Purpose & Desire:What Makes Something “Alive” and WhyModern Darwinism Has Failed to Explain Itby J. Scott TurnerHarperOne, 2017At the heart of J. Scott Turner's sloppy and deceitful new book Purpose & Desire: What Makes Something “Alive” and Why Modern Darwinism Has Failed to Explain It are a couple of con games that are as old as science-denial. The first of these is misdirection: conduct an argument two or three steps to the left of your actual point so that your opponents will be concentrating on one thing while you slip another past them. The second is to overstate the case so as to make enormous claims seem trivial. It's a three-card-monte trick that really shouldn't work, but the trick wouldn't be so venerable if it weren't successful, and here it is again, a 2017 publication from a major publishing house presenting a gussied-up bit of pseudo-science that was discredited centuries ago.The concept, freed from Turner's fog of word-splitting, is vitalism – the idea, as Turner puts it, that “life is a special quality, that chemistry might be a tool for studying life but it is not life itself. It is matter that serves life and not the other way around.” The core of Turner's vitalism is the idea of homeostasis, the idea that behind the physics of life there's a metaphysics of life, a metaphysics that hangs everything on some invisible and indivisible element that separates life from non-life. Turner poses this particular metaphysics against the mechanistic conception of modern science that holds everything to a studiable yardstick. “To be a scientist who studies life, you must also be a mechanist and a materialist,” Turner writes with typical melodrama. “You emphatically may not be a vitalist. To do so is to don the scarlet V.”He claims that this shift is philosophical rather than empirical, and he not infrequently mixes in some condescending anti-intellectualism with his misdirection:

The shift was driven by a tension that has riven Western philosophy ever since Socrates. It turns on a ten-dollar word, epistemology, or how we come to know and understand the world. How we proceed on that quest turns on whether we think the world is all mechanism, including the life that inhabits it, or whether a broader organizing principle makes it all what it is.

The book trots out many half-baked (and often seemingly half-understood) scientific discussions designed to illustrate the limits of the mechanistic model in explaining many aspects of the world, and most of these discussions begin to unravel the minute you pull at their edges. What on Earth, for instance, does this passage mean:

We have a natural tendency to look backward to the time a memory was formed, a remembrance of things past, to use that overworked phrase. Yet at the time any memory is formed, it biases the future to ensure that it unfolds in a particular way out of many possible futures, including ensuring there is a future me who will look backwards in time. The memory of my mother formed in the past sets up the future so that I will react the way I do, many years after. This future-looking perspective does not sit comfortably in modern biology because to look forward is to admit the possibility of foresight, purposefulness, and desire shaping evolution. By keeping our gaze fixed firmly backward, we can safely keep our minds turned away from that difficult perspective. Can we afford to continue to do so? I think not.

Memories construct the future? The fact that somebody can be alive long after the events in their memory exhibits “foresight” in the moment those events were happening? An individual's ability to remember the past (and even to shape their reactions to the present accordingly) doesn't sit comfortably with modern biology or evolutionary science? Having memories equates to “keeping our gaze fixed firmly backward”? It's not really possible that Turner himself could be so dimwitted as believe any of this nonsense. It's very much possible that he wants to fool his readers into believing it.He admits that what he's calling for is the “re-enchantment” of biology, the embracing of that ten-dollar epistemology that says there's some intangible element – we won't say “soul” for fear of the scarlet S – separating life from non-life, and that this element isn't a matter of matter and isn't – and never will be nor can be – an object of quantification. Never mind that computer algorithms, crystals, and viruses all manage to straddle the world of living and non-living, proving along the way that the only intangible thing about the dividing line is the dividing line itself – no, it doesn't matter to bunkum artists like Turner, because, as he finally gets around to admitting, this isn't about science … it's about religion:

Homeostasis does not derive from natural selection; it is homeostasis that drives selection, and there is nothing natural about it. What drives the course of evolution is not the soulless lottery of the gene pool, but life's striving for persistence … A deep intelligence is at work in life, its workings, and its history, and it cannot be denied.

At several points in his book, Turner refers to himself as a scientist. Scientists don't truck in supernatural forces driving the process of life by infusing it with a soul; priests do. HarperCollins has mislabeled this deplorable tract that venerates the untestable and seeks, after long frustrated centuries, to drag back into science laboratories the unseen, the unknowable, the forbidden. And who does that "deep intelligence" belong to? I bet Turner has a ready answer.