Ernest Schoffeniels "El anti-Azar"

Chance and Necessity

by Jacques Monod

This radical book by Nobel laureate Monod is an important intellectual event. Chance and Necessity is a philosophical statement whose intention is to sweep away as both false and dangerous the animist conception of man that has dominated virtually all Western worldviews from primitive cultures to those of dialectical materialists.

He bases his argument on the evidence of modern biology, which indisputably shows, that man is the product of chance genetic mutation. With the unrelenting logic of the scientist, he draws upon what we now know (and can theorize) of genetic structure to suggest a new way of looking at ourselves. He argues that objective scientific knowledge, the only reliable knowledge, denies the concepts of destiny or evolutionary purpose that underlie traditional philosophies.

He contends that the persistence of those concepts is responsible for the intensifying schizophrenia of a world that accepts, and lives by, the fruits of science while refusing to face its moral implications. Dismissing as "animist" not only Plato, Hegel, Bergson and Teilhard de Chardin but Spencer and Marx as well, he calls for a new ethic that will recognize the distinction between objective knowledge and the realm of values--an ethic of knowledge that can, perhaps, save us from our deepening spiritual malaise, from the new age of darkness he sees coming.

Preface

Of strange objects

Vitalisms and animisms

Maxwell's demons

Microscopic cybernetics

Molecular ontogenesis

Invariance and perturbations

Evolution

The frontiers

The kingdom and the darkness

Appendixes (less)

Anti-Chance: A Reply to Monod's Chance and Necessity (Pergamon international library of science, technology, engineering, and social studies)

Este articulo lo comparto teniendo como mentor al Doctor Juan Losno (+), amigo y medico estudioso y biólogo, quien me orientó en el conocimiento de esta disciplina y de estos especialistas cuyas referencias comparto.

Ernest. Schoffeniels y T Swain

Anti-Chance: A Reply to Monod's Chance and Necessity is a critique of Jacques Monod's essay on the natural philosophy of modern biology.

It explores the concepts of chance and necessity, central themes of Monod's work, and specifically whether life is the result of the coincidence of diverse independent chains of causality or, on the contrary, whether it obeys the more fundamental concept of chance as proposed by the Danish School of physicists.

Questions such as the chance or the inevitability of it all, the sites and sizes of the knowledge gaps and as to whether they will be filled with physics and chemistry on the one hand or seasoned with metaphysics on the other, are examined.

Ernest Schoffeniels "El anti-Azar"

Lo queramos o no, estamos en este mundo porque hace tres mil millones de años, aproximadamente, las condiciones de la Tierra y las propiedades de los elementos se dispusieron de determinada manera. A algunos les habrá de resultar desesperante ser el fruto de la necesidad, antes que del azar.

Los denodados esfuerzos de todas las religiones y de la mayor parte de las filosofías, empeñadas en negar ciegamente y contra toda evidencia la realidad de la condición humana, si bien son admirables desde el punto de vista estético, no entrañan más que caos y sobresaltos heroicamente ridículos. El oscurantismo ha jugado su baza. ¡Ya es tiempo de que se haga la luz!

SCHOFFENIELS, Ernest. El Anti-Azar; Ed. Miracle, Barcelona, 1977

Jacques Lucien Monod 

Jacques Lucien Monod (February 9, 1910 – May 31, 1976) was a French biochemist who won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1965, sharing it with François Jacob and André Lwoff "for their discoveries concerning genetic control of enzyme and virus synthesis".

Monod and Jacob became famous for their work on the E. coli lac operon, which encodes proteins necessary for the transport and breakdown of the sugar lactose (lac). From their own work and the work of others, they came up with a model for how the levels of some proteins in a cell are controlled. In their model, the manufacture of proteins, such as the ones encoded within the lac (lactose) operon, is prevented when a repressor, encoded by a regulatory gene, binds to its operator, a specific site in the DNA sequence that is close to the genes encoding the proteins. 

(It is now known that a repressor bound to an operator physically blocks RNA polymerase from binding to the promoter, the site where transcription of the adjacent genes begins.)

The study of the control of expression of genes in the lac operon provided the first example of a system for the regulation of transcription. Monod also suggested the existence of messenger RNA molecules that link the information encoded in DNA and proteins. For these contributions, he is widely regarded as one of the founders of molecular biology.

Philosophical contributions

Monod published Chance and Necessity in 1971 (based on a series of lectures given at Pomona College in 1969), a short but influential examination of the philosophical implications of modern biology, appropriate for a nontechnical audience.

He acknowledges his connection to the French existentialists in the epigraph of the work, which quotes the final paragraphs of Camus' The Myth of Sisyphus. In summarizing recent progress in several areas of biology (including his own research), he highlights the ways in which information was found to take physical form and hence be capable of influencing events in the world.

For example, the information allowing a protein enzyme to 'select' only one of several similar compounds as the substrate of a chemical reaction is encoded in the precise 3-dimensional shape of the enzyme; that precise shape is itself encoded by the linear sequence of amino acids comprising the protein; that particular sequence of amino acids is encoded by the sequence of nucleotides in the gene for that enzyme.

'Necessity,' in the title of his work, refers to the fact that the enzyme must act as it does, catalyzing a reaction with one substrate but not another, according to the constraints imposed by its structure. While the enzyme itself cannot be said in any meaningful way to have a choice about its activity, the thrust of Jacob and Monod's Nobel prize-winning research was to show how a bacterial cell can choose whether or not to carry out the reaction catalyzed by the enzyme.

As he explains, one way the cell can make such a choice is by either synthesizing the enzyme or not, in response to its chemical environment. However, the synthesis/no synthesis choice is in turn governed by necessary biochemical interactions between a repressor protein, the gene for the enzyme, and the substrate of the enzyme, which interact such that the outcome (enzyme synthesis or not) differs according to the variable composition of the cell's chemical environment.

The hierarchical, modular organization of this system clearly implies that additional regulatory elements can exist that govern, are governed by, or otherwise interact with any given set of regulatory components. Because in general, the bacterial activity that results from these regulatory circuits is in accord with what is beneficial for the bacterial cell's survival at that time, the bacterium as a whole can be described as making rational choices, even though the bacterial components involved in deciding whether to make an enzyme (repressor, gene, and substrate) have no more choice about their activities than does the enzyme itself.

Monod shows us a paradigm of how choice at one level of biological organization (metabolic activity) is generated by necessary (choiceless) interactions at another level (gene regulation); the ability to choose arises from a complex system of feedback loops that connect these interactions. 

He goes on to explain how the capacity of biological systems to retain information, combined with chance variations during the replication of information (i.e. genetic mutations) that are individually rare but commonplace in aggregate, leads to the differential preservation of that information which is most successful at maintaining and replicating itself.

Monod writes that this process, acting over long periods of time, is a sufficient explanation (indeed the only plausible explanation) for the complexity and teleonomic activity of the biosphere. Hence, the combined effects of chance and necessity, which are amenable to scientific investigation, account for our existence and the universe we inhabit, without the need to invoke mystical, supernatural, or religious explanations.

While acknowledging the likely evolutionary origin of a human need for explanatory myths, in the final chapter of Chance and Necessity, Monod advocates for adopting an objective (hence value-free), scientific worldview as our guide to assessing the truth. He describes this as an 'ethics of knowledge', which disrupts the older philosophical, mythological and religious ontologies that claimed to provide both ethical values and a standard for judging the truth.

For Monod, assessing truth separate from any value judgment is what frees humans to act authentically, by requiring that they choose the ethical values that motivate their actions. He concludes "... the man, at last, knows he is alone in the unfeeling immensity of the universe, out of which he has emerged only by chance. His destiny is nowhere spelled out, nor is his duty.

The kingdom above or the darkness below; it is for him to choose". While apparently bleak, in comparison to the concepts that humanity belongs to some inevitable, universal process, or that a benevolent God created and protects us, an acceptance of the scientific assessment described in the first part of the quote is, for Monod, the only possible basis of an authentic, ethical human life. It is reasonable to conclude that Monod himself did not find this position bleak; the quote he chose from Camus to introduce Chance and Necessity ends with the famous sentence "One must imagine Sisyphus happy."

His views were in direct opposition to the religious certainties of his ancestor Henri's[20] brothers, Frédéric Monod and Adolphe Monod, who were prominent evangelical preachers in the 19th century. In 1973, Jacques Monod was one of the signers of the Humanist Manifesto II.

Sociologist Howard L. Kaye has suggested that Monod failed in his attempt to banish "mind and purpose from the phenomenon of life" in the name of science. It may be more accurate to suggest that Monod sought to include mind and purpose within the purview of scientific investigation, rather than attributing them to supernatural or divine causes. While not explicitly addressing mind or consciousness, his scientific research demonstrated that biology includes feedback loops that govern interacting systems of biochemical reactions, such that the system as a whole can be described as having a purpose and making choices.

Monod's philosophical writing indicates that he recognized the implication that such systems could arise and be elaborated upon by evolution through natural selection. The importance of Monod's work as a bridge between the chance and necessity of evolution and biochemistry on the one hand, and the human realm of choice and ethics on the other, can be judged by his influence on philosophers, biologists and computer scientists such as Daniel Dennett, Douglas Hofstadter, Marvin Minsky and Richard Dawkins.

Awards and honors

In addition to winning the Nobel Prize, Monod was also the Légion d'honneur and elected a Foreign Member of the Royal Society (ForMemRS) in 1968

Personal life

Monod was born in Paris to an American mother from Milwaukee, Charlotte (Charlie) MacGregor Todd, and a French Huguenot father, Lucien Monod who was a painter and inspired him artistically and intellectually. He attended the lycée at Cannes until he was 18.

In October 1928 he started his studies in biology at the Sorbonne.[1] During World War II, Monod was active in the French Resistance, eventually becoming the chief of staff of the French Forces of the Interior.[23] He was a Chevalier in the Légion d'Honneur (1945), and was awarded the Croix de Guerre (1945) and the American Bronze Star Medal.

In 1938 he married Odette Bruhl (d.1972).

Jacques Monod died of leukemia in 1976 and was buried in the Cimetière du Grand Jas in Cannes on the French Riviera.

Link
Todas las citas se mantienen en el artículo original.