Tag: Jacques Monod

Chance & Necessity: Another Look

In everyday experience, we think of chance as what governs gambling, barring schemes to harness probability in their favor. Necessity, on the other hand, brings to mind the air we breathe, food and/or water. Previously, we discussed Jacques Monod as an early explorer of the collision of probability and chance in biology. In Laws of the Game: How the Principles of Nature Govern Chance (German: Das Spiel: Naturgesetze steuern den Zufall), Manfred Eigen & Ruthild Winkler critique Jacques Monod, stating that his innovation was that the substrate of all biology is chance and accident. You may note that the subtitle of Laws of the Game states the opposite.

This gets even more subtle if you consider Johan Huizinga’s Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play Element in Culture. He emphasizes the role of playful behavior as the university that educates us in the connection between chance and necessity.

Foreword

The lay reader interested in the natural sciences is exposed to a constantly rising flood of information. He may often feel himself cast in the role of a judge before whom different authors appear like competing litigants, each of whom hopes to be found in the right. If these authors are sufficiently clever in presenting their cases, the reader may be swayed by each in turn. But then a reviewer appears on the scene and objects that each cannot be as right as the other, particularly when one author’s claims are the exact opposite of another’s. The reader has no choice but to find the reviewer right, too.

This familiar anecdote, which we have slightly adapted to suit our purposes, contains a moral: Everyone could in fact be right if each one did not insist on being the only one to be right.

Everything that happens in our world resembles a vast game in which nothing is determined in advance but the rules, and only the rules are open to objective understanding. The game itself is not identical with either its rules or with the sequence of chance happenings that determine the course of play. It is neither the one nor the other because it is both at once. It has as many aspects as we project onto it in the form of questions.

We see this game as a natural phenomenon that, in its dichotomy of chance and necessity, underlies all events. Our interpretation of games and play thus goes far beyond Huizinga’s, which considers play only in its relation to human behavior. In applying the concept of play to art, we come much closer to Adorno’s views, which clearly disagree with Huizinga‘s identification of play and art.

The considerations that gave rise to this book go back to the molecular theory of evolution worked out a few years ago. It also draws on the models developed in connection with that theory, models for simulating phenomena like equilibrium, selection, and growth, all of which are based on natural laws. Although this book makes frequent use of examples drawn from the field of biology, its scope is much broader and includes general scientific, philosophical, sociological, and aesthetic perspectives. Our main purpose is to show play in its symbolic nature and in all its metamorphoses. We also make use of its different aspects to illuminate both our scientific understanding of the world and various philosophical positions. We are aware that this brings us into conflict with those who attribute validity to one and only one aspect.

The actual writing of the book was preceded by innumerable talks and discussions with friends and colleagues during our Engadin winter seminars, on hikes and ski tours in the mountains, and, occasionally, over a bottle of wine. We first thought a dialogue would be the appropriate form for our exchange of ideas, but we soon abandoned this concept. The classical dialogues are without exception artificially constructed. Simplicio and Salviati, for example, are both mouthpieces for Galileo. We finally decided that we would both take turns going over all the material point by point. We have, of course, ventured into areas in which we are only dilettantes. We hope the reader will forgive us this in the light of our efforts to uncover parallels and so to emphasize the unity of nature and mind.

We do not want to go any further into the substance of the book here than is necessary to make clear why we chose the title we did. Similarly, the introductions to the individual chapters are meant to lead the reader into the material treated, not to summarize it.

Chance and law (or principles) are the basic elements of games. The subtitle of the book suggests the interaction between them. And here we should add that it is the consequences of chance that are subject to regulation. Only if there is a large number of individual events does the element of chance come under the control of statistical law. This law is at work, for instance, when chance fluctuations undergo self-regulation in equilibrium or when they are amplified in the evolutionary process. The origin of the genetic code, the development of languages by which we transmit our thoughts, the intellectual play of artistic imagination are all based on the same fundamental principles of evolution, even though the results of individual games are determined by the caprice and variability of chance.

The manifestations of the game that matter plays in time and space and the effects this game has on human beings are the themes of the central chapters in the book. Much as we may agree with Jacques Monod in his view of molecular biology, we differ from him greatly in the conclusions he draws from it for mankind and society. We see Monod’s demand for an “existential attitude toward life and society” as an animistic inflation of the role of “chance.” Such a demand neglects the complementary role played by natural law. Criticism of the dialectical overemphasis on “necessity”—a criticism we find fully justified—should not move us to deny completely its obvious infiuence.

We are in complete agreement with Monod’s statement that ethics and knowledge cannot be divorced from each other. For us, however, this view does not condemn the great religions but rather sets them a new task. As we have occasion to point out in the present work, the natural sciences yield no proof of God’s existence, but neither do they claim that men “can do without faith in God.”

The unity of nature is expressed more in the laws governing the relationships between structures than in the structures themselves. Taking this “motto” as a point of departure for Part IV, we examine a number of problems that have recently come more and more under the purview of the natural sciences and that are still far from being solved. In these considerations, we are mainly concerned with the mechanisms of cognizance. In terms of the elementary processes involved, these mechanisms always amount to a falsification in Karl Popper’s sense. Still, we cannot fully accept the views of this great epistemological logician, particularly when he claims: “There is no induction.” Good enough! But there are different mechanisms of falsification that vary in their degree of inductive adaptation.

One of our main concerns in this book lies at the heart of Part III. There we raise the still unsolved question of the hubris of human knowledge. Friedrich Dürrenmatt’s categorical imperative “What concerns all can only be worked out by all” is as relevant for the physicist whose knowledge can unleash the forces of nature as it is for the biologist who is now in a position to manipulate genetic material and influence psychic behavior with drugs. And our appeal here is also directed at the economist and the politician, who have the task of creating, maintaining, and protecting the conditions necessary for a worthwhile human existence.

Pessimistic predictions based on simple extrapolation are widespread today. We will not be able to solve the problem of limited resources by frugality alone. A raw material that will be used up in about fifty years at present rates of consumption might last a hundred years if we cut down on its use. (Such a reduction might, of course, threaten the stability of our economy.) In other words, the catastrophe could be delayed for another fifty years. Would it not be more sensible to concentrate on ensuring unlimited resources, perhaps by reusing our raw materials in a recycling economy and by developing sufficiently productive sources of energy? However we solve this problem, the practicability of our solution will depend on stopping population growth, perhaps even on reducing the world’s population.

We must be clear about one thing: The human being is not a fluke of nature, nor does nature automatically guarantee his survival. The human being is one player in a huge game, the outcome of which is, for him, uncertain. He has to make full use of his capabilities to hold his own as a player and not become a plaything of chance.

Manfred Eigen / Ruthild Winkler-Oswatitsch
Göttingen, September 1975

ONE

The Taming of Chance

Research in physics has shown beyond the shadow of a doubt that in the overwhelming majority of phenomena whose regularity and invariability have led to the formulation of the postulate of causality, the common element underlying the consistency observed is chance.

Erwin Schrödinger, “What Is a Natural Law?” (Inaugural Address delivered at the University of Zurich, December 1922)

1

The Origin of Play

Play is a natural phenomenon that has guided the course of the world from its beginnings. It is evident in the shaping of matter, in the organization of matter into living structures, and in the social behavior of human beings.

The history of play goes back to the beginnings of time. The energy released in the “big bang” set everything in motion, set matter whirling in a maelstrom of activity that would never cease. The forces of order sought to bring this process under control, to tame chance. The result was not the rigid order of a crystal but the order of life. From the outset, chance has been the essential counterpart of the ordering forces.

Chance and rules are the elements that underlie games and play. Play began among the elementary particles, atoms, and molecules, and now our brain cells carry it on. Human beings did not invent play, but it is “play and only play that makes man complete.”1

All our capabilities arise from play. First, there is the play of limbs and muscles. The aimless grasping and kicking of an infant develop into carefully coordinated movements. Then there is the play of our senses. Playful curiosity sends us in search of profound knowledge. From play with colors, shapes, and sounds emerge immortal works of art. The first expressions of love take the form of play: the secret exchange of glances, dancing, the interplay of thoughts and emotions, the yielding of partners to each other. In Sanskrit, the union of lovers is called kridaratnam, “the jewel of games.”2

Every game has its rules that set it apart from the surrounding world of reality and establish its own standards of value. Anyone who wants to “play” has to follow those rules. In parlor games, rules established before the game begins determine the course the game will take and define the scale of values by which it is played. But the effects of a chance occurrence can change the constellation of the game and set it running in a totally new direction. This is how life initiated its first games, and this is how our thoughts and ideas continue to play those games.

From the terrifying realm of elemental forces and the holy realm of laws arises the aesthetic impulse, which creates a third, carefree realm. This is the realm of play and appearance. In it, man is freed from the bonds of all circumstance and liberated from compulsion, moral as well as physical.1

It is our intention in this book to trace the interplay of chance and law that has come down to us from the farthest reaches of time and found its most perfect expression in the inexhaustible creativity of our ideas. We hope to translate Hermann Hesse’s symbol of the glass bead game back into reality. Hesse described this game as one that incorporated all the values of our culture.

All the insights, noble thoughts, and works of art that the human race has produced in its creative eras, all that subsequent periods of scholarly study have reduced to concepts and converted into intellectual property—on all this immense body of intellectual values the Glass Bead Game player plays like the organist on an organ. And this organ has attained an almost unimaginable perfection; its manuals and pedals range over the entire intellectual cosmos; its stops are almost beyond number. Theoretically this instrument is capable of reproducing in the Game the entire intellectual content of the universe.3

There is something mysterious about glass beads. The reflection and refraction of light make them glow, and as we explore the idea of play in this book, Hesse’s glass beads will take on a new life. Part of their symbolic significance derives from the fact that they can exemplify the constant transformations and metamorphoses we observe all around us: atoms evolve into crystals, molecules into genes, living cells into cognitive beings, letters into words, notes into harmonies. The course the bead game takes is determined by the roll of the dice, yet at the same time it is also influenced by the rules of the game, just as chance in nature is subject to the laws of physics. The dice and the rules of the game these are our symbols for chance and natural law.

List of References

  1. Schiller, Friedrich von, “Über die ästhetische Erziehung des Menschen (On the Aesthetic Education of Mankind),” in a series of letters from the years 1793-94, printed in his Philosophical and Critical Writings (many eds.).
  2. Huizinga, Johan, Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play Element in Culture. Boston: Beacon Press, 1955.
  3. Hesse, Hermann, The Glass Bead Game: Magister Ludi. New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1969.
Manfred Eigen & Ruthild Winkler. Laws of the Game: How the Principles of Nature Govern Chance. Translated by Rita & Robert Kimber, Princeton University Press, 1993, pp. xi-5.

Theodor Adorno, a Marxist theoretician, believed the filter before any interpretation of the world was ever-present advertising and, by extension, capitalism. While Adorno thinks of capitalism as destiny, Yeats came to realize that “accident is destiny” (as we previously discussed). Amid these infinitely debatable opinions, the world is often a perplexity machine that may not be described by a single view.

Chance and Necessity from the Perspective of W.B. Yeats

We have just seen “Chance and Necessity” from the perspective of Thomas Bayes and Jacques Monod. Before we get to the case of William Butler Yeats, let’s briefly consider famous non-scientific cases like Joseph Conrad’s Chance, Charles Sanders Peirce’s anthology of essays, Values in a Universe of Chance, and the phrase “nothing but chance,” which was central to the philosophy of Simone Weil.

Yeats attempted to use words to express largely numerical concepts. In the collection Mythologies, he wrote, “I think that all religious men have believed that there is a hand not ours in the events of life, and that, as somebody says in Wilhelm Meister, accident is destiny;…” (p. 336) Here we have chance, but what about necessity? He later states, “I do not doubt those heaving circles, those winding arcs, whether in one man’s life or in that of an age, are mathematical…” (p. 340).

Finally, we read, “I have always sought to bring my mind close to the mind of Indian and Japanese poets, old women in Connacht, mediums in Soho, lay brothers whom I imagine dreaming in some mediaeval monastery the dreams of their village, learned authors who refer all to antiquity; to immerse it in the general mind where that mind is scarce separable from what we have begun to call ‘the subconscious’; to liberate it from all that comes of councils and committees, from the world as it is seen from universities…” (p. 343).

As may be expected from a fundamentally poetic nature, Yeats parts company with the mathematics and science of Bayes and Monod. Like the philosopher Heidegger, who valued equipmental being in use, Yeats is profoundly ruralist, revering the Irish peasant, who has a more primordial connection to nature and folklore. Yeats’ view of “chance and necessity” both mirrors mathematical or scientific thought while trying to remain divorced from it.

Chance and Necessity

If you free-associate the word “chance,” you may arrive at “I’ll take my chances” before potentially arriving at Thomas Bayes’ “Doctrine of Chances”. Jacques Monod was an early explorer of the collision of probability and chance in biology.

THE PRINCE OF CHANCE

Jacques Monod grew up just down the coast from Monte Carlo in Cannes, France, another town famous for its casinos and, later, its film festival. Graced with movie star looks—one prominent French journalist described him as a “prince” who resembled Hollywood icon Henry Fonda, as well as considerable musical talent, and an exceptional intellect, Monod struggled to decide on a career path through his twenties. After distinguishing himself in the French Resistance, Monod rose to fame not as an actor or musician, but as a brilliant biologist. He shared the 1965 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for seminal discoveries about how genes work.

A pioneer in the field of molecular biology, Monod was privy to the blizzard of discoveries in the 1950s and early 1960s about the molecules that determined the characteristics of living things—what Monod and others dubbed “the secrets of life.” He kept close company with a relatively small international community of leading researchers. For example, when James Watson and Francis Crick cracked the structure of DNA (deoxyribonucleic acid) in 1953, Monod was one of the first with whom Watson shared the breakthrough.

But as a Frenchman steeped in his culture’s deep philosophical traditions, Monod was interested in science for more than just science’s sake. After the war, Monod befriended France’s leading philosopher-writer Albert Camus, and the two men pondered questions of human existence in Left Bank cafés. Monod felt that the public misunderstood the principal purpose of science as being the creation of technology. Rather, Monod believed technology was merely a by-product. He said, “the most important results of science have been to change the relationship of man to the universe, or the way he sees himself in the universe”—a relationship of equally intense interest to his friend Camus.

Monod thought that there were profound philosophical implications of the new molecular biology, particularly in the realm of heredity, which had gone largely unnoted in the broader culture. Several years after his Nobel Prize and Camus’ untimely death, he decided to write a book to try to bring the meaning of modern biology to laypersons.

“[T]he ‘secret of life’…has been laid bare,” he wrote.

“This, a considerable event, ought certainly to make itself strongly felt in contemporary thinking.”

Monod used several chapters to describe the insights that had very recently emerged from the study of DNA and the deciphering of the genetic code. He understood this knowledge would be unfamiliar to most readers, so he included an appendix with chemical structures of proteins and nucleic acids, and a primer on how the genetic code worked.

In a matter-of-fact style, he explained genetic mutations as accidental alterations—substitutions, additions, deletions, or rearrangements—in the text of DNA, in the sequence of the long strings of chemical bases (ACTTGATAA, etc.) that make up genes.

Then, almost without warning, he turned to the broader implications of how mutations arise in DNA. It is worth quoting him at length for after 111 pages of background, he delivered one of the most powerful ideas in five centuries of science (all italics are original):

“We call these events accidental; we say they are random occurrences. And since they constitute the only possible source of modifications in the genetic text, itself the sole repository of the organism’s hereditary structure, it necessarily follows that chance alone is at the source of every innovation, of all creation in the biosphere.

“Pure chance, absolutely free but blind, at the very root of the stupendous edifice of evolution: this central concept of modern biology is no longer one among other possible or even conceivable hypotheses. It is today the sole conceivable hypothesis, the only one that squares with observed and tested fact. And nothing warrants the supposition—or the hope—that on this score our position is likely ever to be revised.

“There is no scientific concept, in any of the sciences, more destructive of anthropocentrism than this one.”

In essence, heretofore obscure discoveries in biochemistry and genetics (largely studied at that time in simple bacteria) had upended two millennia of philosophy and religion that put humans at the center or apex of creation. “Man was the product of an incalculable number of fortuitous events,” Monod wrote. “The result of a huge Monte Carlo game, where our number eventually did come out, when it might not well have appeared.”

Le Hasard et la nécessité (Chance and Necessity) appeared in France in October 1970. It was a fairly technical book with several chapters on philosophy and genetics, and those appendices full of chemical diagrams. A first-time author, Monod did not know what reactions to expect.

The merde hit the fan.

The book received dozens of reviews across France and quickly became a bestseller—second only to the French translation of Erich Segal’s Love Story (this was France after all. After it was translated into English, reviews and interviews with Monod were featured in several of the most prominent British and American newspapers and magazines.

Many commentators immediately recognized the threat chance posed to traditional ideas of humanity’s origins and purpose. To Arthur Peacocke, a British biochemist turned prominent theologian, Monod had put forth “one of the strongest and most influential attacks of the century on theism.” A flurry of articles and books appeared with titles such as Anti-Chance: A Reply to Monod’s Chance and Necessity, Beyond Chance and Necessity, and God, Chance, and Necessity. Monod was invited to debate philosophers and theologians both in France and abroad, on television, radio, and in print.

American Calvinist theologian and pastor R.C. Sproul summed up the high stakes posed by chance in the first page of his book Not A Chance:

“It is not necessary for chance to rule in order to supplant God. Indeed, chance requires little authority at all if it is to depose God; all it needs to do the job is to exist. The mere existence of chance is enough to rip God from his cosmic throne. Chance does not need to rule; it does not need to be sovereign. If it exists as a mere impotent, humble servant, it leaves God not only out of date, but out of a job.” More than two hundred pages later, Sproul concluded:

“Chance as a real force is a myth. It has no basis in reality and no place in scientific inquiry. For science and philosophy to continue to advance in knowledge, chance must be demythologized once and for all.”

Sproul and other critics argued that what scientists perceived as chance merely reflected a lack of knowledge of true causes. Perhaps that was the expression of hope to which Monod alluded—the hope that as scientists learned more, our position on the role of chance would somehow be revised.

A SECOND CHANCE

The ensuing fifty years have not played out as either Monod or his detractors hoped. The Frenchman thought that the new insights from molecular biology should be a turning point for modern society-away from traditional beliefs about causes in the natural world toward one that embraced randomness and our chance existence.

Ha! Fat chance. The excitement and fuss stirred by Chance and Necessity simmered down, and Monod passed away a few years later. Surveys reveal that the majority of Americans, for example, continue to believe that everything on earth happens for His reasons.

But Monod’s critics should take no comfort. The province of chance in the biosphere and human life has been revised, although not at all in the scope or direction that they hoped.

The domain of chance has expanded into realms neither Monod nor anyone else imagined.

As we have learned much more about the history and workings of the planet, we have been startled to discover how the course of life has been buffeted by a variety of cosmological and geological accidents—without which we would not be here. As we have explored human history, we have seen how pandemics, droughts, and other civilization-changing episodes have been triggered by random, singular events in nature that easily might not have happened. And as we have probed human biology and the factors that impact our individual lives, we have caught chance red-handed, reigning over the often-thin line between life and death.

This book tells the stories that Monod could not—of astonishing discoveries from the planetary to the molecular scale, from great upheavals across the globe to the machinery of chance that operates within every cell of every creature, including ourselves. And while these discoveries vaporize the comforts of anthropocentrism, the story of chance, I hope you will come to agree, is much more than highfalutin philosophy or the refutation of theologians’ wishful thinking.

I hope that you are awed—awed by the power and the drama of asteroids slamming into the planet, of continents colliding, and of the rapid rising and falling of ice and oceans; awed by the realization that we live on (and are at the mercy of a planet that is far more unstable than our short lives perceive; awed by the knowledge of how random chance is at the source of all of the beautiful and wondrous creatures with whom we share the planet; awed by the unique invisible accidents that made each one of us; and awed by the fact that we humans, recent descendants of bands of hunter-gatherers who persevered through a period of exceptional chaos, have in just the last fifty years or so, figured all of this out!

My goal here is to be comprehensible without being comprehensive. It is almost trivial to claim that the world is the way it is or that we are here because of a long chain of chance, albeit fortunate, events. The explanatory power I seek comes from specificity. It is essential to unpack some of those events to appreciate how they shape the direction of life. The layout of the book follows a simple three-part logic. I’ll begin with inanimate, external chance events that have shaped the conditions for life (Part One, “Stuff Happens”), and then turn to the internal random mechanism within every creature that generates the adaptations to those conditions (Part Two, “A World of Mistakes”). Then, I bring the story to the personal level (Part Three, “23 and You”) and how chance impacts our natural lives, as well as our deaths. Our chance-driven existence shatters long-held beliefs about humanity’s place and raises challenging questions about the meaning and purpose of our lives. In the Afterword, I’ll offer some possible replies with the help of some special guests.

This is a relatively small book for a really big idea. Science has given us a handful of really big ideas over the centuries, but they have been received in funny ways. Darwin had a huge idea that was very simple to understand, and even though the evidence is massive and everywhere, many refuse to believe it. Einstein had a brand new idea, and even though few understand it or the evidence for it, most everyone seems to believe it. Monod had a great idea, but these days most people (other than scholars) have not heard of it, or of him.

My greatest hope, then, is that this short book might be chance’s second chance.

Sean B. Carroll, A Series of Fortunate Events: Chance and the Making of the Planet, Life, and You, Princeton University Press, 2020, pp. 6-12.

Modern biology as described by Monod pushes the linkage of probability, randomness and chance to the center. At the time, this was a very radical and profound way of looking at biology. If we combine Monod’s biology with theoretical physics like Lawrence Krauss’ A Universe from Nothing: Why There Is Something Rather than Nothing, we realize that accidentality is the bedrock on which our knowledge of the universe is built.