Your life has purpose — just not the kind you think | Alan Love

0:04 So the question "Is purpose real?" is one that as a philosopher I want to turn over and dissect. The answer that is sometimes given to the question, do we as humans have a purpose? Is no, we're just an organized bag of molecules that has been shaped by historical processes. That picture doesn't take seriously just how significant the organizational structure that we exhibit is. And in fact, once we do that, the answer is not a dichotomy between yes, you have a purpose or no, you don't,

0:51 but rather what kind of purposes can we identify and document given that we can see from this new research a more complex space of what counts as purpose. My name is Alan Love. I am a professor of philosophy at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis. I'm also the director of the Minnesota Center for Philosophy of Science. So in everyday language, we commonly talk about teeth being for chewing, eyes for seeing. But in biology, that sort of language is tied up with a history of worrying about

1:37 whether or not something illicit is being invoked, that something designed those things for those purposes. And so as evolutionary biology developed through the 19th century and mechanistic approaches continued to develop, talk of purpose is usually censored because it's thought to have those untoward implications. For most of organized human history, when people were interested in questions, they studied them, but did not necessarily have sharp boundaries about who was allowed to study them or whether you could ask only one kind of question rather than another. And so what happens in the 18th and 19th century in particular, is that the

2:27 community of investigators grows in size. We need some form of organization. This structure is very good. However, over time, that leads to people being relatively separated from one another and not spending as much time across boundaries or in ways where we might see creative combinations emerge. Some people think that the emergence of evolutionary thought somehow killed teleology. Other people think that it reaffirmed it. So the word teleology is the study of purposes or goals.

3:14 Probably one of the best examples of teleology is one that's been known for more than 2,000 years, which is the broken wing display that some birds exhibit, where a bird who has a nest identifies that a predator is in the vicinity. And the adult bird engages in a display of seemingly having a broken wing. They move further away from the nest in an effort to attract the predator towards them rather than to the offspring in the nest. This behavior, how did it get there? where a bird recognizes that it has to engage in a behavior for a purpose.

4:04 And if we kind of step back from that array of questions, what we get is two kind of broad purposive questions. One, what is the trait for? But we also can ask, what does it take for a system to be able to engage in those kinds of behaviors? And when we ask that second question, we are getting into the space of what counts as life. What is it to be alive? And is it somehow involve exactly these kinds of capacities? We bump into some of these same issues of teleology or purpose in

4:50 a variety of ways in our everyday life, perhaps most poignantly with respect to disease. So if we take cancer as a disease that involves uncontrolled growth and proliferation of cells, in some respects what's going on is that those cells are taking on a kind of independent agency. Agency refers to the capacity of organisms to self-maintain and select behavioral options from among sets of choices available to them to pursue their goals. At a very basic level, the phenomenon that we are observing in cancer is a cell doing

5:35 something where its own interest is primary rather than the interest of the larger multicellular context that it was embedded in. But the individual cell started with a capacity to have its own behavior and agency and is now a part of a multicellular entity that suppresses, in some respects, the individual agency of that cell for the greater good of the whole multicellular organism. So if we are approaching cancer from that perspective, we can better understand how the cells go rogue by better understanding what it was like for them to have individual agency in the first place.

6:23 Teleology and purposiveness represents one of the most complex phenomena that we have encountered in the natural world. And thus, it's perhaps not surprising that especially in biology, there is deep interest in cross-disciplinary work because whether it's the physics of the embryo or it's the physiology of temperature regulation, organisms on their own in their spatial and temporal scales cover multiple disciplines. And what excites me right now is that we're in a place where we are grappling with the complexity of teleology in real time across different disciplines and fully cognizant that hard problems require

7:14 intense interdisciplinary efforts to crack them. I am utterly amazed about how much we don't know, how much we discover new things and yet never exhaust those discoveries. And that gets me out of bed in the morning and makes me excited to be involved in helping research take place on this ever-expanding frontier.