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ROBERT LAWRENCE KUHN:
 Why did I do my doctorate
 in neuroscience?
 At UCLA at the time,
 it was brain research.
 Everything we think about
 comes from our brains.
If I could comprehend the brain,
 I thought,
 perhaps I can apprehend
 deep reality.
 Although I learned
 to do science,
and lots about the brain, there
 wasn't much apprehension.
 Over the years, I've studied
physics to explore the universe
 as well as neuroscience
 to explore the mind.
 But I've largely ignored the
 foundations of neuroscience,
 biology, though biology,
 human biology,
 was my undergraduate major
 at Johns Hopkins.
 Biology offers its own set
 of big questions.
 What's life?
 What's language?
 Morality? Wisdom?
 What's race and gender?
 What's the origin and
 essence of religion?
 These seem like
 philosophical questions.
 That's why I should explore
 a new field of inquiry
 called philosophy of biology.
 What is philosophy of biology?
 I'm Robert Lawrence Kuhn,
 and Closer to Truth
 is my journey to find out.
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 I'd been planning to attend
 a conference at Notre Dame,
 The Quest for Consonance:
 Theology
 and the Natural Sciences.
 And when I read that
 among those attending
 were several philosophers of
 biology, I had a new priority.
 I wanted to meet them.
 I go to South Bend, Indiana,
 where to start,
 I seek the British-Canadian
 philosopher of science
 who pioneered philosophy
 of biology as a new field,
 Michael Ruse.
Michael, my life's interest
has been in
the philosophy of cosmology,
philosophy of mind,
and the philosophy of religion.
I've not really taken
an interest
in the philosophy of biology,
which has been
one of your specialties.
You've helped create this field.
Tell me what I'm missing.
Ha ha! Well, it's not just
philosophy of biology, is it?
It's philosophy of science,
and the simple fact
of the matter is,
science and technology have such
a huge role in our world today.
And I as a philosopher turn,
shall we say,
almost naturally to this.
There's been a long tradition.
I mean,
Aristotle was a biologist.
Descartes was
a great mathematician.
Leibniz, too.
So, it's not that I'm doing
something strange.
Of course, biology, by the
1960s, was on that upsurge
away from being the poor sister
of the physical sciences,
and it was on its way to being
as important as it is today.
The DNA model
had come out in '53.
Evolutionary biology was now
moving forward with people like
Bill Hamilton writing about kin
selection and ideas like this.
So, characterize
the field for me.
What is the natural divisions
of philosophy of biology?
Well, I think there are
really two big divisions.
What one might call
philosophy of biology,
and what I've heard called
by I think the rather ugly name
of bio-philosophy, but I prefer
philosophy of nature.
One way of doing
philosophy of biology
is you're a kind
of upper level biologist.
You're a kind of metabiologist.
The biologist looks at,
let's say, a classification.
Looks at different organisms
and sees differences
and tries to work out
what the differences are,
and then relates this
to evolution and so on.
The philosopher of biology
would say,
what kind of criteria
does the scientist use?
Why, for instance, does one
separate out bonobos
from humans, and things
that fundamental
in your classification
in a way
you would not separate out
males from females.
I mean, the difference between
men and women are at least
as big as the differences
between humans and bonobos,
and yet one rather
than the other.
So, the philosopher of biology
is asking,
I think, important
and intelligent questions.
The other way -
I call it philosophy of nature,
but that's a little broader
than biology -
is taking the science,
biology in my case,
and applying it to philosophy
and saying,
what about epistemology?
What about ethics?
What about some
of these sorts of issues?
Can we find insights, let's say,
in the fact that you, Robert,
are a modified monkey,
if I might say so -
a very nice one,
but a monkey nevertheless -
rather than modified mud?
In other words, I'm interested
in saying the fact that
we are modified monkeys,
what does this mean
for our moral sense
or something like that?
In the first category, what are
some of the other questions
that would be
in this meta approach
other than demarcation
questions, which seem important,
but of an older kind of science.
The best of all
is evolutionary theory.
Why the hell should we accept
a story about dinosaurs
and these sorts of things
when we never ever see them?
Why is it reasonable to believe
that we are modified monkeys
rather than modified mud?
So, the deep philosophy of what
are your assumptions
and what are
the philosophical--
Absolutely. And to what extent
can we explain what we see here
in terms of unseen entities.
So, as I say, I think a lot
of philosophy of biology
is distinctive in being about
biology, but at heart,
it's philosophy of science.
How do you then demarcate
between the
philosophical fields?
The way you've defined
your second category
of philosophy of biology, you're
subsuming a lot of other fields
that a lot of philosophers
spend their whole lives on.
Yes, but the point is, Robert,
you forget I'm a philosopher.
I'm a philosopher first.
So, you say how do I demarcate?
This has been done for me.
I mean, you know, I'm part
of a legacy of philosophy.
So, issues like
the starry heavens above
and the moral law
within us, as Kant said,
are demarcated for me.
So, this is why I'm so
interested in picking up issues.
You mentioned the mind.
One of the things I'm
particularly interested in
at the moment is to what extent
does evolution throw
views on philosophies of mind.
William Kingdon Clifford said,
if you're an evolutionist,
you ought to be a panpsychist.
Oh, wow.
You ought to think that even
the molecules have minds
at some level.
Now, here's a good question.
This is a philosophical
question.
What is the nature of mind?
But of course,
you're bringing biology.
Is evolutionary theory
in any sense relevant,
as Clifford said?
Or is it totally irrelevant, as
for instance Thomas Nagle said
in Mind and Cosmos.
So, you can't get deeper
or more exciting
philosophical questions
than these.
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KUHN:
 Michael develops philosophy
 of biology as a philosopher,
and he describes two categories
 of the new field.
 The first is where philosophy
 asks meta-questions
 about biology, encouraging
 clarity and rigorous thinking.
 The second is where
 biology addresses
 philosophical questions,
 such as mind, morality,
 knowledge, even religion.
 If this is a philosopher's
 approach to philosophy
 of biology, what would be
 a biologist's approach?
 I should speak with a
 philosopher of biology who is,
 first and foremost,
 a biological scientist
 who starts with the
 discoveries of biology
 and Darwinian evolution.
 Attending the Notre Dame
 conference
 is the distinguished
 evolutionary biologist,
 Francisco Ayala.
 Originally a Dominican priest,
 Francisco is University
Professor of Biological Sciences
 and of Philosophy at the
University of California Irvine.
 To Francisco, which
 issues are fundamental?
Francisco, define for me
the purpose of philosophy
of biology, and then
something of the structure
of the kinds of questions
that it asks?
The process of evolution
in particular
has tremendous
philosophical implications,
because if we want to understand
what we are as human beings,
a fundamental component
has to be that we originated
by a gradual process,
and that our ancestors
of a few million years ago
were not human.
And in fact, our own species
came out only very recently,
perhaps as recently as 100,000
years ago in tropical Africa,
from there, colonized
the rest of the world.
So, what is a human being?
In order to understand
what is a human being,
a philosophical question, you
need to understand our origin.
You have to understand
many other things,
because the process of
evolution has implications
with respect to what we are
not only in the general way,
but in explaining the details.
I mean, think, for example,
of the transmission of signals
that go from our senses
to our mind.
I mean, we know that the
experiences that we have
when we touch something
or when we see something,
it does this-- get incorporated
from our senses to our nerves
and go to the brain.
And it's in the brain where
we have these experiences
we call qualia.
These individual sensations.
But how chemical
and electrical signals,
mostly chemical signals,
become transformed
in color, shapes, and the like?
It's a philosophical question.
And more for the
mental question yet
is how out of all these
experiences emerges the mind,
the person, what we have as
a unitary view of ourselves
and something that exists in us.
How does that emerge?
Well, that's a very fundamental,
philosophical question.
But we have to incorporate
the biological knowledge
and integrate it into
our philosophical view
of how the mind works.
So, there are other kinds
of questions
that a philosophy of biology
would ask?
The questions of morality
of ethics,
because understanding
what we are biologically
and how we have common origins,
and the very little diversity
between different populations
of the world, so-called
races or ethnic groups,
obviously has social
implications,
it has ethical implications.
You know, we see ourselves
as being very different,
those of us who are
so-called Caucasians
from, say, people
from Central Africa
or people from Japan and China.
But if you were to take
the whole genetic variation
of the whole human population,
which has a lot,
eighty-five percent of that
whole variation of the world
can be found
in a little village.
Then when you look at different
towns on the same continent,
you have six percent more.
And you have only
nine percent more
when you look at
the whole world.
Well, if so much of that
variation is local,
why is it that we see
that we are very different?
It is because the adaptations
which we have observed
which have to do with skin color
and configuration of the hair,
configuration of the body
have a lot to do
with the colonization
of the world.
You know,
our ancestors in Africa
were definitely people
with very dark skin.
You need that
when you live in a place
where there is a lot of sun,
because the sun causes
various forms of cancers,
melanomas and the like.
As these people colonized,
say, the temperate zones
and eventually places like
Scandinavia and Alaska
and the like, people with
lighter skin were favored
by natural selection,
because they needed the sun.
There is much less sun,
much less exposure
to the ultraviolet light
of the sun,
which we need to synthesize
vitamin D.
Vitamin D is synthesized in
the deeper layers of the skin,
and is done through the action
of ultraviolet light.
A person with very dark skin
living in Scandinavia
cannot do very well, because
you cannot synthesize vitamin D.
So, that is a deep
philosophical conclusion
that comes from biology,
because it really shows the
commonality of human beings,
even though superficially we see
things that look very different,
that much all of the differences
are much deeper
in the things that we don't see.
Yeah. That's correct.
I think that these differences
are very superficial.
They are real, but in fact
very little of what we are.
And in the majority of the
processes that are controlled
by genes,
all humans are identical.
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KUHN:
 Francisco focuses on evolution
 and its explanatory powers,
 addressing diverse questions
 including the genetic
commonality of the human family
 and the physical workings
 of the human mind.
 He alludes as well to
the biological basis of morality
 and ethics, but morality and
 ethics are traits of the mind,
 different from the pure
 physicality of human genetics
 and sensory perception.
 What's an evolutionary account
 of how morality and ethics
 came about?
[indistinct conversation]
 I speak with the organizer
 of The Quest for Consonance
 conference,
 Celia Deane-Drummond.
 With doctorates in science,
plant physiology, and theology,
Celia's Director of Notre Dame's
 Center for Theology, Science,
 and Human Flourishing.
Celia, what are the kinds
of questions that would be
under a philosophy of biology
that are unique and original
kinds of questions
that can be asked,
and particularly
looking at it from your
theological perspective?
I think one of the most
interesting questions
is the evolution of wisdom.
Where does it come from?
I've thought about this question
for must be 10 or 15 years.
I was trying to find some
evolutionary biologists
and those maybe
working with other animals
to look at that question with me
to try and sort of discover,
are there any sort of traces
in other animals early
in the evolutionary history
that might look something
like wisdom,
which I define or understand
as being that very complex
relationships between things
and how to understand
what that ability to have
those social kind
of relationships might mean.
So, not simply
love relationships,
but relationships as such.
So, it's really fundamental
to understanding
how a community works.
So, we were trying to find, if
you like, a baseline definition
of wisdom that would work
both theologically
but also work for
evolutionary anthropologists.
In Aquinas, for example,
there are two different kinds
of wisdom.
There's wisdom proper,
which is about the relationship
of everything with everything
else, including God,
and that's the virtue of wisdom.
But there's also
practical wisdom,
which is the particular skill
you need
to deliberate, judge, and act.
So, both of those elements
were likely to be important
in the evolution of wisdom.
So, one of the first tasks we
did was to try and not look at
the archeological record
of early hominins
just as a collection of bones,
but try and imagine
that internal world as well as
their external world.
In other words, what was
going on when they started
making beads
to go around their necks?
What was going on when they
dabbed red ochre on their faces
and other parts of their body,
and maybe shells and so on.
Something was changing in their
minds in a way that was about
their ability to form these
very different relationships.
So, we started to map these
different signals, if you like,
of something happening
in a cognitive sense
that indicated
some sort of complexity.
Jeffery Schaff said something
interesting about wisdom.
He said that it was the
ability to judge a right
between different possible
cultural expressions
of a social sphere.
So, it was like a sort of meta -
a meta ability
and over and above it.
When we were trying to
think about how to look at
the evolution of wisdom,
we were trying to scale back
a little bit from that what
you say as sort of grander
metaphysical narratives to
something much more practical.
And we found something
really surprising,
which is why this research has
proved extremely interesting.
That if you go back to way far
back in the evolutionary record
to something like 500,000 years
ago, and even beyond that,
you find early signals of acts
that hominins did
that suggest some sort of
mental complexity,
even though the standard
narrative amongst
the evolutionary anthropologists
is that we change
from anatomically modern humans
to cognitively modern humans
all in one go,
around 200,000 years ago,
whereas these other signals
were happening
much, much earlier than that.
And gradually, you get more
and more and more of them
building up.
So, in order to have this
research project make sense
in tracing the history
of wisdom,
you can't have this big break
where you have humans on one
end and animals on the other.
You have to have a
clean continuum.
There's no step function
break in it
which is a traditional teaching
of Christianity.
I would say there's
a continuum,
but there's still
distinctiveness.
So, in other words,
when we were looking at this,
we were looking at hominins.
Now, hominins is the period
after the -
the split between,
between humans
and, and other primates
happened, 8 million years ago.
We're looking at relatively
recent history,
after that branch had split.
All the species we're
looking at were homo species.
So I see it as part
of the homo family.
What's more interesting I think
is to see the imago dei say
as applying you know
much further back
than where we've
previously supposed.
- It's not just--
- Image of God...
Yes, not just the image of God
is homo sapiens necessarily.
Maybe it was
further back than that.
But what I see
is like anything else,
the evolution of wisdom
happened gradually.
So, you don't suddenly get
this extremely complex capacity,
especially the capacity
to relate to the Divine,
all at once.
What happens is you get these
intimations of that possibility,
and then eventually
it clusters together
into this more sophisticated
cognitive ability,
which I think is the ability
to receive God
as it were in Revelation.
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KUHN:
Celia sees wisdom as a marker in
 the evolution of human beings,
 signifying the emergence
 of cognitive powers
 and a moral sense.
 It's an example of how
 philosophy of biology
 sifts evidence
 and shapes theories.
 No sudden jumps in the
 progressive development
 of wisdom.
 It's a continuum, she says,
 but still
 there is distinctiveness.
 But can the clustering
 of cognitive capacities
 mean that emerging wisdom
 does not refute
 traditional religious views
 of human origins?
 Projecting our contemporary
 sense of wisdom
 into the phylogenic
 or anthropological record
of proto-wisdom is a challenge.
 How much more so is the
 leap from proto-wisdom
 to the capacity to receive
 God as in Revelation?
 One way to try to make
 such a move
 is to try to extend
 our winning explanations
 to social, psychological,
 and even theological matters.
 I meet Louis Caruana, a Jesuit
 priest, who is Dean
of the Philosophy Faculty of the
 Gregorian University in Rome,
 and Professor of Philosophy
 at the Vatican Observatory.
Louis, how can the questions
that you address in evolution
and Darwinism and Catholic
doctrine, how can those reflect
on the importance
of a philosophy of biology?
In my studies, I concentrated
mainly on how evolution
explanation can be applied
to explain religion itself,
and whether such explanations
are plausible
or useful and so on.
What is an
evolution explanation?
Let's start there.
Of course, to have
an evolution explanation,
you need to have something
to explain, of course,
and then one of the
attributes has to be hereditary,
it has to be significant
for survival,
and it has to have some kind
of random mutations.
If you have that sort of thing
and the system
is self-replicating,
then you have actually natural
selection in the long run.
So, when that kind of mindset,
that philosophy,
needs to identify some aspect
of the religious phenomenon
which has these characteristics.
And there are a number
of suggestions here,
and one of them is that
the religious phenomenon
is all dependent on some
primordial agency-detecting
device that we may have.
That means when we see movement,
for instance,
we associate the movement
with an agent.
We may be hypersensitive
to this, as if we're assuming
that there are agents
when there aren't.
If you consider that
as a unit of explanation,
it seems to suggest that in
the long run, groups, let's say
of hominids in the early
evolution of the human species,
groups who had that trait
of seeing agency
or assuming there is agency,
exaggerating in this kind
of assumption, it has a survival
value in the long run,
because it's better to assume
that there may be
an agent rather
than when there is one.
As you say a false
positive is much better
- than a false negative.
- Exactly, that's the point.
And some philosophers
try to suggest that
because of this argument
and similar arguments,
then religious belief
as we have it today
is somewhat undermined.
Now, I have doubts about
that kind of conclusion.
Even if we accept the cogency
of the kind of explanation,
there may be traits that have
an evolutionary origin
in this sense or similar senses.
I would say it doesn't
necessarily mean
that religion is undermined.
Yeah, but I think the point
of philosophy of biology
is such that this is
a relevant question.
You can argue that religion
is not undermined,
somebody else can say
a biologist
or atheist is undermined.
It's interesting, but it
becomes a question under -
a big question under
the philosophy of biology.
That makes sense.
Philosophy of biology is
usually philosophy for biology.
What we're talking about here
is what biology uses
as its explanation, whether it's
plausible in other areas.
So, that kind of critique of
religion usually says, you see,
so, religion has nothing
to do with God.
Religion has nothing to do
with the supernatural.
It is actually just
a natural phenomenon
because it's explainable
in this way.
Now, some religious people
may find that very difficult
to accept, because
they want to see religion
as a non-natural phenomenon.
But I would not have great
problems with that myself.
I mean, if religion has
a natural origin,
in fact, it's a positive fact
that we may be discovering.
That in fact, being religious
is part of our bodily makeup
in a sense.
That the evolutionary mechanism
has given us actually
some kind of kick start,
if you like,
in the direction of discovering
more about God and so on.
I wouldn't like to kind of
squeeze religion
on that particular aspect
only, but my main point
is that if there are
naturalistic explanations
of religiosity of this kind,
it shouldn't be a great worry
for the religious believer.
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KUHN:
Philosophy of biology offers new
ways of thinking about biology.
I see it operating
in five areas:
 One, using philosophy to
 enable progress in biology
 as a science,
 such as clarifying the nature
 of biological evidence,
 models, and arguments.
Two, using philosophy to assess
applications of biology, such as
 genetic testing, treatment
 of animals, astrobiology.
 Three, using philosophy
 to discern specific
 biological puzzles such as
 how did altruism evolve,
 and how does environment
 affect race?
 Four, using biology
 to address perennial problems
 in philosophy, such as
 the nature of mind, morality,
 and wisdom.
 Five, using biology to analyze
 the nature of religion
 and belief systems in general.
 Although religion
 could be classified
 as a perennial problem
 in philosophy,
 I opt for a separate category,
 because the intersection
 of biology and religion
 is a deep probe
 of the human condition.
 Philosophy of biology,
 I admit, is new to me.
 I'm just getting started
 getting Closer to Truth.
[♪♪♪]
ANNOUNCER:
 For complete interviews
 and for further information,
please visit closertotruth.com.
[♪♪♪]
