Teleology & evolution: Stephen Talbott's take (Introduction)

by David Turell , Monday, June 06, 2016, 17:39 (3092 days ago) @ dhw
edited by David Turell, Monday, June 06, 2016, 18:13

dhw: “A rather odd urgency sounds through all this earnest insistence that, while organisms certainly look as if they possessed intelligent agency, we should not be so foolish as to be compelled by the evidence of our own eyes.”
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> I don't suppose you are too keen on this observation, after your fifty years of dogmatic insistence that cells only look as if they are intelligent.-Just what do you think he means? He may mean our interpretation of actual intelligence may be fooling us, and they are intelligently designed. Remember he is neutrally debating natural materialism vs. ID
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> dhw; If we bear in mind that organisms are communities of cells, it is clear that cell communities are continually cooperating (play together) to produce all the processes that accompany the colossal range of behaviour that goes to make up an organism's life, -It is easy to say they are purposely designed that way.-> dhw: If cell communities are not programmed, how do they take their decisions if not with their own intelligence? However, in partial defence of David's dogmatism, I would still suggest that once an organ like the liver or kidney has been invented, the cell communities perform their tasks more or less automatically, i.e. without “thought”, until they are confronted with problems. -Why 'acting intelligently' only after their invention? Intelligently designed processes can certainly act intelligently before and after.-> 
> “As we have seen, the life of the organism is itself the designing power. Its agency is immanent in its own being, and is somehow expressed at the very roots of material causation. It brings forth this or that kind of growth with no need for the artifice of an alien hand arbitrarily intervening to arrange parts and causal relations this way or that. The choreographing is brought about, it would appear, from that same depth of reality where the causal forces themselves arise, not from “outside”.
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> dhw: If the agency is immanent in its own being, we have an autonomous inventive mechanism. I'd be interested to know just what he is referring to with his “alien hand”, but once an autonomous inventive mechanism is in place, by definition it won't need to be dabbled with. (But see below re source.) The only “outside” causal forces would then be environmental conditions, which either demand or allow change. -He can certainly be referring to a designer. Remember his premise: evolution is a natural event or the result of ID.-> 
> dhw: Talbott has obviously encountered his own equivalent of a David Turell! The intelligence of organisms (i.e. cell communities) is not to be equated with human consciousness.-Of course he knows my thinking. He sees it in the ID movement. And I agree with him. The apparent intelligence in cells or organs is the result of intelligent planning. It is not at our level of consciousness-> 
> dhw: I can't find any indication of Talbott's beliefs on Google, but I suspect from his moderate, balanced, carefully reasoned tone that he is an agnostic! -He seems agnostic to me also. Bethell's review of Talbott is here and expresses the opinion that he is agnostic: -http://www.evolutionnews.org/2012/03/its_life_all_th057251.html-Note this is from an ID site, very comfortable with Talbott.