David S. Oderberg, University of Reading – To Err Is Not Only Human

Mistakes are a part of life.

David S. Oderberg, professor of philosophy at the University of Reading, says all creatures follow this mantra.

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.

To Err Is Not Only Human

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