KAUFFMAN & LONERGAN - New World Order, Of the Emergence of Order in an Evolutionary Universe

7/29/2019 KAUFFMAN & LONERGAN - New World Order, Of the Emergence of Order in an Evolutionary Universe

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New World Order: Kauffman and Lonergan on theEmergence of Order in an Evolutionary Universe

Grant Miller FranciscoDepartment of Theology

Boston College

Stuart Kauffman argues that Darwinian natural selection cannot account for the spontane-ous order ofself-organized systems. This paper lo(>Ls in detail at two ofKauffman s claims: (Ithat life is an emergent property ofautocatalytic sets of chemicals; and (2) that the ontogeneticdevelopment of living organisms is an emergent property of complex networks of genes. Theauthor suggests that there are parallels between Kauffman's ideas about "emergent properties"and Bernard Lonergan 's notion of "emergent probability." He then briefly explores the differentways in which their work on the emergence of order in the universe raises religious cpiestions.

What might a Roman Cathohc theologianand a theoretical biologist have in common?While at first glance there would seem to belittle of substantive interest connecting thework of Bernard Lonergan and StuartKauffman, I want to argue that there are strongaffinities between their projects. Exploringthese affinities will mean looking in somedetail at their understanding of the sources oforder in the universe. From the problem ofthe origin of life to the moiphogenesis of de-veloping organisms, Kauffman finds this or-der emerging in ways that challenge the gradu-alism of Darwinian natural selection.Lonergan's work on the worldview of mod-ern empirical science, which he terms "emer-gent probability," converges in surprisingways with Kauffman's work. To understandthis convergence, one must first examine thesethinkers in the context of their respective en-terprises.

Bernard Lonergan ( 1 904- 1 984) was a Je-suit philosopher and theologian whose pro-fessional career was spent teaching theologyin Roman Catholic universities. Since theSecond Vatican Council, there has been awidespread collapse of the neoscholastic

paradigm for theological studies that hadbeen dominant within Roman Catholiccircles. Yet Lonergan had already becomeaware of the untenability of this paradigmseveral decades before Vatican II. He locatedthe root of the difficulty in the inability ofneoscholastic theology to deal with the meth-ods of both the natural sciences and the criti-cal historical sciences, and he made his life'swork the search for a theological methodol-ogy that could integrate these methods.While Method in Theology (1972) remainsLt)nergan's mature articulation of such atheological methodology, it is in large mea-sure dependent on the foundation laid in hisearlier work. Insight: A Study of HumanUnderstanding { 1957).

Lonergan intended Insight to be "an ex-ploration of methods generally in preparationfor a study of the method of theology." 'Lonergan "s fundamental strategy in this ear-lier work is to understand methodnot justtheological method, but all determinate meth-ods, whether theological, historical, or scien-tificas rooted in a set of invariant structuresoperative within the human subject. Thus, aspart of his overall argument in Insight,

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Lonergan includes on the one hand an analy-sis of the operations which the scientist per-forms as a scientistin other words, an ac-count of scientific knowingand on the otherhand an explicit articulation of the worldviewimplied by this same account of scientificknowing. Lonergan 's tenn for this worldviewis "emergent probability." As I hope to show,aspects of Lonergan's notion of emergentprobabilityin particular his understandingof"schemes of recurrence," development, andfinalityprovide a point of contact with thework of Kauffman.

Stuart Kauffman is a recipient of the pres-tigious MacArthur Fellowship ( 1987-92), andis one of the founding members in 1984 ofthe Santa Fe Institute, a scientific researchcenter devoted to the interdisciplinary studyof the dynamics ofcomplex phenomena. HereI will focus on his work as he presents it inhis book. At Home in the Universe: TheSearch for Laws of Self-Organization andComplexity (1995), a somewhat popularizedversion of his earlier book. The Origins ofOrder (1993).

Kauffman is a theoretical, rather than anexperimental, biologist. A tremendously cre-ative thinker, he spends most of his timespeculating on large-scale questions aboutsuch things as the origins of life, the structureof living organisms, and the behavior of com-plex systems from cells to global economies.As with many of the scientists engaged instudy of the problems of complex dynamicalsystems, he exploits the power of the com-puter and the mathematical models and ex-plorations that it makes possible; his "experi-ments" tend to be "in silico'' rather than ///vitro. He is primarily concerned, then, withasking questions, pursuing promising lines ofinquiry, and hazarding provocative and tan-talizing answers to the questions that he raises.The work of experimental verification heleaves for others. As such, he fills one im-portant role within the ecology of scientificresearch. He is engaged in what philosophersof science would call the ailiculation of a para-digm- or the fonnulation of a scientific re-search programme.^

What is the new paradigm or researchprogrannne that Kauffman proposes? Theleitmotif that runs through his work is thenotion of spontaneous order in nature"or-der for free" as he puts it repeatedly.^ He isconvinced that Darwinian natural selection inand of itself cannot account for the order ob-served in the universe. He proposes the fol-lowing:

[M]uch of the order in organisms maynot be the result of selection at all, butof the spontaneous order of self-organized systems.''

He argues that much of the order withinthe universe is not the accidental outcome ofchance processes, but emerges spontaneously,naturally, in ways that are only beginning tobe understood. According to Kauffman, Dar-winian natural selection is not wrong, but it isinsufficient for understanding these sourcesof spontaneous self-organization. Yet a revi-sion of the Darwinian worldview needs a con-ceptual framework that can embrace both se-lection and self-organization, in which bio-logical evolution can be understood as both a"deeply historical process" and yet "lawlikeat the same time."*' So Kauffman sees hisproject as a search for such a conceptualframework. He proceeds by trying to iden-tify "generic emergent properties" in whichthe whole of a complex system exhibits prop-erties not possessed by any of its parts.^

Kauffman proposes to explore these "ge-neric emergent properties" using three differ-ent examples. First, he takes up "the originof life as a collective emergent property ofcomplex systems of chemicals." Secondly,he investigates "the development of the fer-tilized egg into the adult as an emergent prop-erty of complex networks of genes control-ling one another's activities." Finally, he ex-plores the emergent properties of "the behav-ior of coevolving species in ecosystems thatgenerates small and large avalanches of ex-tinction and speciation."** The origin of life,the ontogeny of the organism, and the coevo-lution of linked populations: each exhibitsemergent properties that Kauffman believes

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may point us toward laws of self-organiza-tion.

Autocatalytic sets as schemes ofrecurrence

As I alluded to above, one of the key as-pects in Lonergan's notion of emergent prob-ability is that of a "scheme of recurrence."What relevance this has to Kauffman'sproject will perhaps become clear in turning

/ want to shift attention to the similar-ity between Kauffman^s notion of col-lectively autocatalytic sets and whatLonergan calls schemes of recurrence.to the first issue that Kauffman takes up: hisunderstanding of the origin of life as a collec-tive emergent property of complex systems ofchemicals. The central idea here is whatKauffman calls an "autocatalytic set." "^ Heintroduces the idea of an autocatalytic set as away of answering(he question ofhow it is thatlife emerges from non-life. But first he pre-sents a thumbnail sketch'" of the history of at-tempts to explain the emergence of life:Alexander Oparin's discovery thatcoascervates could provide high concentrationsof simple organic molecules; Stanley Miller'sdemonstration that many of the fundamentalbuilding blocks of proteins could be synthe-sized abiogenically; Crick and Watson's dis-covery of the double-helix structure of DNA,and the subsequent discovery of the complexmachinery of protein enzymes which mediatesthe work of DNA; finally, the idea that lifecould have begun in much the same way thatnude RNA functions, without DNA or its me-diating structure of protein enzymes. The gen-eral picture painted by these efforts is in ac-cord with the assumptions of Darwinian gradu-alism: a slow accumulation of chance occur-rences that eventually results in living organ-isms. In other words, life emerged simple andbecame complex.

Kauffman has a radically different visionfrom these previous attempts to explain the

origin of life. He argues that life emergedcomplex and whole, and has remained so eversince. The linchpin for his argument is theidea that life emerges as a consequence ofthe catalytic closure characteristic of auto-catalytic sets. The basic idea of an autocata-lytic set is fairly easy to grasp. First of all,"autocatalytic" simply means self-catalyzing.Molecules are created through chemical re-

actions. These chemicalreactions are capable of be-ing catalyzed, or sped up, byother molecules. If the setof molecules formedthrough such catalyzedchemical reactions arethemselves capable of cata-lyzing the very set of reac-

tions that formed them, then the collectionof such self-catalyzing molecular chemicalreactions can be temied an autocatalytic set.Kauffman writes:

At its heart, a living organism is asystem of chemicals that has thecapacity to catalyze its own reproduc-tion. Catalysts such as enzymes speedup chemical reactions that mightotherwise occur, but only extremelyslowly. What I call a collectivelyautocatalytic system is one in which themolecules speed up the very reactionsby which they themselves are fomicd:A makes B; B makes C; C makes Aagain."

Cells, for instance, are autocatalytic sets, be-cause

except for "food molecules," everymolecular species of which a cell isconstructed is created by catalysis ofreactions, and the catalysis is itselfcarried out by catalysts created by thecell.'^

The cell, however, is an enormously complexnetwork of chemical reactions among roughly100,000 different kinds of molecules. It thusseems unlikely that such a vast network ofautocatalytic chemical reactions could emergespontaneously. What Kauffman labors todemonstrate is the possibility that an autocata-lytic set could emerge spontaneously givensufficiently high numbers of chemicals in suf-



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ficiently high concentrations. His argumentdepends on precisely establishing the condi-tions for the emergence of such autocatalyticmolecular systems, and then asking whethersuch conditions can indeed be fulfilled.

Furthermore, Kauffman has to show thatsuch systems (which so far lack DNA) arecapable of reproduction, and that such repro-ducing entities are capable of Darwinian evo-lution through natural selection. These argu-ments take up the bulk ofchapters two tliroughfour. In the end, Kauffman thinks he has madea good case for the plausibility of such a theo-retical model of the origins of life. As I men-tioned above, the further work of scientificexperimentation and verification remains tobe done. Autocatalytic sets may or may notbe the final solution to the mystery of the ori-gin of living systems from nonliving collec-tions of chemicals, but they are certainly anintriguing possibility. The point I want tomake does not have to do with the likelihoodof whether or not Kauffman is right. Instead,I want to shift attention to the similarity be-tween Kauffman's notion of collectively au-tocatalytic sets and what Lonergan callsschemes of recurrence.

The heart of this comparison is the notionof reflexivity. Autocatalytic sets are reflex-ive because they are able to catalyze the veryreactions that produce the catalysts in the firstplace: "A makes B; B makes C; C makes Aagain." But this reflexivity underliesLonergan's notion of a scheme of recurrenceas well. Lonergan's notion of a scheme ofrecurrence is that of a series of events whichare ( 1 ) conditioned, and for which (2) the con-ditions link up to form a closed circuit.Lonergan writes:

The notion of the scheme of recurrencearose when it was noted that thediverging series of positive conditionsfor an event might coil around in acircle. In that case, a scries of events A,B, C,... would be so related that thefulfillment of the conditions lor eachwould be the occurrence of the others.Schematically, then, the scheme mightbe represented by the series ofconditionals: If A occurs, B will occur:if B occurs, C will occur: if C occurs.

. . .A will recur. Such a circulararrangement may involve any numberof temis, the possibility of alternativeroutes, and in general any degree ofcomplexity.'^

As Kenneth Melchin suggests.The basic insight at the center ofLonergan's notion of the recurrencescheme is that of retlexivity.'^

Kauffman's description of autocatalytic setsand Lonergan's notion of schemes of recur-rence are clearly congruent with one another.

But while this reflexivity provides a pointof comparison, there is also a point of differ-ence. Kauffman's autocatalytic set stands asa particular instance of Lonergan's more gen-eral notion. Lonergan suggests several ex-amples of schemes of recurrence:

In illustration of schemes of recurrencethe reader may think of the planetarysystem, of the circulation of water overthe surface of the earth, of the nitrogencycle familiar to biologists, of theroutines of animal life, of the repetitiveeconomic rhythms of production andexchange.'^

A scheme of recurrence is thus a highly gen-eralized or generic notion, capable of the wid-est application.

This difference between particular in-stance and generalized notion is rooted in thedifference between Kauffman's andLonergan's respective projects. In order todeepen my comparison of Kauffman andLonergan, I would like to try and sketch thebroader context for both autocatalytic sets andschemes of recurrence. The two notions areanswers to two different kinds of questions.Kauffman is asking the question: what is theway in which life emerged from non-life? Heintroduces autocatalytic sets as a plausibleanswer to this question. In short, he is seek-ing determinate knowledge about the world(even if he presupposes a division of scien-tific labor by leaving the process of verifica-tion to others).

Lonergan, on the other hand, is asking adifferent question. He wants to understandboth the scientist's knowing, as well as thestructure of the scientifically known.

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Lonergan's question thus has two sides to it:{ 1 ) what does a scientist do when he or sheknows something scientifically? and (2) whatis the general structure of the world, not as itis known through any detemiinate results ofscientific investigation, but as it is known heu-ristically through the structures of scientificknowing?

What does this mean? Lonergan's analysisof scientific knowing focuses on the cognitionalactivities of the scientific knower. What he dis-covers is that scientific inquiry is rooted in whathe calls "the unrestricted desire to know," thehuman capacity to wonder, to ask questionsabout anything and everything. But questionsare one thing; answers are another. Modernempirical science has developed powerful meth-odsLonergan calls them heuristic stnicturesfor guiding this process of asking and answer-ing questions. Heuristic structures are ways ofmoving from the unknown to the known. Justas in algebra, one names the unknown "x" inorder to name its properties, to combine thoseproperties in equations, and finally to solve the

Lonergan^s analysis of scientific knowingfocuses on the cognitional activities of thescientific knower. What he discovers isthat scientific inquiry is rooted in what hecalls ^Hhe unrestricted desire to know,*^ thehuman capacity to wonder.equations for a specific values of "x", so mod-ern empirical science has developed heuristicstructures for naming the unknown.

Lonergan focuses on two of these struc-tures in particular, which he terms classicaland statistical heuristic structures. Both clas-sical and statistical investigations seek to un-derstand the "immanent intelligibility" of theuniverse, but they do so in different ways.Classical investigations seek insight into sys-tematic processes tlirough "the correlation ofmeasurements by means of mathematicalfunctions." "' These insights are generally

expressed as physical laws. This is the sortof heuristic structure employed by Galileo inhis law of falling bodies (d = I/2 Gt-) or byMaxwell in his laws ofelectromagnetism. Thework of statistical investigators, on the otherhand, may be understood in the followingterms:

[Sjtatisticai invesligalions provide ascientific account of nonsystematicprocesses by searching for the prob-abilities with which events occur, whileabstracting from the random differencesfrom those probabilities.'^

Lonergan has in mind here 19th-century de-velopments in thermodynamics and the ki-netic theory of gases, and 20th-century de-velopments in quantum theory. These twotypes of investigation and their resultant in-telligibilities are complementary:

[C]lassical laws tell what would happenif conditions were fulfilled; statisticallaws tell how often conditions arefulfilled.'^

Lonergan's notion of a scheme of recurrenceenters in here as a way of linking classical

y and statistical intelli-gibility into a unifiedwhole. The key pointsare as follows:

( 1 events occur;(2) these events

have probabilities ofoccurring;

(3) some eventsare systematicallylinked to others byclassical laws;

(4) in certain cases events with their re-spective probabilities can be linked in cycles,or schemes of recurrence, by virtue of theirsystematic, classical connections;

(5) these schemes of recurrence them-.selves have probabilities of occurring;

(6) both events and schemes of recurrencehave conditions; and

(7) some schemes of recurrence functionas the conditions for other schemes.This linkage of classical and statistical intel-ligibility through the notion of schemes of re-currence results in the powerful explanatory



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structure which Lonergan temis "emergentprobabiUty":

h results from the combination of theconditioned series of schemes with theirrespective probabilities of emergence andsurvival. While by itself it is extremelyjejune, it possesses rather remarkablepotentialities of explanation.'"

For Lonergan, the universe is fundamen-tally characterized by emergent probability.The universe unfolds through the myriadinterlinking of physical,chemical, biological andpsychic schemes of re-currence. Furthermore,emergent probability isno less operative in hu-man history than it is inthe natural world, hi es-sence, much of the lat-ter half of Insight con-sists of Lonergan 's at-teinpts to explore the significance of emer-gent probability for human history, includingthe huiuan good. Emergent probability isclearly a key idea for Lonergan. What I wantto suggest here is that just as Kauffman's no-tion of an autocatalytic set invites compari-son with Lonergan 's notion of a scheme ofrecurrence, so Kauffman's use of emergenceinvites comparison with emergent probabil-ity. As I pointed out above, Kauffman be-lieves that the origin of life, the ontogeny ofthe organism, and the coevolution of linkedpopulations all exhibit einergent propeilies.Reductionism, holism, and emer-gent probabilityA recurring theme in Kauffman's book isthe notion of emergence, a theme that refersto the relationship between the parts and thewhole. One of his central intuitions is thatreductionism is not ultimately an adequatestrategy for understanding the biologicalworld:

The reductionist program has beenspectacularly successful, and willcontinue to be so. But it has often left avacuum: How do we use the informa-tion gleaned about the parts to build upa theory of the whole? The deep

difficulty here lies in the fact that thecomplex whole may exhibit propertiesthat are not readily explained byunderstanding the parts. The complexwhole, in a completely nonmysticalsense, can often exhibit collectiveproperties, 'emergent" features that arelawful in their own right.-"

Darwinian natural selection is a reduction-istic attempt to account for biological order.In Kauffman's estimation, it is, therefore, ul-tiinately insufficient and needs to be comple-

Jiist as Kauffman*s notion ofan auto-catalytic set invites comparison withLonergan^s notion ofa scheme of recur-rence, so Kauffman^s use of emergenceinvites comparison with emergent prob-ability.

mented by an account of the whole in bio-logical systems. For Kauffman, the order ofself-organized systems is an emergent order.Life "emerges" as a property of catalytic clo-sure in chemical sets. Similarly, as I shallpoint out below, ontogenyor more precisely,cell differentiation and morphogenesisemerges as a property of genomic networks.This idea of emergent properties is at the veryheart of Kauffman's notions of "order for free"and laws of self-organization.

Lonergan shares with Kauffman this fun-damental intuition about the inadequacy of re-ductionism and the importance of emergence.In his introduction to Insight, he says that partof the relevance of his treatment of mathemati-cal physics in the opening chapters is to high-light "the significance of the transition fromthe old mechanism to relativity and from theold determinism to statistical laws."-' InLonergan's view, scientific developmentsthemselves have made a strict mechanism ordeterminism untenable. Still, not all branchesof .scientific investigation or all scientists havemade this realization explicit, so part of thefunction of his idea of metaphysics as "theintegral heuristic structure of proportionatebeing" -- is to enable a systematic exposure

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of the limitations of mechanist and determin-ist assumptions and to effect their reversal.Emergent probability, then, is a way of talk-ing about the worldview presupposed by sci-entific investigation, but a way that avoidsmechanist or determinist assumptions.

Emergent probability gives Lonergan away of talking about emergence that is pre-cise yet highly generalized. As is character-istic of Lonergan's way of proceeding, emer-gence takes its fundamental meaning fromcognitional theory. Here Lonergan talks aboutthe integration of elements of an imagethrough an insight:

The prototype of emergence is theinsight that arises with respect to anappropriate image: without the insight,the image is a coincidental manifold; bythe insight the elements of the imagebecome intelligibly united and related;moreover, accumulations of insightsunify and relate ever greater and morediversified ranges of images, and whatremains merely coincidental from alower viewpoint becomes systematicfrom the accumulation of insights in ahigher view point.-'

While Lonergan here uses the example ofan insight or set of insights that systematize theotherwise merely coincidental image or rangesof images, such a notion of emergence can begeneralized to include any number of succes-sively higher integrations. An autocatalytic setcan be understood as just such a higher inte-gration of a lower chemical manifold. Whileeach and every chemical reaction is related toits predecessors by classical laws, the intelligi-bility of the whole recurring set goes beyondthe intelligibility of each event in the set.

Such a meaning for emergence, workedout within the context of a basic set of termsand relations, is lacking in Kauffnian. Emer-gence is clearly a notion that bears a heavyphilosophical burden in Kauffman's work,but besides his frequent remark that his un-derstanding of emergence is "nonmystical,"he is somewhat at a loss to explain what hemeans, other than by providing examplessuch as his idea that life is an emergent prop-erty of autocatalytic sets, or that ontogeny isan emergent property of genomic networks.

Emergence is a central notion in Insight aswell; but unlike Kauffnian. Lonergan is ableto provide an explanatt)ry account of emer-gence, by means of which it is possible towork out its implications for understandingthe universe. One of the implications ofemergence, for both Kauffman andLonergan, is that the universe is a develop-ing universe, and so it is to Kauffman's ex-ploration of the developing organism that Iwill turn next.Ontogeny and development

The second topic Kauffman takes up inhis investigation of generic emergent proper-ties is the issue of ontogeny, "the developmentof the fertilized egg into the adult as an emer-gent property of complex networks of genescontrolling one another's activities." Ontog-eny, or development, has two aspects: celldifferentiation and morphogenesis. In the celldifferentiation that takes place in a humanperson, for instance, the descendants of asingle zygote cell develop into 256 differentcell types, each of which is specialized for acertain type of function within the body.Somewhere on the order of 10''* cells areformed through a series of 50 cell divisions.Morphogenesis refers to the organization andcoordination of this vast number of cells intofunctioning tissues and organs. The obviousquestion is. how did such a magnificentlycomplex and ordered process emerge?

The discovery of the gene, and later, DNA,led to what Kauffman calls the central dogmaof developmental biology:

Cells differ because different genes areactive in the different cell types of theorganism.-^

But this leads to further questions:What is the mechanism that allowssome genes to be active while othersare suppressed? And how, as the zygoteunfolds into the body, do the variouscell types know which proteins toexpress?'^

The next important step, according toKauffman, was the work of Jacob and Monodin the mid-1960s, and their idea of geneticcircuits, especially the idea that "action via



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second sites meant utter freedom from themolecular point of view to create genetic cir-cuits of arbitrary logic and complexity." -*'Such a view is amenable to the Darwinianview that natural selection is the sole sourceof order. In this view, the pattern of ontogenythat leads to a human body is simply the re-sult of the chance accumulation and selectionof arbitrary genetic circuits.

Kauffman, as might be expected, is notsatisfied with this explanation. He does notthink it is sufficient to account for the actualorder observed within the processes of on-togeny:

Since each of our cells houses some10(),()()() or more genes, the state spaceof the human genomic regulatorysystem is at least 2"'"""" or lO^*''^"". Aswe have noted, this number is meaning-lessly enormous compared withanything we know about, hi terms ofthis vast state space, what is a cell type?The central dogma of developmentalbiology merely states that different celltypes are different patterns of activity ofthe same genomic system. That is notmuch help when the human genomeaffords at least 10^"""" combinations ofgene activity.-'

In place of this central dogma,Kauffman proposes that cell types are ba-

Is there a way in which the organism as awhole operates to condition which basins ofattraction a cell might be pushed toward?Kauffman does not address this question^but Lonergan^s understanding of develop-ment suggests that this might be a fruitfulline of inquiry to pursue.sins of attraction within the genomic net-work. The vast state space of the genomicnetwork was not explored in a purely ran-dom fashion; rather, it is pulled by a rela-tively small number of attractc^rs.-** Suchbasins of attraction should be able to resist

perturbations; otherwise these cell typeswould lack the requisite homeostasis. Onthe other hand, this homeostasis cannot beabsolute:

If the zygote differentiates throughbranching pathways to intermediatecell types that themselves branch to thefinal cell types of the newborn or theadult, then occasionally a perturbationwill have to push a cell into a newbasin of attraction (lowing to a newattractorthat is, into a new develop-mental pathway flowing to a new celltype.-"

If Kauffman is right about genomic networksfunctioning as basins of attraction for celltypes, then the process of ontogeny representsanother example of "order for free."A further question arises about the sourceof these perturbations in the first place. Isthere a way in which the organism as a wholeoperates to condition which basins of attrac-tion a cell might be pushed toward?^"Kauffman does not address this question, butLonergan's understanding of developmentsuggests that this might be a fruitful line ofinquiry to pursue. As has been shown,Lonergan introduces emergent probability asa way of integrating classical and statisticalmethods, but emergent probability also ad-

mits of further ex-pansions to includeboth genetic method(which allowsLonergan to dealwith developmentand change) and dia-lectical method(which allows himto deal with the dis-tortions of humanhistory). Genetic

'^ method deals withdevelopment, which Lonergan defines thisway:

...a flexible, linked sequence ofdynamic and increasingly ditferentiatcdhigher integrations thai meet the tensionof successively transfomied underlying

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manifolds through successive applica-tions of the principles of correspon-dence and emergence.^'

Development consists of a series of higherintegrations of lower, otherwise coincidentalmanifolds, but if development is to be ongo-ing, such integrations must be dynamic. Ahigher integration is static when the lowermanifold is dominated with complete success,so that the same systematic patterns keep re-curring without modification or change."Lonergan's example here is of the inert gaseslocking manifolds of subatomic events withinpermanent routines. One could also think ofit in terms of Kauffman's absolute homeosta-sis within cell types that would preclude fur-ther differentiation. But according toLonergan, when the higher integration is dy-namic, there results an ongoing modificationof the underlying manifold until a new inte-gration emerges. Lonergan refers to the de-veloping organism as an operator, because it"so integrates the underlying manifold as tocall forth... its own replacement by a morespecific and effective integrator."^' As an op-erator, it seems likely that an organism mightplay at least a limited role in determiningwhich developmental pathway a cell mightfollow. The developing organism is thus theongoing linked series of increasingly differ-entiated integrations.

I hope I have shown that Lonergan's ex-planatory account of emergence, along withits implications for development, meshesnicely with Kauffman's explorations into theontogeny of the organism. As was the casewith the comparison between autocatalyticsets and schemes of recurrence, there is here,as well, an interesting convergence betweenthe ideas of these two seemingly disparatethinkers. As I mentioned above, however,Kauffman has so far left the work of experi-mental verification to others. It is entirelypossible, perhaps even likely, that Kauffman'stheories are wrong. The point I want to em-phasize here is that the validity of Lonergan'sunderstanding of emergence and emergentprobability in no way depends upon the cor-rectness of Kauffman's ideas. Because

Lonergan's account of emergent probabilityis based on the heuristic structures of empiri-cal science (in other words, on the concreteperfomiance of scientists), rather than on thedetemiinate contents of particular scientificinvestigations, his account does not stiuid orfall with the eventual verification or falsifi-cation of Kauffman's theories.Order for free and finality

In closing, I want to consider briefly thematter of how, for both Kauffman andLonergan, reflection on an evolutionaryworld-order characterized by emergenceopens out onto religious questions. Writtenas it is as a popularization of a body of scien-tific work, it would be easy to overlookKauffman's more poetic flights in At Homein the Universe. But while such reflectionsmay not offer much in the way of "hard sci-ence," still they express on the one hand a deepdissatisfaction with what he takes to be theimplications of Darwinian natural selection,and on the other hand a deep-seated religiouslonging for meaning. Kauffman sees nihil-ism at the heart of Darwinian evolution:

Science has left us as unaccountablyimprobable accidents against the cold,immense backdrop of space and time.^''

Not that Kauffman is about to embraceinstitutionalized religion. Traditional reli-gious belief he considers a non-option: "Para-dise has been lost, not to sin, but to science."^^ For Kauffman, the rise of science meansthe demise of religious belief. Yet he holdsout hope that although paradise has been lostto science, perhaps science can still wrest fromthe world a sense of the sacred:

If we are, in ways we do not yet see,natural expressions of matter andenergy coupled together innonequilibrium systems, if life in itsabundance were bound to arise, not asan incalculably improbable accident,but as an expected rulfillment of thenatural order, then we truly are at homein the universe. ^^

The phrases "at home in the universe" and"we the expected" rather than "we the improb-able" echo throughout the book, and lend



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Kauffman's search for "order for free" not alittle of its urgency.

Lonergan finished writing Insight in 1953,the same year Watson and Crick's paper onthe double helix structure of DNA was pub-lished. In light of this, the applicability ofLonergan 's ideas on genetic method is noth-ing short of astonishing. Lonergan, I havesuggested, would find much in Kauffman'swork to embrace. There is one final pjirallelthat I wish to draw, namely, that for Lonerganno less than for Kauffman, the order of theuniverse opens out onto religious questions,albeit in significantly different ways. For whatKauffman terms "order for free" finds itscounterpart in Lonergan's notion of finality,an "upwardly but indeterminately directeddynamism towards ever fuller realization ofbeing." ^^ But while Kauffman limits hissearch for the sacred to the universe acces-sible to the empirical sciences (what Lonerganwould refer to as the universe of proportion-ate being), Lonergan allows for the unre-stricted desire to know to raise the questionof transcendent being: that is, is there some-thing that explains the explainability of theuniverse of our experience? And to raise thatquestion is already to be engaged in a searchfor God.

Works cited:Byrne, Patrick H. "God and the Statistical

Universe." Zygoii 16, no. 4 (December1981): 345-63^

Kauffman, Stuart. The Origins ofOrder: Self-Organization and Selection in Evohition.New York: Oxford University Press, 1993.

At Home in the Universe: The Searchfor Laws of Self-Organization and Com-plexity. Oxford: Oxford University Press,1995.

Kuhn, Thomas. The Structure of ScientificRevolutions. 2nd ed. Chicago: Universityof Chicago Press, 1970.

Lakatos, Imre. "Falsification and the Meth-odology of Scientific ResearchProgrammes." In Criticism and the Growthof Knowledge, ed. by Imre Lakatos and A.Musgrave, 91-1 96. Cambridge: CambridgeUniversity Press, 1970.

Lonergan, Bernard. Insight: A Study ofHu-man Understanding. Vol. 3 of CollectedWorks of Bernard Lonergan, ed. byFrederick E. Crowe and Robert M. Doran.Toronto: University ofToronto Press, 1992[1957].

. A Second Collection. Ed. William F.J. Ryan and Bernard J. Tyrrell. Philadel-phia: Westminster Press, 1974.

Melchin, Kenneth R. History, Ethics andEmergent Probability: Ethics, Society andHistory in the Work of Bernard Lonergan.Lanham, Md.: University Press ofAmerica,1987.

Endnotes:1. Lonergan, A Second Collection, p. 268.2. See Kuhn.3. See Lakatos. Roughly speaking,

Lonergan might say that Kauffman operatesprimarily at the level of formulating insights,while leaving the task of judgment to others.While this remark invites a comparison ofLonergan's account of scientific rationalitywith that of other figures in the philosophy ofscience, I will prescind from this task in or-der to deal at greater length with other issues.

4. Kauffman, At Home in the Universe, pp.71-95 passim.

5. Ibid., p. 25.6. Ibid., p. 14.7. Ibid., p. 24.8. Ibid., p. 19.9. Ibid., ch. 3.10. Ibid., ch. 2.11. Ibid., p. 49.12. Ibid., p. 50. See figure 3.1 (p. 49) and

figure 3.7 (p. 65) for schematic representa-tions of autocatalytic sets.

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13. Lonergan, ///.v/g/zr, p. 141.14. Melchin, p. 105.15. Lonergan, loc. cit.16. Byrne, p. 349.17. Ibid., p. 357.18. Lonergan, op. cit., p. 131.19. Ibid., p. 145.20. Kauffman, op. cit., pp. vii-viii.21. Lonergan, op. cit., p. 15.22. Ibid., pp. 415-21.23. Ibid., p. 506.24. Kauffman, op. cit., p. 95.25. Ibid.26. Ibid., p. 97.27. Ibid., p. 106. The recently completed

sequence of the human genome puts the num-ber of genes closer to 30,000, but Kauffman'spoint remains valid. See "The Newly Se-quenced Genome Bares All," by J. Netting and

L. Wang, Science News 159, no. 7 (17 Feb.2001): 100-101.

28. For an introduction to attractors andattractor basins, see Chaos: Making a NewScience, by James Gleick (New York: Pen-guin Books, 1987), pp. 1 19ff. and 233-36.

29. Kauffman, op. cit., p. 1 10.30. This question was suggested to me by

Patrick Byrne during a "God and the Worldof the Sciences" seminar meeting at the Je-suit Institute at Boston College on 25 March1999.

31. Lonergan, op. cit., p. 479.32. Ibid., p. 477.33. Ibid., p. 490.34. Kauffman, op. cit., p. vii.35. Ibid., p. 4.36. Ibid., p. 20.37. Lonergan, op. cit., p. 477.

Grant Miller Francisco is currently in his fourth year of doctoral studies in the Departmentof Theology at Boston College. His area of specialization is systematic theology, with anemphasis in theology and science. Originally from Portland, Oregon, he received hisbachelor's degree in religion from Reed College, and an M.A. in theology from the EarlhamSchool of Religion. He now lives in Newton and attends St. Paul's Episcopal Churchthere.This paper was presented on 27 April 2000 at Boston University for the Science andReligion Colloquium, an annual event sponsoredjointly by the New England Center forFaith and Science Exchange and the Boston Theological Institute.


KAUFFMAN & LONERGAN - New World Order, Of the Emergence of Order in an Evolutionary Universe

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