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    Purpose and Desire: What Makes Something "Alive" and Why Modern Darwinism Has Failed to Explain It
    Purpose and Desire: What Makes Something "Alive" and Why Modern Darwinism Has Failed to Explain It
    Purpose and Desire: What Makes Something "Alive" and Why Modern Darwinism Has Failed to Explain It
    Audiobook9 hours

    Purpose and Desire: What Makes Something "Alive" and Why Modern Darwinism Has Failed to Explain It

    Written by J. Scott Turner

    Narrated by Greg Tremblay

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    About this audiobook

    A professor, biologist, and physiologist argues that modern Darwinism's materialist and mechanistic biases have led to a scientific dead end, unable to define what life is-and only an openness to the qualities of "purpose and desire" will move the field forward.

    J. Scott Turner contends, "To be scientists, we force ourselves into a Hobson's choice on the matter: accept intentionality and purposefulness as real attributes of life, which disqualifies you as a scientist; or become a scientist and dismiss life's distinctive quality from your thinking. I have come to believe that this choice actually stands in the way of our having a fully coherent theory of life."

    Growing research shows that life's most distinctive quality, shared by all living things, is purpose and desire: maintain homeostasis to sustain life. In Purpose and Desire, Turner draws on the work of Claude Bernard, a contemporary of Darwin revered among physiologists as the founder of experimental medicine, to build on Bernard's "dangerous idea" of vitalism, which seeks to identify what makes "life" a unique phenomenon of nature. To further its quest to achieve a fuller understanding of life, Turner argues, science must move beyond strictly accepted measures that consider only the mechanics of nature.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherTantor Media, Inc
    Release dateOct 24, 2017
    ISBN9781541486324
    Author

    J. Scott Turner

    DR. J. SCOTT TURNER is a leading biologist and physiologist and professor of biology at the State University of New York College of Environmental Science and Forestry, in Syracuse, New York. His work has garnered attention in the New York Times Book Review, Science, Nature, American Scientist, National Geographic Online, NPR “Science Friday” and other leading media outlets. He is the author of two books with Harvard University Press: The Extended Organism: The Physiology of Animal Built Structures (2000) and The Tinkerer’s Accomplice: How Design Emerges from Life Itself (2007).

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    • 2/5
      Doctor Turner looks desire rather than physical or behavioral traits that is the basis of Darwin’s Theory of Evolution and natural selection. It is a jump from looking at what biological elements in a laboratory to using laboratory techniques to alter or create life forms. He supports his theories with figures and graphs of body traits and scientific formulas. Overall, he claims scientists do not base modern Darwinism on natural selection and the promoters that say it does are not recognizing the way culture and religion accounts for evolution. Turner selected a mixture of scientific theories, theological ideas, and philosophical concepts that are most beneficial for support, but fails to provide in-depth discussion or follow a set logic principles. Footnotes, endnotes and an index are included.I received this book through a Goodreads giveaway. Although encouraged, I was under no obligation to write a review. The opinions I have expressed are my own.
    • 3/5
      Purpose and Desire is the opposite of Chance and Necessity (Jacques Monod, 1972). So it’s a biology in-joke. In order to enjoy Purpose and Desire, you must buy into Scott Turner’s initial premise that biology is in crisis, a Hobson’s Choice over intentionality. If you believe it is critical and essential that life in all its forms is intentional, it changes your entire outlook on life, the universe and everything. If intentionality does not keep you up nights, you might not like this book.The cognitive dissonance grows as you must then accept Turner’s definition of homeostasis as “life as a persistent dynamic disequilibrium”, as opposed to my understanding of it as a mean, a target range to which life forms constantly revert. (Three quarters through, Turner switches to this definition, which he admits works better, and which originated with Claude Bernard, which I did not know.)Turner keeps referring to real scientists as reductionists – those who seek a one point connection between cause and effect. But reductionism is discredited in favor of systems, which encompass numerous inputs and outputs in the working of an entire system or network. He can beat up reductionists all he wants, but he’s late to that party.After much rehashing of evolutionary dead ends and wrong turns by various philosophers and scientists, the actual biology lesson begins. Turner’s arguments rest on lifeforms’ cognition - their ability to recognize their situation and act according to the successes of past generations. Right down to simple bacteria. With that in place, it is not much of a leap to posit that every lifeform therefore exhibits intention/desire. Turner believes this is the key to evolution – the intention to succeed.For Turner, there are two components to life: hereditary memory, and homeostasis. He says one can’t exist without the other and therefore one could not have preceded the other. Ergo, some external being must have put them together. He does not prove this argument – for me at least. I have no problem envisioning the hereditary memory of the single-celled beast building out the homeostasis infrastructure.He then turns to birds. Their feathers were originally heat management tools, but deep down birds wanted to fly. Well, so does Man, and likely moreso than birds, but….So I had great difficulty buying into Turner’s arguments. (I guess that makes me an unreconstructed Darwinist. Oh well.) But if this is the state of the art, then Turner’s first accusation is correct: biology is in crisis.David Wineberg