96 James F. Crow
theory is less widely accepted than it was in Wright’s lifetime. It is not clear at
present whether what Wright regarded as his crowning achievement will be his
lasting heritage. Whether or not this is true, his high place in biological history
is assured. His contributions to the mathematical theory of population genetics
and to statistics are here to stay, as is his analysis of inbreeding. As one writer
[Kimura, 1983]said: “Who cannot have wished to invent something so simple and
important as the inbreeding coefficient?”
7 PHILOSOPHYIn 1952, as President of the American Society of Naturalists, Wright surprised
his audience, who had heard him repeatedly speak about evolution, by discussing
philosophy[Wright, 1953]. Biologists don’t often do this.
Wright had a long interest in the philosophy of organism and the mind-body
problem. His solution was an unusual one. He refused to accept emergence, in
particular the emergence of mind. He used the word “organism” very broadly.
Thus an organism could be an individual plant or animal, a hive of bees, a human
society, a species, an ecosystem, or the entire biota. It could also be the earth,
the solar system, or the universe. Or in the other direction, molecules, electrons
or protons. If he were writing today, he would include quarks. Since he wanted
to avoid emergence, he emphasized the continuity between individual, organ, cell,
virus, and gene — and, more broadly, between living and non-living.
With a hierarchical organization where there were no clear borders between the
different levels, Wright could not imagine truly emergent properties, such as mind.
There is no place, he said, at which one can say that mind exists only beyond this
point, whether one is speaking of stages of development, or times in evolutionary
history, or even from quark to the universe. Emergence of mind from no mind,
Wright said, is “sheer magic”. “If the human mind is not appear by magic, it must
be a development from the mind of the egg and back of this, apparently, of the
DNA molecules of the egg and sperm nuclei that constitute its heredity”[Wright,
1964 ]. Seeing no stopping point here, Wright went on to say: “Because of the
hierarchic nature of biologic and physical entities it appears that my mind must
be based somehow on the minds of my cells and these on those of the constituent
molecules and so on down to elementary particles.” It sounds a bit like Leibniz.
According to Wright, one mind sees another as matter, except as they compare
experiences. Wright thus arrived at his view of “dual-aspect panpsychism”; mind
is everywhere. “The only satisfactory solution of these dilemmas would seem to
be that mind is universal, present not only in all organisms and in their cells but
in molecules, atoms and elementary particles”[Wright, 1964]. Mind is universal
and so is matter.
As to the influence of this view on the practice of science, he wrote: “Accep-
tance of this point of view requires relatively little change in the actual practice
of science, especially as determinism has never been more than an ideal admit-
tedly unrealizable in full because of the invariable errors of observation and in