Newsletter: July 2024

In last month’s newsletter, I mentioned that I’d been exploring a career change to nursing. To fulfill a prerequisite for my nursing school application, I enrolled in an online course in human anatomy and physiology. It’s the first university-accredited course I’ve taken for a grade in nearly two decades—and the first non-philosophy course in two and a half. I’ve declined the offer of admission to nursing school because I’ll be joining the philosophy department at Koç University in Istanbul instead, but I continue to work through the course in anatomy and physiology nonetheless. It’s time-consuming but engrossing. I wrapped up the muscular system in May and have been exploring the nervous system in the time since.

I began my undergraduate studies as a prospective physics major. I was good at math and captivated by the mysteries of the very big and the very fast and the very small—how stars bend space and time, how objects seem to get infinitely short and infinitely massive as they accelerate toward the speed of light, how the distinction between observer and observed seems to break down at the quantum level. I still find these things interesting, and I wish I understood them better, but in recent years my curiosity has been more engaged by the wonders of biology.

In a brilliant essay called “Is God a Mathematician?: The Meaning of Metabolism,” the philosopher Hans Jonas argues that biology has a special status among the sciences. Jonas was formed in the rich intellectual environment of Weimar-era Germany. He was a student of Edmund Husserl, Rudolf Bultmann, and Martin Heidegger and a lifelong friend of Hannah Arendt. Jonas was Jewish, and fled Germany in 1933, vowing that he would return only as a soldier in an army committed to overthrowing the Nazis. He fulfilled that promise as a member of the Jewish Infantry Brigade Group in the Second World War.

Jonas’s post-War writings were shaped by the traumas of the Nazi genocide. Like many European intellectuals, his faith in human goodness had been deeply shaken. Asking whether life had any meaning, Jonas gave sustained attention to the basic question of what life is.

Jonas opens his essay by quoting the English physicist James Jeans: “From the intrinsic evidence of his creation, the Great Architect of the Universe now begins to appear as a pure mathematician.” Jeans is impressed by the fact that all the fundamental principles of physics seem to be expressible in mathematical terms. All the complex churn and swirl of the cosmos can be boiled down to a few basic equations. The physics nerd joke that God spoke Maxwell’s equations “and then there was light” captures the spirit of this idea of a mathematician God.

But what does this mathematician God see when He looks out upon His creation? Matter and energy circulating according to fundamental physical laws. These laws describe the movements of super-hot hydrogen atoms in a star and of crystallized water particles in a cloud. They also describe the complex chemical processes that happen within and between the cells of your body. There are no special physical laws that apply only to living organisms. Whether it’s the fission reactions that set off a nuclear explosion or the enthusiastic reactions of an audience to a string quartet, the mathematician God sees always and only the same thing: matter and energy in motion. A mathematician God that sees the world through the lens of fundamental physics, Jonas argues, is a God who doesn’t see life.

A large part of the appeal of physics is that it offers what seems to be a God’s eye view of the world. Physics purports to describe the world as it is objectively, stripped of any human-centric bias (the weird observer-dependent results of quantum mechanics are less of an exception to this notion than they might seem). It can feel exhilarating to step way outside the human world of politics and economics, squabbles and insecurities, and look upon it all with Olympian detachment.

But Jonas argues that life is something you can only recognize from the inside. Living organisms keep themselves going through metabolism, the sum of chemical processes by which complex substances are broken down into simpler ones and simpler ones are built up into more complex ones. Organisms are constantly exchanging matter with their external environment: you take in food, secrete sweat, breathe in, breathe out. On an atomic level, very little of the matter that makes up your body is there for an especially long time. What persists over time isn’t matter but form. An organism cycles matter in and out but the matter it incorporates into itself (you really are what you eat) is pressed into a stable set of metabolic functions. Those functions can only be understood in terms of their purpose, which is to keep the organism running. A mathematician God doesn’t see purpose, only matter coming and going. It’s only as the subject of these metabolic functions that we can recognize that something special is going on in the cycling of matter.

In short, biology requires a different perspective on the world than physics. Physics aspires to a God’s eye view from which it can look on all of reality from a position of perfect neutrality. Biology lacks the universality and neutrality of physics. It looks at one particular and, as far as we can tell, exceptionally rare phenomenon in the vast cosmos—the phenomenon of life. And, for all its rigorous methodology, the science of life starts from a very partial standpoint: it takes one to know one.

Physics is the hardest of the hard sciences and the one that’s most universal in its scope. For those reasons, it’s often taken as a paradigm for science and the scientific worldview more generally. But the philosopher John Dupré makes a case for giving biology the starring role in our conception of the sciences: “Biology is surely the science that addresses much of what is of greatest concern to us biological beings, and if it cannot serve as a paradigm for science, then science is a far less interesting undertaking than is generally supposed.”

Physics, at its most fundamental level, pursues the question of what it means for anything to be at all. Biology, by contrast, pursues the question of what it means for anything to be alive. Maybe with age, I’ve come to a greater appreciation of how brief and precious life is. In any event, the miracle of life, and the tiny corner of creation it occupies, has come to claim a greater and greater hold on my imagination. 

1. There seems good reason to think that elephants have “names” for each other—distinctive vocalizations they make to call specific members of their group. (source)
2. For a short time during the First World War, British intelligence officers used their own semen as invisible ink—semen on paper is invisible to the naked eye but shows up under UV light. Almost too good to be true, the head of the Secret Service Bureau when this innovation was adopted was named Mansfield Smith-Cumming. (source)
3. Lawyers make up less than 0.5% of the population of the United States but a third of the House of Representatives and more than half of the Senate. (source)
4. King Richard II was the first English monarch since before the Norman Conquest, more than 300 years earlier, to speak fluent English. He’s also credited with inventing or popularizing the handkerchief and the codpiece. (source)
5. There are more people interred in the Calvary Cemetery in the borough of Queens, New York, than there are people living in Queens. (source)
6. A cubic metre of healthy soil can contain over a kilometre of earthworm tunnels. (source)
7. American boomers have a collective net worth that amounts to over $1 million per person. (source)