Societal Implications of Astrobiology

2016-2017

by Linda Arntzenius

According to research scientist Frank Rosenzweig, the timing could not be better for the kind of dialogue for which CTI has become known. That is why he is taking time out from a demanding schedule to lead, together with theologian Douglas Ottati, a bold endeavor that brings scholars in the humanities and social sciences into conversation with astrobiologists.

Having grown up in a home where vigorous debate was the norm, Rosenzweig has a passion for the sort of dialogue he finds sadly absent from public discourse. “My father was a science/engineering type and my mother was a literature professor. He was French and Jewish; she was American and Southern Baptist.” Both, he recalls, were devout in their own ways and neither ever had any question about scientific explanations of the natural world, viewing science as a way of reading the ‘face of the Divine.’ His mother accepted evolution as the most parsimonious explanation for Earth’s diversity. “There were matters of dogma in each of their faiths and, as an only child, I witnessed a lot of debate as they tried to accommodate each other; but the three-legged stool that supported our family was science, literature and religion.”

“One of my chief reasons for being here is my concern for the disturbing suspicion of science and reason that has increased over the last quarter century. We have not been progressive but rather regressive and I’m here to understand why that is so.” At CTI, he finds a group that is rigorous in its thinking and participating “in the sorts of dialogues I imagine have occurred over the past 500 years, through the Scientific Revolution and beyond.”

Trained in literature and in biology—he received his bachelor’s in comparative literature at the University of Tennessee and did post-baccalaureate work in zoology at Duke University before earning his doctorate in biology at the University of Pennsylvania Rosenzweig relishes the chance to sit down with scholars in the humanities and social sciences, especially at a time when “we are all ‘siloed’ in our own ‘echo-chambers.’” He regards the dearth of dialogue among people pursuing different agendas, be it political, environmental, or academic, as “one of the most disturbing aspects of our time.” Being at CTI is “a means to break that pattern,” and his is “the pleasant responsibility to keep the group focused on the science.” In addition to guiding, stimulating and grounding the collaborative work of the scholars-in-residence, Rosenzweig plans to complete a number of science writing projects. As principal investigator of the NASA Astrobiology Institute and a professor of biology with a research laboratory at Georgia Institute of Technology, he will also continue to oversee his laboratory.

In layman’s terms, Rosenzweig’s scientific work attempts to create examples of evolution in the laboratory so as to study the mechanisms by which simple life forms evolve into more complex life forms. Using microbial bacterium, yeast and alga, his scientific team examines the evolution of complex traits that increase biodiversity, control cell lifespan and drive major transitions in the history of life. But with respect to the nature of evolutionary change in biological systems, the geneticist is quick to point out that major transitions in evolution do not have to occur. “There is nothing inexorable pushing evolution forward, nothing inexorable about complex life, no wind behind pushing toward an end,” he says, adding that “it’s a very human thing to want to impose on a scientific discussion about big things like process and change on a cosmic scale, process and change in the biological world, an arrow that is pointed in some direction and that, within fairly narrow limits, is going to follow a particular trajectory.”

Music was also an important part of Rosenzweig’s upbringing. His mother was a “superb” pianist and his father played too. One of his two sons is a musician composer and the other, a computer scientist, is an accomplished fiddler and guitar player. He plays guitar and mandolin. He also reads science fiction, loves to swim and hike and to cook, a legacy of his French grandmother who taught him, although today he favors the challenges of the Indian palette of spices and vegetarian dishes.

Like Rosenzweig, Douglas Ottati grew up in an environment that valued both science and religion. It was, he says, “an odd Presbyterian” family. His father was a Brazilian immigrant with a passion for democracy and social medicine (as a result, Ottati still roots for Brazil during World Cup soccer matches). His mother was a German Lutheran raised on a farm outside of Ann Arbor, Michigan. His parents met in Jonas Salk’s laboratory at the University of Michigan and moved when he was three years of age to Tenafly in northern New Jersey, where they converted to Presbyterianism. Ottati majored in religious thought at the University of Pennsylvania during the era of political assassinations, Civil Rights and the Vietnam War, a time when people were looking for moral thought that made sense. He went to the University of Chicago to “work out a moral view that would support a way of being in the world.” After years of teaching at Union Theological Seminary in Richmond, Virginia, he is now the Craig Family Distinguished Professor of Reformed Theology and Justice at Davidson College, North Carolina.

Ottati is interested in the impact of scientific ideas on Christian theology. “Astrobiology is one of the more interesting of those sciences because it places human life in the most expansive cosmic context,” he says. While he wouldn’t go so far as to describe this as a revolution on the Copernican scale, “it’s a move that on the one hand relativizes the place of humans in the cosmos and, at the same time, helps to reposition them as ‘distinctively equipped participants’ in that cosmos.”

At CTI, he is excited to be leading a diverse group whose interests impinge differently on astrobiology. “All of them will have an impact on, and I hope improve, my ability to think about my own work. For a theologian who believes he should take into account the findings of other disciplines and scientists, it is a rare privilege to be working with a geneticist who is also an astrobiologist.” He plans to use his time to work on the second volume of his systematic theology, Theology for Liberal Protestants: God the Redeemer. The first volume, Theology for Liberal Protestants: God the Creator, was published in 2013

During the year, he will encourage scholars-in-residence to refine their questions. “This is an opportunity to up our game with respect to astrobiology. One has to keep moving and interpreting in order to keep theologically dynamic, literate and alive. If we can come up with a list of questions that are next generation interpretive queries then we might help clarify how other people might work with this material. It might even show, in some ways, that the humanities remain relevant,” he laughs, adding: “That would be a nice little pay off, since almost no-one thinks that now!”

From the point of view of Swedish philosopher Erik Persson, this year’s Inquiry is both timely and necessary. His first time at CTI, he is comfortable in its interdisciplinary environment. And even though coming here meant he had to turn down another opportunity elsewhere, it was an opportunity not to be missed.

Persson works in environmental ethics on the grand scale, concerned with issues of planetary protection. Besides having worked a good deal with astrobiologists, he has been involved in terrestrial environmental ethics. His preference is for mission-oriented rather than method-oriented work, and if there is one question he is keen to develop with the team, it is the predominance of private money in space exploration. “We have a chance to think about this so that the scientific interests are not over-run by the commercial interests. Commercial powers must understand the needs of astrobiology.”

Private enterprise is eager to move ahead, says Persson, and is already looking for guidance, pushing harder than the scientific community. That worries him. “Enterprises like mining or tourism might take a few decades but the policy process, legislation, takes time and commercial interests have already started. The scientific community needs to catch up.” And yet, while feeling the urgency to move forward quickly, this is an area that demands careful thought. As Persson points out, deep thinking takes time. Mindful of the unhappy history of terrestrial exploration the colonization of seemingly virgin lands that were in fact occupied by indigenous populations and species Persson worries that philosophers, ethicists and other thinkers are coming late to the table. Still, he believes, there is a chance of influencing future events. “I’m all for exploration and development, but I think it should be possible to do it in a responsible, non-destructive way.”

Is he optimistic that ethicists can have an impact? Although some of those involved with the scientific and commercial exploitation of space see the involvement of ethicists as interference, Persson has had positive experiences, as soon as he is recognized as other than “an antithetical extremist.” Invited to conclude a session on synthetic life in the laboratory at a recent conference in Japan, he was gratified to hear some of the participants who had initially intended to protest his presence (why do we need an ethicist to tell us what to do had been their reaction) commend his “reasonableness.” “Rather than tell them what not to do, I was there to encourage them to think about proceeding in a good way.”

This year, Persson looks forward to getting his thoughts down on paper, identifying questions and developing ideas to make them operational. He also hopes to enjoy some time in nature with his young daughter, Lycke (the name means Joy) and his wife Yuan, who is a biologist.

In the dialogue between theology, philosophy and hard science, Zoë Lehmann Imfeld sees a constructive role for literary theory. Now a lecturer in modern English literature at the University of Bern in Switzerland, she is also a postdoctoral fellow at the Centre for Space and Habitability there.

When Imfeld first approached her Ph.D. in literature, she discovered that the late Victorian texts she had been studying presented themes that had more to do with theology than general culture. “Much had already been written on the ‘Victorian agnostic panic’ and how this was a post-religious period, but I found much that was deeply theological.” The ghost stories of medievalist M. R. James, for example. Besides being a conscientious scholar, James wrote entertainments for his pupils at Eton that put his protagonists into life-altering confrontations. A proper treatment of her subject, Imfeld found, necessitated studies in theology as much as in literature.

Ever the thorough scholar, Imfeld started over with a degree in theology. Now she has a master’s in both theology and literature. Her 2015 doctoral thesis is now a newly published book, Theology and the Victorian Ghost Story.

At CTI, she hopes to help bridge the gap between knowledge and possibility. “Some people are very comfortable moving into speculative space, others much less so. Fiction can fill the space between these two mindsets, between the ‘safe zone’ of fact and philosophical meaning.”

“It is easy to dismiss sci-fi literature because of its fantastic subject matter but in the process of being confronted and having to reassess one’s understanding of what it means to be in the world, the green-eyed monsters are not the important part of the story, they are the manifestations that allow the protagonist to reconsider his or her world view.” This is where literature moves into speculative space a sort of psychological, sociological and theological exploration that allows one to play with embryonic ideas. And that, offers Imfeld, is why literature has something to contribute to the conversation.

“Everyone who comes to CTI knows they will be examining questions with scholars coming at them from different angles. It’s not an easy thing to do; I’ve seen it not work elsewhere, where a level of competitiveness, even combativeness, can develop. CTI is a model for stepping out of the day-to-day,” says Imfeld. “It might well be the people that make it work; the sheer breadth of expertise gathered here is amazing.” At the first symposium, for example, Imfeld found that lectures by David Grinspoon and Frank Rosenzweig, though far apart in content, were both drawn upon in the conversations that followed. Her participation left her with “neurons firing off in a million directions as a result.” With such commitments as two young children aged 5 and 9, Imfeld’s participation in the year’s Inquiry will be intermittent. Even so, she is a dedicated participant, who reports: “Even in the few days I’ve been here, I’ve been stretched.”

Viewing the Inquiry with the penetrating eye of a social anthropologist is Timothy Jenkins, Reader in Anthropology and Religion at the University of Cambridge. By his own description, Jenkins is a social scientist who keeps company with philosophers and theologians. Starting out as a student of zoology at Oxford University, he was drawn not only to its subject matter but also to how zoologists approached their subject matter through theories of evolution and systems of classification. This led him into anthropology and to the discovery that he was had always been interested in ordinary life. Eventually, Jenkins was “steered back to academia,” where he found a great deal of sociology deeply insensitive to religion, assuming that it would die out.

“Nevertheless, over the last 30 years, there has been a considerable movement among historians and anthropologists to take the concerns of religious groups seriously,” he says. And that “allows one to talk about all sorts of groups, some of which are eccentric while others are ordinary people quietly trying to make sense of life and imagining that their faith actually matters and makes a difference in the world.” His interest lies in the more eccentric groups that have been sensitive to new ideas in physics. “In a way, what I’ve been observing with such groups is what I call ‘moral thinking with science.’ I’m intrigued by the way people respond to scientific ideas. In the 19th century, some of the best minds were involved in Spiritualism, which is bound up with the Newtonian idea of action at a distance. When Henry Sedgwick founded the Society for Psychical Research at Cambridge, the laws of conservation of energy were being thought about along with the question of energy being transformed and what might happen to human energy in death. It was very serious and also very controversial, as most serious things are.” As Jenkins points out, psychology and psychoanalysis began with issues that were once the province of Spiritualism and Mesmerism.

Currently, Jenkins focuses on contemporary forms of religious life and groups interested in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence [SETI]. “SETI can be seen as part of a long tradition of seeking communication with other minds and, while thoroughly orthodox, it is seeking disembodied voices, evidence of intelligence and intention; clearly part of the impulse of seeking contact with intelligences other than the simply human. Present explorations of science are, I believe, deeply tied up with speculations about other minds, other species and so on.”

Here at CTI for the first time, Jenkins hopes to be disturbed to some extent. He expects to do a lot of attentive listening, especially as he considers that a cutting-edge new science is developing. “I was attracted to this year’s Inquiry in part because I’m interested in the power of scientific and technological discoveries to disturb human categories and the ways in which religious groups put those disturbances to work (and very often share in creating them). Technological discoveries rather shatter one’s view of what the world is like, but at the same time, the people who explore them immediately are often those religious groups. Small religious groups are one place where new ideas are explored and frequently, of course, lambasted when they first appear.”

A film buff fond, as his family teases, of anything in black and white, in French and with subtitles Jenkins admits to finding aspects of film-making illuminating, the role of cutting for example, which in the hands of a director such as Max Ophüls can “construct a mental world that doesn’t actually exist.”

Applying a theological perspective, Gerald (Jerry) McKenny, Walter Professor of Theology at the University of Notre Dame, studies biotechnology, human nature and Christian ethics.

Long-drawn to questions posed by advances in biotechnology, McKenny initially studied philosophy, which he found to be a good training for analytical thinking. “I was raised in a mainstream and then an evangelical Protestant family; my great grandfather was an ordained clergyman and president of a small college that later became Eastern Michigan University, so the academy and the ministry are interwoven throughout my life,” he says. His interest in biotechnology first developed during his graduate years when he worked as a patient advocate in a hospital emergency room. And when he took up his first position at Rice University in Houston, then one of the centers for the study of the human genome, speculation about genetic science and technology was “in the air.” In 1989, when the first human gene therapy clinical trials began, he became fascinated by what might be accomplished.

“Today, a lot of biotechnologies, including drug technologies that interact with memory and concentration, and neurological interfaces between brains and computers are helping people with disabilities. The topic of performance- and intelligence-enhancing drugs as featured in television and science fiction, has captured the public imagination and it’s natural for people to ask whether there is some intrinsic value to human nature. Is it open for us to alter it, or should it not be changed?”

At CTI for the first time as a scholar-in-residence, McKenny looks forward to being “jolted” into thinking outside of his academic comfort zone. Having talks with biologist Frank Rosenzweig is an unparalleled opportunity, he says. Likewise, Doug Ottati, with whose work he is more familiar. “The questions about human nature that I am interested in get you very quickly into questions that are inherently destiny are very complex.”

A punk rock enthusiast who enjoyed visits to the famed CBGBs in New York City during his student days at Princeton Theological Seminary (Patti Smith once sat at the table next to his), McKenny is also a keen baseball fan and Detroit Tigers supporter. He also likes classical, jazz and the blues.

Interviewed at the start of the 2016-2017 Inquiry after a very short time of their being together, it is apparent that this is the most diverse group yet assembled at CTI. Here are dedicated intellectual thinkers with open minds eager to understand and accommodate the perspectives of other disciplines. Even so, there are deep divides in beliefs to be encountered.

Make no mistake, this is a bold endeavor. Frank Rosenzweig is a serious scientist and no whiff of teleology is going to escape him. Douglas Ottati is an accomplished theologian who takes science seriously. Their involvement signals a highly demanding and productive year ahead. Like Imfeld’s ghosts, the questions they will tackle are potentially transformative. And if the ultimate outcome is that they agree to differ in some respects, it will be from a richer appreciation of these differences, their profundity, their respective values and their respective origins.

With a plethora of unanswered questions to examine, the team’s initial task is to investigate possibilities in collaboration across disciplinary boundaries and with the best current science.

And that is exactly what CTI does best.