I never met a child who didn’t love animals. Some animal, at least. Every child it seems has a favorite, beloved on account of its unique characteristics. This little girl loves penguins because of their funny waddle, and throws herself into hysterics of laughter mimicking their gait around the kitchen. This little boy loves grizzly bears, and cannot walk through the yard without imagining himself stalking in its fearsome girth. Plushy platypuses and cheetahs are a staple of every child’s bedroom; Natgeo books about the rain forest and oceans a common genre of their libraries. There is hardly any other trait, besides a love for warm sheets and an aversion to asparagus, upon which children are so universally matched.
And why shouldn’t that be the case? Even the most habitually insouciant adults can find themselves intrigued by the strange habits and accoutrements spread throughout the animal kingdom: the startling symmetries of the nautilus shell, the apparent mourning of elephants over a deceased herd member, the nourishment of wasp larvae upon the paralyzed living flesh of a tarantula. All of these phenomena are utterly fascinating, and bring home to us in an unrivalled manner the mystery of being. They bring home to us the mystery of our own being too, as sudden reminiscences of the organic functions and instincts that shape our earthly existence light up in the study of non-human animals.
Almost as enthralling are the multifarious forms of growth which vegetable life can assume. The beauty and variety of flowers is only the most obvious example of this; I hardly need to expand on the allure that flowers have always had for human beings. But what in fact is most astonishing to contemplation are the spontaneous forms of generation at the heart of vegetative growth, the ordered copiousness that characterizes the development of plants from seed to fruit. It was precisely this miraculous process that Goethe celebrated in his poem The Metamorphosis of Plants, when he sang of the “secret law” that drives the growth of the “blooming and colorful multitudes.”
If you were designing a course of study in Biology, then, you would obviously want to harbor the inherently captivating nature of the study of plant and animal life, in order to draw in the minds of students to examine the causes underlying their observed phenomena. That, at least, would be the approach of any educator who understood his task, and understood the minds of the students undertaking that task alongside him. It is not, however, the approach of Kenneth Miller and Joseph Levine, authors of Pearson’s Biology textbook, one of the most commonly used resources in high schools science departments. Pearson, of course, is one of the largest producers of educational materials for America’s schools, a sprawling corporate conglomerate flush with millions of dollars wrung from our vast educational bureaucracies. But once more we see that all the money in the world cannot buy wisdom.
The table of contents of Miller and Levine’s textbook outlines the course of study dictated by these two authors. How do they propose young people begin their study of living things? By reading about lots of dead things. After an attempt to define the discipline of Biology in Chapter One, Chapter Two explores the “Chemistry of Life” under such headings as “The Nature of Matter,” “Properties of Water,” “Carbon Compounds,” and “Chemical Reactions.” What the authors are assuming here is that a study of organic life that begins with an examination of its non-organic fundaments progresses seamlessly and non-problematically towards a comprehension of all the emergent phenomena of biological life. It is the assumption that an understanding of the parts coalesces into a grasp of the essence of the whole.
This prioritization of parts over wholes dictates the entire course of study laid out by Miller and Levine. The unit after Ecology focuses on the cell and its structure; the unit after that examines genetics. All the substructures of an organism are described in precise detail, again, with the underlying assumption in place that a full accounting of these substructures provides us with an explanation of the structure of an organism. These units are followed by a unit on evolution, which theory of course constitutes an apotheosis of the conviction that concatenations of efficient causes add up to satisfactory explanations of formal appearances.
It is only after all the parts, or substructures, of biological life have been examined in detail that biological structures, or organisms, are actually placed before the students in all their formal, organized completeness. The “Introduction to Plants” appears on page 632; the “Introduction to Animals” on page 728. This means that, even in the hands of the most efficient of teachers, the class will not begin the study of animal life – easily the most fascinating component of the subject matter - until sometime in the spring.
As a simple matter of effective instruction, the stupidity of this approach cannot be overstated. The actual phenomena of life, the forms and movements of vegetative and animal life, are clearly the components of the discipline that have the greatest interest for young minds; by placing these phenomena at the end of the course of study, rather than at the beginning, the teacher who adheres to Miller and Levine’s approach surrenders the charms most likely to allure the attention and application of his students. If you wander the halls of America’s high schools, peering into the Biology classrooms as you go, and observe whole sections of students staring apathetically at the lifeless content arrayed before them, now you know why.
But the deficit in Miller and Levine’s approach to the study of life goes far beyond its instructional futility. To be sure, they have hit upon the approach to their subject matter most likely to extinguish interest in students. But it also happens to be the approach that distorts and stymies comprehension of that subject matter most perfectly. The forms and movements of vegetative and animal life are not merely the most interesting aspects of biological study; they are the subject matter itself. They are life itself, the phenomena to be comprehended through the study of life. In this sense it is the whole, not the parts, of the organism that constitute the fundaments of biological study. The determining presupposition of Levine and Miller’s whole textbook – the assumption that an examination of the parts constitutes an explanation of the whole – is fallacious, and vitiates their whole treatment of the discipline.
The most decisive refutation of this fallacy that I know of is to be found in the work of Stephen Talbott, a philosopher of science whose series of articles in the “New Atlantis” convincingly demonstrates the ideological blindness behind so much of what passes for modern biology. In “The Unbearable Wholeness of Beings,” he categorically rejects the supposition that organic life can be adequately explained solely from an analysis of its constituent parts:
whatever the level we analyze, from macromolecular complexes, to organelles, to cells, to tissues, to individual organs, to the organism as a whole, we find the same principle: we cannot reconstruct the pattern at any level of activity by starting from the parts and interactions at that level. There are always organizing principles that must be seen working from a larger whole into the parts.
Far from deriving the functions of organisms from their parts, it is often the case that the functions of the parts can only be explained by the their role in processes unfolding at the level of the whole organism. One must as often explain life from the top down, as from the bottom up:
It turns out, then, that less change is what shows the whole cell or organism to be more than the sum of its parts. It is as if there were an active, coordinating agency subsuming all the part-processes and disciplining them so that they remain informed by the greater unity. The coordination, the ordering, the continual overcoming of otherwise disordering impacts from the environment so as to retain for the whole a particular character or organized way of being, expressively unique and different from other creatures — this is the “more” of the organism that cannot be had from the mere summing of discrete parts.
To construe this “more” as merely one more manifestation of mechanistic causality, imposed upon the various constituent parts of the organism, is to make an entire category error:
What we see, rather, is a continual mutual adaptation, interaction, and coordination that occurs from above. That is, we see not some mechanism dictating the fate or controlling an activity of the organism, but simply an organism-wide coherence — a living, metamorphosing form of activity — within which the more or less distinct partial activities find their proper place.
That form of activity, which Talbott elsewhere describes as a kind of harmony or unity, is the essential subject matter of Biology. An approach to the discipline that minimizes its importance, or by its philosophical presuppositions excludes it from consideration, is one that occludes the comprehension of the material.
What Talbott is really contending with in his artricle is the myth of emergent properties, the notion that complex modes of organization can be understood without remainder through a full accounting of their component, or more basic, parts. On the contrary, what organisms reveals to us, if we have the eyes to see it, is what rightfully deserve to be called transcendent properties, by which I mean properties necessitating for their description the use of concepts which have no application to the description of their parts. There is an evident discontinuity between living and non-living beings, a conceptual rupture unmistakable to all but the writers of modern Biology textbooks.
Of course, the real discontinuity that modern biologists want to disclaim is that between the human and non-human animals. This was the explicit intent of Darwin, who repeatedly asserted that the theories of natural and sexual selection undermined a belief in any “fundamental difference” between man and other organisms. It is in the case of man that the inevitability of transcendent properties is most observable; he alone is that creature who summons for his proper understanding the whole conceptual world of ethical, political, aesthetic, and religious discourse. By pretending that there is a continuous conceptual frame leading from matter to organisms, the purveyors of mechanistic biology like Miller and Levine can insinuate a vision of reality in which there are no transcendent properties to be encountered, not even those traditionally held to be the defining characteristics of man.
The classical picture of man is unavoidably at odds with this picture. It disclaims and derides it entirely. The classical picture asserts that the human must be understood in human terms, that the transcendent properties furnishing his sentient experience are as undeniable as anything under the sun could possibly be, and always elude a complete derivation from descriptions of material changes. In a classical school, devoted to the preservation of this hallowed vision of our kind, there is no room – even in the Biology lab - for the purveyance of materialist fairy tales about a million carbon atoms adding up to a sense of beauty.
What might a classical approach to the study of life look like? It is one that begins where a student’s interest begins, with the observed phenomena of biological growth and behavior. It is one that recognizes that the essence of biological development lies in a process of unified differentiation, and so calls students’ attention to the organizing influence of the plant or animal’s form upon its constituent parts, as much as the causality exerted by those parts upon the operations of the form. A classical approach to biology is one that acknowledges the transcendent properties of living beings, and in the conceptual world conjured by terms like development, function, behavior, summons the young minds engaged in its study into a realm of harmonies and purposes.
So a lesson on the circulatory system might be preceded by a study of the cheetah’s characteristic hunting behavior, enabled by its uniquely robust heart and lungs. A lesson on photosynthesis and its cellular processes might be accompanied by a class observing (by drawing perhaps, perhaps by note-taking) the growth of a plant from week to week, so that students can trace that growth to the energies released by photosynthesis. A lesson on natural selection might begin with a study of crime statistics, that would invite students to consider how much of the aggression observed in men might be a legacy of selective pressures.
What lessons framed in this manner would seek to recreate is the mental dynamic of scientific discovery, the movement from observed phenomena to underlying causes. But what it would avoid is insinuating the false notion that this causality is always to be discovered in the constituent parts and their interactions, through a process of analysis. It would as often lead students to discover the explanation for the functions of cells and systems in the needs of the organism itself. Such an approach can accommodate every last discovery of modern biology, in its most minute specifications, while still retaining a frame broad enough to resist a mechanistic simplification of these discoveries. The vaunted mastery of nature, so long considered the most cherished fruit of scientific advancement, would still be enabled by this approach to biology, but now accompanied by a sense of the intricacy and balance involved in the processes we might seek to control, an overarching picture which cannot help but temper the willfulness too often impelling the drive to become “masters and possessors of nature.”
Above all, a study of biology approached in this manner would stand in consonance with the rest of a classical curriculum. There would be no chance that the realm of harmonies and proportions explored in Fine Arts would clash with the cacophony of causes propounded in the science lab. There would be no danger of the dignified, multifarious creature studied in Humanities class being gainsaid by the blind beast of biological inquiry. In every classroom, the same startling, stunning, wondrous parameters of existence would reveal themselves to the burgeoning understandings of young minds. And in this respect, a classical approach to life would prove as invigorating as it is true.
If I am understanding your argument right, the idea is that biology should prioritize the study of whole creatures over anatomizing them into parts (and then analyzing those parts into the sub-bits) because students find that a more interesting place to begin. To some extent, that strikes me as a curious generalization. I've yet to meet a boy in late elementary or early middle school who didn't want to investigate something dead, and particularly, if a stick were handy, to probe its insides and see what they looked like. As far as wanting to go a step further and understand the biochemical basis for the anatomized parts, I can see your point, dealing with that level of abstraction is difficult and often little relished, the same way algebra, grammar, music theory, and formal logic can be quite formidable to students. I'm not really a biology teacher, so I can't say authoritatively whether those rudiments are the necessary grammar for further understanding, though.
Thoroughly enjoyed this. I detested high school biology and thought I'd never touch the subject matter again, due largely to the fallacious approach you write about here. Many, many years later, however, I've found myself quite intrigued to return to the study of biology because of the beautiful continuity and harmony I've discovered between biology and other areas of study I love: theology/philosophy, literature, art, holistic health/nutrition, sustainable farming, and more.