I suppose I should take some fundamental objection to all this. To start with, I don't think one should take objection to and arbitrarily reject the delimited projects of natural science per se, as opposed to taking objection to certain interpretations of natural science,- (regardless of whether those interpretations are held by practicing scientists or not),- specifically, those that operate along deterministic/reductionistic/instrumentalistic lines. And whereas I wouldn't want to assert the exclusive validity of natural science as a way of knowing the world,- (as opposed to its delimited validity, in a more-or-less Kantian/Wittgensteinian sense, that is, a validity founded on a specific awareness of its limits),- and I wouldn't want to revert to the attitude that Horkheimer famously dubbed as "traditional theory", (though especially with an eye toward social scientific theorizing, even if the Cartesian mindset as a whole was implicated), I would still hold to the case for the intrinsic value of natural scientific theory, as both a source of validity and an end-in-itself, for not only does it permit an understanding of the pre- and extra-human world, without any appeal to a transcendent deity or a destiny of Being, but it also serves to inform our understanding of the place of human beings and their societies and their role and effects within that world. (It is most especially the ecological awareness that derives from such research, especially now that we are faced with "global warming", and the rather terrifying potentials for "non-linearities" that might ensure, that needs urgently to be re-enforced.)

Bergson might have taken objection to what he understood of Darwinian theory, but it's worth pointing out that Darwinian theory, evolution by natural selection, was not really fully established at that time. It was only when not only Mendelian genetics was rediscovered, but also statistical population ecology was worked out that "Darwinism" successfully "won out" over potential competitor theories, as possessing superior explanatory resources for the productive pursuit of empirical research. But even the Neo-Darwinian synthesis of the 1930's, though a significant milestone, is hardly the last word, and, in fact, within the broad Darwinian paradigm, there is ample room for different and conflicting or competing interpretations and approaches, (which disputes, to my mind, at least, is a far more interesting set of issues than efforts to reject or "refute" evolutionary theory, such as ID, a ridiculous obfuscation/exploitation of human anxieties about "purpose" in the world, which advocates of Darwinian evolution are only remiss in not disentangling, while delimiting the specific bases of validity of their research, since between the two bad alternatives of metaphysical/theological teleology and deterministic causal immanentism is the entirely viable option of teleonomic accounts, or neo-vitalist revivalism, which seems to derive from confusion about the stakes involved with respect to human freedom and its material substrates, since a causal explanation of a capacity is obviously not a causal determinism with respect to that capacity, while an explication of the constraints involved is not the erection of some sort of permanent barrier, but rather an explication of the pathways and real possibilities of their transformations or transcendence.) Now, to be sure, there nowadays is a lot of hard-line Darwinian fundamentalism abroad, especially in popularizing writings, (which is only a particular instance of the general communicative problem of the relation between the currently established results of specialized scientific research and the formation of generalized cultural understandings). Most especially, there are efforts, along the axis of Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, and Steven Pinker, to renew and extend the traditional,- (and, to my mind, largely discredited),- project of "ontological naturalism/epistemological representationalism". Dawkins, the only real biologist of the three, is known for his gene-selection theorem, which claims that genes,- rather than the phenotypes of whole organisms, as in traditional Darwinism,- are the actual objects of natural selection, as if genes would have, as it were, an independent conative drive. However, even leaving aside the absurdly reductionist claims in his pop writings that whole organisms are the means for the reproduction of genes,- (rather than genes being the highly conserved "memory" of natural selective processes, else it would be rather like the CPU processing memory and the cold-storage disc drive memory of one's computer being all mixed up with one another, i.e. highly and destructively unstable),- and that the genome, since we have a clear analytic knowledge of its chemical units, their composition, structures and some of the resultant reactions, is thereby a digital code, as if per se non-intelligent chemical reactivities could be an instance of digital processing, whereas, in actual fact, the genome interacts with the cellular metabolism in multi-directional and highly oontext-dependent ways, in actual fact, further research has revealed that "transpositons", bits of DNA that implant themselves ad hoc onto other portions of the double helix are so common that the real question for research is now how does the genome suppress such effects and repair itself so as to effectively preserve its regulatory and reproductive effects. Dennett, leaving aside that his book "Consciousness Explained", as several reviewers have noted, would better have been titled "Consciousness Explained Away", since its account is essentially epiphenomenalist and, while confusing the criticism of dualist accounts of consciousness as an epistemological foundation with the separate task of explaining consciousness as a real phenomenon, actually provides no account of the emergence of consciousness as an evolutionary real, that is, as something that emerged under specific selection pressures because of real, i.e. behavioral, effects and advantages, goes on to claim, as an extention of his account of consciousness, whereby he himself commits the fallacy of an inverted "sky-hook", i.e. projecting onto the world one's preferred account of "mind", that he reproves in others, that evolution is an "algorithmic processes", which is an awfully odd way to describe biological reproduction. But that's not just odd, but exactly wrong, since an algorithmic process involves the reiteration of fixed rules, the reproduction of the same, whereas the whole point of natural selections is that there are no fixed pre-established rules and, further, that selection requires the maintenance of sufficient diversity/variation in a population to permit the continuation of selective effects,- (which is one of the reasons for the predominance of sexual modes of reproduction). Pinker, with his claims for a science of "evolutionary psychology", requires an account of "mind" in terms of strict strong modularity, in order for cognitive functions to be specifically selected for in unit-like fashion, which Jerry Fodor, the inventor of the notion of cognitive modularity, would reject, as without any empirical warrant. Further, he has to assume that cognition is strictly reducible to a set of functions and that those functions strictly subserve adaption. This ignores the fact that neural systems originally evolved for physical and physiological reasons that have nothing to do with so-called "mind" or cognition, that any emergent mental or cognitive capacities evolved in continous interaction with physiological and behavioral processes rather than as independent functions of adaption, and that the emergence of such features themselve bring about modal shifts in the environment being adapted to. The upshot here is that these supposedly "hard" Darwinian accounts, reductionist, genetically determinist, strict adaptionist, cognitively functionalist, are not, in point of fact, Darwinian at all, since Darwinian accounts are selectionist, involving contigent selections among large and statistically variant populations to generate the information that allows for the co-variation between organisms and environments that otherwise does not exist. Rather these accounts are instructionalist, taking their cue from artificial digital-processing devices, which presume both a prior set of independently, externally defined functions and a "transparency" or pre-established harmony of environmental information as an "input".

The broader upshot here is that I think the worry about the broader Darwinian paradigm and its fields of application and research as mechanistic and reductionistic is misplaced, and, at least, something that can be contested within the Darwinian field. The supposed logical principle that from a suitably specified cause an effect necessarily follows can hardly disallow the fact that there are many emergent levels and types of causal processes, and that biological causality is circular or cyclical, intricate and complex, and multi-level and often non-linear, I think, is widely recognized by many practitioners in the field. Specifically, I think worries about genetic determinism are misplaced. As Ernst Mayer, one of the chief architects of the Neo-Darwinian synthesis, who was originally educated as a German vitalist, pointed out, it was pre-molecular Mendelian genetics that was wont to be strictly deterministic, since, lacking any actual knowledge of the genetic mechanism, all it could go by was unit-phenotypes traced to purely hypothetical genes. But now, not only can we understand how multiple genes can contribute to a phenotype and how a single gene can have multiple phenotypic effects, but, aside from understanding the only direct effect that genes actually have, producing RNA sequences to manufacture various proteins, we can investigate the interaction between genetic regulations and metabolic processes at various levels, which are by no means a one-way street or conducive to unitary/reductionist explanations. In fact, the latest thing nowadays is "evo-devo", the program synthesizing evolutionary theory and molecular genetics with developmental biology, (i.e. embryology). Its adherents claim that evolutionary change results less from specific isomorphic chemical mutations in individual genes than from changes in the regulatory cycles that determine gene expression and the variable production of proteins in different regulatory regimes or cycles. (In fact, there is empircal evidence in specific instances for both kinds of changes.) At any rate, the reductionist notion of genes as a master blueprint determining all life processes is almost certainly mistaken. The central importance of genes, or, more generally, the DNA/RNA complex,- (and it seems that the RNA complex is the older and more original),- is the bald fact of template reproduction, as providing a basis for the metabolic cohesion of life processes.

But some further considerations of the explanatory resources of biological science within a broadly Darwinian framework, (though, obviously going beyond the original resources and vision of "The Origin of Species"), should rebut the charge that it can not account for the proliferation, diversity and differentiation of life processes, (leaving aside the dubious distinction between "external" and "internal" understanding- relative to what?) In the first place, the opposite of determinist explanation is stochastic processes, that is, explanation in terms of probability distributions, which extends well beyond the means that Darwin would have had at his disposal. (His nephew Francis Galton was to subsequently extend the development of statistical methods, though with a somewhat nefarious purpose in mind.) The upshot is that life processes are negentropic organizations, which "violate" the second law of thermodynamics, positive entropy or "heat death", the reversion to the lowest energy equilibrium possible. But that just means that an increase in the negentropic organization of organisms can only occur on the basis of an increase in the positive entropy of their environment, that is, through feeding off of energy sources in the environment. In fact, metabolism can best be described as the structured organisation of positive-entropic processes which release energy to build and reproduce negentropic structures that control the release of such energy. But, obviously, organisms tend to find and derive their energy resources by feeding off of other organisms in their environment. The upshot here is two-fold: 1) organisms can only emerge and evolve in a more or less diversified bio-sphere, in which other organisms form a good part of the environment of any given organsim, for better or for worse; and 2) a biosphere can only emerge and develop under conditions of quasi-permanent thermo-dynamic disequilibrium. The upshot then is that the emergence and evolution of a biosphere as a whole not only permits the further emergence and evolution of more complex forms of life-processes provided only that large populations of less complex organizations persist, but precisely tends toward diversification and differentiation of organisms and their environmental niches, provided one takes into account three principles that supplement natural selection in the narrow sense: namely, symbiosis, co-evolution and self-organization. And self-organization is not especially a biotic or "vitalist" process. For example, drop some limpids into a container of water and they will form folded rounded shapes. Why? Because they revert to the lowest energy state with respect to their surface tension- standard thermodynamics. But limpids, of course, are the stuff of which cell membranes are made. In other words, biological or metabolic life-processes build over and chain into their organization the already self-organized and structured features of their physical environments, such that, not only are biological processes themselves not fully alive, but the self-organized features of their environments are already a statistical ground for their diversified and divergent evolution. At any rate, though explanatory principles or, better, ground-rules are essential both to guiding empirical investigations and to developing a basic understanding of the nature of the fields or domains to which they are applied, I would strongly hesitate to hypostatize them ontologically, as if they could provide not just a distinctively limited basis of achievable intelligibility, but a source of vital or cosmic action itself. Still less do I think that they can be uncovered and deduced metaphysically from some buried ground, even if that ground is one of non-identity and unsupercedable difference. That still reeks too much of the fallacy of the Ontological Proof.

I need to go to bed now, so I'll end my run-on-sentences without any further post-metaphysical strictures. Maybe later.