Teleology and Thomas Nagel (Introduction)

by David Turell , Sunday, February 12, 2017, 16:37 (2840 days ago) @ David Turell

Michael Ruse on teleology of life:

https://aeon.co/essays/what-s-a-stegosaur-for-why-life-is-design-like?utm_source=Aeon+N...

"As I have written about before in Aeon, the chemist James Lovelock got into very hot water with his fellow scientists when he wanted to talk about the Earth being an organism (the Gaia hypothesis) and its parts having purposes: that sea lagoons were for evaporating unneeded salt out of the ocean, for instance. And as Steven Poole wrote in his essay ‘Your point is?’ in Aeon earlier this year, the contemporary philosopher Thomas Nagel is also in hot water since he suggested in his book Mind and Cosmos (2012) that we need to use teleological understanding to explain the nature of life and its evolution.

"Some have thought that this lingering teleological language is a sign that biology is not a real science at all, but just a collection of observations and facts. Others argue that the apparent purposefulness of nature leaves room for God. Immanuel Kant declared that you cannot do biology without thinking in terms of function, of final causes: ‘There will never be a Newton for a blade of grass,’ he claimed in Critique of Judgment (1790), meaning that living things are simply not determined by the laws of nature in the way that non-living things are, and we need the language of purpose in order to explain the organic world.

***

"But historical teleology — the question of whether evolution itself takes a direction, in particular a progressive one, is a trickier problem, and I cannot say that there is yet, nor the prospect of there ever being, a satisfactory answer. One popular way to explain the apparent progress in evolution is as a biological arms race (a metaphor coined by Julian Huxley, incidentally). Through natural selection, prey animals get faster and so in tandem do predators. Perhaps, as in military arms races, eventually electronics and computers get ever more important, and the winners are those who do best in this respect. The British evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins has argued that humans have the biggest on-board computers and that is what we expect natural selection to produce. But it is not obvious that arms races would result in humans — those physically feeble and mentally able omnivorous primates. Nor that lines of prey and predator evolve in tandem more generally.

"I’ll offer no final answers here, but one final question. Could a full-blown teleology, of the more scientific Aristotelian kind, reappear, complete with vital forces? There’s no logical reason to say this is impossible, and that is why I think it is legitimate for Nagel to raise the possibility. Two hundred years ago, people would have laughed at the idea of quantum mechanics, with all its violations of common-sense thinking. But there is a big difference: quantum mechanics was invented because it filled a big explanatory gap. This is Nagel’s big mistake: his argument for returning to the idea of purposes and goals in biology is not based on an extensive engagement with the science, but a philosophical skim across the surface. Quantum mechanics is weird, but it works. There is nothing in the idea of final causes to encourage such wishful thinking."

Comment: I still think evolution of humans shows purpose.