IS THERE PURPOSE IN BIOLOGY?

Denis Alexander is one of the foremost scholars in the science and religion field as former chair of the molecular immunology programme at the Babraham Institute in Cambridge and founding director of The Faraday Institute for Science and Religion - his excellent Genes, Determinism and God was reviewed in these pages last year. He tackles the central issue of purpose in biology, arguing that life is not necessarily purposeless as so frequently assumed in the public domain. The book begins with a very well informed discussion of the historical roots of purpose in biology, highlighting the crucial shift from a symbolic to a literal interpretation of the Bible, leading to a loss of a critical level of understanding and followed by the rise of the mechanistic metaphor; then the influence of Darwin on the argument from design, while also noting the overall Christian context in which the arguments were conducted.

The next three chapters provide the substance of the argument, drawing on strands within biology itself such as the increase of complexity, laws, convergence, cooperation, and molecular constraints - for instance in relation to the genetic code and protein evolution. The fourth chapter examines in detail the notions of randomness, chance and purpose, pointing out that chance can only have agency in a strictly metaphorical sense - a critique that can also be applied to Richard Dawkins. An important more general observation is that biologists impose their own metaphysical narrative on the field, which is no less true of Monod than of Alexander himself. In my view, he successfully makes the case that the details of biology and evolution do not lead inexorably to a nihilistic conclusion and are compatible with his Christian matrix. In this respect, he distinguishes between purpose defined in terms of biology, and a larger metaphysical Purpose that cannot in fact be read out of it.

This leads on to his more detailed explanation of the compatibility of the Christian matrix with the biological world, beginning with a memorable quote from Jonathan Sacks: 'Science takes things apart to see how they work. Religion puts them together to see what they mean.' Alexander reminds us that Darwin's thinking came out of a Christian background including natural theology along with natural history and natural philosophy. For him, creation is about ontology, origins, meaning and the intelligibility that renders science possible. He argues that the historically articulated Trinitarian God is immanent in the created order, metaphorically as both musical composer and conductor of the symphony of creation. He proposes three purposes for biology: diversity, the emergence of humanity with a capacity for free will, moral choice and response to the divine in terms of love, and finally the prospect of a new heaven and a new earth transcending the present. This matrix is then considered relation to death, pain and suffering as consequences of carbon-based life with 'nomic regularity' – the 'cost of existence', which he considers worthwhile, illustrating this with his own experience of cancer surgery, also, as he sees it a means of working out divine purpose in individual lives. While not all readers will accept the theological picture painted here, they cannot but respect the author's depth of analysis both in relation to biology and theology as he tackles perennial existential issues. A very valuable contribution to the field.