Convergence; Simon Conway Morris Teleology (Introduction)

by dhw, Saturday, June 11, 2016, 09:22 (3087 days ago) @ David Turell

David's comment: He [Conway Morris] is committed to Darwin, but enthralled by convergence and I think convergence implies teleology as does the author of the article. A resemblance to Denton's patterns is also at play here. It certainly seems as though advances are patterned in advance within the genome.-dhw: Since there seems to be a consensus here on the truth of common descent, patterns are inevitable. If we also accept that organisms look for ways to survive and to improve (me) or complexify (you), we have teleology in the sense of individual purpose - as opposed to the sense of divine design.-DAVID: Living creatures always try to survive. It seems built-in (epigenetics). To me that is the main purpose of life. We have not explained scientifically saltations of new species.-Well, at least survival is an improvement over non-survival. As a purpose, it certainly makes more sense than complexification for the sake of complexification. As for saltations, it is because nobody has explained them that we keep coming up with different hypotheses, one of which is your 3.8-billion-year divine computer programme (yawn), another your divine dabbling (yawn), another random mutations (though Darwin rejects saltation) (yawn), and another the autonomous inventive/complexifying mechanism (yawn), which even you have agreed provides the best explanation for the higgledy-piggledy bush of evolution. Zzzzz….-dhw: Convergence is then the result of different intelligences coming up with similar solutions to similar problems. If the inventive or complexification mechanism is autonomous, advances are not “patterned in advance” but occur as and when conditions force the mechanism to adapt or allow it to innovate.
DAVID: IF different 'intelligences' exist. So far it is a supposition based on external observations only.-Agreed. That is no reason for rejecting the hypothesis and insisting that convergence is the product of divine preplanning or dabbling. That is a supposition based on no observations at all.