Denis Noble upholds philosopher Kathy Wilkes' support for dissident academics

British philosopher Kathy Wilkes is one of those unsung academic heroes who quietly changed many lives and deserves to be better known. 

Wilkes, who died in 2003, was honored at a 2022 symposium at the Dubrovnik Inter-University Center in Croatia. She was praised for her original ideas in addition to her significant support for the dissident academic community in Czechoslovakia, and what is now Croatia, during the Soviet period.

Wilkes courageously remained in Dubrovnik in 1991-1992, to support its citizens when the city was under siege in its fight for independence from Yugoslavia. She provided much-needed accurate reports on the situation in Dubrovnik for the world.

Wilkes' philosophy work and interdisciplinary contributions during her career at Oxford University were reviewed in detail at the 2022 symposium by a longtime scientific colleague at Oxford, professor Denis Noble. His keynote lecture in Dubrovnik forms the basis for his article in the Croatian Journal of Philosophy.

Noble, an eminent biologist, participated with Wilkes in interdisciplinary seminars at Oxford in the 1980s about the explanation of animal and human behavior. His article gives an intellectual history of how Wilkes' ideas influenced his thinking about biology, and how these ideas continued to evolve over the years in discussion and debate with Wilkes and other scientists.  

How ideas develop

Noble's article presents the non-scientist with an inside look at how scientific ideas and concepts develop over time through discussion, debate and new empirical evidence. In conveying the importance of Wilkes' ideas, Noble describes the process of his own thinking, and that of his colleagues, about the behavior of organisms. The ideas she contributed 30 years ago "are very much live issues today," he says.

Noble highlights Wilkes' idea that in the computer modeling of  the human mind, scientists might need to "use as structural elements synthetic cells, or things that behaved very like neurons, with, say, action potentials, graded potentials, `synaptic' modifiability, `dendritic' growth, etc." 

Noble writes, "This paragraph is tantalizingly close to where my own thinking has gone recently. Specifically, I have speculated that in order to access the kinds of molecular stochasticity [randomness] in real brains we might have to make `computers' using water rather than silicon. The argument is simply that novelty and creativity, in organisms may depend on precisely what kind of stochasticity is harnessed by living organisms."

Noble says that this has helped become "a possible physiological basis for the ability of organisms to choose between alternative actions, and so become active agents."

Teleology

Much of Noble's description of the evolution of his thought concerns the scientific debates about teleology, roughly, the idea that the explanation of something is a function of its goal or purpose, and not its proximate cause.

Noble uses as an example, an important book in physics, Erwin Schrödinger’s What Is Life?, which led to the double helical idea of DNA and Watson and Crick's central dogma of molecular biology. Noble's view of this during the 1980s seminars with Wilkes and others was mistaken, he says. He now thinks that Schrödinger’s statistical view of DNA was not correct.

"We would now say that the molecules involved [DNA] are subject to statistical variation [copying errors, chemical and radiation damage], which are then corrected by the protein machinery that enables DNA to be a highly reproducible molecule. This is a three-stage process that reduces the error rate from 1 in 10^4 to around 1 in 10^10, which is an astonishing degree of accuracy. The order at the molecular scale is, therefore, actually imposed by the system as a whole."

Further, Noble states, "When we examine the mathematics of multilevel causation, which is encapsulated in the principle of biological relativity, it is impossible to dispense with the influences of higher levels on lower-level behavior. That is a mathematical necessity in any living system in which the molecular level is controlled by higher levels." 

`I am a fighter'

For the non-scientist as well as the specialist, Noble's memoir of Kathy Wilkes presents a fascinating account of the development of scientific ideas. Noble also lists references for further reading, some of his many books and articles and those of Wilkes.

Noble quotes Wilkes' words as she was dying of cancer: "I am a fighter. I never give up." 

He concludes the article with the words, "She was."

British philosopher Kathy Wilkes at the University of Zagreb./croatia.org

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Denis Noble. "Kathy Wilkes, Teleology, and the Explanation of Behaviour." Croatian Journal of Philosophy, Vol. XXII, No. 66, 2022. 

https://doi.org/10.52685/cjp.22.66.3

An interview with Denis Noble

The importance of Kathy Wilkes and interdisciplinary research

What are the main contributions of Kathy Wilkes?

She was a great tutor in philosophy to generations of students at her College, St. Hilda's, at Oxford University.

She contributed to interdisciplinary seminars in collaboration with philosophers, psychologists, and physiologists, with great insights on the theory of mind and action. 

She was honored by the Czech Republic for her bravery in organizing underground seminars in Prague before the fall of the Soviet Union and the liberation of Czechoslovakia. The award was made in person by Václav Havel.

She was honored by Croatia following the siege of Dubrovnik, when she stayed with the city throughout the bombardment, resulting in her being made an honorary citizen and having a square near the city walls named after her. 

What are some of the philosophical concepts needed to understand Wilkes and her work?

Her main contribution to our ideas about the mind was that it may not be reproducible by artificial machines, since it may depend on the way in which our nerve cells are constructed. They are essentially made of bags formed by oily membranes around a water-based mix of chemicals, all of which can move around in the water.

By contrast today's computers using silicon and metal have molecules that are static. Perhaps we need to make water-based computers, but no one has done that. Nature took a few billion years to evolve the kinds of cells we have in our bodies. 

How did Wilkes get involved in clandestine work in Soviet-controlled Eastern Europe? 

The philosophy faculty at the University of Oxford received an appeal from Prague dissident philosophers for help since they were unable to teach students the fundamentals of Western philosophy, including Aristotle and Plato, openly at Charles University. Kathy Wilkes was the secretary of the faculty. Other universities also received this appeal, but, through Kathy's efforts, Oxford was the only one to respond.

Leading Oxford philosophers, such as Sir Anthony Kenny, Bill Newton-Smith and Kathy herself, made the journey to Prague to lecture in private apartments. Several were arrested, including Kathy. She persisted and returned to continue her contributions to teaching underground seminars. 

How do you hope your memoir will affect the way scientists, philosophers, and students think about their work.

I hope my article may not only encourage people to understand the courage and erudition of Kathy, but also to appreciate the great value of interdisciplinary research. I am myself a scientist. My work on the physiological basis of free will and on the theories of evolution greatly benefited from sustained debate with professional philosophers. 

Can you elaborate on your statement: “Furthermore, it is precisely through the constraints that the higher order imposes on the lower-level stochasticity that we can develop a multi-level theory that privileges the higher level.”

This is close to my own current work in science. I am one of the key opponents of the neo-Darwinist theory of Evolution. That theory supposes that changes in our DNA are purely random, cannot be functional and that it is only via natural selection that evolution occurs. I am a Darwinist, not a neo-Darwinist, and I show that random changes in DNA are used functionally by living organisms. Organisms use the random variations to be creative.