Science Is Reconsidering Evolution

No the fact is that I think neod [Music] [Music] [Music] Noble had deep misgivings about the prevailing theory of evolution his current ideas and research are both angering his peers and inspiring the next generation of origins of Life researchers to reexamine how we came into existence in a theory that as We'll build to in this conversation takes purpose and creativity as fundamental Neo Darwinism that became the selfish Gene aka the modern synthesis or Gene centered theory of evolution is that all the same that's it that's the best definition you've just given it yes I just

thought that was Evolution I see okay well NE Darwinism is of course a theory of evolution but it's not Darwin's theory he despite the Name that would be a shock to many people I studied Darwin very carefully I've also studied the 19th century people who began to disagree with him they took Darwin's idea and developed it by making an assumption that they could not prove which is precisely this there is a barrier it's sometimes called the vican barrier and it is absolute nothing can go across it the vican barrier was foundational in the development of

evolutionary biology and modern genetics In the 1800s biologist and Neo darwinist August vicman hypothesized that the is a strict barrier that separates all the cells in our body that die when we do from The Immortal germ cells that produce sperm and eggs transporting genetic information from one generation to the next in a process that goes back to the beginning of Life and can theoretically go on forever over the years new evidence has challenged the strictness of the vican Barrier but for Noble New Evidence doesn't just challenge the strictness of the barrier it undermines the idea

that there was ever a barrier at all why was that assumption made this is what I'm trying to work out at the moment I'm actually in the process of reading those 19th century texts one answer would be that it would be a way of excluding the alternative theory of evolution which was Lamar the French biologist who preceded Darwin by 50 years Lamar Thought that as the giraffe reaches up to be able to eat the leaves at the top of the tree it grows its neck as it were by sending messages to its eggs or sperm

to make the Next Generation even taller now he may have been wrong about the giraffe we don't have to take the examples that Lamar sometimes used as fully illustrating his idea his idea was the same as Darwin's because lar did not know about natural selection but Darwin did he was the originator of the idea Together with Wallace but in addition to Natural Selection he realized there had to be something else so he was looking for an additional process which could go on in addition to Natural Selection and that's why he was keen on the idea

of Lamar which is that some features of the influence of the environment directly on organisms could be inherited via the chm line that was the key to Darwin's nuancing if you like of his theory in which people like Wallace and vican Decided they wanted to get rid of I'm trying to understand why they wanted to distance themselves from lar In Darwin's hands that idea that the body does communicate with its germ line Darwin was convinced that was the case and he's been Vindicated recently in the last 20 years we have found physiological work has shown

that control processes rnas that control the genes in our body do pass from the body to The Germ line so first thing to say very clearly is the Vi barrier doesn't exist so it was an assumption that it was there and it was necessarily true that it was there but it was an attempt to simplify the process of evolution to be only natural selection so alam's Razer yes it's alam's Razer where you don't need a more complicated hypothesis make it simple now unfortunately life doesn't behave like that and aram's Razer is just a principle for

practicality right it's it's indeed it's a principle which we Should respect but respect with care because once you find that there is more than one process going on you don't go on denying it just because you want it to be the simplest process possible if the simplest model I created in 1960 was actually fully correct we would be dead you developed the first mathematical model of cardiac cells in the 1960s that's correct based on experiments not just a mathematical Theory was actually experimentally based just as the hodkin haxi nerve impulse was my examiner was Alan

hodkin I remember my my supervisor Auto telling me Dennis you better be right because you know Alan hodkin was like a great God to physiologists in those days you better be right otherwise we we've all got egg on our faces alen was fantastic in those days you had to queue up to use a huge valve computer not even with semiconductors these were valves like Light bulbs all that thing as as switches in and well I didn't know it was an array of maybe 20,000 of these you then had to queue up to ask for time

on this computer which was itself a a Marvel 1960 the very earliest days of valve computers I didn't even know how to program I thought I could take my equations to the people who ran this machine and said can you put these into the computer said oh no m Noble I I was Not even Dr Noble then you need to buy a computer manual for M house we you can go away yourself and learn how to program the computer which is what I did I wrote as far as I know one of the very first

programs for generating a biological function on a computer and this influenced our modern understanding of heart functions which has significantly impacted um bi medical research and how modern medicine treats heart disease which is one of the Leading Killers it was the first time that anybody had reproduced the Rhythm the electrical Rhythm of the heart without having an oscillator there to create it it is s generous it generates itself once you put the equations in for the different Iron channels and how they affect the global cell cell voltage which is a GL property of the cell

it is automatic which is why I'm very sympathetic to Stuart Cal's idea that uh life is an Autocatalytic process Stuart Kaufman is a complexity scientist physician theoretical biologist an influential figure in origins of Life research in 1971 he theorized about collectively autocatalytic sets the spontaneous emergence of self-sustaining self-creating self-reproducing networks of molecules his theory was later demonstrated experimentally challenging Gene centrism by validating the Possibility that life can emerge create and sustain itself without the need for complex genetic information or template based replication kofman calls this a Conan ho after the 18th century philosopher Emanuel Kant

the idea that the parts exist for and by means of the whole this is contrasted with our current evolutionary Gene Centric Theory where we are created by our genes and our genes are driving Evolution I've been interviewing Kaufman for a story which is how I was introduced to Noble as these two scientists independently found similar fundamental patterns of behavior that changed our understanding of how life Works a year and a half ago I debated the whole question with the main exponent of neod Darwinism Richard Dawkins both he and I we've been talking with each other

and we have a a sort of friendship between us for over well Nearly 60 years because I examined his thesis in 1966 the selfish Gene came out uh 10 years later no we both respect each other but he was unable even to understand the molecular biology iCal and cellular points and explanations that I was giving he's a very skilled debator so he goes off in another Direction very convincing if you don't realize he hasn't answered the question and can we can we Define or nutshell in plain English what genetic reductionism is it's exactly what Richard

says in his book The Selfish Gene genes created us body and mind so from knowing The genome you'd be able to make me I I read very carefully his 4th anniversary edition of The Selfish Gene first of all the actual book is republished exactly as it was in 1976 then he has an afterward and the afterward is quite long and it's quite careful and he says this a book on genetics but genetics are transformed Out of all proportions in the last 40 years why is the book still the same and then he goes on to

an extraordinary phrase in some ways I would like to find a way to recant the selfish Gene Darwin he was looking for an additional process which could go on in addition to Natural Selection that was Darwin's nuancing if you like of his theory in which people like Wallace and vican decided they wanted to get rid of of what what another reason for wanting To get rid of that and to lean into to genetic reductionism is because science is about reductionism at least in physics and chemistry scientific reductionism is an approach of trying to understand bigger

things by breaking them down into their simpler fundamental Parts it's used to understand causation or how small things like particles and chemical reactions can cause or create big things but reductionism has its limitations when it comes to explaining Emergence where something new suddenly comes into existence in complex systems this new emergent phenomena can't be fully explained or predicted by looking at the underlying chemistry and physics no the fact is that I think neod alism is dead because we're not our genes and can't be reduced to our genes precisely now Richard said it in the debate

he said Dennis we could carve all the a TS and G's into a granite block will have the complete sequence of Dennis Noble and we could keep that for 10,000 years and then we will be able to recreate you I stopped him and said Richard where are you going to get my mother's egg cell as it existed in 1936 so oh yes we would need it we be able to do that there by thing well you know just a moment that was a very I mean all of our DNA all of our cells in our

body are highly unique there will never be an exactly you or an exactly me nor will a clone be the same because if You just know the DNA without having the inherited egg cell from a particular person at a particular time you won't have that in individual so you can't recreate your mother's angel from that time influenced by all of these outside factors that would have changed it in the future so you can't recreate recreate that we are all of us you know the number of possible combinations of three billion base pairs is Way Way

Beyond the total Material in the whole universe so it's just simply impossible the great majority of the population of the world is a tiny fraction of the total number of possible genomes that could exist with three billion base pairs Noble's work contributed significantly to the discovery of biological robustness where other genes biological parts or mechanisms take over the function of a gene or network of genes this ability requires an Understanding of function at the system level not the gene level as I developed the heart pacemaker model to include more genes and more proteins in the

models it grew into a more complete description of a heart cell what we found was very interesting you could remove one of the key elements causing the Rhythm and the Rhythm would still carry on and that can be shown experimentally too so what's happening is that if the organism finds that this Gene is absent it uses another Pathway to do exactly the same thing it's in other words it's robust because it's got more than one mechanism by which it can achieve its need it's got the ability to be so robust that you can remove a

gene that is critical to the normal Rhythm of the heart but the heart rhythm will still continue how does that affect the rest of the body in relate to disease 95% of genes produce only very modest Association levels between the presence or absence of that variant of the Gene and the disease State what that means is that most of the time that kind of robustness that I found in the heart pic occurs elsewhere too the difference or rather the exceptions the outlier 5% or so of are those who've got a genuinely monogenetic disease a disease

that arises from a single Gene like the gene Mis variant for Cystic Fibrosis being Present in which case you will necessarily get cystic fibrosis but those correspond to only about 5% of the total population and and just to spell this out if you can remove a gene that means the gene Centric View cannot be true because there's a prioritization of the the organism the priority in determining what happens is at the organism level this is back to the holistic view that I think Stuart calman is also proposing The you have to see a living system

as what he calls a Canon hole that sounds like a deep philosophical point but it's actually very simple the purpose of the individual molecules and genes comes from understanding the whole without that you don't know why those components are there and so is this why genetic determinism you you don't think that's possible the test is already been done in the British medical journal medicine in October last year a team from University College London led by a gentleman called inani one of the scientists leading this project they subjected the whole of the polygenic scores that is

all the scores in the polygenic repository where you can download all the scores of association between this Gene and this function and add them together which is why it's called polygenic so they subjected that to the same criteria as a clinical trial of a drug is it predictive can it tell You which disease you would get can it tell you how you would cure it the answer is no this is the biggest trial that's been done on the output of the Human Genome Project it's a failure in cardiovascular disease so failure in cancer those account

for 60% of the deaths of people so don't have to ask me the question you know could one show that it's wrong it's already been shown to be wrong I spoke with the lead scientists Of this study a genetic epidemiologist who didn't want to go on camera but basically your polygenic risk score adds up your Gene variance and gives you a total score for How likely you are to get a common disease his study shows polygenic risk scores aren't good at predicting who's going to get a common disease because the majority of people who get

common diseases don't have a high risk score so Gene variants aren't predictive yet genes are still causal And here's why this is going to be a super simplified explainer but to try to make it easier to understand we're going to consider a gene that I'm just going to call Fred now we all have a version of the Fred Gene and all Fred genes make Fred proteins some people have a version of Fred that pumps out an excess of Fred proteins and this allows scientists to see that a lot of Fred proteins leads to elevated LDL

cholesterol levels which is Causally linked to heart disease so scientists make a drug that inhibits anyone's Fred from making Fred proteins so now anyone with elevated LDL cholesterol can take a Fred inhibitor to to block their Fred now we all have a Fred Gene and because Fred's proteins can cause elevated LDL cholesterol linked to heart disease it means the frede is causally linked to heart disease even if heart disease is Multifactorial meaning thousands of factors are causal contributors to heart disease very obvious that scientists have got to recognize different forms of causation and you've got

to distinguish between them otherwise there's a terrible m active differs from passive causation Aristotle actually divided it up into round four I add another two because coding is a kind of cause the cause that arises because of a form and the DNA as A sequence is a form is not the same kind of causation as neutronian things banging into each other that is active causation I'm saying that active causation in organisms is the function of proteins not of genes that does not mean that genes are not causal um because they make the proteins because they

make a protein precisely yes Noble agrees that genes are causal contributors to disease and genetic Research has been instrumental in developing drugs to treat diseases but even the genetic epidemiologist who ran the polygenic risk score study said that at the moment there are very few diseases that are possible to cure but here's the thing Noble's research has shown adaptive and functionally flexible causation and biology where various other genes in the network and even non- gentic mechanisms like RNA hormones and Microorganisms jump in and compensate for a bum Gene without missing even a heartbeat so instead

of focusing on genetic reductionism where we try to break a person apart and sift through the thousands hundreds of thousands of different genetic and non- gentic factors that might causally contribute to disease Noble is suggesting we look at the whole person and the variety of ways we may be able to restore function the biological nature of Causation challenges genetic determinism in the US Congress had to enact the genetic information non-discrimination act Gina in 2008 to prevent employers and health insurance companies from discriminating against people based on flawed oversimplified assumptions about the causal relationship between genes

traits behaviors and disease which the polygenic risk score study suggests might be a confusion about causation in Biology as far as I'm aware biomedical research relies on reductionism how do we do science how do we do important research if reductionism turns out to be seriously inadequate well I sorry to do an advert but quite written there explanation for that it understanding living systems should that be required reading for all medical students is do you think we need an overhaul of our well this is what this says we need to change our our Biology yes I'm

not the only person to say that I just published in February a review of a book by Philip B A scientific correspondent in one-time editor of nature um it's published in nature on the 8th of February and simply called genes are not the blueprint for life ball concludes that we are at the beginning of a profound rethinking of how life Works Philip B um he's written a much longer book than mine this is quite short it's just 150 pages and it's Extremely simple is is a kind of guide for the working biologist to what he

calls the new biology that's the phrase he uses if genes are not the blueprint what is the blueprint there isn't one that's the point you see you can only get life from Life let me qualify that I'm not opposing the idea and I know that Stuart calman and others are very keen on exploring it that somehow it's a natural Process for life to emerge on a planet that seems to me to be perfectly the way to go and to work out what are the conditions in which autocatalytic sets can start in which membranes can exist

and once all of that's happened bang you're off and life is developing Evolution then will take you the rest of the way I'm not opposed to uh to any of that story at all what I am saying though is this once life has taken off to ask the question where does the Purpose of the living system come from where does it agency It's ability to go this way rather than that way to choose how to find his food how to mate and all the rest of it which incidentally Darwin was also very keen on in

thinking about his ideas about what he called sexual selection it doesn't make sense to say how on Earth does something like purpose arise from simple chemistry I'm saying that that is a process which you can only take as the Whole it's the whole that gives the purpose to the parts how does that derive from Evolution how does that how how does I mean this is such a basic question that you know I think we just take for granted because we are purpose of beings but how would an would purpose be a function of an organism

it's a it's it's process that has evolved wasn't there before so are You in the same camp that functions are this emergent property in biological systems functions are emergent prop properties yes the function to feed the function to reproduce the function to perform any of the things that we do which characterize what we call living all of those are something that has emerged from the chemistry of the world not there before is it correct to regard organisms as purposive and it seems utterly incredible to anybody say They're not Evolution has generated purpose and that's what

the ne is do not like at all to them it seems to give wind to their creationist opponents which of course is a form of theism would would the concern be and maybe I'm misunderstanding this but if evolution can act on an organism top down and develop purpose and it's not subject to reductionism it almost seems like you could take a step back and and have a theological explanation for Evolution like a purpose of oh abely there's a book just published by MIT by about 20 authors called Evolution on purpose now we're coming to the

Deep Rift between Darwin and his Neo darwinist opponents Wallace vicman they wanted to get rid of the concept of purpose Darwin was entirely with it because what he saw in organisms like the peacock or in squid or in the octopus what he saw was clearly purposive Behavior now the neod darwinist say well let just quaint 19th century anthropomorphic talking of course he's no longer with us to answer but I think Darwin's reply would be very much the same as I would give no the purpose has evolved it's as simple as that you don't have to

suppose the purpose was there before the organisms existed um the purpose is itself um an evolution Noble has proposed a theory of biological relativity where reductionist scientific Approaches which dominate physics and chemistry and are used to determine causation are insufficient for understanding living systems from origins of Life research to health disease and Consciousness compounding evidence suggests life does not adhere to any privileged level of causation nor does it conform to a purely Newtonian notion of causation arist said there's also what he called the final cause which is Indeed purpose what he understood I think is

that we as organisms can do something now that anticipates the future how important is purpose to your theory the existence of purpose of a agency in organisms is in my view the central point on which in the end the division occurs how are you defining purpose I think purpose is the use of charm to explore strategies for the future it is I've got this array of Options in my repertoire um because of the stochasticity of my uh living system as an organism I am using that to try out in a a proper sense in a

sense you know I've got a hypothesis this could be the future this could be the way which I go will it work and the best way to do that is to try it out and see whether it does so I think purpose can be given a very simple scientific definition it doesn't have to rely on some kind of Spiritualist or religious notion of purpose I think that's a key because one of the big reasons why there's such a divide between uh The evolutionary biologist and the creationist once you start to admit that that organisms have

purpose they religious side will say but there you are then where did that purpose come from I would say it came from me it came from me as an organism so your view doesn't concern itself with a Creator or Intelligent designer no not at all no absolutely not that's that's not to say that those who believe that that is the case are necessarily wrong I have no idea um but what I can say is that I've have no difficulty with attributing purpose to an organism like myself or to the cat or to the mouse and

I I I don't see any reason why because that sometimes is interpreted in a particular religious context one has to avoid using the Concept of purpose as a scientific concept it goes to show that um bias that we attribute to religious belief can be just as applicable to skepticism if you're not open-minded about evidence ex exactly so yes because what's happening I think well I I would sometimes say that Richard's position is very much like a religious position it's got the following characteristics he dogmatic it cannot consider that you might be Wrong second he's got

fantastic notion of original sin we are born selfish I my goodness me what do understand what he saying when he says that as steu uh is saying are we in the middle of a third transition and you have a third way of evolution and it seems to be that there's a shift happening if we're doing Evolution acting top down on an organism how is that explained by these underlying Sciences that kind of explain how the universe works in a sense that's what I was doing in 1960 because people called this biophysics because I was using

a physical model with all the cellular components necessary to let the model work to reproduce the biological process so I am what some people in those days and still do call a biophysicist uniting the two is I've been for a long time editor of a journal called progress in biophysics so yes I Think that is the um challenge but now I come to the really important but which destroys reductionism what I was doing there in that model of the heart is what you have to do for all models in biology which is that the higher

levels of organization constrain what the molecular level does those constraints don't change the laws of the physics and chemistry of those molecules those laws are fixed but whatever you do if you put A number of molecules together in a chamber like a cell or just a bottle the interactions will depend upon what we call the boundary conditions that is how the structure constrains what the molecules can do now look at the structure of a living cell it is exceedingly oh it's like a terribly complex maze membranous systems almost filling all the space in the cell

that's why it doesn't feel like a bubble of water it's it's jelly like it's a bit Like the sauces you mix up which they can almost stand on their own because they're so they're so well structured cells are infinitely complex in structure and that is what constrains the molecules to do what they do so even if you did a biophysical representation of what's going on you are incorporating the you have to call it this the downward causation of the higher level of organization into the equations for the Process because the molecules bump into those membranes

they bump into those constraints constraint is not something that is non-physical but it's nevertheless needed and it's a description at the higher level of organization so are biophysicists then by definition not Neo darwinists because they're going whole organism down instead of genes up well the this gets difficult Andrea um I I don't think any Neod doist would deny that all of that structure exist obviously they have seen the electromicroscopy of cells and know how complex our cells are certainly true what they would say though is yes but that all develops from the DNA because of

the central dogma of molecular biology which is another great mistake of the 20th century sorry if that's going to shock you but it's true the central dogma strictly speaking says from from a DNA Sequence I can make an RNA and from that RNA a special part of the cell the ribosome can make a protein so it uses the code in the DNA transferred into RNA to make a protein with its sequence of amino acids Now That central dogma view is correct I'm not going to challenge that any any way at all where it became incorrect

was the the way the neod interpreted it because they thought they got the equivalent at a molecular level of the vican barrier the barrier between The body and the germline some biologists criticize Noble by claiming biological developments have been accepted and integrated into the modern synthesis but as recently as 2017 a peer reviewer at a scientific journal responded to one of Noble's papers saying the vican barrier as now embodied by the central dogma of molecular biology has not yet been falsified Noble says that he asked that the comments from the peer reviewer be Published but

the request was denied now that sequence from knowing the DNA to the RNA to the protein tells you nothing about what controls the DNA we now know that an army of rnas do so where are they generated they're generated by the epigenetic processes in our cellular organ and tissue structures which are in effect telling the genome what to do worse than that they can do something which the neist don't like at all change the DNA just ask what was Happening during the pandemic our immune systems encountering a coron virus they've never seen before and let's

forget about vaccines for a moment let's look at the natural process our immune system recognizing there was a new Invader was busy telling the immune system cells please mutate as vapidly as possible in just that part of the genome that creates the grabbing part of the immunoglobuline that's the protein that grabs the virus create a Million new versions then we will select the one that grabs the virus and that's prec Ely what the immune system does it changes the genome not supposed to be possible happens all the time the conventional take on this is that

these changes to the DNA are still the result of natural selection just a sped up warp speed version of natural selection inside the body dentist is saying no the organism is the one Turbocharging natural selection and using it to fight off an Invader so the organism is doing natural selection on purpose can I ask I love this story and I hope it's true it's a theory that i' I've read that viruses started off as living cells that were parasites on other living cells and then Evolution was like you don't need to be alive to be

a parasite and de evolved life out of its gene pool that's quite possible yes and I'm not not necessarily opposing That theory no that's right what that meant is that they couldn't live outside a body so life for the organism was just a trait it's a process that's so so viruses are literally the undead they're they they're dead outside a cell yes they're living inside a cell because they've got the ability to code for the protein that enables them to reproduce so that is a real Theory That that's know that's not a the any all

we know way that's true that that they were once alive and then they de well okay no no we we can't be sure of that I think the better way to put it Andrea would be to say it's quite possible that that's how viruses started as forms of life that realize they didn't need to carry around the whole panoply of a cell in order to exist because they can exist as a v spiral particle outside a cell but they Can only reproduce inside a cell interesting so so Evolution can work on an organism to make

it no longer an organism well Evolution has often done that the fact is that we life has regressed quite frequently into simpler life forms so the idea that viruses might have Arisen the same way that they found if you like to put it that way that they could exist as spores viral spores outside a cell but whenever they managed to get inside a cell to attack a Cell and get into it they could reproduce well automatically they would go on Surviving so every time we get infected we reproduce them so they can reproduce without being

alive like I understand regression but regression to the point of no longer being alive think so yes wow how should we put it put those viruses on a completely nassen planet with no life on it at all they would just stay there for billions of years we're doing nothing because Nothing to let them reproduce and only a living cell can do that when they uh parasitically attached to us they don't become alive they're still non-living is that right that's a very interesting question what is alive I'm not playing jokes here um inside a cell a

molecule because that's what a virus is it's a DNA molecule perhaps with a little bit of protein around it so it's simply molecules now in our cells to it's incorrect to say that our molecules are Alive our cells are alive because coming back to su's ideas they are Canon holes that's what he would Define as the potential for being a living system so the best way I would put it would be to say any of the molecules in our cells outside the cell is dead virus is a particular example of that as molecules just DNA

they are dead but when they're in a Cell they are part of a living Process and that living process now includes the replication of the virus so it's inaccurate to say we give them life they are altering our life their entry into us has altered our life and possibly even killed it yes exactly so essentially evolution is acting on the whole to develop functions if it's doing that and the functions are that important this function serve the purpose of the whole would there be a way for evolution to work on the whole That isn't purposeful

because functions themselves have ingrained purpos yes they're ingrained with purpose you can't have a function which doesn't have a purpose no I think that's absolutely correct so so purposiveness then is is sort of ingrained in evolution it's part of the evolutionary process I think it is yes that's right yes and I think that was true from the earliest cells so purpose then is is an objective part of the evolutionary Process I think it's an objective thing and it can be therefore investigated scientifically exactly so it's been my purpose for the last seven years to try

In Articles to first of all explain how significant the harnessing of stochasticity is how it's undeniable in the case of the immune system I think it's also undeniable in the case of the nervous system and how it is that that gives organisms the purpose that they show in the immune system of course it's Not a single cell that is doing it because he can't any single cell in the process is it's totally chance whether it gets the right immunoglobulin or not is the recognition by the system as a whole that these cells are the ones

that should be told to reproduce the rest are given the autophagy signal so there is a non-conscious aware Wess of the value of these precisely so that we are not conscious of this that's OB obviously so but it is cognition in the sense that It's intelligent it's selecting precisely those cells from the immune system that succeeded in making the imunoglobulin needed let me ask you then why why do you think we just go but it's not ious like we don't know what Consciousness is we don't necessarily have to make sure it's only this one thing

we'll say it's intelligent it's cognition it's this it's problem solving why do we take Consciousness out of it do you think It's potentially like hey maybe it could be but let me let me see what I can do with that first I've no difficulty with purposiveness being unconscious now that raises the question why then do we also have conscious processes that can be said to be our intentions I don't think it's correct for me to say that because my immune system creates the right immunoglobuline to attack the virus that I intended to Make that imunoglobulin

I think that's a misuse of intentional language so there is a clear division here an unconscious process that uses the harnessing of stochasticity to produce purposive behavior is not necessarily intentional I think that's the way I would put it in philosophical terms interesting that's clearly so because the immune system is not conscious how do we know well now that's a very good Question Andre uh we don't know so it's not our Consciousness no absolutely oh oh I like that distinction okay so all we can say for sure is we're not consciously doing it ourselves whatever

our is and selves is but our bodies are ask the following question we exist because cells came together and found the mechanism to be uh assembling themselves into structures that is a body that has different functions for the different Cell types now all of those cells were at one time in going way back in the evolutionary process isolated single cells there are even organisms that go through stages in their life cycle in which they are just free floating amiea likee single cells and then come together to form the very elaborate Spore forming process to reproduce

The Colony if you want to call it that so we've all as multicellular organisms derived from single cells that came Together now the Single Cell itself is clearly called cognitive it's got a a bacteria has many cognitive features in what it does and I think it's correct to use the word cognition about about it I don't know what it must be like to be a bacterium but I don't even know what it must be like to be a bat to quote another famous philosopher and I don't think I need to know that what I need

to know is that the EV Process has somehow found a way in which my Consciousness is not the consciousness of my particular cells it's something that emerged from the coming together of a vast number of cells in a single organism a multicellular organism and it's makes perfect sense to me that part of those processes are not open to my conscious intent I don't see why they it should can we Define cognitive based Evolution CBE it's an alternative to neod Darwinism uh it it proposes cellular intelligence cells are capable of measuring and responding to their environment

it redefines life as fundamental based on cognitive abilities of cells and evolution is continuous non-random process where cells solve problems to adapt and survive yeah it seems to me that it's correct to say just as AI is cognitive it's a form of cognition which is enabling a solution to a question can you write This essay for me on XY Z and uh life is certainly doing the same kind of thing so I've no hesitation in describing a cell as cognitive I've no hesitation in describing our nervous systems as cognitive and I don't see why we

should have any hesitation in doing that I think we want to be special in our brains we want to think that there's this little special orb in our head that has all these special properties that are make us very unique if we attribute That to AI I can't see why we shouldn't attribute it to an even more complicated process which is the living cell the harnessing of stochasticity is a purposive process and therefore it could also be another definition of of purpose interesting that's interesting um that's really interesting that's that's how you can get you

see the neutral description is the harnessing of stochasticity and the immune system people will be totally happy with that Um I go on a bit further and say but that is precisely what organisms are doing when they are behaving purposefully they're also harnessing stochasticity now where you define the edge between no purpose and purpose that that's a philosophical question which I'm very happy to debate at length well it may be philosophical at this point but it's really important for science like it's just not touched yet I I think because we don't know how to define

it Test it whatever it is but so when you say purpose evolved like Consciousness purposiveness and Consciousness have themselves developed and become more and more impressive no doubt about that so we're look at a process continually enriching what the possibilities are but I think if one starts asking the question was the earlier cell purely mechanical I don't think it can have been that's interesting so so because that was one of my questions is if it's If purpose is a part of evolution and we know that evolution is what brings life into existence how did purpose

and evolve from life like how how does how does purpose be part of evolution even before life I guess is what I'm asking that's asking the origin of Life question isn't it which we have not solved we'll skip it that I'm afraid is difficult some people think that the earliest stages at which autocatalytic networks which is the first stage of a Possibility of a process that continues all the time to continue to create itself and to maintain itself that's what we mean by autocatalytic that could have happened in the way some people describe it in

the Deep fishes of the rocks of the earth so that the maintaining of the autocatalytic network in a restricted space might have been a geological feature but at some stage those autocatalytic networks acquired Membranes once they've got membranes they've got purpose because you see there's constraint by the membrane itself that is what is maintaining the Integrity of that Network it doesn't disperse out into the general solution it stays within that cell uh structure so purpose emerges because it's constrained Within an an agent an entity that's how you sort of get purpose out of it is

because exactly and it becomes an individual Because of that before that happened it would be well autocatalytic networks forming by chance within what we describe as the Primal soup of the ocean um but it would be temporary it would just disperse itself you've got to some stage to constrain it you've got somehow another to encapsulate it so it is an individual not just a mass of reactions so purpose has to be contained that's really interesting um so so what is non-conscious purpose what is is it a Process is it a thing like what is that

well it's certainly not a thing I don't think life is a thing either you see I think it's a process I I think this is one of the big difficulties that the neod is have and at root it is a philosophical difficulty as I see it you see um if you were given all the molecular processes molecular elements rather um as uh already listed and within this structure which is the cell Um you wouldn't have described what is happening because simply enumer in what there is there cannot do that it's the structure of the processes

and processes do have structures they have ways in which they move around the network that is a process not a thing and that's a fundamental difference between the ontology of things and the ontology of processes that's that's also really interesting so so I was when I was thinking about purpose and I was Trying to sort of parse it apart from the new jerk reaction that theists have or creationist have and science has about what it is do you think we have this sort of very limited or il- defined definition of purpose because it has for

us when we when we intersect with it it has feels like it has a feeling to it so it might be more than that like it might be a non-conscious process but to us we experience it as a feeling so we think oh this like conscious qualia property And you're saying it's a process it's the process exactly yes well and we can describe it you see if I go back to the heart rhythm I would say this channel opens ions go through and create a voltage change which makes this channel close and that other one

over there open and that creates more current flow and eventually the current flows are such that the voltage goes back to where it was at the beginning and the whole process can start again and you end up With beautiful cardiac Rhythm you see I can describe all of that in purely mechanical terms but it's still a process it didn't need an oscillator the process itself generates the oscillation and you don't need to have something there that is forcing it to go up and down there's nothing there forcing it to go up and down it just

emerges from the properties but there's nothing ghostly about that because what we're opposing is anything that says Once you attribute purpose to something you are automatically uh committing yourself to a kind of cartisian dualism there has to be a ghost in the machine well we're saying there's none the only thing that's there are these processes which automatically generate those processes that matter life it's so funny because Pro processes sound very kind of um boring U for me I don't believe in a God I don't believe in much of anything but Life and that process is

magical like it's it's I know it is incredible I've got a banana plant growing in my garden at the moment and it's putting out these extraordinary worlds of um you know that eventually create the the banana leaves you could then characterize all the mathematical equations you could say it's using of course he's not using any mathematical equations and I would say on that you see that nowhere in that process is there a ghost the modern Synthesis also called Neo Darwinism says that unguided processes over millions and billions of years shape the evolution of complex living

systems and attributing purpose to Evolution and networks of cells is anthropomorphizing which is a describing human characteristics or behavior to non-human things like animals objects or processes however there's an alternative take on all this it's that our own experience of purpose is an Anthropomorphizing of an objective process or organizing principle that is essential and fundamental to all living systems from cells to organisms to communities of organisms and to whole biospheres the process within it just as I found in the heart cell work that I did way back in 1960 it just emerges from the process

itself it is the thing if you want to call it that so but it's so it's a kind of a a brain breaker because a designer sort of implies an External intelligence but with purpose the organism designs itself you just need three or four billion years so in your view too with this cont and whole then it still takes the billions of years of evolution like RNA world theory where it just takes so long for this RNA to finally get to the point where life then can spontaneously arrive in an autocatalytic set or I think

that's the chances are that the earliest stages were at least a billion years I mean That's the period for which we know life existed but there's extremely little evidence fossil evidence of that being the case so you're not um incompatible with Neo Darwinism entirely like it just seems like it's um there's just more to the story well except as they made there a few rather critical mistakes you see the vicman barrier which was a Cornerstone has gone the central dogma interpreted to mean that organisms do not change the DNA has gone so the differences are

assumptions like there were just assumptions put on this model um well yes in a sense you're right you know if you asked what was vian's evidence for the barrier he said it must exist I've got all the quotes on that you can have as many quotes as you like and if you remove the assumptions do you does it totally make room for what You're saying yes why do you think Neo darus would dig in into something that there's so little you have to get up give up if you just get rid of those you're quite

right and I'm writing a book at the moment trying to say exactly that what do you really disagree with me on you know let's go through the list I've just gone through a few be in the list you see the the vicman barrier gone um the idea that um jeans alone are sufficient to create us gone um no no I Think it's a very good question but I think that becomes a sociological question and there are sociologists asking that question well I I feel like when I I of course we were rewatched the quote unquote

debate with you and Dawkins and I think I wondered if because it's it was characterized as a conversation if that's why it went so beautifully because it really is the gold standard of scientific debates like it's justful I think it was a I think it Was a debate it was called a conversation at Richard's request and I agreed with that I don't mind with you when calls it a conversation or a debate but I totally agree it's the it's the way debate should be done in U that kind of environment with courtesy and at least

an attempt to understand the other side I'm wondering if Dawkins understood what you meant by the type of cause so he's not giving up genes as having an influence he's not giving up any of that It's this other type of cause if he can agree on that that's all he doesn't even have to agree on purpose because that's another assumption we're going to test he can just agree it's not genes and we can move on so if he could accept that argument he will be left with the fact that yes genes in a sense are

causable they've got associations with all of this and they certainly are necessary for making all the proteins in our bodies isn't that enough it's not Necessary it's not necessarily needed because the function of the organism can continue even in its absence which is the heart of adaptability exactly it is the heart of that and for 95% of genes that is true you can knock one out and the rest of the organism will continue as so it better and of course I put that point to him he said well Dennis if we all know about robustness

the question is has he Understood that that means that his nation of cause is in question it is as Richard correctly said and he said look Dennis the problem is if if you're right I and many other people have been wrong for 50 years he's absolutely right of course but that doesn't defend the issue that only simply says look it's big it's it's really serious and I couldn't agree more it is serious it's a very strange Psych That is developing here speaking of Richard I got one response via email all right okay I reached out

for comment and he said I have a whole chapter dealing with Dennis Noble in my next book the genetic Book of the Dead it will be available in September oh okay well I'm delighted I'm delighted you will have a whole chapter dealing with me I don't have much confidence in it really dealing with me I asked if he would if he had anything to anything additional To add to that or anything to clarify and I got no response so that was it okay well I I well look I'm very happy if he has a go

that that's fantastic I I I long for the near do is to have a go and and then we can have a proper discussion but it would require what we're doing at the moment which is dissecting out these fundamental decis distinctions between the different forms Of causation and without that you don't have a proper science of causation well I'll tell you what when it comes out let's touch Bas and we can go through that chapter EXA so I would invite to do that so is it true we you mentioned this briefly that um there it's

very hard in Academia to talk about these ideas these unorthodox ideas and you didn't feel you could actively start being head of this movement until you retired in 2004 2004 is when I retired from being a a Professor running a big laboratory I was therefore from there on no longer responsible for applying to research organizations for Grants to support the salaries of people in my group so I was no longer in a position in which my own unorthodox views could damage the career years of people working in my laboratory that's the reason I only started

writing in 2004 and the first publication was the music of Life which indeed is very clear about descending from the standard Neist synthesis so all the way from 2006 I've been very clear about that if I had been as indeed I was for the first 10 years or so when I came out is the right way of putting it on this issue I was denigrated and with some pretty uh strong language if that had damaged my reputation to the point at which it would have been difficult for me to get the grant money that would

support the salaries of a team I would in effect by my own actions in relation to expressing My views on Evolution have damaged their careers as simple as that I couldn't do that in doing background research I found Noble's been on the receiving end of some fairly vulgar attacks from other biologists so I asked Noble if responses to his research and ideas are changing at all in 2016 together with two other scientists and two philosophers I organized a meeting at the Royal Society in London the top Academy of the United Kingdom Together with also the

British Academy which is the social science side of all of this and we organized a meeting on new trends in evolutionary biology that meeting triggered a major protest from leaders of the neod alvinist synthesis there was actually a protest trying to stop the meeting happening in the form of a signed letter to the president of the Royal Society saying please dissociate the society from this meeting so that meeting went ahead there's a History to that which we don't need to go into but it was quite difficult history the interesting thing is this since that meeting

I am no longer attacked the Silence from the other side is deafy has there been any response to the nature review that I did a few weeks ago with the very provocative title genes are not the blueprint for life nobody's replied I look for forward to a Reply but there's been no reply either to the articles that were published in 2017 after that 2016 meeting at the Royal Society I think there was a Tipping Point there Gene Centric Paradigm that's that has to go this is Joanna Xavier a bioengineer specializing in systems biology and origins

of Life research Xavier studied under Noble and went on to collaborate with Stuart Kaufman identifying emergent autocatalytic networks and ancient Bacteria as potential candidates for how life emerges Xavier started the origin of Life early career Network that now has over 200 interdisciplinary researchers from around the world this group co-authored an inaugural paper to start a new chapter in the field I'll be posting the full interview with Joanna I'm glad to see Dennis making so much progress there it's urgent and that has implications that stretch far beyond science What do I find now I meet young

people doing research in my own University and in other universities who are working within a paradigm that is totally different from the neod DAR inist paradig can they do so yes they can do you think though in terms of just having these theories that have robust evidence for so much of them and then there's assumptions placed on them to sort of tell a story a cohesive story do you think there's a way we could potentially Going forward see how often this is flawed like take H for example he had an incredible story about how the

mind worked and so much of those pieces underpin science we have today but he tied it up in in a great little bow to tell a story and the whole story itself was wrong but we want to tell a story so I wonder if there's a way that when we we have models and we tell stories about how something works we can look at the evidence and then parse apart our Assumptions and go let's have this team of scientists run off with an assumption to to tell the story this way and this team run off

and tell the story this way and I'll both of them have the evidence and we'll just see who's more right after 20 years indeed so I I I I give way to the philosophers on everything to do with you needing to have certain things and ideas in place before you can even do science that's correct yes science is not a Bank sheet that starts With no assumptions whatsoever that kind of science is just St collecting we just collect facts and I'm not doing that I realize that but so it it strikes me though that assumptions

are being taken as evidence right because that's how this got so entrenched so is there a way to sort of disambiguate between the evidence we have and the assumptions we need to make this model work and test it and then we can we cannot dig so deeply into it that It becomes a fight and you're picketed when you give a lecture I I like that approach um I would love to find a way of defusing the tension and the the standing off that we experienced for example that Royal Society meeting in 2016 there were just

a few NE darwinists at the meeting and um it was like a gladiatorial confrontation and I don't think that's necessary so I'm with you in the sense that surely we can find a narrative Think what you're calling a story um okay it's a story a narrative a model I don't mean to call it a story that's too BL but I'm trying to arrive at a point which I can say I don't think we any of us seriously disagree about six or so major features of the story I'm telling in which case why are we having

the argument well this is this is the this is sort of the bigger question that I'm trying to get at is I presume that This has real world significant practical implications for the development of therapies and treatments and and Medicine Abol it's critical to the future of healthc care Francis Collins who led the Genome Project in the United States put it very well in the lecture he gave we will have the cures for cancer cures for cardiovascular disease cures for Alzheimer cures for schizophrenia because where are all the Genetic cures they don't exist where will

they be they won't exist look this approach doesn't work what will work I think I know one possible way forward but that means you're going to have to respect the integrative aspect of any living organism to probe its ability to switch from this to that say disease state to non- disease state or whatever it might be by much more subtle methods focusing on a higher level of Organization I recently met at Stanford University in its biox facility which is an Institute for bringing the different disciplines together this is a a young scientist who is trying

to investigate Alzheimer but taking the view that the top priority is to restore function not to find a gene for Alzheimer so I think it it is absolutely right for you to say what's the narrative you're going to give what what you're going to put in the place of Something which has failed and I think it's a perfectly valid challenge yeah and I'm I'm not even necessarily saying we should have a story I just think that that's what we do to make a model you take your evidence and you you we are story makers and

we need to be able to test something we can make sense of and so we put it into a story and that might just be twoo small assumptions it could be very it's not it's not like we're making things up We just have to grant me these two things and this model works just I think we have to be so skeptical of those two assumptions instead of getting entrenched in this is what it is I'm afraid we would done better to back several horses at once I say this not as somebody gloating over it because

I I face the same problem as many other people face in the families having to deal with serious illness with social care that costs more than you can ever Afford so I've been through all of that I know what what it what it does to families too and I we've been told now that AI is going to help solve all these problems and um and expedite disease uh treatments and and and new drug discoveries um what I think is interesting is I heard Jeffrey Hinton The Godfather of AI talk about how AI was set back

because everyone believed n chomsky's uh theory of language which wasn't evidence based on fact check it Was actually the CEO of Google Deep Mind Demis hassabis who said this in a conversation with Jeffrey Hinton when they were talking about the debunking of chomsky's theory of language and I just keep seeing this pattern of of us being held back by these assumptions and it's just we have to back more than one horse in science do you have any thoughts on AI as a new intelligent thing I think there's a very simple reason why AI won't do

for us what we really want Which is in practice to create superhuman ability Al those sounds crazy when you first state it to create AI that would compete with our ability in creativity we would require computers made not of silicon not of solids but of water we are nowhere near knowing how to create computers based on water and that's what a cell is now why does that Better in water there is an enormous amount of stochasticity all the molecules in our cells are wandering around in stochastic fashion we harness that sto acticity which is absolutely

fast and I don't think that AI based on Silicon machines can possibly do that when you say stochasticity the unpredictableness that's found in these systems is that what you're saying is the the sort of source of the creativity enormous it's it's in our cells at the Molecular level at the neural level and certainly at the social level I'm arguing that the characteristic of a human is that we are capable of har Hing that stochas Sy we Channel it just as the plants worked out how to channel the stochastic arrival of photons from the Sun into

directed guided creation of ATP that was a brilliant harnessing of stochasticity those those particles arriving completely randomly they are channeled by the plant into being a Beautiful Storehouse of energy which we can eat the same thing applied to the immune system system telling the immune reproductive replicating molecules to generate millions of new DNA sequences and then choosing amongst them stochasticity is the center of creativity in organisms to just try to Nutshell what that means is that is that uh an organized hole A conent ho's ability to take the unpredictable and make and be creative with

it to be Intelligent with it to make predictions with it precisely which is what I think a Beethoven did which is what I think almost any artist is capable of doing the ability of humans but of other organisms too to be extraordinarily inventive is I think based on that harnessing of stochasticity from the debate between you and uh dkin it didn't strike me that he was so as resistant to your ideas as I thought he might be um he didn't know How to answer them that's right so he didn't challenge them directly my the the

the thing I just want to impart to you is I I would love in my lifetime to see you two be able to agree oh if only for the symbolism and there's no gesture I think more honorable for a skeptic to be able to be skeptical of their own assumptions and theories and that would be an incredible um uh gesture of Integrity into intellectual Integrity I think to Be able to to uh to reassess and right well you know um I think Darwin did that throughout his life he he did not think towards the end

of his life as he thought at the beginning when he first published the Origin of Species he came to understand that he had not explained the Origin of Species that's quite something that the were other processes That had to be added in addition to Natural Selection W has disagreed with him and the rest is history and if he had survived long enough do you think we might be on a different trajectory oh yes indefinitely so if Darwin as he was at the end of his life had won out and not being suddenly replaced vian's barrier

idea was published in 1883 Darwin died in 1882 so didn't even know viceland's idea oh but we know from what he writes That he would have disagreed so it was that critical and it it was unchallenged by Darwin because he died the year before he died the year before and that was then left to romanes his colleague who worked with him for 20 no about 10 years um before Darwin died they used to meet at downouse the place where Darwin had his laboratory his Greenhouse where he had all the insec iferous plants and so on

now George ranes wrote a three volume book I've got it in my library Next door um Darwin and after Darwin it was published four years after Darwin died 1886 it's all in there and I'm in the process of resurrecting all of that indeed already done so was an article in the Journal of physiology explaining how romanes and Darwin had a solution to the question of the origin species but it was not what Darwin published in 1859 I've got more Bombshells to Appear there's a vast story here and it it really goes back to those arguments

in the 19th century I have young people helping me with all of this because believe me I can't do all of this on my own my point of view is a good time to be alive and and as it happens I'm still alive yes [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause]