Steve Talbott News Today

Causes and effects are never neatly separable in organisms. Over and above physical causation, we discover a story-like coordination of causes. Biologists widely recognize this, but nevertheless try to describe biological processes as if they were nothing but a succession of physical causes and effects. The resulting descriptions are highly self-contradictory.

A few days before Thanksgiving 1977, a not-so-recent college graduate from Red Sox country gazed from the state Thruway toward a city spread densely across…