The Restless Clock: A History of the Centuries-Long Argument over What Makes Living Things Tick

Riskin, Jessica. The Restless Clock: A History of the Centuries-Long Argument over What Makes Living Things Tick. Chicago and London: U of Chicago P, 2016. "544 pages | 9 color plates, 51 halftones | 6 x 9 | © 2016."[1]

A richly illustrated, copiously annotated fulfillment of the promise of the subtitle, indexed, with over 60 pages of bibliography.

Starts with "Introduction: Huxley's Joke, or the Problem of Agency in Nature an Science." Not much of a joke, but a mild mocking of the idea that some "vitality" gives life by asking if the qualities of water come from "aquosity" (p. 1) or can eventually, in theory, be accounted for totally by the chemistry of H₂O. See for the key background idea that "the core paradigm of modern science" is a mechanistic view that "describes the world as a machine — a great clock, in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century imagery — whose parts are made of inert matter, moving only when set in motion by some external force [...]": passive and without agency (p. 3).

Chapters

1. Machines in the Garden
2. Descartes among the Machines
3. The Passive Telescope or the Restless Clock
4. The First Androids
5. The Adventures of Mr. Machine
6. Dilemmas of a Self-Organizing Machine
7. Darwin between the Machines
8. The Mechanical Egg and the Intelligent Egg
9. Outside In
10. History Matters

From the publisher's extended blurb: Contrary to the orthodox scientific view discouraging anthropomorphism and assigning agency to material nature and the vast majority of living beings,

[...] Since the seventeenth century, many thinkers have made agency, in various forms, central to science.

The Restless Clock examines the history of this principle, banning agency, in the life sciences. It also tells the story of dissenters embracing the opposite idea: that agency is essential to nature. The story begins with the automata of early modern Europe, as models for the new science of living things, and traces questions of science and agency through Descartes, Leibniz, Lamarck, and Darwin, among many others. Mechanist science, Jessica Riskin shows, had an associated theology: the argument from design, which found evidence for a designer in the mechanisms of nature. Rejecting such appeals to a supernatural God, the dissenters sought to naturalize agency rather than outsourcing it to a “divine engineer.” Their model cast living things not as passive but as active, self-making machines.

The conflict between passive- and active-mechanist approaches maintains a subterranean life in current science, shaping debates in fields such as evolutionary biology, cognitive science, and artificial intelligence. [...][2]

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Chapter 1, "Machines in the Garden" (note Leo Marx's, The Machine in the Garden)

Relevant here primarily for its extended discussion and illustration of of late Medieval and Renaissance (or "Early Modern") automatons of various sorts: complex, ingenious clocks and miniature mechanical theaters, hydraulic engines, etc. for a wide group. Note well that along with these popular devices could go a denial of a division between mechanical and living in that the more sophisticated automata could be experienced as "lively" in more than a figurative sense.

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ Chapter 2, "Descartes among the Machines" (note Samuel Butler's pseudonymous "Darwin Among the Machines")[3]

Descartes's proposal that an animal is a machine has sounded to most people [...] like saying that an animal is essentially inanimate. [...] But it is a misreading of Descartes: the key point about his animal machine was that it was alive; it was a living machine. [...] To be alive was the whole purpose of Descartes's animal-machine. Not as if alive, not apparently alive [like automata discussed earlier], but actually alive. By describing animals as automata, Descartes did not mean to reduce them to lifelessness. On the contrary, he meant to declare that one could explain every aspect of life in terms of machines, and so could understand the workings of living beings as fully as a clockmaker understands a clock. Rather than to reduce life to mechanism, he meant to elevate mechanism to life [...]. (pp. 44-45)

We will note here that this reading of Descartes (rightly or wrongly) led to some mocking his theory of the soul in a human body as "the ghost in the machine," which has become a catchphrase.[4]

Chapter discusses not only Descartes but key figures who preceded him, and then contemporaries and successors who read, misread (?), supported, and argued with him, including such notables in the mechanism debate as Aristotle and the theory of three souls (vegetative, sensitive, rational),[5] the ancient physician Galen, John Locke, the Dutch Catholic theologian Caterus, who "warned that Descartes had note offered no good defense against those who believed that the human mind was a bodily thing" (p. 65), Thomas Hobbes, and later Georges Buffon and Voltaire.

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ Chapter 3, "The Passive Telescope or the Restless Clock"

"The telescope [...] and the clock both served as key models of living structures" — eyes and optics, especially for the telescope — "in the new mechanist life sciences of the mid- to late-seventeenth century" (p. 77). Of interest here is the clock analogy, leading on one side to a vision of "the new animal-machine drained of life," as William Coward had us: "a meer [sic] piece of Mechanism," if (amazingly) also "a Reasoning engine made out of dead matter" (quoted, Riskin pp. 78-79). Mechanism, however, was complex, and very much so in the thought of Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz. Like everyone at the time writing on such matters,

[...] Liebniz described animal and human bodies as equivalent to automata. But he meant something very different by it from what was rapidly becoming the dominant meaning. The shared keywords of the seventeenth century — "mechanical," "clockwork" — camouflaged radical differences of opinion. In Leibniz's view, neither animals nor, indeed, machines were passive or brute. Leibniz was among the many who rejected Descartes's claim that animals lacked souls. But in his case it was part of a more general refutation of Cartesian physics: to Leibniz, nothing really lacked a soul. (p. 95)

For this view "Artificial mechanisms provided models not only for agency, but also for indeterminate, variable[,] and responsive activity" (p. 95). "'All of nature,' Leibniz wrote, 'is full of life,' and exactly as full of mechanism" (Riskin p. 108).

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ Chapter 4, "The First Androids"

These "androids" are not the mostly organic entities of current usage, but — as we should expect from Riskin's thesis — neither are they robots. The first on record goes back to 1677, the creation of Salomon Reisel, a physician and "philosophical mechanist" who claimed to have built an "'artificial man' with all the internal bodily functions," and with Reisel planning "to endow his creation with speech and the ability to move about on its own." Described in a journal article of the time as something we might see like a 1960s museum model of Our Amazing Body "'with such similarity & resemblance to man in all internal parts that, except for the operations of the rational soul, one sees in it all that happens in our bodies, & this by the principles of Physics-Hydrostatics'" (Riskin p. 113). "The first androids, then, seemed anything but clocklike in the traditional sense of the term; they seemed clocklike, rather in Leibniz's sense: unquiet, restless, visceral, active, responsive" (p. 132).

Note Wolfgang von Kempelen's hoax of the "Chess-Playing Turk" (continued by Johann Maelzel), which, in its long career, (a) defeated among others Benjamin Franklin and Charles Babbage, and (b) somewhat ironically was a serious contribution to the debate "whether intelligent mental processes could be reproduced by artificial machinery" (pp. 123-25 f.), and relevant for discussions of Descartes and "the Cartesian divide" (p. 125), and AI. Also see this chapter for

A mechanical duck that shat, or appeared to, and was sufficiently famous to appear (inaccurately drawn) in Scientific American for 21 Jan. 1899 (Riskin pp. 133 f.): for at least a simulacrum of the superimposition of the mechanical on the quite basically organic.

A fad in the 1730-40s of "moving anatomies," machines that "breathed and bled," or appeared to (pp. 136 f.) — with proposals for even more completely lifelike automata, some suitable for medical experimentation. 
With the more ambitious, there was the continuing desire to make an automaton that would simulate all human functions, including "apparently crossing" that "Cartesian boundary between mechanical body and rational soul" by producing "'speech and the articulation of words'" (Riskin p. 137, quoting a source from 1744). So in "the last decades of the eighteenth century," there was a time "when philosophers and mechanicians and paying audiences were briefly preoccupied with the idea that articulate language was a bodily function" and hence "that Descartes's divide between mind and body might be bridged in the organs of speech" (p. 144).

In the mid-18th c., "Automata were a preoccupation among [... a number of] modernizing proprietors, imperialists, and slaveholders. The equivalence of machines to lowly people of various sorts — slaves, conscripts, workers — was an attractive supposition and a theme that would recur throughout the development of automatic machinery, industrial as well as experimental. In such conversations, machines unsurprisingly had a decidedly Cartesian meaning: they signified the lack of a rational soul, of a capacity for reason and intellect. (p. 146)

Mechanical calculators had an analogous effect to the automatic loom demoting calculation from a paradigm of intelligence to the antithesis of intelligence. If a  machine could calculate, then something else — say, decision making or language — must be emblematic of human intelligence.

— Participating in this discussion: such big names as Blaise Pascal, Leibniz, and Charles Babbage (a key worker in fields leading to computers (p. 148 f.).

Riskin notes changes in the idea of "machine" in and a bit beyond 18th c., with the five initial editions of the Dictionnaire of the French Academy defining the term, "'Engine, instrument sutured to move, pull, lift, drag or throw something,' with figurative uses such as 'man is an admirable machine.'" In the 6th edition of 1832-35 the example for one figurative use is "It is nothing but a machine [...] a walking machine, [for] a person without spirit, without energy" (p. 150).

A brute-mechanistic distinction between mind and mechanism informed the process of industrialization and that process made manifest an ultimately brute-mechanistic division of the social and economic world into parts, mind on one side and mechanism on the other. The new class of automaton workers included humans and animals as well as machines. The industrial reformers and inventors of automated machinery alike understood their task as the ingenious and lucrative division of intelligence from labor, design from execution, agency from mechanism. (Riskin p. 150)

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Chapter 5, "The Adventures of Mr. Machine" Opening section on Julien Offray de La Mettrie, author most influentially of Man a Machine (French: L'homme Machine), 1747, which see. Riskin discusses insightfully and in some detail how the human-machine has agency, thought, and the capacity for a sex life (pp. 153 f.).

Later parts of the chapter — "The Sentimental Education of Mr. Machine"[6]— also deal largely with French philosophy — in a kind of Who Was Who of 18th-c. philosophical writing — and very important on how the human-machine idea could be used for materialist arguments for "natural" hierarchies in terms of race, class, gender, and to some extent nationality: some machines are clearly more sensitive, efficient, and elegant than others (and so should rule). Alternatively, one could support the mechanistic model and still argue for human equality. Having this discussion in the background might usefully highlight the fabular aspects on race and slavery in such works as Isaac Asimov's "The Bicentennial Man," and the TV episode Star Trek: The Next Generation, "Data's Day".

Riskin concludes this section on the argument — with some philosophers taking both sides at one time or another — with a sardonic summation of what she has just illustrated through extensive quotations from these thinkers themselves (and she does not approve):

We are all just stuff. But the world of stuff is infinitely divisible. The human-machine model and the conversation about the relations between human-machinery and human agency underlay a rapid alternation between universalist ideals on the one hand and the whole panoply of relegations on the other: Hottentots are mechanically indistinguishable from orangutans; female machines are driven by the womb; faulty machines such as the deaf and blind are not really human and so on. This dizzying alternation was itself a hallmark of the [contentious and contradictory] Enlightenment discussion of human nature. We are all the same, a single type of living machine. [Vs.] We are arranged on a graduated scale of mechanical perfection from [the philosopher] Montesquieu down to a monkey, from [inventor, artisan, and artist Jacques de] Vaucanson to his automata. (p. 178)

Section, "Organized Rather Than Designed, Mr. Machine Evolves"

Mr. Machine, that moral material creature, was no passive, brute mechanism. On the contrary, he was an active, self-moving, self-constituting mechanism. No divine Clockmaker assigned him his structure, function, or source of movement. These developed from within himself. [...] Mr. Machine was not a designed machine but an organized one. (Riskin p. 178)

We will note that, like Koheleth (3rd c. BCE?), La Mettrie, Buffon, et al. among anti-Rationalist French philosophers declined "to set humans, and especially themselves, apart from the rest of nature with the idea of a disembodied rational soul [... insisting we] must learn the 'humiliating truth' that man was an animal" (p. 181).[7] These ideas can serve for deep background on the slow-motion debate in 20th-c. SF on whether the embodiment of an uploaded/downloaded personality affected the personality: for primary examples, "No Woman Born," "Masks," and, in Frederik Pohl's Gateway series, The Boy Who Would Live Forever. We will add that the idea of organization as central to life proved robust, and that these Enlightenment ideas prefigured later theories of emergent properties.[8] They also look backward and forward to theories and narratives — in a way that can feel paradoxical — that link materialist humanity to the larger world: "A living, sentient cosmos" (cf. and contrast "the Gaia hypothesis" for Earth) "thrumming with feeling traveled arm in arm with Mr. Machine, a further effect of eliminating Descartes's disjunction between mechanism and self, self and world" (Riskin p. 184).

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Chapter 6, "Dilemmas of a Self-Organizing Machine" And following the Enlightenment (and the "Augustan Age" in English — RDE), Romantics:

The man-machine's quandary was a chief preoccupation of the Romantic movement,[9] as this period is traditionally known in the history of literature and the arts, and more recently, in the history of science too. The Romantics struggled mightily with the idea [...] that living beings might be self-organizing and self-transforming machines, striving to constitute and reconstitute themselves in the dynamic, living machinery of nature. [...]

Section, "Striving Machines" The condition of a self-organizing living machine inhabiting an un-designed world inspired an effusion of poetry and science — or to put it better, an effusive fusion of poetry and science — around the turn of the eighteenth to the nineteenth centuries. A remarkable intimacy between poetry and science characterized the Romantic movement. (p. 189)

And the Mechanism vs. Vitalism debate was proceeding robustly in what was developing in the period into truly scientific biology.

Deals briefly with Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, but notes his centrality to the succeeding chapters. "When he coined the term biologie in 1802, Lamarck defined the [...] new field in terms of [...] a vital, mechanical striving. An intrinsic pouvoir de la vie (force of life) [...] drove 'animated machines,' plants and animals, not only to compose themselves, but to elaborate and complicate the organization over time" — a very long time (p. 199). "A living thing was like a watch," for one of the comparisons standard by Lamarck's time, but "only insofar as a watch could be considered to contain the agency that set it in motion," implying the robust idea of "life as a form of activity," and "a living being" as "an agent" (p. 201). {Cf. and contrast more recent debate between orthodox behaviorists[10] with, so to speak, the slogan "Animal non agit, agitur" (animals do not act; they are acted upon [sic on plural for English] vs. the ethnologists' idea that healthy animals are "up and doing."[11]

Section, "The Striving Machinery of Life Dramatized" Samuel Taylor Coleridge (key English Romantic): "The dilemma that Kant had struggled to describe and overcome was the focus of Coleridge's writing. Rather than working to resolve it, he dramatized it. Descartes's mechanist system, Coleridge wrote, was a 'lifeless Machine whirled about by the dust of its own Grinding,' a reduction of "the living fountain of Life' to 'Death.' On the contrary, in Coleridge's judgment, living organs were different from artificial machines in that, rather than being composed of parts, they actively assimilated foreign matter into themselves" by an "'unseen Agency,'" with Riskin seeing "Agency" as "the key word in Coleridge's understand of living nature" (p. 202).

Moves on to Frankenstein (with the Creature "the leading hypothetical man-machine of the Romantic period"): with background in "machinery as a model of animal and human life" and (renewed) theories of spontaneous generation of life (203-04). "Frankenstein's monster represented the central dilemma of contemporary science" when the book was written, "according to which all living beings were constituted by an inherent agency and yet made out of dead matter." More generally, "Rather than contrasting life with nonlife — the inanimate — the Romantics set life up against death. What was not alive was dead" (p. 207). "That matter was dead, the opposite of life, and that life was a form of activity[...] were the Romantic principles that informed the founding of biology as a discipline. Life was the struggle against extinction [...]" (p. 208). Note rising popularity of ideas on "Vital Power" and "the World Spirit, and the entry into the a-borning new science of physiology as well as biology generally Leibniz's idea of vis viva ("living force") and how, with this concept, Leibniz "had built the source of action into his world-machine rather than attributing it to an external source, distinguishing his intrinsically active form of mechanism from what he saw as the passive machinery of both Descartes's and Newton's cosmoses" (pp. 209-10).

Chapter ends with consideration that "The dead matter of the Romantics became animate, not at the hands of an eternal Designer, but through the action of a vital agency, [...] an all-embracing energy intrinsic to nature's machinery" (p. 212). Which lead to two developments: (1) the idea "that by tracing the developments of limited agents working in specific contexts over [long] periods of time, they might reconcile the demands of mechanism with the appearance of living purpose. [...] [T]ranscendence through the dimension of time." And (2) "a kind of transcendence though energy: the idea that organisms, understood as living machines, were connected through a great web of energy exchange to the cosmos itself" — a web of energy that included Frankenstein's "Monster" (pp. 212-13)

See chapter for the long-running debate on Mechanism vs. Vitalism; see also for similar works from the period, such as E. T. A. Hoffman's "Automata."

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Chapter 7, "Darwin between the Machines" Notes Romanticism's effects on Charles Darwin, however much he was no fan of his grandfather's, Erasmus Darwin's, exercises in scientific Romantic poetry, and directly through the influence of the German Romantic Alexander von Humboldt (p. 215).

It was a deep, an elemental ambivalence [... in Darwin's ideas of mechanism]. Moreover, Darwin was drawn to the work of other people torn between the same two impulses: to banish agency from living nature's machinery and to make agency its very crux. The French physiologist Claude Bernard struggled mightily with the same problem, also without solving it, and also extremely productively. [...] ¶ "An organism is nothing but a living machine," was Bernards constant refrain. [...] Moreover, living machines did not differ from "brute machines" [...] ¶ Yet at the same time, Bernard did also believe that living machines had a certain distinguishing feature, unique to them [...]: "a creating idea [...]". The vital idea, Bernard said, was the essence of life. [...] Indeed, he continually used the term "vital force" all the while insisting that there was no such thing. [...] Bernard rejected both what he called "vitalism" [...] and mechanistic materialism. (pp. 235-36)

Darwin's supporter T. H. "Huxley argued that Descartes's idea of living beings as machines should be extended to include even the human mind: 'We are conscious automata'" (p. 237). Darwin remained ambivalent: His "mechanist accounts of life [...] encompassed both extremes: a kind of machinery in which agency was elemental, constitutive of the world, and a kind of machinery in which agency was illusory, reducible to brute parts" (p. 238).

No agency, though, was an invitation to accept William Paley's 1802 thought-experiment where one finds a watch on a heath and infers "A watch implies a watchmaker: it is a perfect encapsulation of the argument [for God] from design. What people do not generally notice is the part played by the watch here: it lies upon the heath like a stone about to be kicked. The watch is perhaps unlike a stone in its mechanical complexity but in Paley's famous passage it resembles the stone in its passivity and inertness [...]. It represents the clockwork universe of early modern science not only in being an intricate mechanism, but also in being a profoundly passive object of externally imposed design" (p. 239). This became more of a problem for Darwin when he accepted the term of "fitness," since this idea "retained a ghostly aura of the divine Engineer. Through they had evacuated God from his machinery, mechanists and authors of argument from design had left behind a device world, an artifact world: a world utterly dependent upon an external source of purpose and action" (p. 243).

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ Chapter 8, "The Mechanical Egg and the Intelligent Egg" Covers the the beginnings in Europe of embryology as an independent scientific discipline; but introductory section offers some significant general background.

[... In the growing consensus] Darwinism was unequivocally "mechanist," notwithstanding Darin's own ambivalence about the mechanical models of life [...]. Darwinism became "mechanist," and "mechanist," in turn, became the opposite of "vitalist," a word often a[[;ed to science of the eighteenth century and even earlier. but which was [...] in fact an innovation of the nineteenth. [... Our emphasis]

Yet a tradition [...] going back to the earliest ones to describe species as changing in time [...] understood their approach as at once mechanist and historical. They took living entities to be machines, by which they meant rationally comprehensible systems of moving parts that developed and changed thanks to a kind of historical agency: an ability throughout the parts of the machinery to constitute and transform themselves and their relations to one another purposefully and responsively. (p. 252) * * *

[Max] Weber admonished that to be successful, one must accept that science was not a path to meaning, art, God, or happiness. Science dealt neither in the revelations of "seers and prophets," not in the truths oaf "sages and philosophers." What science had to offer was technology, the means to carol the conditions of daily life, and also clear thinking." A key role of this German Protestant mode of positivist, mechanist science was to puncture the authority of generalized visions. (p. 256)

Sections follow on "The Mechanical Egg and the Historical Egg" — "eggs and embryos as machines and, specifically, not [...] developing historical entities" (p. 257) — for one view; and "The Homunculus Machine and the Self-Made Embryo" for two competing views on ontogeny and its relation to phylogeny (etc.), plus analysis, not immediately relevant here, of August Weismann's important contributions in starting the road to genetics and, more relevant but less admirable, Weissmann's caricaturing Lamarck's views on "the inheritance of acquired characteristics," a formulation Lamarck never used (p. 268). Moving into the 20th c., Riskin's quotes a 1916 text, she finds characteristic:

We tend to lay the causes of form-change, of evolution, as far as possible outside the living organism. With Darwin we seek the transforming factors in the environment rather than within  the organism itself. We fight shy of the Lamarckian conception that the living thing obscurely works out its own salvation by blind and instinctive effort. We like to think of organisms as machines, as passive inventions gradually perfected from generation to generation by external agency, by enviornmnet or by natural selection or what you will" (quoted by Riskin p. 272)

Quotes Weismann disciple Erwin Stresemann with use of a watch-word with later (psychological) Behaviorists, if not always with the "sed": "animal non agit, sed agitur" — an animal doesn't act, but is acted upon — part of a larger "Weismannism" that would "dominate biological thinking in the United States in the early-to-middle decades ion the twentieth century" (Riskin p. 278) — challenged in the 1960s and after by, among other views, the idea of ethologists that healthy animals are "up and doing" (Konrad Lorenz, as remembered by RDE).

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See also Sublime Dreams of Living Machines: The Automaton in the European Imagination and "The empty brain". Note The Restless Clock as potentially useful deep background for Gaiman's American Gods.

RDE, finishing, 28Feb21f. through May 2021