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Literary Research/Recherche littéraire 21.41-42 (2004): 340-345 Why Some Why’s and Not Some Others? Tim Lewens, Organisms and Artifacts. Design in nature and elsewhere. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2004; xi+183 pp.; ISBN: 0262122618 (hbk.); LC call no.: QH331.L533
Answers that fulfill the specific requirements of their questions do not necessarily respond to an inquiry’s intent. Certain sets of questions and answers reveal very little about why the questions are even posed. In matters of genetic engineering and biotechnology, distinctions between what is natural and what is man-made become increasingly difficult to identify. In Organisms and Artifacts, Lewens examines why both types of object are studied using the language of design. While Lewens’ principal project is to provide the whys of the shared conceptual approaches and methodologies, it is reasonable to expect that Lewens’ [end page 340] inquiry will lead to questions concerning the implications of when organisms are artifacts? This question is curiously absent from the work: Why? Lewens’ inquiry must presume the possibility that the vocabulary of design may not be at all appropriate to yield answers to the types of questions biologists ask. He puts this question in the mouth of the “outsider”: “What is all this talk of solutions adopted by species to deal with the problems laid down by environments? Why do biologists persist in asking what are there for the peacock’s tail or the earwig’s second penis?” (ix). Lewens writes for an array of imagined audiences, claiming accessibility to the “nonspecialists” who do not necessarily bring direct experience in biological research. It is difficult to imagine an outsider would ever ponder the question above. The outsider must control the urge to assume that the complications in discerning Organism from Artifact that arise from contemporary issues such as genetic engineering are necessarily included in this exposition and entertain Lewens’ seemingly dated distinctions. If this Artifact Model[1] is entirely inappropriate and, in fact, specious, Lewens’ case is simple: highlight the obvious incompatibilities between two unrelated disciplines. Of course vocabulary useful to investigate and explain inorganic, “made” objects is unacceptable in the domain of the living, organic specimens of biological study. But we already know that this is not Lewens’ position: organisms and artifacts are equivalent in at least some regards. The comparison between the two is centered on two principal categories of “artifact thinking” in biology: language and methodology (which becomes a focus on Intent).[2] Lewens focuses his questions on the term Function and the applications of the artifact model, which, in turn, shapes the sorts of answers he offers. There are, however, correspondences between the two that are implicit in Lewens’ approach (and perhaps, to biologists in general): scale and structure. The organisms and artifacts are presented as specimens: Lewens discusses small-scale samples, such as moths and jam jars, and so puts the categories in physical proportion to one another. This is not to say that the two are never disproportionate, but that Lewens judiciously focuses the reader on smaller sized objects of each type. Insects are never positioned against Boeing 747s; whales do not appear alongside baseball caps. He manages to select a wide variety of specimens, living and inorganic, and organize them in such a way that they fit comfortably on the page. It is easy to imagine these organisms and artifact specimens as “collectibles”: little bits of biology and man-made objects catalogued and stored. Collectibility is a curious classification: why do we keep things? Lewens’ examples are scientific curios: oddities and anomalies that are [end page 341] difficult to pigeonhole in the larger context of biological research.[3] The “Brazil-nut effect,”[4] cow pats and tumors all appear, albeit briefly, as bits and pieces of evidence in the general inquiry. Perhaps biologists’ use of design vocabulary is also of this class of curiosity: worthy of textual collection, but failing the measure of consistency required by the field at large. Linguistic concerns arise early, as Lewens suggests that biologists may incorporate “function” language only as a metaphorical convention. One reason to consider that these terminologies and models of design are not merely figurative is the “mechanism of the dead metaphor” (13). If teleological terms like function persist in biological research long after the natural theologians have passed on, it is because the once metaphorical meaning of the word is also deceased. That a term such as function passes out of metaphor and into direct description is a curiously understated element of Lewens’ argument: although he later discards such questions of the meaning of such words as completely irrelevant to his inquiry, he doesn’t wonder if words shape the project or vice versa.[5] The “dead” metaphor is a semiotic specimen, a small sample in a jar on a shelf, saved with other curiosities. Collecting is keeping, preserving, and storing. Is collecting about remembering the past or storing for the future? Lewens collects specimens from past studies: he quotes from other scientists. As is the case with literary quotations, citing is an exercise in recontextualization. The issue of recontextualization becomes a central concern of any successful application of the Artifact Model, which surfaces in Lewens’ conditional endorsement of artifact thinking (and which will resurface later in this discussion). Organism and artifact also possess a structural compatibility, which Lewens reveals through the Artifact Model. Biologists understand organisms as a collection of component, interdependent traits[6] – indeed, how else can they be understood? Here we see the complexity of this project: this very description of organisms already shows signs of design. Beyond the basic distinction of living and nonliving, it is difficult to see wherein lie the distinctions between organism and artifact (pre-genetic engineering and other such human-designed ‘tinkerings’ in nature). In fact, where Lewens encounters those slight differentiations, he easily turns biological models of evolution and adaptation back onto the artifact. Just as artifact cannot claim the term function for its own, biologists hold no claim over the words development and adaptation, and biology itself does not necessarily have privileged use of the artifact model in other sciences.[7] Lewens’ supposes that biological talk in artifact research will become more important as researches seek to establish “richer evolutionary models for technological change” (140). What this really means is the development of analogous predictive system for technologists. [end page 342] Lewens explains the artifact model in two practices: reverse-engineering and adaptive thinking. Reverse-engineering “seeks to infer both the problems posed by an organism’s environment and the constraints on what solutions could be adopted to those problems from data regarding observed organismic traits” (40). Adaptive thinking “reverses the direction of inference and seeks to use knowledge of adaptive problems faced by an organism to predict likely solutions” (40). How exactly do these approaches fail the biologist? The problem is not really with either particular operation, but with that mysterious figure of the designer, which, at first glance, seems to be the major differentiator between organism and artifact. Without theological interference, biologists must replace the imaginary designer with a series of possible evolutionary or adaptational explanations for change in organisms. These explanations are typically founded in context: environment, competition, and forces of selection and drift. Lewens differentiates selection from drift, explaining the distinction as “what it is for drift to act is for a population to have changed in such a way that it departs from expectation, and what it is for selection to act is for a population to have changed in such a way that it accords with expectation” (23). Expectation implies observation and interpretation, but not participation. Biologists do not initiate change in organisms, but conduct their experiments by recording these modifications. In a sense, biologists follow behind the organism, even though research may produce predictive analyses. Biotechnology, on the other hand, actually satisfies the major problem with artifact thinking in biology: the designer. But perhaps it is in the best interest of the evolutionary biologist to keep the designer, or the idea of direct Intent, out of question. In fact, Lewens concludes that the assumed necessity of the designer in the artifact-artifact model is not compulsory at all: “No intelligent designer is needed to make sense of artifact talk” (4). We are not sure if the emphasis here is on designer or intelligent. When a designer is not required in artifact contexts, it would be unreasonable to hold the same requirement to biological artifact thinking. Thus, the substitute dependency on environment and selection also weakens. According to Lewens’ tentative assessment, Naive Function (NF), which is the “thinking of functions not as past fitness contributions, but as current fitness contributions” (102), is the least problematic biological employment of the Artifact Model. The NF is not exactly ahistorical, but presents a kind of “history of the now” approach to biological record.[8] In the context of a “designed” organism, NF re-admits evolutionary biologists into a biotechnological discourse that may not necessarily include such historical work. [end page 343] Lewens’ text delicately avoids the possibility that Organism and Artifact can be rewritten as Organism As Artifact, or even Organism Is Artifact. He steers those questions that are typically left to the end, questions about future developments and potential courses of further study away from the obvious sorts of complications posed by the field of biotechnology. Even an outsider can see that the need for an analogical relationship between organism and artifact might disappear. Lewens ends his query wondering about predictive models for technological ‘evolution’ and brief remarks about “Intelligent Design Creationism” (162). Any outsider may not even be prepared by this point to fully understand this confusing debate. One of his closing comments may clear things up: “What goes for organisms goes for artifacts” (166). This is something we all knew, or at least suspected, at the outset. Organisms and Artifacts does not seem to offer more than a survey of recent publications (mostly technical) that further the internal arguments between evolutionists and adaptationalists. The outcome of these supposed disputes is of little use to the casual reader (and Lewens is quick to point out that they may in fact be arguing over nothing more than trivial linguistic nuances). The average literary-minded outsider might be more distracted by certain scientific oddities like the ‘Brazil-nut effect’ than by Lewens’ treatment of the topic. While the book itself may be a disappointment to the outsider, it is difficult to determine whether or not the text contributes to the specific disciplines from which it originates, a qualification that can only be made by a specialist intimate with the history of the debate. The topic is fascinating – that such design vocabulary is also employed in the field of translation studies suggests that the relationship between organism and artifact is relevant to both biological and literary fields. This is not the best introduction to philosophical and methodological concerns in biological research, but then, for the outsider, perhaps there is no easy way to familiarize oneself with a debate that has been ongoing, and going some distance around him, since the beginnings of biology.
[1]. In simple terms, the “artifact model” is the “vocabulary of problems, solutions, purpose, and function” that approaches biological specimens as designed objects (2). [2]. Although relegated to footnote status, an interesting approach to Organisms and Artifacts is consideration of the direct workings of “artifact thinking” in language, particularly in the field of translation, where “design” [end page 344] vocabulary such as function, equivalency and adaptation are commonly present in formal, theoretical approaches. Language is caught between organism and artifact, as a translation is stranded somewhere between the original work and textual autonomy. See Benjamin’s “The Task of the Translator” for examples of where and how this terminology surfaces in another discipline. [3]. Laurence Weschler’s Mr. Wilson’s Cabinet of Wonder is a peculiar exploration of the organism as artifact – the collectible biological curiosity. [4]. “Whereby large Brazil nuts work their ways to the tops of cereal packets” (128). [5]. Language and Method: which influences which? Lewens argues that design vocabulary rarely appears in so-called “technical,” specialist publications (15), but does not then shape this argument into an important question: Are those publications that do not use terms like function the result of experiments that are not guided by such a concept? Is the word function only edited out at the last step while those same studies conduct their experiments according to function-oriented research questions? [6]. Is there a difference between part and trait? Lewens’ only complaint is that the artifact model “encourages us to ignore developmental relations between traits” (49) because artifact parts may not rely on such a high degree of interrelation. [7]. As Lewens argues, if selection can be expressed as a sorting process (120), other disciplines such as chemistry may also find the artifact model useful. [8]. Lewens guards against the expected reaction (rejection) to this statement, reassuring the field that he does not mean to discard all history, just that which is not necessarily included in the rather confusing reframed timeframe of the “current environment as extending both backward and forward in time from the moment of utterance” (106).
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