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Weekly Column in Washington Post: Science and Man
Dec. 28, 1968
Joshua Lederberg

   Man Can Be Called 'Machine' -- But a Most Complex One

     Does Modern science dehumanize man?

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     It is easy to find deeply ambivalent feelings about
science among intellectuals (even including some scientists),
in Congress, among alienated youths and among bewildered
citizens.  We live in a scientific age whose glories and
terrors are both credited to science.  At this level, we can
hardly deny that our ever-growing scientific mastery over the
forces of nature imposes an almost unbearable responsibility
on political authority and on a democratic electorate to learn
about, think about, plan for and use these forces for real
human benefit.

     In this climate, many people have become highly sensitized
to more ethereal questions that are raised by the scientific
study of man.  One such question is the doctrine of mechanism.
Dr. D.E. Wooldridge, a well known physicist and systems
engineer and a successful industrialist -- formerly president
of TRW (Thompson-Ramo-Wooldridge) Inc. -- has written several
excellent syntheses of present day thought in biology.  His 
latest work, "Mechanical Man -- the Physical Basis of Intelligent
Life," concludes "that a single body of natural laws operating
on a single set of material particles completely accounts for
the origin and properties of living organisms.  Accordingly,
man is essentially no more than a complex machine."

     A few eccentrics aside, the whole community of contemporary
science shares the view that the same laws of nature apply to
nonliving and living matter alike.  All of us who investigate
the chemistry and physics of living organisms pursue our work
as if organisms were complex machines, and we find man to
exhibit no tissues or functions that would except him from
this way of analyzing human nature.

     Nevertheless, we are or should be careful to state just
what we mean before we assert that "man is a machine," and much
more so before using the phrase "merely a machine."  The
statement that man is "a mere machine," or a mere anything,
is a needless irritant to precise communication between
scientists and laymen.  (We might better proclaim that
"man is merely the most complex product of organic evolution
on earth, the only organism whose intelligence has evolved
to the point that his culture far transcends his biological
endowment.")

     The "mere machine" phrase is usually a retort to the
claim that there are mysteries of human nature that are, in
principle, beyond the reach of scientific investigation.  
Scientists would do better to save their breath quarreling
about what they can analyze in principle; in their own work,
they are mercilessly pragmatic about confining their
conclusions to what they can examine in practice.

     There are, in fact, theoretical limits to scientific
analysis that may justify men in repudiating Dr. Wooldridge's
assertion that "the concept of the machine-like nature of man
is incompatible with a long-cherished belief in human uniqueness."
There is nothing "mere" about a machine as complex as a man;
the word "machine" is just a manner of speaking about the
scientist's faith in a universe ordered by natural law.  That
faith was expressed most eloquently by the French philosopher
the Marquis de Laplace, who averred that, given complete
knowledge of the universe at one instant, the scientist could
in principle compute all of its future states in infinite
detail.

     In practice, we must now remind ourselves, the scientist
and his computers are machines that occupy space and consume
energy.  Dr. Rolf Landauer of IBM has pointed out that the
process of calculation itself soon reaches fundamental limits.
If the whole visible universe were one gigantic computer, made
of components at the theoretical lower limit of size and
energy consumption, it would still be insufficient for some
problems that are soluble "in principle."

     Far short of the complexity represented by a human being,
some mere machines called computers nevertheless have already
reached the point where their actual behavior is predictable
only to a rough approximation, and we must be careful to
program internal checks to detect when these highly individualized
robots deviate from their intended instructions.

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_900428  Note La Mettrie (1709-1751), L'homme machine, 1748
-- cf Durant Age of Voltaire 618