more valuable than people have taken. People have suggested. I mean, especially these historians, you know. [01:23:55] Speaker B: The sofistic critics, people who looked at. [01:23:57] Speaker A: Stuff carefully have concluded there is no scientific value in the book because it was only a tool. Right. So I'm criticizing those people in that sense. I'm defending Schrodinger. So the reviewer is saying, like, well, you know, it looks like you come pick a side. [01:24:09] Speaker B: Pick a side. [01:24:10] Speaker A: But I don't see. There's, like, there's. I don't know if that. That. That struck you when you were reading it, but that's not. [01:24:15] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. [01:24:15] Speaker A: So that's not what I was. You know, I don't think there's any inconsistency because in the second half, I'm actually trying to take his ideas seriously. You know, I'm saying, well, but, yeah, you know, if you look at what he actually said, the argument, and then you look at what we know about the cell and how. And how. What we know was. Was sort of developed in the second half of the 20th century, there's. There's so much continuity that one can make a really good case that one, you know, that it was influenced. [01:24:40] Speaker B: I think there's cognitive dissonance, because you say it clearly and without apology, where you see that Schrodinger was correct in these things. And you don't spend a lot of time defending that. You just lay out the case and say it. [01:24:54] Speaker A: Yeah, I would maybe tweak that and say that I show how Schrodinger was influential. I wouldn't use the word correct to refer to truth, because the view of the cell that he gave us, I don't think is right. He was influential. He really was genuinely influential in giving us that picture that I have criticized in my previous work. So, you know, but that is a process of defending Schrodinger, defending his influence, not defending what he says, but the fact that what he said was valuable and was not valuable, was influential, was taken seriously, you know, and then I. [01:25:23] Speaker B: Think it was valuable in that it moved fields forward, maybe in the wrong direction, but in a direction. [01:25:28] Speaker A: Yeah. And also valuable in that you know what you're dealing with. I mean, you know where it comes. I mean, what you're dealing with today. If you're a scientist and you don't care about history, you have no interest in history, my book says, well, you should care, because the view that you are dealing with now has, you know, has a history, has a beginning. You know, we know when these ideas came from. So I think it's relevant to know that, because as I said before, it helps you to remind yourself that it's not inevitable. Right. And then, as I say, the final part, the third of the book, is trying to work out why Schrodinger said what he said. And that takes you to physics. I mean, there's a discussion about quantum mechanics and how to interpret quantum mechanics and all of that. And that becomes much more philosophical because then you need to talk about free will and all of that stuff and misrepresentations and personal rivalries. I mean, it's kind of hilarious to read the literature, the letters, where they're insulting each other. You know, Schrodinger calls, talks about Copenhagen twaddle and the sham philosophy of Bohr. I mean, really, really hardcore. Heisenberg describes the visual. You know, it talks about Schrodinger as. It's crap, says, this is crap, what he's doing. Schrodinger complains that Bourne is computing the shitty little matrices from my beautiful wave equation. So all that language is in there. It makes it all much more human. You know, this that you've got people, you got personalities and rivalries that are responsible ultimately for their motivations. You know, that led to people saying what they said. You don't see that in the published final product. But if you actually go into the archives, you find out there's all this strong, you know, people being very offended or being moved by emotion and wanting to say what they want to say. [01:27:15] Speaker B: Yeah, well, how did you. I mean, maybe that's why also your book is a pleasure to read, is because there it is, a story. And we love story. Yeah. So how did you respond to that reviewer? What came of that? [01:27:26] Speaker A: Well, I tried to explain that the two things can be true, that I am. I mean, it's nuanced. I'm sorry. I mean, there are points where I'm being very critical of Schrodinger. I mean, as a scientist, you can be critical. Like, I don't care about history, just give me these ideas. And as a scientist, I can evaluate them on the basis of the evidence that we have today. That's one task. And then as a historian, you say, well, where do these ideas come from? And then you can come to a completely different conclusion. You can say, well, I want to defend the influence that Schrodinger had on shaping the ideas that we now take for granted. And that's so why one can be negative in the first and critical in the second. I don't think there is a. That's what I try to explain. There's no necessary conflict there. [01:28:07] Speaker B: All right, so when I met you for coffee, you were digging in the archives, like, you were just describing. I just kind of want to know more about what that process is like. I mean, those quotes that you were just rattling off about the shitty Matrix stuff like that. Were you reading those on the page? And like, so what is that? What is the day like, in terms of, like, what you're doing? It sounds like you're joyfully thumbing through these juicy stories, but that's not most of the time. [01:28:34] Speaker A: Most of it is. Is very tedious because you're having to go through a lot of material and it's. It's like looking for. I don't know if you were in mid 19th century America looking for gold. You have to dig through a lot of dirt and get a little bit of gold. It's the same thing. I mean, you have to go through a lot of material to find something that is valuable. Sometimes you see this quoted by other historians. They have used it for another purpose. Yeah, that's quite nice. So you can use that. But I always like to go to the primary sources because you'll be surprised how often people are misquoted. I don't know if deliberately or accidentally. You can't trust anyone. I mean, as far as I'm concerned, if I'm going to have a quote I want to make, I want to go to the original archive to find it, make sure that I'm not misrepresenting it, understanding the context in which that quote was, you know, why the person said what they said. Right. And it is. It is so different from doing science or doing philosophy. This is. This. This is like hardcore historical work, you know, and it's difficult. [01:29:35] Speaker B: It's got to be difficult because you're sitting. You can't. You. You have to know, where do I look for the thing that is related to what I just found out? And, God, it seems like almost impossible. [01:29:45] Speaker A: It is difficult. I actually spent a summer, well, not a whole summer, but several weeks at this place called Spring Harbor Laboratory, which was, you know, it's in Long island and they have an archive there. And I spent weeks going through the archives of Muller and Brenner, a bunch of people, and I couldn't find. I didn't find anything, Paul. Like, really, like. I didn't. [01:30:09] Speaker B: I. So sometimes it is really bland. [01:30:11] Speaker A: I learned a lot about, you know, but I didn't actually find anything that I. There's nothing in my book that. That. I mean, I should really say this publicly because I was funded, you know, but I mean, that's just how research. Sometimes you just don't find anything. And so I didn't. I didn't find what I thought I was going to find, which was. Because I was looking for more examples, like mono, of people in the 50s saying, you know, yes, mentioning Schrodinger in the context of the scientific arguments that they were making. I couldn't find that Right. Then I. [01:30:41] Speaker B: What is it? What does that do to you psychologically, when you spend weeks and find nothing? [01:30:45] Speaker A: Well, yeah, you just try to convince yourself that you find other interesting things, which. And that they may become helpful in other projects in the future. I've learned so much about people that I didn't know about. I forced myself to educate myself about things that I didn't know about and people that I didn't know very well. And so that is a sort of arsenal of resources that then you can draw upon later. That's why people say that philosophers age like milk and historians age like wine, because an old historian is much more valuable than A young historian, because an old historian has so much context that any new piece of information that you give, a 30 year old historian versus a 70 year old historian, the 70 year old historian is going to give you, is going to be able to use that new piece of information much more effectively because they can relate it to everything. Whereas if you're young, you don't know enough about everything. Right. Is constantly developing a more thicker scaffold for the new information. Whereas in philosophy or mathematics or whatever, if it's all about argument and reasoning, you're going to be brighter when you're younger than when you're in your 70s or your 80s. [01:31:47] Speaker B: It's the same process on every turn. [01:31:49] Speaker A: Yeah. And what matters is how you know, how quick you can be in working out, how you can connect things, working out the logic of it. Right. So yeah, doing historical work is completely different. But really I think what happens, and there's a connection here with science in the sense that unlike philosophy, so in philosophy you could maybe controversially say that you don't really change your mind. Like you have an idea, you want to defend the idea and you do your best to defend the idea. Right. And then. And people present you with objections and then you sharpen your idea even more so that it gets invulnerable to the critique of that person. That puts an objection. Whereas in history, it's like it's not up to you. If you find evidence in an archive that may speak against what you have been claiming and you just have to. That just may be a refutation of what you're saying or thinking about it. Conversely, it's happened to me. I made a claim in a paper and then a reviewer says this is not true, this is not true. And if it was a philosophical objection, that's really hard to respond because it's interminable. But this was a historical claim that they said was not true. All I had to do is present the evidence. Look at this paper published in this year shows that what I'm saying is right, End of story. [01:33:12] Speaker B: But in the case of. So that's awesome. But in the case of your project here, you discovered the why you believe of why this book was written. But that's something that has to be inferred. There is no evidence for that. You have to abductively infer a reason. Right. So I thought you were going to sort of point to that because part of the historical process is like the discovery. Wow, look, you can actually discover new things. [01:33:37] Speaker A: What I was going to say is that is that the connection between science and history here is that I know this from my limited experience of being working in a laboratory is that it's also extremely tedious. And often things don't work and you don't find interesting things. But if you're lucky, if you're lucky, maybe once every 10 years or maybe once in your life you'll find something, you'll discover empirically something or you'll find will come across a result unexpected, groundbreaking. And the thrill of having that discovery is sufficient to feed you for the rest of your life of disappointments, of not anything else. I mean I've had that has, you know, I didn't, I haven't had a lifetime of experience in lab, but I've had people telling me this, I mean, when I was deciding not to continue as a scientist because I find it very tedious, this is what they told me. Like it will be tedious 99% of the time. But if you're lucky, one day you'll find something that will be, you'll get such a rush from. This will be the most pleasurable moment or intellectual pleasure of your life and it will be enough to sustain you on all those dark days of being, you know, smelling chemicals and rooms with no windows. Right? That will sustain you. And one could make a similar case when you're looking at archival documents. As a historian, you know, and yet. [01:34:49] Speaker B: You persist in history, you will eventually. [01:34:52] Speaker A: Find ho, if you hope something that. [01:34:53] Speaker B: Will you you personally like. So, so this has happened to you. You've had your moment where it's all been worth it. The 99% of the. [01:35:02] Speaker A: Yeah, I mean, there's a quote that I really like in my book by Darlington, which I think was the closest I've had to this. Darlington is this really well known Buddhist geneticist and Schrodinger actually has a couple of diagrams in the book from the Darlington textbook and there's a correspondence with him. I didn't expect to find anything. And it was like there, Darlington says, funnily enough, he says, he says, I'm so happy that a physicist of your caliber is getting interested in genetics because, you know, I've been having lots of discussions with physicists. This is in the early 1940s and they're all so obsessed with indeterminacy. Frankly, I find it really annoying. Darlington says, and they're showing a response, response, thank you for letting me use, you know, giving me permission to use this figure. By the way, that quarrel that you have with some physicists, I can assure you, is not with me. And then he goes on to say why he's written the book. And I have that in my book because I think that what we need to think about in the case of the cell is determinacy, not indetermin. Physicists have thought that we can read out in determinacy and even a solution to the problem of free will. So all the things that I wanted someone to, that I want assuring them to say, he literally says those things in the letter. I don't have to make the case. And there's no abductive reasoning here Paul like saying it. And I can just put that in my. That in that way history is easier than philosophy. In philosophy you have to make your case reason for it. In history, if you're lucky enough, you have the person saying what you want them to say. You put, put that in your. And that, that speaks for itself. I mean you can. [01:36:33] Speaker B: Okay, but modern day someone can say something. You can have it on video recorded and it doesn't matter. Like you cannot mean what you say. You could lie, you could, you know, you can write a letter to be influential and, and lie. Right. And claim something because you think you're getting in someone's good graces. So I'm just saying like you can't, you're not always being completely truthful. [01:36:54] Speaker A: You know, that's your communication fair point. Maybe. Yeah, that's right. Then the question would be how likely is it that there's being truthful? [01:37:05] Speaker B: So you had to infer a little bit. [01:37:07] Speaker A: I think you're right. I think that's a very subtle good point. Objection that you can make. Exactly. It's never the case that a quote speaks for itself. Interpretation is always necessary. But you know, if Schrodinger is saying I wrote the book because I was pissed off at these physicists making this, you know, that's great. [01:37:24] Speaker B: Good enough for you. [01:37:25] Speaker A: And if you see him saying something similar in other contexts, responding to other people, this is why I went to different archives. I saw him saying similar things to different people. That convergence also speaks to speaks gives more evidence that he's being truthful about what he's saying. [01:37:37] Speaker B: That's true. [01:37:39] Speaker A: And I found that. So when he speaks to Donna and he's complaining about Boar, when he speaks to Darlington, he's complaining about Boar. In another of his books he complains about Boar and Jordan. So I think that I quite confident that I've identified the true motivation. It's not one that historians have suggested. This has to be something very novel in what I'M saying you asked me about the novelty of Schrodinger's book, but not the novelty of my book. So one of the things that you could say, this novel about my book is this new interpretation of why Schrodinger writes about biology. I say there are a bunch of different older interpretations, hypotheses that he. That he read Darwin as a child, that his father was a botanist, that he was interested in this idea of memory over time that you referred to before, the idea of some sort of what stays fixed over time. And some people have argued that that's what got him interested in genetics, others that he was a renaissance man interested in many different things at different times. But I think that the. Right here we can't talk, I think, about right and wrong, that the right primary motivation for Schrodinger, given the historical evidence, some of it unearthed in this process, is that he's responding to physicists with how these physicists have tried to use quantum indeterminacy to take a stance on teleology and cells and ultimately free will. And that that is why he. Ultimately, it all boils down to free will. That's why he adds this completely nonsensical epilogue about free will, five page long at the end of the. Of the book, which has nothing to do with free will. [01:39:10] Speaker B: The. [01:39:10] Speaker A: The rest of the book. Right. And it's kind of tragic to me that if that's true, it's like tragic to see it 80 years later that no one has picked up on that. You know, if it really is the case that that is his main motivation. And no one has picked up on it, apart from Darlington, who I have a quote of him because, you know, should have explained it to him. And so Darlington says, yeah, the organism now has a say in the matter. You can no longer jump from indeterminacy in physics to indeterminacy in psychology. So apart from a few people, most people did not understand the book. And that's kind of tragic because. But on the other hand, it had a huge influence. So that's a very, very interesting story, I think. [01:39:49] Speaker B: Okay. Okay, so last thing here, I promise. So you mentioned during your PhD days, the state. So this is a bit of a left turn. The state of the philosophy of biology was such that everything was being written about evolution. Evolution dominated the state of biological philosophy, philosophy of biology. What is this? And that was some time ago. And you've said that the tides have turned partly because of work that was going on at your institution. Was it Exeter? Yeah. What is the state of biology these days? And what resource, if I were going to get the lay of the land, what resource would I look to today? [01:40:35] Speaker A: You mean the state of philosophy, of biology? [01:40:37] Speaker B: Yeah. What did I say? [01:40:38] Speaker A: Biology? [01:40:38] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, give me the state. Give me the state of biology. Dan. [01:40:43] Speaker A: Another three hour podcast? No, I think that it's in a healthy state because biology is much more than just evolutionary theory. And now philosophy of biology is reflecting more accurately the diversity of interests and questions and problems that one is confronted with in the life sciences. [01:41:06] Speaker B: Is there, okay, so is the reason why it was dominated by evolution then? Does that have something to do with the molecular revolution? That had something to do with Schrodinger's influence? [01:41:17] Speaker A: It doesn't have, I don't think, anything directly to do with either Schrodinger or molecular biology. But there is a historical story to that too, Paul, and I'm interested in that and I've written a couple of papers about that, about why it is that philosophy of biology ended up being completely dominated by a very narrow agenda. [01:41:36] Speaker B: Of Egyptians, the organicists. [01:41:38] Speaker A: It's with the people who started doing philosophy of biology in the late 60s and early 70s, who did everything they could to wipe the slate clean so that the previous organicist tradition was basically removed from the collective memory. And so what I was doing actually in Pittsburgh when we talked about, was looking at the archives, at the correspondence of one of the founders of modern philosophy, biological guy called David Hull, because the letters are in his book. And it's super interesting to me to see what he's writing and who he's corresponding with in the 60s and 70s when he's sort of establishing the field that we now know as philosophy or biology. And it's fascinating to see who he read, who he read, but then doesn't mention in publications, but mentions privately how he has an agenda too, like Schrodinger, like everyone else, and wanting to put forward a very specific particular view of what it means to do philosophy of biology in the right way. His famous paper, actually, just to give you an example of this, the famous paper that he wrote is actually titled what the Philosophy of Biology is not in 1969. And he's basically saying how one should not do philosophy of biology. And it's kind of hilarious that that's now become a foundational document in my field because it's a review article of previous work. And yet it's a foundational document because it's like, let's wipe the slate clean. Let's start off, we're going to do things seriously. And it's going to be. And because these people, David Hull, Michael Roos, were interested or knew more about evolutionary advice than other areas of biology. Those are the areas that then become dominant. And then they have students and the students are going to write about and do dissertations on the stuff that they know about from their advisors. And so you've got this perpetuation, this bottleneck basically where it takes a very, very long time for philosophy of biology. Especially in the US it's different a bit in Europe, but in the English speaking world in England, Australia and the US it's extremely narrowly construed. It's basically Philosophy of biology is philosophy of evolution. There's a textbook from 19, I think from the early 90s by Elliot Sober and it's called Philosophy of Biology. You open it up and it's all about evolution. They don't even realize that they're being narrow. They are using evolution of biology interchangeably. And that wouldn't fly today. If you look at a text. [01:43:51] Speaker B: Well, yeah, I mean you saw like all this opportunity where philosophy was not being done in biology because I had. [01:43:58] Speaker A: Been trained not as a philosopher, learning a little bit about biology on the side, but as a molecular biologist. And so I was interested in conceptual questions. And then I started learning about field bio and then asking my teachers, where is the stuff on? Where's the stuff from molecular biology? Where's the stuff from developmental biology? Oh yeah, well there's one. I mean things were already getting better by the time. I mean, I'm not that old, but if I had been in the 90s, this would have been seriously, there would be hardly anything for me to draw on. To the extent that there was molecular biology at all, it was in relation to philosophical questions about theory reduction, which are like not interesting to scientists. You know, can you reduce a theory like Milan genetics to molecular genetics? And that's really completely irrelevant to the real questions about reduction that are confront that you're confronted with as a scientist. Can you explain a system in terms of its parts without any loss of information? These kinds of questions which are now of course taken seriously by philosophers, were not being taken seriously 30 years ago. I mean, that's why it's so fascinating to open one of these books from the 80s and 70s and see what they think philosophy biology is. And it kind of explains why most biologists didn't think that that was relevant. And so it's work that had to be done by people before me to bring open up the agenda so that people talk about Immunology and they talk about biochemistry, they talk about botany, they talk about microbiology and a lot of that stuff. [01:45:21] Speaker B: Stop talking only about spandrels. [01:45:23] Speaker A: Only about spandrels and the metaphysics of selection and species and all that stuff, which, of course, they're important questions, but they're not the only questions. And some of that did happen at Exeter when. This is why I mentioned it. I mean, the talk that you're referring to was basically a talk that attempt to explain what philosophy of biology was like at Exeter. When I started my Ph.D. it was a kind of commemoration of the 20th anniversary of E.E. janice, the place of Exeter and also the retirement of John Du Prey. And so I said in that talk that the stuff I was exposed to there was not being really discussed anywhere in most other places. We were reading stuff that wasn't being discussed in other places because in most other places, the scientific engagement on the part of the philosophers, very narrow. And so today, if you're interested in philosophy, biology, it's a much better position to be in because you can find books, this Element series is a good example. There are 44 volumes already on all kinds of topics. It's fantastic. You can find, if you're interested in all kinds of questions, that all those sort of represented. And so that's a very good sign that the field is in a much more healthy state. But what I find interesting, just to go back to the. Is that you can also tell a historic. There's nothing inevitable about that either. People have wanted to make the inevitability case. Don't get me wrong. People have said, well, there's only interesting philosophical questions in evolutionary theory. How can I get excited about the guts of fish? Michael Roos actually says to. I have him a quote from that. How can I get excited about that? About fish anatomy? That's nonsense. I'm very interested. So people did think it was inevitable. And I think the historical insight liberates you from that inevitability. It reminds you that you can do. You know, there's a lot. And that's why the organic stuff is relevant. Right. Because these people two generations earlier in the interwar period, were doing what we would now call philosophy of biology. But they were doing it about development, about the cell in a much broader way, ironically, than what was happening 50 years later. So we're kind of turning. We're going. Coming full circle now in that sense. [01:47:22] Speaker B: Well, it's. Yeah, circle. Maybe a spiral, because it moves forward. [01:47:26] Speaker A: Right. Yeah. [01:47:27] Speaker B: Well, thank you for contributing to the health of the field. And I mean, I highly recommend, you know, your book and your work. I mean, I've said this before, but I really appreciate the novel and in the elements style. It's like particularly good because it's not. You don't have. It's not a two month long endeavor to get through everything, but it does. Yeah. Read it in one sitting. Okay. Thank you so much, Dan. I hope we keep in touch and I'm looking forward to your future work as well. [01:47:57] Speaker A: All right, my pleasure. [01:48:06] Speaker B: Brain Inspired is powered by the Transmitter, an online publication that aims to deliver useful information, insights and tools to build bridges across the across neuroscience and advanced research. Visit thetransmitter.org to explore the latest neuroscience news and perspectives written by journalists and scientists. If you value Brain Inspired, support it through Patreon. To access full length episodes, join our Discord community and even influence who I invite to the podcast. Go to BrainInspired Co to learn more. 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