Francisco J. Ayala: In Memoriam. Lodi winemaker and geneticist.
The wild-type allele doesn't exist + the conflicts in Cicero's translation of Aristotle's aition
As I learned from Why Evolution is True, Francisco José Ayala passed away in early March.
I have discussed genetics, philosophy and teleological explanations in biology with him several times.
A fraction of this made it into my book Das Loch im Walfisch - Die Philosophie der Biologie. I recall two notable discussions in particular: Wildtype and Cicero's translation of Aristotle's aition.
Ayala was a vehement advocate of the statement: the wildtype allele does not exist. Precisely. He championed the balance model of population structure - based on studies of natural populations. According to this model, there is generally no single wildtype or normal allele. Rather, the gene pool of a population is assumed to consist of a set of alleles at moderate frequencies at most loci. A typical individual is heterozygous at a large proportion of its gene loci. There is no normal or ideal genotype, only an adaptive norm consisting of a set of genotypes that yield satisfactory fitness in most environments encountered by the population.
Or as Dobzhansky put it in 1970 in Genetics of the Evolutionary Process:
„Evidence reviewed in the foregoing chapters shows, conclusively in my opinion, that much of the genetic variability in natural populations of outbreeding sexual species is maintained by several forms of balancing selection. This evidence upholds the balance model, rather than the classical model, of the genetic population structure. The ‚normal’ species genotype is a will-o'-the-wisp, like Plato’s eidos. With many gene loci, no single allele can be regarded as ‚normal‘; the adaptive norm of a species or a population is an array of heterozygotes at many loci.“
That's right, a will-o'-the-wisp, appropriate to German culture, around June 27, 2000, when the feuilleton of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung announced: “Yesterday morning at three o'clock in the morning Craig Venter sent us the data set documented below. It contains the final sequence of the human genome... revealing the composition of the stuff of life." For the following page-long reprint of Venter's ATGTAATAGTGAs, the newspaper received the Gold Medal from the Art Directors Club for "clarity and persuasiveness" of the product.
In fact, the human genome does not exist, and Venter had not sequenced it, but only his own. And only half of it. A few years later this became relatively obvious when single nucleotide polymorphisms became fashionable. But it is the expertise of German science journalists anyway, to build up a bugbear, to win prizes among themselves, and then to tear down this bugbear again. When almost everyone has realized what a b is anyway. I only say: debate in Germany about cloning, of humans and cats, about CRISPR, about the evolution of the two sexes.
In fact, the human genome does not exist, and Venter had not sequenced that, only his own. And that's only half. This became relatively obvious a few years later when single nucleotide polymorphisms became fashionable. But anyway, it is the expertise of German science journalists to set up a bugbear, to win prizes among themselves, and then tear down this bugbear again. When almost everyone has already noticed what a bugbear is. I'm just saying: Debate in Germany about cloning, of humans and cats, about CRISPR, about the evolution of the two sexes.
And therefore the will-o'-the-wisp continues blithely: two years ago virologists started to make a big show about wild type in viruses (sic). With viruses that are constantly changing anyway. This was a great way to score points with politicians and, once again, so-called science journalists, in order to push through lockdown models in Germany and Austria.
In 1960, Ayala was ordained a Dominican priest in his native Spain. "You need to know that when you discuss with Francisco Ayala," my friend Ernst briefed me beforehand. I said, "Don't worry, I know that."
Indeed, Ayala's religious background earned him the Templeton Prize, no comment, but also plenty of gloating among geneticists. Stories still circulate about how he paraded into Dobzhansky's fruit fly lab at Columbia wearing a priest's robe. I wasn't there. He also earned envy when he married a rich hotel heiress. That's life. At least he was last running a decent vineyard in Lodi.
All in all, you can say what you want about Ayala, he knew philosophy. I have sometimes said to Ernst that I do not find the philosophical outpourings of his close or distant comrades-in-arms, I only say Dennett or Ruse, very convincing. The Dr. didn’t like to hear that. Probably he was right, neither have prejudices. There was nothing to doubt about Ayala's philosophical competence. One does not have to subscribe to his remarks about teleology, purpose, cause and function either. Unlike, say, Ernst, Ayala did not consider teleological explanations of final causes in evolutionary biology to be anything objectionable. Teleological explanations require that the trait or behavior being interpreted contribute to the existence or maintenance of certain states or properties of a system.
"But we now know," Ayala explained to me at the time, "that in evolution, natural selection establishes something only when there is a purpose or function for the organism."
There are opinions that the great merit of Darwin is to have thrown the purpose out of science.
Anyway, a very good example of Ayala's expertise is his discussion of the origins of cause and the analysis of the use of aition. This is a word used by Aristotle that is difficult to understand. Cicero translated this Greek expression as cause, causa in Latin. This is where the problem began. At least that is how Ayala put it. For Aristotle, as is well known, treated four principles of explanation, the causa materialis, formalis, efficiens and the causa finalis. Whereby only the causa efficiens means cause in the modern sense. For matter cannot be its own cause, nor can form.
"And what does aition actually mean?" I asked Ayala at the time.
"It actually means 'principles of explanation', and the plural aitia 'foundations of reasons'. Aition does not necessarily mean causation in the sense of an acting cause. Aristotle meant: If you want to understand something, you can ask four different questions. What is it made of? - causa materialis. What brought it forth? Or in modern terms, what is the cause - causa efficiens.What form does it take - causa formalis. What intention does it serve or out of which intention was it made - causa finalis. If you want to understand the stages of development of a chicken, if you want to understand an egg, you have to ask where does it come from. Aristotle's mistake was that he extended a developed system of explanations for organisms - and these were his primary interest - to the inorganic world. Thus he came to all these inconsistencies when he wanted to explain gravity: that all bodies sink to the earth, that the final destination of a stone is to fall to the center of the earth. All this was taken up by philosophers of science and physics, and it was to Darwin's great credit that he found a pure mechanistic explanation of the processes of the living world by formulating the principles of natural selection.“
Surprisingly, Ayala himself did not elaborate on this idea until 2016 in his book Evolution, Explanation, Ethics, and Aesthetics - Towards a Philosophy of Biology. Since then, this idea has been waiting to be unpacked further.
But by whom?
Certainly not by German-speaking university professors or other Leopoldina aces. Although the German tugs at everything, especially his own depth, with Charles Darwin it has remained rather with a fashionable treatment. To this day, Darwin is often referred to as the father of the theory of evolution. A joke. The best example of the ignorance prevailing in German culture is the edition history of On the Origin of Species. Recently a new edition has appeared in German, with a preface by a specialist. If the good man had a clue, his comment would have been, "Here the wrong edition has been retranslated." Of course, the sixth, from 1972, but the connoisseur always reaches for the version that stirred the Western world - the principle text of the 1st edition, published on November 24, 1859.
Always Ernst joked about the German preference for the sixth edition. "Yes, yes, the Germans with their sixth edition. But it is in many ways the first edition that represents Darwin in his most revolutionary spirit, and this is the edition that stands as such a great monument in the history of human intelligence. This is the edition to study.“
Francisco J. Ayala was in the tradition of interpreting Darwin's revolutionary spirit philosophically. So I asked him, "Amazingly, you teach about Darwin as a philosopher. In Germany, no one would think of Darwin as a philosopher.“
Ayala’s original sound check from Das Loch im Walfisch:
"He was not a philosopher, but he had very important and fundamental philosophical ideas. When I say he was not a philosopher, I mean that he did not teach philosophy by profession. Darwin was very well read, and he knew philosophers like Herbert Spencer, but often had a very poor opinion of them. He thought it was pure speculation. His main influence was on the great intellectual upheaval, on the birth of science as an intellectual enterprise. Before the 16th century, before Copernicus, with whom this revolution actually began, there was a certain kind of science, mostly not very - in our sense - professional, rather non-systematic. There were important technological developments. There were philosophers who occasionally did science, certainly in the Greek tradition of Aristotle. And there were some physicians and naturalists. But science as a systematic intellectual enterprise didn't emerge until Copernicus, Galileo, and Newton. When I look at this Copernican revolution, I must say it was far from complete. But it created the science of inanimate nature, that is, a science that could be applied only to inanimate objects, to the motion of the planets and all that. Organisms were completely ignored - they were considered as something created for a functional purpose: the eyes to see, the hand to catch something. Philosophers and natural theologians concluded that scientific principles could not be applied to something designed for a specific purpose. But that is exactly what Darwin does, in my opinion. He completed the Copernican Revolution in the sense that he included an explanation of living things in the sciences. In this context, I find Descartes very interesting. Descartes knew that organisms didn't fit into the scheme, but he still wanted to bring them in. And so he made the organisms into machines. But he completely ignored one question: who constructs the machines? Darwin found the answer. The essential contribution of Darwin is that he explained appearance and function as a consequence of natural laws. It is sometimes called the solution of the William Paley problem. Darwin explained function by natural selection. I see Darwin's contribution in a different light than most. Usually Darwin's solution to the problem of how organisms evolve is thought to be his main contribution. True, he provided a very good explanation for it. But I mean this is by no means his most significant intellectual contribution. Darwin completed the Copernican Revolution by bringing the world's most complex beings into the realm of natural science. Science came of age. That's why Darwin is so important to our intellectual life."
