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A controversy about chance and the origins of life: thermodynamicist Ilya Prigogine replies to molecular biologist Jacques Monod

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Abstract

The ancient, interlinked questions about the role of chance in the living world and the origins of life, gained new relevance with the development of molecular biology in the twentieth century. In 1970, French molecular biologist Jacques Monod, joint winner of the 1965 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, devoted a popular book on modern biology and its philosophical implications to these questions, which was quickly translated into English as Chance and Necessity. Nine years later, Belgian thermodynamicist Ilya Prigogine, 1977 winner of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry, published a popular book on the history and philosophy of natural sciences with Belgian philosopher Isabelle Stengers. Translated into English under the title Order out of Chaos and widely discussed, the whole book can be seen as a response to Monod on these biological and philosophical questions. This study will trace this intellectual controversy between two Nobel Prize winners defending two opposing scientific and philosophical visions of the living world, rooted in two different scientific disciplines.

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Notes

  1. From https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/medicine/1965/summary/ (last accessed 22 September 2022).

  2. On the importance of the initial involvement in the French Resistance (Lemerle, 2009, p. 77) and of the intervention in the public debate (Lemerle, 2009, p. 72, p. 75) for this generation of French biologists, see (Lemerle, 2009).

  3. Lwoff’s book (Lwoff, 1969) was a reworked translation of his former English book (Lwoff, 1962). François Jacob’s book (Jacob, 1970a) was translated in the same year (Jacob, 1970b).

  4. These sales figures were communicated to the author by Jean-Marc Lévy-Leblond, a French physicist, essayist and director of collections at Éditions du Seuil, on 10 July 2016.

  5. Throughout this article, references to this book are to the 1977 British paperback edition (Monod, 1977).

  6. From the website scholar.google.fr, last accessed 22 September 2022.

  7. From https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/chemistry/1977/summary/ (last accessed 22 September 2022).

  8. Ilya Prigogine obtained Belgian nationality in 1949.

  9. My main sources of information are Prigogine’s abundant (non-indexed) archives at the Université libre de Bruxelles (consulted in July 2018) and the two biographical and bibliographical notes written after his death by his close collaborators Radu Balescu (Balescu, 2006) and René Lefever (Lefever, 2018). Balescu’s note can be downloaded from the website of the Royal Academy of Belgium (last accessed 22 September 2022): www.academieroyale.be/Academie/documents/Balescu_Prigogine13653.pdf

  10. Isabelle Stengers, interview with the author, Brussels, 7 July 2015, my translation.

  11. Figures obtained from Christelle Fourlon-Kouayep (Éditions Gallimard), on 28 March 2022.

  12. From the website scholar.google.fr, last accessed 22 September 2022.

  13. Isabelle Stengers, interview with the author, Brussels, 7 July 2015, my translation.

  14. In this article, when I mention a passage from the French original version of the book that was not preserved in its 1984 English translation, I will use my own translation.

  15. The electronic version of this article, available at the following address (last accessed 20 December 2022) – www.cairn.info/revue-le-debat-1980-3-page-119.htm – does not follow the pagination of the original paper version (pp. 119–132), but a pagination from 1 to 10, to which I will refer with my own translations.

  16. I shall come back to this topic in Sect. 8.

  17. All quotations from (Maziak, 1980) are my translations.

  18. For a sociological analysis of this phenomenon, see (Lemerle, 2009).

  19. The two adjectives “classical” and “modern” were used in an almost undifferentiated way by Monod (and also by Prigogine & Stengers).

  20. Throughout his book Monod used the expression “genetic code” in two different senses: in a broad sense, as the information contained in the genetic material, and in a narrower sense, as the system of correspondence between the nucleotide sequence of a DNA fragment and the amino acid sequence of the protein encoded by that fragment. Despite this semantic ambiguity, I have chosen to retain this polysemy of the word “code” in this article.

  21. This epistemological reductionism does not imply ontological reductionism, since, as shall be shown in Sect. 7, for Monod, “the organism effectively transcends physical laws” (Monod, 1977, p. 81).

  22. The use of the term “macromolecules” can be misleading, and should not obscure the fact that we are still talking about molecules, and therefore about a microscopic (or molecular) scale, as opposed to the macroscopic scale of biological structures containing a large number of assembled (macro)molecules.

  23. The term “teleonomy” was introduced in 1961 by Ernst Mayr (1961); see (Woodford, 2016, p. 2).

  24. On the debates concerning the use of the notion of purpose in contemporary biology, see (Woodford, 2016).

  25. For a comprehensive study of the concept of animism in the long term, see (Kochan, 2021).

  26. Despite this statement by Prigogine, I have not found any trace of correspondence between the two scientists in Prigogine’s archives at the Université libre de Bruxelles (consulted in July 2018).

  27. These quotations from Monod confirm that his physical reductionism is epistemological and not ontological, as I already mentioned in Sect. 5.

  28. Nanotechnology can be defined as all technological studies, constructions and manipulations of matter on the nanometric scale, i.e., on the molecular scale.

  29. Synthetic biology is an emerging scientific field which mobilises biology and engineering to design and synthesise new biological systems.

  30. Roulette is a game of chance which became popular after the opening of the Monte Carlo Casino in 1856 in the Principality of Monaco. This is why it is sometimes called the “Monte Carlo game”.

  31. To explain Monod’s familiarity with the lexical field of the Christian religion, we can call on Bernardino Fantini’s text, which traces Monod’s biographical and intellectual career. Fantini notes that the biologist belonged to a “family descended from a Swiss Huguenot pastor who came to France from Geneva in 1808” and in which Protestant pastors were numerous (Fantini, 1988, p. 5, my translation). He adds that Monod’s professional ethics were “very close to the ethics of Calvinist Protestantism, with which he was certainly imbued” (Fantini, 1988, p. 6, my translation).

  32. Isabelle Stengers, interview with the author, Brussels, 7 July 2015.

  33. Isabelle Stengers, interview with the author, Brussels, 7 July 2015, my translation.

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Acknowledgements

I owe a debt of gratitude to Charlotte Bigg for her careful proofreading of the English in this article. Of course, if there are still non-idiomatic expressions, that is entirely my fault. Wolf Feuerhahn is also greatly acknowledged for helpful discussions.

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  1. Centre Alexandre-Koyré, UMR 8560 (EHESS/CNRS/MNHN), ESPCI Paris-PSL, Paris, France

    Emanuel Bertrand

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Bertrand, E. A controversy about chance and the origins of life: thermodynamicist Ilya Prigogine replies to molecular biologist Jacques Monod. HPLS 45, 21 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s40656-023-00576-5

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