Image credit: Rodrigue Somalia, “Writing causation #8 Painting
Saatchi Art, https://www.saatchiart.com/art/Painting-Writing-causation-8/651434/8744983/view
“Seems,” madam? Nay, it is; I know not “seems.”
‘Tis not alone my inky cloak, good mother,
Nor customary suits of solemn black,
Nor windy suspiration of forced breath,
No, nor the fruitful river in the eye,
Nor the dejected ‘havior of the visage,
Together with all forms, moods, shapes of grief,
That can denote me truly: these indeed seem,
For they are actions that a man might play:
But I have that within which passeth show;
These but the trappings and the suits of woe.
— William Shakespeare, Hamlet
It usually begins something like this:
As I will describe in this chapter, the word “cause” has never had a single definition. … Poke in one direction or another, and people’s definitions expand or contract, as need be, to encompass the things they want to embrace as causal, and to evade others.1
Great. That from the geneticist Kathryn Paige Harden. Doubtless, she will escape the trap so many others fall into.
As people generally have the notion that anteriority is somehow related to authority, what does an esteemed authority from the past have to say? Hume gave it a go in the eighteenth century:
We may define a cause to be an object, followed by another, and where all the objects, similar to the first, are followed by objects similar to the second. Or, in other words, where, if the first object had not been, the second never had existed.2
Going back still further in time (thus, no doubt, authority), Aristotle famously identified four causes applying to everything requiring an explanation.3 In Metaphysics XII, 1072a he sneaks in a fifth: ὃ οὐ κινούμενον κινεῖ, that which moves without being moved; the uncaused cause. Believe it or not, entire careers have been spent working out the implications of Aristotle’s framework. Paid careers!
In physics, causation is typically said to be determined by the fundamental laws of nature, which govern how physical quantities interact with each other (stuff bumping into stuff). In classical physics, when one thing bumps into another even a mediocre physicist can predict what will happen next to both things; causation is deterministic. In quantum mechanics, things may or may not bump into each other (or may both seem to bump and not bump); causation is probabilistic.
And then of course there are some who deny causation altogether:
The law of causality, I believe, like much that passes muster among philosophers, is a relic of a bygone age, surviving, like the monarchy, only because it is erroneously supposed to do no harm.4
That from none other than Bertram Russell. Sean Carroll, a theoretical physicist at Johns Hopkins, is sympathetic with Russell’s view but finds it a bit extreme from a practical perspective. Carroll’s solution is to have his cake and eat it, too:
Concepts like “cause” appear nowhere in Newton’s equations, nor in our more modern formulations of the laws of nature. But we can’t deny that the idea of one event being caused by another is very natural, and seemingly a good fit to how we experience the world.5
So, the universe admits of no causation really, but humans experience causation…. There must be some explanation for such a convincing illusion. Are you just a dope?6
At a certain point, golf seems a better choice than all this stuff and nonsense. Perhaps it is best to thank these great minds for their contributions and hit the links–with every expectation that striking the ball with a club will cause the ball to move. (Whether or not in the direction or at the velocity you intend is another matter altogether. Summon the mediocre physicist.)
Which is to say, you likely live in a world where if you, say, bang a hammer on your thumb the result is likely to be pain (and, unless inadvertent, a trip to the Ward No. 67). That is, in a world of causes and effects, where the effects are real (whatever the universe and great minds may have to say about it).
Is that all there is to it, then? Is all the pondering through the centuries, all the expensive burning of fuel by any number of cerebral cortices just so much wasted effort, as there seems to be no consensus? Schedule a tee time?
The answer to that question depends, dear reader, on your personality (which, by the way, you had precious little hand in forming). If your response to such phrases as, “It’s complicated,” or “It depends on the context,”8 or “We need to define our terms” is to sigh and reach for the golf clubs (or a drink), then the answer is Yes, wasted effort. If, on the other hand, you’re the sort of person who is likely to utter such phrases, the answer is No; there is a need for serious thought (and the burning of more fuel). And on the assumption that, as you’re still reading, you’re the latter rather than the former (at least occasionally), grab a scoop instead of the clubs and shovel more coal into the furnace.
Kathryn Paige Harden–besides being exceptionally bright (fair guess that she needs less coal to fire up her furnace than most), having a cool name, and being an accomplished geneticist–has practical concerns and takes a practical approach to causation. Her concerns have to do with using genetics to address social inequities. Her approach is to employ counterfactual inference (yes, it’s a thing; look it up) in defining causation, which is, she points out, “endemic to every branch of medicine and the social sciences”.
Under the counterfactual definition of the word “cause”, to say that X causes Y is to say that, if X had not happened, then the probability of Y happening could be different.9
Sensible. Practical. Has a history of success. Not a bad guide to follow.
Except, maybe it’s complicated.
Richard Lewontin was a rare sort. He held an endowed chair in zoology and biology at Harvard from 1973 to 1998, and was and is considered to be one of evolutionary biology greats—and vigorously butted heads with other evolutionary greats, such as E.O. Wilson and Richard Dawkins. He won any number of awards (the Sewall Wright Award, the Crafoord Prize in Biosciences, the Thomas Hunt Morgan Medal from the Genetics Society of America, etc.). Stephen Jay Gould considered Lewontin the most intelligent person he had ever met.10
Lewontin was also a Marxist, which gave him a peculiar perspective (for most Western evolutionary biologists). Importantly, he was not shy about noting that his philosophical positions influenced his scientific work. In his book of essays, Biology as Ideology (which grew out of his 1900 Massey Lectures Series for CBC Radio11), Lewontin begins with what should be so obvious as to need to no stating—but seems to be often overlooked:
Scientists do not begin life as scientists, after all, but as social beings immersed in a family, a state, a productive structure, and they view nature through a lens that has been molded by their social experience….12
And, following that, comes the kicker:
Science, like the Church before it, is a supremely social institution, reflecting and reinforcing the dominant values and vices of society at each historical epoch.13
One of the chief functions of science, for Lewontin, is explanation of how the world really works. And that function serves another purpose: legitimation, the reinforcement of existing social norms and assumptions. And in that role, science has supplanted religion as the chief legitimating force in modern society. Like religion, “it must not seem to be the creation of political, economic, or social forces, but to descend into society from a supra-human source.”14 Like religion, science’s explanations “must seem to be true in an absolute sense and to derive somehow from an absolute source … true for all time and all place.”15 And like religion, science “must have an esoteric language, which needs to be explained to the ordinary person by those who are especially knowledgeable and can intervene between everyday life and mysterious sources of understanding and knowledge.”16
Check, check and check.
But has this to do with the topic at hand? you may rightly ask (perhaps with an understandable combination of impatience, frustration and contempt)? Seems a fair question.
For Lewontin, industrial capitalism initiated a transformation in science which, in contrast to scientific development in the Middle Ages and Renaissance, made a sharp distinction between causes and effects. Everything is either one or the other, acting or being acted upon. In classical Darwinian terms, humans are seen as passive effects of the active environment. In a more modern biological context, humans “are seen as being determined by internal factors, the genes.”17 And as genes to individuals, so individuals to society, and so back to genes: “Genes make individuals and individuals make society, and so genes make society.”18
In short, science has adopted Descartes’s mechanistic view of the world. The world is a clock. What has been forgotten is that Descartes’s clock was a metaphor. The world was like a clock (seemed to be a clock). Modern science thinks it is a clock. And if a clock breaks, the cause must be found if there is any hope for a fix.
In his essay “Causes and Their Effects”,19 Lewontin reviews various issues related to health and disease. Mesothelioma, tuberculosis, smallpox, measles, life span and so on. He then proceeds to cast a skeptical eye on science’s claims to have remedied these issues, whether by explanation leading to remediation (removal of asbestos) or by a scientific advance (development of the smallpox vaccine). He finds all such claims wanting. We must, he insists, distinguish between agents and causes. And as a good Marxist, the cause is invariably unregulated industrial capitalism; the “poor bacterium” is simply an agent.
To a long, but important (or at least as important as golf) quote:
So long as efficiency, the maximization of profit from production, or the filling of centrally planned norms of production with reference to the means remain the motivating forces of productive enterprises the world over, so long as people are trapped by economic need or state regulation into production and consumption of certain things, then one pollutant will replace another. Regulatory agencies will calculate cost and benefit ratios where human misery is costed out at a dollar value. Asbestos and cotton lint fibers are not the causes of cancer. They are the agents of social causes, of social formations that determine the nature of our productive and consumptive lives, and in the end it is only through changes in those social forces that we can get to the problems of health. The transfer of causal power from social relations into inanimate agents that then seem to have a power and life of their own is one of the major mystifications of science and its ideologies.20
Odds are that if you’re reading this, you live in the developed West and were born after World War II. Lucky you. Why lucky? Because statistically you have the highest chances of what usually passes for objective measures of well-being.21 If you’re luckier still, you’re white, college educated and live in the richest of the developed West’s rich societies (for the same reasons). As such, you may well have a bias to dismiss a Marxist interpretation of … pretty much anything … as being “relic of a bygone age, surviving, like the monarchy, only because it is erroneously supposed to do no harm [any longer].” Not even Russians buy into Marxism anymore.
Ipso facto, no need to take Lowentin seriously or give up pastimes with arguably more utility (like golf) only to past time burning cognitive fuel, posthumously, on his quaint writings (or utterances, if consumed via the CBC Radio broadcast rather than in book form).
But mightn’t he have a point, setting aside Marx’s prognostications (which Lewontin doesn’t take up and can safely be dismissed as eschatological, thus metaphysical, thus useless—unless you’re the sort of person who likes counting angels on the heads of pins as a pastime)? Is it too simple to rely on counterfactual inference as the basis for defining (and at long last be done with worrying about) causation? Might Harden’s concern with social inequities be brought into sharper focus by considering that there may be both agents and causes in need of distinguishing?
Might biology (and, more broadly, science) be an ideology?
Or (more likely) is all the foregoing “but the trappings and the suits of woe”?
- Kathryn Paige Harden, The Genetic Lottery: Why DNA Matters for Social Equality (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2021), 96. ↩︎
- David Hume, An Enquiry concerning Human Understanding, ed. Peter Millican (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008; orig. Pub. 1748). ↩︎
- Physics II 3 and Metaphysics V 2. If you haven’t read Aristotle by now, no need to bother. He only established the foundations of Western philosophy. ↩︎
- Bertram Russell, “On the Notion of Cause” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 13:1-26, 1913. Russell was knighted in 1935 but not given the title “Sir”, as the title is reserved for British citizens. How smug. ↩︎
- Sean Carroll, The Big Picture (New York, Penguin Random House, 2016), 63. ↩︎
- And of course Carroll has one. You may be (likely are) a dope, but Carroll’s solution has to do with entropy and the arrow of time, which lets you largely off the hook. Read the book for yourself if you must know more. ↩︎
- Anton Checkov, Ward No. 6 and Other Stories, Barnes & Noble Classic Series) trans. Constance Garnett (New York: Barnes and Noble, 2003; orig. pub. 1892). To spare you the reading, Ward No. 6 is a mental asylum. ↩︎
- Regarding context, what might we be talking about when we talk about, say, depression? A psychological state? An atmospheric phenomenon? A geological feature? An economic event? Answer key: it depends on context. ↩︎
- Ibid., p.100. ↩︎
- If you don’t have at least a vague idea of who Stephen Jay Gould was and why his opinion might carry some weight, there’s no hope for you. Hit the links. ↩︎
- As you likely prefer listening to reading, Lewontin’s Massey Lectures are available at https://www.cbc.ca/radio/ideas/the-1990-cbc-massey-lectures-biology-as-ideology-1.2946847. ↩︎
- R.C. Lewontin, Biology as Ideology (New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 1991), 3. ↩︎
- Ibid., p. 9. ↩︎
- Ibid., p. 7. ↩︎
- Idem. ↩︎
- Idem. ↩︎
- Ibid., p. 13. ↩︎
- Ibid., p. 14. ↩︎
- Ibid., pp. 39-57. ↩︎
- Ibid., pp. 45-46. ↩︎
- Health, job opportunities, socioeconomic development, healthy environment, safety, fair political participation. See Voukelatou, V., Gabrielli, L., Miliou, I. et al. Measuring objective and subjective well-being: dimensions and data sources. Int J Data Sci Anal 11, 279–309 (2021). ↩︎