We forget where we parked. We misplace our keys. We misread instructions. We lose track of the time. We call people by the wrong name. ‘To err is human,’ as the English poet Alexander Pope wrote in his Essay on Criticism (1711). But it is not exclusively human. All animals do things that prevent them from surviving, reproducing, being safe, or being happy. All animals get things wrong. Think of a fish that takes the bait and accidentally bites into a metal hook. Think of dogs that forget where they have buried their bones, or frogs that aim their tongues in the wrong direction. Birds build flimsy nests. Whales beach themselves. Domestic hens try to hatch golf balls.
But not everything in the Universe can make mistakes. While living things navigate a world filled with biological errors, the fundamental building blocks of the cosmos adhere to the laws of physics with unwavering consistency. No one ever caught an electron erring, let alone an atom, a sodium ion, a lump of gold, a water droplet or a supernova. The objects that physicists study, the pure objects of physics, do not make mistakes. Instead, they follow ineluctable laws.
And this is where a problem emerges. Mistake-making organisms, like everything else in the Universe, are made from law-abiding atoms and molecules. So where does mistake-making begin and end in living things? How deep does it go? Can the parts and subsystems of organisms, like immune systems or the platelets in blood, make mistakes too? And, if they do, is there something that connects human mistakes to those made by biological subsystems?
The answers to these questions have profound implications for how we think about life. If things go wrong only when physics becomes biology, biology might truly be irreducible to physics and chemistry, despite centuries of reductionism saying otherwise. It might also mean that organisms really have ‘correct’ goals and purposes that they can mistakenly deviate from – they really are teleological, despite a long history of mechanistic arguments claiming otherwise. And if life’s errors really are as ubiquitous as they appear, it might mean we need a ‘grand’ framework to explain what happens when things go wrong: a theory of biological mistakes.
As a philosopher, I have spent much of my life studying the puzzles of metaphysics and ethics. I have explored the nature of reality, the concept of being, and the moral implications of human action. But, in recent years, I have been working on the problem of mistakes with a team of researchers at the University of Reading in the UK. What drew us to this topic was our puzzlement about a major gap in the history of biological thought. Surprisingly, mistakes have mostly been ignored by researchers, even among biologists and philosophers of biology, and traditional definitions of life have largely overlooked the role of mistakes, focusing instead on successes, adaptations and beneficial mutations. That is why, in the late 2010s, our team began investigating how a more rigorous look at mistake-making could generate novel scientific hypotheses. How could mistakes be understood in a more systematic and interdisciplinary way, we wondered?
During the past few centuries, scholars and scientists have tended to focus on what goes right rather than what goes wrong. The idea of rightness in living things has taken many forms. In the 17th century, during the early days of the scientific revolution, René Descartes characterised animals as automata: ‘machines’ made of tissue that obeyed mechanical laws, like the movements of a clock. ‘No movement can take place,’ Descartes wrote, ‘either in the bodies of beasts, or even in our own, if these bodies have not in themselves all the organs and instruments by means of which the very same movements would be accomplished in a machine.’ The idea of automata implies that animals can only malfunction or break down rather than make mistakes – understanding the internal circuitry tells you all you need to know about the ‘right’ way for an animal to behave.
Two centuries later, a different view of biological rightness and wrongness emerged through the work of Charles Darwin. From a Darwinian perspective, whether something counts as a mistake can be assessed only in the cold light of evolutionary time, after a species has either perpetuated its lineage or died out. Organisms, according to the ‘standard’ view of evolution, are simply the product of blind natural selection working through the success of random genetic variation. In this case, the ‘right’ variation will lead to a species being more adapted to its environment, and more likely to survive, reproduce and continue evolving.
No matter how lofty or powerful a species may be in its environment, they all get things wrong
To understand how things can go wrong for animals outside of evolutionary time, the animal behaviourists of the 19th and 20th centuries placed renewed emphasis on the study of individual organisms. I am thinking of behaviourists such as B F Skinner, but also of ethologists such as Charles Otis Whitman, Oskar Heinroth, Konrad Lorenz and Nikolaas Tinbergen. Their writings contain examples of mistakes made by animals, such as gulls misidentifying eggs and ducklings attaching themselves to inanimate objects. Biologists influenced by Lorenz’s and Tinbergen’s seminal works now routinely investigate mistake-making in various forms. However, there is still no grand conceptual framework, no theory of mistakes, that might create an interface between philosophy and biology.
Thinking about mistakes gives us the right kind of orientation to understand ourselves and other organisms. It focuses our attention on the fact that living systems, from paramecia to people, are subject to normative standards of right and wrong. This can be explained simply: when living things operate in some ways, they do well; when they operate in other ways, things go badly.
Life is strewn with attempts to avoid, correct or minimise mistakes. Living things employ all kinds of strategies to keep themselves on the normative straight and narrow. It is no surprise that recent work by researchers such as Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky into human mistake-making has been so important and influential. We humans use ‘heuristics’ – mental shortcuts or rules of thumb – to judge situations, rank preferences, assess people and so on. Very often these heuristics serve us well (sometimes you can judge a book by its cover), but other times they lead us astray. No matter how lofty or powerful a species may be in its environment, they all get things wrong.
This is why our team has sought to develop a rigorous conceptual framework for thinking about mistakes and normativity. Such a framework will, we hope, help generate new, testable hypotheses for experimental biologists, and might shed light on many of the mistakes to which we humans are prone. But developing our framework has taken us in unexpected directions. We believe that mistake-making might illuminate the nature of life itself. It might show, once and for all, that biology is irreducible to the laws of physics and chemistry – atoms, remember, don’t make errors.
If organisms are bundles of atoms that obey fundamental physical laws, how do........