No Newton for a Blade of grass

Perhaps the greatest of Newton's defenders among philosophers was the late-eighteenth century philosopher Immanueal Kant. In 'The Critique of Pure Reason,' Kant tried to show that when it came to physics, Newtonian mechanics was the only game in town. But he insisted no one could ever do for biology what Newton did for physics -- banish purpose and design from it. In 1790, he famously wrote, "It is absurd to hope that another Newton will arise in the future who will make comprehensible by us the production of a blade of grass according to natural laws which no longer has ordered."

"No Newton for the blade of grass" became the slogan of those who drew a line in the sand of science and dared physics to cross it. What Kant meant was that when we get past physics and into biology, the physics of matter and fields was not going to be enough to explain things. Only purpose could do the job. As in so many other areas of science and philosophy, Kant managed to get this one badly wrong. Only about 20 years after he wrote those immortal words, the Newton on the blade of grass was born to the Darwin family in Shropshire, England.

Kant was not alone in making this mistake. It continues to be made right down to the present. Its source is people's love of stories with plots. That's how explanations that invoke purposes or designs work: they are stories with plots. Because only such explanations provide relief from the psychological discomfort of curiosity, we seek them elsewhere. But they are absent in physics, most people have very little interest in it. Now only is physics too hard -- too much math -- what it explains is either boringly obvious, absolutely scary, or completely unintelligible (quantum superpositions). Worst of all, it's not stories. What most people are really interested in is biology. And the reason biology is so interesting is how neatly and often how weirdly things are arranged to look like they happy ending of a story. Nature seems to show the obvious marks of purpose or hand of design everywhere. ~ Page 48

The anti reductionist has to hold that the meiosis explanation of recombination is “rock-bottom” biology. In Kant’s terms, no “Newton for the blade of grass”; no explanation of meiosis in terms of purely physical science. Of course, an antireductionist accepts that there will be a major discoveries at the macromolecular frontier of biology. It’s just that no matter no matter how impressive, they will neither replace (eliminate) nor explain (reduce) meiosis. Why not? Here is one reason that might be offered, which we should reject, and which indeed antireductionist have explicitly rejected: the cognitive and computational capacities of Homo sapiens (or, for that matter, the maximally cognitively powerful creatures biology could allow for anywhere in the universe) are too puny to either discover or hold together in memory all the molecular details of every way in which meiosis is actually accomplished, and too puny to deploy this information in explanations of meiosis that we (or more powerful agents) could recognize to be explanatory for the process of meiosis as it is variously realized on this planet. Call this the epistemic argument, since it makes reduction an epistemic impossibility. The epistemic argument’s conclusion may, for all we know, be true. - Page 24 - "Darwinian Reductionism" ~ Alex Rosenberg