Jacques Monod
Retrieved April 6, 2025, from Information Philosopher
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Jacques Monod
Jacques Monod's 1971 book Chance and Necessity was a landmark in the popular science literature for its unequivocal statement that the origin of life is purely a product of Chance.
...[mutations] constitute the only possible source of modifications in the genetic text, itself the sole repository of the organism's hereditary structures, 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.Monod correctly denies that any teleological forces are needed to create life from inanimate matter, but he finds that teleonomic purposeful behavior is one of the fundamental characteristics of life, along with what he calls autonomous morphogenesis (life is "self-constructing") and reproductive invariance (life is "self-replicating"). Information philosophy agrees that with the emergence of life, information structures with purposes entered the universe. But there must have been information-creating, ergodic processes at work before terrestrial life appeared. They created the informational substrate for life, in particular, the sun and the planetary environment hospitable to the origin of life on earth. Monod says that some biologists have been unhappy with his idea of teleonomy, that living beings are endowed with a purpose or a project, but he says this is essential to the definition of living beings. His next criterion is autonomous morphogenesis. He says, ...a living being's structure results from a ... process ... that owes almost nothing to the action of outside forces, but everything, from its overall shape down to its tiniest detail, to "morphogenetic" interactions within the object itself.The quantum cooperative atomic phenomena that form crystals are of course the same as form the macromolecules of life, DNA, RNA, etc. Monod thinks there is an "internal, autonomous determinism" that "guarantees the formation of the extremely complex structures of living beings." The "guarantee" can not be perfect as a result of statistical physics. Monod is fully aware of quantum indeterminacy. After discussing chance in terms of probability and games of chance, he says, on the microscopic level there exists a further source of still more radical uncertainty, embedded in the quantum structure of matter. A mutation is in itself a microscopic event, a quantum event, to which the principle of uncertainty consequently applies. An event which is hence and by its very nature essentially unpredictable. (p.114)Monod identifies the key evolutionary process as the transmission of information from one living information structure to the next. Note that this is accomplished in the constant presence of thermal and quantal noise. Such structures represent a considerable quantity of information whose source has still to be identified: for all expressed — and hence received — information presupposes a source. He says "the source of the information expressed in the structure of a living being is always another, structurally identical object."
[Living beings have the] ability to produce and to transmit ne varietur the information corresponding to their own structure. A very rich body of information, since it describes an organizational scheme which, along with being exceedingly complex, is preserved intact from one generation to the next. The term we shall use to designate this property is invariant reproduction, or simply invariance.Monod claims that the main distinction between crystals and living things is the quantity of information transmitted between the generations. He thus neglects the creativity inherent in the acquisition and transmission of knowledge by living things. Crystalline structures, however, represent a quantity of information by several orders of magnitude inferior to that transmitted from one generation to another in the simplest living beings we are acquainted with. By this criterion — purely quantitative, be it noted — living beings may be distinguished from all other objects, crystals included. In his major contribution toward an informational approach to biology, Monod goes on to make a quantitative estimate of what he calls the "teleonomic level" of a species, arranging them in a hierarchy based purely on information content. This is an important beginning for information-based biological science. ...since a structure's degree of order can be defined in units of information, we shall say that the "invariance content" of a given species is equal to the amount of information which, transmitted from one generation to the next, assures the preservation of the specific structural standard. As we shall see later on, with the help of a few assumptions it will be possible to arrive at an estimate of this amount.For François Jacob, who shared the Nobel Prize with Jacques Monod, teleonomy was a basic characteristic of every cell. Jacob said that the basic purpose and desire of every cell is to become two cells. But Monod sees that his teleonomy appears to be in conflict with a basic tenet, the very cornerstone, of modern science. The cornerstone of the scientific method is the postulate that nature is objective. In other words, the systematic denial that "true" knowledge can be got at by interpreting phenomena in terms of final causes - that is to say, of "purpose." An exact date may be given for the discovery of this canon. The formulation by Galileo and Descartes of the principle of inertia laid the groundwork not only for mechanics but for the epistemology of modern science, by abolishing Aristotelian physics and cosmology. To be sure, neither reason, nor logic, nor observation, nor even the idea of their systematic confrontation had been ignored by Descartes' predecessors. But science as we understand it today could not have been developed upon those foundations alone. It required the unbending stricture implicit in the postulate of objectivity — ironclad, pure, forever undemonstrable. For it is obviously impossible to imagine an experiment which could prove the nonexistence anywhere in nature of a purpose, of a pursued end.Monod's resolution of his "profound epistemological contradiction" is to make teleonomy secondary to - and a consequence of - reproductive invariance. Since the teleonomic properties of living beings appear to challenge one of the basic postulates of the modern theory of knowledge, any philosophical, religious, or scientific view of the world must, ipso facto, offer an implicit if not an explicit solution to this problem. Colin Pittendrigh
Colin Pittendrigh was the first to use the term "teleonomy" to distinguish the appearance of purpose in biological evolution, specifically Darwinian natural selection, from the ancient idea of "teleology," Aristotle's "telos" or "final cause," a cosmic purpose pre-existing the appearance of life.
Today the concept of adaptation is beginning to enjoy an improved respectability for several reasons: it is seen as less than perfect; natural selection is better understood; and the engineer-physicist in building end-seeking automata has sanctified the use of teleological jargon. It seems unfortunate that the term 'teleology' should be resurrected and, as I think, abused in this way. The biologists' long-standing confusion would be more fully removed is all end-directed systems were described by some other term, like 'teleonomic', in order to emphasize that the recognition and description of end-directedness does not carry a commitment to Aristotelian teleology as an efficient [sic] casual principle.Monod summarizes the history of philosophy more or less as we do (and as Karl Popper does), along the lines of the great division, or dualism, between idealists and materialists. We see the distinction as between those who think information is an invariant and those who see it as constantly increasing. Monod's focus on reproductive invariance may prevent him seeing the importance of novelty and creation of new information. Ever since its birth in the Ionian Islands almost three thousand years ago, Western philosophy has been divided between two seemingly opposed attitudes. According to one of them the authentic and ultimate truth of the world can reside only in perfectly immutable forms, by essence unvarying. According to the other, the only real truth resides in flux and evolution. From Plato to Whitehead and from Heraclitus to Hegel and Marx, it is clear that these metaphysical epistemologies were always closely bound up with their authors' ethical and political biases. These ideological edifices, represented as self-evident to reason, were actually a posteriori constructions designed to justify preconceived ethico-political theories.Like many scientists, Monod regards the open search for knowledge and truth as of intrinsic value. Can he go on to make knowledge itself a value in the objective world of "value-free" science? Monod seeks an "ethic of knowledge." Must one adopt the position once and for all that objective truth and the theory of values constitute eternally separate, mutually impenetrable domains? This is the attitude taken by a great number of modern thinkers, whether writers, or philosophers, or indeed scientists. For the vast majority of men, whose anxiety it can only perpetuate and worsen, this attitude I believe will not do; I also believe it is absolutely mistaken, and for two essential reasons.Monod took the title of his work from a statement by Democritus that he imagined or misremembered (an example of the Cogito Model for human creativity). He opens his book with this quotation, Everything existing in the Universe is the fruit of chance and necessity. DemocritusUnfortunately, Democritus made no such statement. As the founder of determinism, he and his mentor Leucippus were adamantly opposed to chance or randomness. Leucippus insisted on an absolute necessity which leaves no room in the cosmos for chance. "Nothing occurs at random (maten), but everything for a reason (logos) and by necessity." For Scholars
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