In
The Restless Clock Stanford Professor
of History Jessica Riskin suggests there might be a flaw in how explanations
are done in the life sciences, perhaps even in all the sciences. The current
model, which she finds incomplete, treats all of nature as a machine whose
parts are made of passive, inert matter, moving only when set in motion by
external forces. Natural entities are themselves viewed as empty of any active
power of their own, of any force, will, purpose, self-direction,
self-organization, any trace of what she calls in general “agency.” In order to
challenge this paradigm, which she characterizes as "brute
mechanistic" or "passive mechanistic," she reviews the history
of modern science since the seventeenth century, showing how this dominant view
has always been shadowed by alternate views explaining nature in terms that do
include agency.
The
passive mechanistic model was established during the seventeenth century, but
not only as a foundation for purely rational, mechanistic explanations of the
world. There was also a religious dimension to regarding nature as a machine, a
gigantic clockwork. To the thinkers of that time the wondrous complexity of
nature and the marvelous fitness of all its parts required a Great Designer
existing outside nature — thus, the Argument from Design. Also, if there was no
force within nature responsible for its motion and organization, the force must
be outside, in other words, a God winding up the great clock of the universe.
Riskin believes that science today, secular and at the same time denying agency
in nature, is failing to explain the origin of motion and organization in
nature.
As
a prime example of an early attempt at describing nature as containing its own
agency (which she calls "active mechanism"), she offers a quote from
Leibniz. He reinterpreted the idea of a clock as something more than a passive
device deriving its activity solely from outside forces, and he provided her
the title for her book. “In German,“ Leibniz wrote, “the name for the balance
of a clock is Unruhe—that is to say
disquiet. One could say that it is the same thing with our body, which can
never be perfectly at ease: because, if it were, a new impression of objects, a
little change in the organs, in the vessels and viscera, would change the
balance and make these parts exert some small effort to get back to the best
state possible; which produces a perpetual conflict that is, so to speak, the
disquiet of our Clock.” Leibniz's clock is a mechanism, explainable in terms of
its component parts, but self-organizing under the power of its own balance, a mechanism
with agency, a restless clock.
The Restless Clock gives a
detailed discussion of the interaction of theories of passive and active
mechanism over a period of more than three hundred years. An astonishing number
of cases are covered, from Descartes, Leibniz, and Lamarck to John von Neumann,
Stephen Jay Gould and Ray Kurzweil, with dozens more in between. The issue
shows up not fully resolved even in the chapter on Darwin who, while usually
adamant in rejecting agency in nature, nevertheless lapsed occasionally,
admitting the existence of natural powers such as “tendencies” or the innate
power to vary.
What
would it mean to include agency in scientific explanations? Riskin offers only
a few suggestions, such as a heliotropic plant following the path of the sun or
electrons moving to conserve charge. But she points out that, in fact, even now
scientists often use language that suggests agency: they speak of cells wanting
to move toward a wound, proteins regulating cell divisions, or genes dictating
the production of enzymes. Scientists insist that such phrases are mere figures
of speech, shorthand taking the place of a complete, rigorous,
passive-mechanistic description. If that rigorous explanation is not known
today, they maintain, it will be found in the future. That hope, according to
Riskin, is an article of faith, not of science. She suggests, instead, that
agency be given a place in scientific explanations as “a primitive feature of
the natural world like force or matter, an aspect of the very stuff of nature’s
machinery, and especially its living machinery.”
The
final chapter focuses on an influential treatise by Erwin Schrödinger, a
founder of quantum physics. In “What Is Life?” he argued, first, that a living
creature is a machine by definition in that it produces and maintains order.
“Schrödinger explained that molecules were configurations of atoms occupying
their lowest energy level. In order to change configurations, they needed to
receive at least a minimum quantum of energy. The stability of a molecule could
perhaps account for the order-producing capacity of genes, responsible for
maintaining the structure of living organisms both within individuals and
across generations.” But Schrödinger goes on to claim that a living creature is
more than a machine; it is essentially an agent because, by means of its action
of eating, drinking, breathing, photosynthesizing, and so forth, it resists
entropy — it avoids decaying into equilibrium. A living creature is thus a
clock — but a restless one, a machine with agency.
Despite
its detailed scholarship — or perhaps because of it — The Restless Clock is unlikely to win many overnight converts. It
winds its way through innumerable theories, debates, and descriptions, through
many people, a great deal of biographical material, but with little effort made
to tie the pieces together, to summarize, to reveal an overall pattern. The
impression is often of a catalogue rather than an argument.
However,
if nothing else, as theory piles upon theory, and one debate shades into
another, the book certainly illustrates how terribly difficult it has been for
civilization to sort out such a jumble of ideas and arrive at the understanding
of the world we now have. And along the way it unearths a truly astonishing collection
of historical curiosities.
It
even has moments of comedy, as when it describes many elaborate mechanical
systems that royalty and other high-ranking Europeans constructed on their
grounds in the late medieval and early Renaissance periods. These perceiving
and responsive machines were able to sense the presence of people and react to
them, for example, tempting visitors to pause before a beautiful scene, then
bombarding them with a cloud of flour or spraying them with water from hidden
pipes, or luring them to sit on a bench, then soaking their bottoms. It was
comedy, but it also marked the beginning of machines exhibiting humanlike
capabilities.
