Mistakes are a part of life.
David S. Oderberg, professor of philosophy at the University of Reading, says all creatures follow this mantra.
Faculty Bio:
David S. Oderberg is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Reading in the UK. His latest book is The Metaphysics of Good and Evil (2020). He is currently writing a book on biological mistakes.
Transcript:
We all make mistakes. Texting while crossing a busy road is a mistake. So is forgetting where you put your wallet. But when I say ‘all’, I mean all living things. A dog can forget where it buried its bone. A frog can dart its tongue at an insect a millisecond too late. A gorilla can charge at a mirror, mistaking its reflection for a rival. A living being need not have language, rationality, free will, responsibility, or even self-consciousness to make a mistake. Bacteria can be confused by a plant mimicking signals used by the bacteria to coordinate infection of the plant. Furthermore, a mistake-making living being does not have to be an organism.
We depend on the antibodies of our immune system to fend off foreign invaders; but antibodies can be fooled by those very invaders into allowing them a free pass to wreak havoc with our health. Blood platelets, nucleus-free cell fragments essential to clotting, can be activated in the absence of tissue injury requiring repair, leading to potentially fatal blood clots. Mistake-making is a highly general phenomenon – possibly universal across biological systems.
It certainly provides a relatively novel and distinctive way of investigating life. To make a mistake is to depart from a standard of correctness for the organism. A mistake threatens the ability of an organism to act well in in its environment – to be effective at ‘getting on’ in the world – staying healthy, integrated, adapted, aware and alert, solving problems, negotiating threats, and achieving reproductive success.
Focusing on mistakes gives us a broad, normative view of how organisms get on in the world, which can lead to novel, testable experimental hypotheses in biology, all focused on the general question: what kinds of mistake can this organism make, and can it prevent or correct them?
Read More:
[Reading] – Mistakes in Living Systems
[YouTube] – Mistakes in Living Systems
