The Power of Life
My conversation with science historian Jessica Riskin
In December, I was thrilled to interview Jessica Riskin, a historian of science based at Stanford University. As you’ll read, an essay she wrote in 2023 about Alan Turing and AI played a non-trivial role in my decision to launch Cognitive Resonance, and I’ve broadly become a fan of her efforts to challenge existing scientific paradigms using the lens of history. To that end, she has a new book coming out in March, The Power of Life, that reexamines the scientific theories of Jean-Baptiste Lamarck—it’s a fun and provocative read (and available for pre-order here).
We touched on many subjects so I’ve broken the interview into six sections—feel free to skip around, but the whole conversation is worth reading!
Life, Intelligence, and AI
Determinism and Free Will
Eugenics and Behavorial Genetics
Lamarck and The Power of Life
Cultural Evolution
Fighting Authoritarianism in America
1. Life, Intelligence, and AI
[Ben] Let’s start with your intellectual project as I see it. Having read your forthcoming book The Power of Life, and your previous one The Restless Clock, as well as many of your essays, I feel in your writing a real celebration of natural life. Across your efforts, I see you resisting the reduction of life to mechanistic descriptions, both in the present and the past.
You highlight that we’ve come to think of science as this mechanistic process, but it didn’t have to be that way. Historically, it took a turn in that direction, but it wasn’t inevitable.
And thus the people who nowadays claim the mantle of science as this rational project, they miss the fact that the current approach is actually grounded in very biblical, even divine notions—God is the watchmaker who puts life into motion.
You want us to stop doing that and reembrace the complexity of humanity. I wrote down this quote from your most recent book, “life at its essence is creative agency.”
So I feel you saying that to be human is to have a will. Does this resonate?
[Jessica] That’s beautiful. I like that very much. I would add, it’s not just humans, but I think all living things. Life in its essence is creative agency, that’s Lamarck’s idea, but I really admire it and like it. I think with living beings in general, there’s been this kind of reductive mechanist approach to nature in general. It seems to be wrong headed.
So, I would also add my meta-level interest in science, what science is, and why people think certain kinds of explanations are science and others are not science. How did it get to be that this very narrow, reductive mode of explanation is the only one that people will accept?
And people even feel they have to kind of prove themselves by carrying it to crazy extremes, these kind of crazy extremist positions like Robert Sapolsky’s.
Oh we’re going to get to him. But let’s first talk about AI.
I became one of your biggest fans when I read your essay on Alan Turing and ChatGPT in the New York Review of Books in June 2023. You shared an anecdote about a conversation you had with a student who raised the idea that perhaps his thinking was no different than the pattern-matching and statistical correlations that generative AI makes.1
I think that was a career-changing moment for me, because I realized this tool was going to be used both as mirror and searchlight into the way we think about how we think, and what we are. And this made me freak out that we’re heading toward a place where we further devalue the beauty in our essential humanity, and our agency.
So I’m curious if you’ve kept in touch with that student, and how many more conversations like that have you had? It’s been a few years, what’s the vibe?
On the first question, no I haven’t kept in touch, because that was actually a student at Reed College, not Stanford. I had gone to Reed to give a lecture and two-day seminar there.
But I have had hundreds of conversations with students since then about that kind of thing. And what’s interesting is that my students seem to be getting less open to it. Certainly, the graduate students seem to be more skeptical, and feel it’s really insidious, and want to hold it at bay more and more. Which gives me hope.
If anything, I see a more entrenched view that there is an essence to human thinking that is not at all what these AIs do. Of course, nobody really knows how the AIs work, so there is a level of mystery.
I always think back to Alan Turing’s 1950 paper, where he says it would be possible to have a process of training so complex that the designers and trainers themselves wouldn’t understand how it works. And he says this would necessarily be the case because if the trainers did understand it fully, they would have no further sense that it’s intelligent. But the same goes for a human brain, if you knew everything that was going on inside, you’d have no illusion of intelligence.
So that brings us to Turning and his test, which is really the main topic of your NYRB essay. There’s something you write about that has stuck with me, which is the conversation Turing had with Max Newman on the BBC, where they were talking about what you just described. And Newman said, well, perhaps intelligence is like a mosaic: if you look at the constituent things, all you see are little bits of colored stones, but pull back and the beauty is there.
I can’t tell if you agree with that or not?
No, I don’t at all agree with that. I don’t agree with that reductive idea that if you can break it down into tiny moving parts the intelligence evaporates.
And if you think of his analogy, it’s not even true, right? The mosaic isn’t just lots of little colored dots with cement in between. It has a design. They’re arranged that way for a reason.
It often seems when people want to insist on some kind of an irreducible essence to life or cognition—or intelligence, thought, mind—that they are forced to do it in religious terms, as “the soul,” or in some dualist way.
And what’s interesting to me about Lamarck is that he absolutely rejects that. He thought it was fine if people wanted to believe in God, but it had no bearing on anything, from his perspective. He was a materialist, he thought there was only one material, natural world. And so he’s unusual in that regard.
That’s partly what I find attractive about his approach. I really do think that most reductive modes of scientific explanation are just not persuasive, and there’s no reason to believe in them. They are their own kind of faith, in fact.
It feels to me like you are in the vicinity of those who argue that we should pay more attention to cells rather than neurons. AI and cognitive science are focused on neurons an information transformation, this is where Alan Turing and Claude Shannon cut their teeth, the manipulation of symbols. But it feels that the Lamarckian view, and maybe the Riskinian view, suggests we should look at the genesis of cellular life and how it builds upon itself. Is that at all true?
I would say there is something kind of dualist in believing you can do anything in silicon that you can do in a living brain. As if the matter doesn’t matter, the substance doesn’t matter.
Why would you think that the actual substance has no bearing on whether the thing is alive or intelligent? I mean, certain electrical phenomena only happen with conductors, you wouldn’t think that you could make those things happen using pieces of wood.
So why would it be that intelligence or cognition or life could be transferable to another kind of matter? It only works if you’re a dualist on some level, and you think that there’s some immaterial essence to it.
The pushback I get on this, which I’ll now use to play devil’s advocate with you, take two forms. First, and I chuckle at this, I’ve been accused of “meat chauvinism,” that because we humans have bodies, we presume they are required for intelligence. And people point to AI and even computing more broadly as evidence that there are ways to emulate aspects of intelligent behavior in non-corporeal forms.
And then the other argument is the “wing-flapper defense” as I call it, which is that we looked at birds and how they fly and thus mistakenly tried to build mechanical wings for a long time. It was only when we turned to theories of aerodynamics and lift that, boom, the Wright brothers build airplanes. So maybe we should examine our human intelligence and develop theories about it, but try to recreate it artificially in some other manner.
What would you say in response?
Well, the meat chauvinism, that really sounds so Silicon Valley.
100%.
But that’s exactly the point I was making. That is a very dualist person! He probably thinks—just hazarding a guess it’s a he—he thinks he’s a hardcore scientific type, very rationalist and sober, but he’s really a dualist.
You could do a computer simulation of water and it won’t be wet. Why would anything be transferable into a computer simulation and be considered the same thing as whatever it’s simulating?
Now, the flying example is one answer to that. Airplanes really do fly. They aren’t simulating it. But they aren’t computer simulations either, they are heavy objects traveling through air.
I might have thought you’d point to the lack of agency in AI, that when two humans communicate, they both have thoughts they are trying to express using words, and that absent this, we can only go so far with AI.
I don’t want to be absolutely categorical, a priori, and claim there will never be an artificially produced, intelligent, sentient machine. I mean, maybe there will be of some kind. Maybe there will be. But I don’t think any sane person thinks large-language models are that.
They don’t have a kind of inner autonomous agency, right? They’re not engaging with you. They’re a tool that you either use or you don’t. I do use them now like a search engine. But it’s not an intelligent machine that has lived experience in the world.
I would say that having a kind of physical, embodied lived experience in the world would be a prerequisite to true artificial intelligence.
2. Determinism and Free Will
Earlier you mentioned your colleague Robert Sapolsky, and you wrote a review of his book Determined where you pulled no punches.2 I was in a book club where we discussed his ideas for several weeks. It was painful.
I don’t think it his book is worth that level of engagement. It’s not serious.
Agreed, but these are smart people in my book club, I’d like to say, and some found his work very seductive. And what makes it seductive is that he makes it seem if you don’t agree with him, you’re invoking some spooky or even Biblical unknowable force in the Universe.
And this is where your book The Restless Clock comes in, because it traces the history of science viewing nature as a clock, created by a divine Clockmaker, echoes to the present day with people like Sapolsky. So I’m wondering if you can trace that history briefly?
The irony is that somebody like Sapolsky presents his totally mechanist, totally determinist model as the only scientific model, and suggests that if you reject his model, then you’re going over into spooky woo-woo kind of metaphysical stuff, when in fact, it’s the other way around.
That mechanistic clockwork model grew out of the argument from design, that somewhere out beyond our mechanical world, there must have been a rational designer.
And yet we’ve had this weird reversal where people like Richard Dawkins and Robert Sapolsky, they’re heirs to William Paley, who in the early 19th century wrote the definitive version of the argument from design. If you stub your toe on a rock, you don’t ask how the rock got there, but if you stub your toe on a clock, there had to be a clockmaker somewhere around, it couldn’t just be there.
Of course, then comes Darwin, who replaces the external clockmaker with evolution by natural selection. But what I’m interested in in The Restless Clock is the way in which Darwin really had to wrestle with his model because he was pulled in two directions. He was pulled toward the Paley direction, of there being a clockmaker out there somewhere, but also in the Lamarck direction, which gets rid of the external clockmaker by giving organisms agency.
So if you were to strike your foot against something and it yelps and scuttles away, you might conclude it arrived there by its own agency. Which is very interesting to think about.
3. Eugenics and Behavioral Genetics
This brings us to the ugliest extreme of Darwin, namely eugenics, and the notion of determinism through our genetic code. You and Mark Feldman wrote a review of Kathryn Paige Harden’s book, The Genetic Lottery, that also pulled no punches.3
It felt like there was real anger in that review, at the revival of arguably the worst manifestation of modern science. Harden would say she’s trying to recast things, and that understanding genes is not inevitably evil, and in fact, if you’re of the progressive left, you need to have an understanding of the role that genes play in making us who there are.
And you and Feldman are basically saying it really doesn’t tell us all that much.
Genes obviously play an important role in living beings. Obviously, I wouldn’t deny that; it would be kind of crazy to deny it.
But I think it’s a category mistake to think that they do some of the things that she and others in sociogenomics and behavioral genetics ascribe to them. Things such as grit or educational attainment. Those are social and cultural categories that are hard to measure in themselves.
I’ve just been looking at one study discussing polygenic indices for educational attainment in children, and environmental influences involving how their parents and caregivers treat them. And the study reported finding that children’s polygenic indices for educational attainment make no difference to whether the parents sing or read to the child, but only to whether they play with a child.
This is totally preposterous: if you’ve ever sung or read to a child or played with a child, you know that these are not separable. It’s just crazy.
DNA plays a crucial role in the production and disposition of proteins. And that’s important in all kinds of ways. But there need to be plausible causal mechanisms. In the production of melanin in the iris, there’s a very clear causal pathway from DNA to dark-colored eyes.
But there are no such pathways from DNA to the Harvard Admissions Office, they don’t exist. They couldn’t exist. It’s like saying that you could use Euclidean geometry to do the weather report.
It took me a while to figure this out. It doesn’t necessarily occur to people that this realm of behavioral genetics is more social science than it is natural science. As soon as you use the word genetics, you think that what’s happening here involves people in white lab coats conducting experiments.
But actually, it’s just statistics and correlations. We take a trait that we see in the world, we put a metric on it, and then we match it up to some aggregated genetic data. It feels to me that in the last five years, on the scientific frontier we’re starting to realize this has many limits. Yet, at the same time, we’re also seeing the revival of expressly eugenicist efforts to manipulate your baby’s DNA to make them smarter.
I’m curious how you see things trending?
Behavioral genetics uses these very enormous and easily accessible databases. So the social scientists are not running gels in a lab. They’re accessing these databases and doing a kind of astrology with them.
Sometimes they seem invincible, but I think it’s worth continuing to make the counterargument. I have a colleague who has been making it since 1970. The current version with this alphabet soup of GWASs and PGIs and EAs, the people in this field repeat the old adage that correlation is not causation.
And yet, their whole field is founded on a conflation of correlation with causation. They never make the slightest gesture at a causal mechanism. How do you get from the creation and disposition of certain proteins all the way to life outcomes?
The riddle wrapped inside an enigma is when you take something like intelligence. By design, intelligence tests create the bell curve, but then we treat that as if that is a naturally occurring phenomenon, when it’s not. You have to pick and choose what questions to use to get to that distribution. And so you actually have social science wrapped inside of social science, all which is largely hidden from view.
Exactly, exactly. And even on the correlation level, putting aside the absence of causation, the correlations are vanishingly tiny.
And then there’s the whole problem with population stratification that keeps coming up again and again. One example I’ve heard is using multiple forks. You could do a polygenic study to determine who uses multiple forks at their meals, and you’d find an association with aristocrats, since they pass down both their DNA and their cutlery practices.
But DNA is not causing people to use a different fork for their salad.
We shy away from this, but this is clearly what happens with race. We have clearly created institutions with a long historical track record that have punished and kept people in a state of subservience because of differences around perceived race. People see disparity in life outcomes cutting along racial lines and assume there’s some X% we can attribute to genes.
But when it comes to nature and nurture, you invoke the metaphor of a coastline, which I love. How much of the coastline is caused by the ocean and how much the shore? It’s just a nonsensical question.
4. Lamarck and The Power of Life
The Power of Life, your new book on Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, will come out in March. I don’t want to give away the ending, but it ends with three words: “Lamarck was right.” What was he right about?
I’ve thought about this a lot. I think that Lamarck was right that living organisms shape the course of evolutionary development, by their behaviors and responses to the environment on various levels. They shape the course of evolutionary development.
They are not solely the passive objects of outside forces.
Of course, Lamarck died in 1829. So he didn’t know about anything that’s happened since. I don’t mean that he was literally right each of his statements, but overall, his picture of the living world was one according to which living organisms are continually actively, creatively engaging with their surroundings on many levels. And that shapes their development from generation to generation.
I think I can firmly say he was right about that.
My only memory of Lamarck from my own education, prior to reading your book, was being told in my biology class that Lamarck though giraffes stretched their necks and then passed this trait along, and boy wasn’t he so dumb to think that.
But was he wrong about the giraffe?
So funny you should ask that, because I am now involved in the first science experiment I’ve ever been involved in since high school. It’s a study of epigenetics in giraffe inheritance, with colleagues at Stanford and other schools, and people at the Giraffe Conservation Foundation in Namibia.
They actually collected cheek swabs, if you can believe it, as part of their conservation efforts. My daughter thought was the most hilarious thing, she imagined people climbing up on ladders to take these samples.
I think some people hear the phrase epigenetics and get a little lost. Can you just briefly say what you mean by that?
What I mean is that the DNA molecule is kind of wrapped and packaged with other things. And these other things, these molecular structures, make a difference to gene expression.
Scientists have shown there can be inherited epigenetic effects from generation to generation, changes that are not in the DNA, but are in the structure surrounding the DNA, that cause differences, phenotypic differences that can be inherited from generation to generation.
And then these feed back into natural selection.
So, for example, if a giraffe stretched its neck, underwent epigenetic changes—changes in the packaging of its DNA —and then passed those on to its offspring, natural selection would then be acting upon offspring with an inherited longer neck.
So this is really very preliminary this research. It’s just to see whether there are epigenic structures that differ among species of giraffe and between giraffes and okapi. And if there are epigenetic differences between the species, along with the phenotypic differences, then we would design some more experiments to see what those differences might mean.
5. Cultural Evolution
All this makes me wonder if you’ve thought about the role of cultural evolution and humanity, because I think we can tell the biological story of our evolution that will take us up to some point at around, say, 100,000 years ago.
But at that point, we start to bring in all sorts of things that are clearly not rooted in biology, such as language, right? And other cultural practices that become bound up with who we are, and the ways in which we express our agency.
And I have become a huge fan of Celia Hayes at Oxford, author of Cognitive Gadgets, a book that explores how much of what we consider our cognitive architecture comes through the cultural transmission of practices.
I’m curious what your reaction is to that?
That’s super interesting. Of course, people involved in the Extended Evolutionary Synthesis have been studying culture in other animals. Whales apparently have these, like, whale conventions in different parts of the ocean, and work out their song for the year, and they change them annually.
I think the study of bioacoustics, of animal languages is also a study of culture.
And so I’m not sure that I see human culture as discontinuous or distinct from the rest of the animal world and other sorts of animal cultures. Obviously humans are very different and our culture has the appearance of being more complex and elaborate. But if you believe in evolution and you believe that humans are the product of evolution, then it would just make sense that our capacities are continuous with other animal capacities. Communication and language and culture included.
And I’ve always been sort of surprised about Chomsky and the linguistic idea that there’s this absolute discontinuity on the level of language. I think it took hold of the field of linguistics for a long time. Maybe now it’s loosening.
Well I think Chomsky’s ideas are on the ropes, both from the cultural evolutionists, and frankly from AI. The stimulus isn’t all that impoverished.
But lucky for you, we’re almost out of time, because I would push back and say that while it’s cool that whales get together and sing,that’s nothing like what humans do in terms of the institutional and cultural practices that we have developed. There’s nothing like formal schooling that animals go through.
That’s absolutely true. But there is teaching and learning and knowledge that’s handed down, in birds and other organisms, primates. I think it’s a growing area of research and it’s an interesting one.
6. Fighting Authoritarianism in America
My last question touches on something you wrote, I believe it was the review of Harden’s book, wherein you observed that the history of recent social justice movements have been grounded in the recognition of personhood and self, and in our agency to change our circumstances.
And now we are undergoing a moment in the United States of just incredible, horrific fascism aimed at certain populations, and the scientific enterprise itself, and I’ve been frustrated that more people aren’t just jumping into the fray.
But you are. Tell me about how that’s going and how you’re handling that?
Yeah, oh God, yeah. I’ve been doing a lot of that.
So we have an AAUP chapter, American Association of University Professors, at Stanford. I did not know the chapter existed until a little less than a year ago. It had four members. It never met. It had no officers or bylaws or anything.
And then in January of 2025, a bunch of us started trying to reawaken it.
So now I’m a co-president with a colleague in the medical school, Alyssa Burgart, and we have five officers and almost 200 members, and we meet every month, the executive committee meets every week, and we’ve been doing a bunch of things. We’ve done open letters and petitions and rallies and teach-ins, and we’ve been writing op-eds in the Stanford Daily. I think one of the most satisfying things we’ve done so far is to sign on to various AAUP amicus briefs in lawsuits against this Administration.
Our two causes are (1) academic freedom and autonomy, and (2) shared governance of the university. Those are the two things we can all agree on.
The thing that has been most dismaying, almost, since the beginning of Trump 2, is how his administration cuts through the whole country like butter. The law firms collapse, the media companies collapse, the universities by and large collapse, though not quite all of them yet.
And it just felt like even if nothing we do has an effect, at least it feels better than doing nothing. We’re bearing witness, and we’re manifesting our presence, at the very least.
You’re proclaiming a will. And I admire you for it.
My thanks again to Jessica Riskin for sharing her thoughts on such a wide range of topics. The Cognitive Resonance newsletter will be on brief hiatus for the next week or so due to travel.
Here’s the relevant passage from Riskin’s essay:
“Recently I was talking with a group of very smart undergraduates, and we got to discussing the new AIs and what sort of intelligence they have, if any.
“Suddenly one of the students said, ‘I wonder though, maybe that’s all I do too! I just derive patterns from my experiences, then spit them back out in a slightly different form.’ My answer came out of my mouth almost before I could think: ‘No! Because you’re you in there thinking and responding. There’s no ‘I’ in ChatGPT.” He smiled uncertainly. How we can we tell there’s no ‘I’ in there, he and the others wondered? To insist that ChatGPT can’t be intelligent because it’s a computer system and not a living thing is just a dogmatic assertion, not a reasoned argument.
“How do we know when we’re in the presence of another intelligent being? Definitely not by giving it a test. We recognize an intelligent being by a kind of sympathetic identification, a reciprocal engagement, a latching of minds. Turing was definitely on to something with his idea about conversations, and if we were able to have conversations like the ones he imagined with machines, that might be a different matter. It wouldn’t be a test of artificial intelligence, but it might be a compelling indication of it. Such machines, though, would be fundamentally different from the generative AIs. To contemplate what they might be like, I think we’d need to draw upon the very sort of intelligence whose existence the the founders of AI denied: an irreducibly reflective, interpretive kind of thinking. In fact, the sort Turing used to imagine conversing with intelligent machines.”
Here’s a quick peek into Riskin’s thoughts on Sapolosky’s argument:
“Sapolsky’s reductive model of human beings carries the same implications as others of its kind. It relegates people to categories by class, biology, and cultural stereotype: the college graduate versus the garbage collector, those with one ‘flavor’ of genes versus those with another, the person from ‘individualist’ America versus the person from a ‘collectivist’ East Asian culture that emphasizes ‘conformity.’ Sapolsky is careful to stress that no single factor—genetic, environmental, cultural, familial—determines these categories, but he’s equally emphatic that the sum of factors fixes them utterly: the garbage collector can’t help but be a garbage collector, nor the conformist East Asian person a conformist. Sapolsky speaks this ‘incredibly important point’ ex cathedra in the name of science, even though, ‘yeah, no single result or scientific discipline’ demonstrates it: ‘Put all the scientific results together, from all the relevant scientific disciplines, and there’s no room for free will.’ Now, is that scientific? To claim that lots of failures to prove something add up to a definitive proof?
“Science can’t prove there’s no free will because the question of free will is not a scientific question but a philosophical one. To misrepresent it as a scientific question is a prime example of scientism—extending the claims of science beyond its bounds.”
Here’s Riskin and Feldman’s commentary on Harden’s repeated citations to Arthur Jensen, a prominent psychologist who long contended that race is genetically responsible for IQ differences:
“Harden condemns Jensen’s racism and rejects his assertion that social interventions are futile, but she doesn’t question his basic claim that genetic differences produce an innate hierarchy of scholastic achievement. She also doesn’t acknowledge his dependence on fraudulent data from a 1966 paper by the English psychologist and geneticist Cyril Burt purporting to compare identical twins raised together and apart. And nowhere does she cite the Princeton psychologist Leon Kamin’s 1974 devastating debunking of Jensen and Burt or engage with the critical problems Kamin raised there regarding twin studies in general, because of the impossibility of isolating genetic factors from environmental ones. While Harden, who describes herself as a political progressive, repudiates Jensen’s overt racism, she resurrects the misconceived science underlying it.”
And later:
“Genome studies can illuminate things that genes cause, but genes don’t cause everything. Whatever scientific evidence emerges regarding genetic populations, it won’t explain why some students do well on tests any more than it will explain why some social scientists construct essentialist theories of intelligence. Educational success and biological essentialism are social and cultural phenomena, not genetic phenomena. True, genes help shape people, and people make up social and cultural situations. Likewise, grammar helps shape sentences and sentences make up Harden’s book. But we can’t reduce her contention that genetic di!erences cause social di!erences to the syntactical rules of an English sentence. Meanwhile, beneath Harden’s protestations that she’s an egalitarian hides a stealthy affirmation of the old, tenacious view that races and classes are natural kinds.”
This is an incredible interview and I am so excited to read this book. I've recently read Morphic Resonance by Rupert Sheldrake, which is also compelling in its criticism of the current mainstream description of evolution, but it also leans into metaphysical beliefs, so I'm excited to hear Jessica's perspective.
I just subscribed! I also recently wrote about how AI researchers could benefit from communicating more with biologists, and I'd be honored if you read it: https://maiascience.substack.com/p/ai-fungi
A pleasure to read this interview. Opens a broader perspective beyond daily political chaos