Pierre-Paul Grassé says life shows intelligence

A leading and influential biologist in France:

"Any living thing possesses an enormous amount of ‘intelligence’… Today, this 'intelligence' is called 'information,' but it is still the same thing ... This ‘intelligence’ is the sine qua non of life. If absent, no living being is imaginable. Where does it come from? This is a problem which concerns both biologists and philosophers, and, at present, science seems incapable of solving it."
- Pierre-Paul Grassé, Evolution of Living Organisms, 1977

new arrangements and the flash of genius

Came across this nugget from Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations:

The problems are solved, not by giving new information, but by arranging what we have long since known.

Another way of stating this in terms of information theory, I think, is to say that new information consists now of applying past knowledge into new arrangements.  Consider this interesting exchange from the movie Flash of Genius:

You have a Ph.D in electronic engineering, is that correct?
Uh, that's correct. I've taught for the past several years...
No, that's fine, sir. Your credentials are already part of the record. Now, when you said earlier that Mr. Kearns didn't create anything new, could you explain what you meant by that?
 Yes. As you can see, Dr. Kearns's basic unit consists of a capacitor a variable resistor and a transistor. Now, these are basic building blocks in electronics. You can find them in any catalog. All Mr. Kearns did was to arrange them in a new pattern, you might say. And that, that's not the same thing as inventing something new, however.
 Did Mr. Kearns invent the transistor?
 No, sir, he did not.
 Did Mr. Kearns invent the capacitor?
 Again, no, he did not.
 Did Mr. Kearns invent the variable resistor?
 No, he did not.
Thank you, Professor.

Or more amusingly, in an episode of the series "3rd Rock From the Sun," High Commander Dick Solomon tries to discredit a novelist by pointing out that he has used information that is accessible to anyone:

[to Jeff] You think you're pretty clever, don't you? I happen to know that every word in your book was published years ago! [to everyone in the room] Perhaps you've read...The Dictionary!

Jeff wrote his novel by merely recombining meaningful words, and Robert Kearns merely rearranged the previously discovered transistors, capacitors, and variable resistors into new parts.  In the first instance, plagiarism would consist of stealing Jeff's particular improbable combinations of words, and in the second instance, intellectual theft consisted of stealing Kearn's ingenious arrangement of standard components.

Consider now that Charles R. Marshall and other biologists have argued that the Cambrian Explosion might have resulted from "simply rewiring the existing genetic networks." To say that this solves the informational problem is like saying that all I need to do to create useful computer programs is to "tweak" how the procedures invoke one another and how data flows between them.

Pierre-Paul Grassé wrote, "If to determine the origin of information in a computer is not a false problem, why should the search for the information contained in cellular nuclei be one?"  Indeed.

Pierre-Paul Grassé, French biology, and mechanism

Pierre-Paul Grassé is the past President of the French Academie des Sciences and editor of the 35 volume "Traite de Zoologie" published by Masson, Paris. [+]

I think it was Berlinski that hypothesized that the French identification of Darwinism as an inherently Britannic idea allowed their biology to be free of the Darwinian stranglehold.  I almost love the avant-garde stubbornness of it.  Read here about Pierre-Paul Grassé.  He could make you become a Francophile.  

"The opportune appearance of mutations permitting animals and plants to meet their needs seems hard to believe. Yet the Darwinian theory is even more demanding: a single plant, a single animal would require thousands and thousands of lucky, appropriate events. Thus, miracles would become the rule: events with an infinitesimal probability could not fail to occur .... There is no law against day dreaming, but science must not indulge in it."

I would like to sit at a sidewalk cafe in Paris, sip some good coffee (okay, the French do that really well), and talk to Grassé.  Or listen, mostly. "Dr. Grassé, what do you think of the fact that most American biologists think that you can't actually do biology without a commitment to the truth of the Modern Synthesis?"  

Alas, it is too late to have such a conversation with Dr. Grassé. much as it is with Dr. Marcel Schutzenberger.  Though perhaps Dr. Schutzenberger may have said similar sorts of things.

This all reminds me of a Chinese researcher quoted by Dr. Jonathan Wells:

"In China we can criticize Darwin but not the government. In America you can criticize the government but not Darwin." [+]

Hey, something has to be sacred.

I just saw that there is a TalkOrigins article that tries to address the anti-Darwinism of the French, which they write off as mere cultural bias (and how much pro-Darwinism in England and America circa 1880-1920 was motivated by trends of atheism and scientism in university culture?) They clarify that it was Prof. Louis Bounoure who said:

That, by this, evolutionism would appear as a theory without value, is confirmed also pragmatically. A theory must not be required to be true, said Mr. H. Poincare, more or less, it must be required to be useable. Indeed, none of the progress made in biology depends even slightly on a theory, the principles of which are nevertheless filling every year volumes of books, periodicals, and congresses with their discussions and their disagreements.

while it was biologist (and atheist, for what it's worth) Jean Rostand of the Académie Française who said, "Evolution is a fairy tale for adults." French atheist and scientist Paul Lemoine who was director of the National Museum of Natural History, wrote in the Encyclopedie Francaise:

Evolution is a kind of dogma which its own priests no longer believe, but which they uphold for the people. It is necessary to have the courage to state this if only so that men of a future generation may orient their research into a different direction.

TalkOrigins explains that Paul Lemoine believed in descent with modification, and so, like Michael Behe presumably, was only referring to a theory about actual evolutionary mechanism, not to the theory that some sort of change over time occurred.  Of course, so rendered, such a theory devoid of mechanism doesn't fit with the umbrage taken over describing neo-Darwinism as "just a theory."

For the sole purpose of false economy of explanation, if there is some evidence of change over time, that is, a presumed relationship of organism A at time X and organism B at time Y, it is presumed that NaturalSelectionDidIt, and any diachronic difference between otherwise similar organisms becomes prima facie evidence of the power of natural selection.

Consider Dr. Paul Nelson's 1995 recollection of an exchange with ardent neo-Darwinist Kenneth Miller (the guy with the mouse-trap tie-clip).

The critical question is one of mechanism. Is it possible for mammals to vary sufficiently for - to take the case of whales - their skulls to be completely remodelled, so that the nostrils (nares) move all the way up to the top of the head? (Indeed, all the other cranial bones must change their size and shape as well.) If not, we're looking at an apparent, not actual, continuum. The designed forms are transformationally discrete, with independent histories. 

That's what I said to Ken, as he was putting away his slides. He replied, "Yeah, Paul, I know, with you it's always 'mechanism, mechanism, mechanism.' But there's more to it than that." 

What the "more" is ain't clear to me.

It isn't clear to a lot of us.  Especially after Eugenie Scott's highly publicized "theometer" comments and the desperate, desperate plea for a mechanism for intelligent design.  Tu quoque?

Back to Prof. James M. Tour:

Although most scientists leave few stones unturned in their quest to discern mechanisms before wholeheartedly accepting them, when it comes to the often gross extrapolations between observations and conclusions on macroevolution, scientists, it seems to me, permit unhealthy leeway. When hearing such extrapolations in the academy, when will we cry out, “The emperor has no clothes!”? 

…I simply do not understand, chemically, how macroevolution could have happened. Hence, am I not free to join the ranks of the skeptical and to sign such a statement without reprisals from those that disagree with me? … Does anyone understand the chemical details behind macroevolution? If so, I would like to sit with that person and be taught, so I invite them to meet with me.

How about Dr. Robert Hazen?  Dr. Hazen co-ao-authored an article with Dr. Jack Szostak on "Functional Information" which had a formula that reminds me wuite a bit of some of Dr. William Dembski's formulas.  Dr. Hazen states:

A fundamental law of nature, the law describing the emergence of complex ordered systems (including every living cell), is missing from our textbooks. ¹

Why do Robert Hazen and Stuart Kaufman and so many others think we need to specify another fundamental law of nature when we have a perfectly adequate, fully specified mechanism in NaturalSelectionDidIt?

Schützenberger quotes

Schützenberger:

Biology is, of course, not my specialty. The participation of mathematicians in the overall assessment of evolutionary thought has been encouraged by the biologists themselves, if only because they presented such an irresistible target. Richard Dawkins, for example, has been fatally attracted to arguments that would appear to hinge on concepts drawn from mathematics and from the computer sciences, the technical stuff imposed on innocent readers with all of his comic authority. Mathematicians are, in any case, epistemological zealots. It is normal for them to bring their critical scruples to the foundations of other disciplines. And finally, it is worth observing that the great turbid wave of cybernetics has carried mathematicians from their normal mid-ocean haunts to the far shores of evolutionary biology. There up ahead, Rene Thom and Ilya Prigogine may be observed paddling sedately toward dry land, members of the Santa Fe Institute thrashing in their wake. Stuart Kauffman is among them. An interesting case, a physician half in love with mathematical logic, burdened now and forever by having received a Papal Kiss from Murray Gell-Mann. This ecumenical movement has endeavored to apply the concepts of mathematics to the fundamental problems of evolution -- the interpretation of functional complexity, for example. [from here]

Okay, one more:

Speaking ironically, I might say that all we can hear at the present time is the great anthropic hymnal, with even a number of mathematically sophisticated scholars keeping time as the great [Darwinian] hymn is intoned by tapping their feet. The rest of us should, of course, practice a certain suspension of judgment.