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A recent closed question asked 'What is life in a deterministic system?'.

The question seems to assume that life can exist in a deterministic system, but one answer and commenter in particular strongly claimed that life cannot exist in a deterministic system.

The paper A feedback mechanism controls rDNA copy number evolution in yeast independently of natural selection states "Deterministic evolution features in living systems".

The paper is beyond my capabilities, but it sounds as though the claim is that determinism is compatible with life.

Is this correct?

To address complaints of irrelevance to philosophy:

There is a stance taken by some philosophers; hard determinism.

"Hard determinists think that all human actions are causally determined by the laws of nature and initial conditions".

Clearly though, if life is incompatible with determinism, this stance becomes invalid (if we grant life exists). So the answer to this question has at least one important philosophical ramification.

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    Now all we have to do is figure out if life is compatible with determinism, and all our problems are solved! "Can you say: 'moving the goalposts? ' I knew you could."
    – Scott Rowe
    Commented Jul 5 at 15:00
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    Your question is off-topic and (I'm sorry to say) nonsense. The paper provides evidence that there is some cellular system that drives evolution deterministically but without natural selection. This has nothing to do with the question whether or not determinism (as general "theory") is compatible with life (which is also a non-philosophical question that was rightly closed earlier).
    – mudskipper
    Commented Jul 5 at 15:02
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    The paper is distinguishing "deterministic evolution" from natural selection, even though the latter can be deterministic on a macro scale. What "deterministic evolution" seems to mean here is that it "follows physical or chemical laws in the absence of heredity, and independently of the selective pressures that conduct most biological evolution". This concept is distinct from philosophical determinism. Although interpretation of biology papers is probably more appropriate for Biology (not sure whether they allow that specifically, though).
    – NotThatGuy
    Commented Jul 5 at 18:09
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    @andrós. If unpleasantness were the criteria upon which we should or should not engage with questions, we'd avoid some of the most essential questions of all.
    – Futilitarian
    Commented Jul 6 at 7:45
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    Ok. Sorry to seem mocking or something. I guess to me it just seems tiresome that this debate goes around and around, with different people attacking and defending in different ways and is inconclusive. I think we need to throw the whole thing out, put up a sign that says, "Here Be Dragons", and move on. Of course, many will disagree with that. I think the function of Philosophy is to point out the specific areas where more research is needed, and areas where concepts forbid a conclusive answer (so the concepts need to be altered). Philosophy should blow the whistle on this question.
    – Scott Rowe
    Commented Jul 7 at 12:33

2 Answers 2

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There is no universal definition of life . SEP states in https://plato.stanford.edu/archIves/sum2020/entries/life/index.html

Living entities metabolize, grow, die, reproduce, respond, move, have complex organized functional structures, heritable variability, and have lineages which can evolve over generational time, producing new and emergent functional structures that provide increased adaptive fitness in changing environments.

Each of these traits can exist in a purely deterministic system such as a computer simulation. This has been demonstrated many times, the 1996 computer game Creatures shows most of those https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creatures_(video_game_series)

Computer simulations can also demonstrate agency of purely deterministic systems, such as goal selection, planning and action selection. An electric vacuum cleaner demonstrates those.

The cited paper in the question does not discuss the possibility or impossibility of life in deterministic systems. It discusses a mechanism by which yeast can change specific aspects of DNA strands in cellular offspring to adapt to the environment, a bit as if human parents decided the color of skin of their children depending on the country they live in. This is shown to be deterministic for yeast, so in a lab researchers can force yeast cells to "evolve" in one way or the other quickly by changing some factor. This does not depend on random mutations, and thus is called deterministic. But this deterministic mechanism would also work in a universe with many sources of indeterminism, so none of that is relevant to the question of life in deterministic universes. This does also not replace evolution as the main driver for adaption of biological life, it just shows some lifeforms may have dedicated ways to control some specific DNA changes in the offspring.

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  • Computers do not do not demonstrate agency, goal or action selection or planning. Computers are not deterministic systems, they require human programming to work. Programmers make all the decisions concerning the operation of the computer.
    – Pertti Ruismäki
    Commented Jul 6 at 8:33
  • Even chatgpt can tell you what's wrong about your comment.
    – tkruse
    Commented Jul 6 at 19:43
  • @ScottRowe A deterministic system does not take any input at all after the initial setup. Example: Conway's Game of Life. A non-deterministic system can take all kinds of inputs, random and intentional.
    – Pertti Ruismäki
    Commented Jul 7 at 12:53
  • @ScottRowe The Game of Life is one of the best simulations of a deterministic system. It demonstrates beautifully how everything that happens during runtime is completely determined by the initial setup.
    – Pertti Ruismäki
    Commented Jul 7 at 13:23
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Determinism is one of the central notions of positivism, but now it is an obsolete concept because chaos theory and systems theory showed us that even simple things like pendulums can behave non-deterministically. Life is of course trillions of times more complicated than a pendulum.

In addition to that quantum mechanics rejects the concept of determinism at the smallest scale.

You used the term 'deterministic system', but does not exist in the real world. One cubic millimeter of air contains gazillions of atoms and it is impossible to know where each atom will be 0.00001 seconds later.

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    But chaotic systems are still deterministic, just extremely sensitive to disturbances. Examples like the double pendulum are classic deterministic chaos. Only with quantum uncertainty, we have the ingredient that makes the concept less useful. If particle properties are not accurate in the first place, chaos blows up these uncertainties until the approach becomes useless.
    – Chieron
    Commented Jul 8 at 14:59

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