Evolution: purpose not explained (Introduction)

by David Turell , Sunday, July 09, 2017, 19:32 (2695 days ago) @ David Turell
edited by David Turell, Sunday, July 09, 2017, 19:52

This long essay notes that purposeful activity by organisms and by their cells is not explained by DNA. Natural selection is passive, but all of this is ignored by materialists who try to explain evolution. Shades of Nagel in Mind and Cosmos.

http://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/evolution-and-the-purposes-of-life

"Being “endowed with a purpose or project,” wrote biochemist Jacques Monod, is “essential to the very definition of living beings.” And according to Theodosius Dobzhansky, a geneticist and leading architect of the past century’s dominant evolutionary theory, “It would make no sense to talk of the purpose of adaptation of stars, mountains, or the laws of physics,” but “adaptedness of living beings is too obvious to be overlooked.... Living beings have an internal, or natural, teleology.”

***

"The idea of teleological behavior within a world of meaning is rather uncomfortable for scientists committed — as contemporary biologists overwhelmingly are — to what they call “materialism” or “naturalism.” The discomfort has to do with the apparent inward aspect of the goal-directed behavior described above — behavior that depends upon the apprehension of a meaningful world and that is easily associated with our own conscious and apparently immaterial perceptions, reasonings, and motivations to act.

***

"All biological activity, even at the molecular level, can be characterized as purposive and goal-directed. As a cell grows and divides, it marshals its molecular and structural resources with a remarkably skillful “wisdom.” It also demonstrates a well-directed, “willful” persistence in adjusting to disturbances. Everything leads toward fulfillment of the organism’s evident “purposes.”

***

"As the Chilean neuroscientist and philosopher of biology Francisco Varela wrote: “The answer to the question of what status teleology should have in biology decides about the character of our whole theory of animate nature.”

"My own sense of the matter is that the question has yet to be fairly taken up within the core disciplines of biology. What appears certain is that as yet we have no secure answer to it. Even more important is what seems least recognized: to the degree that we lack understanding of the organism’s purposive life we also lack a respectable foundation for evolutionary theory.

***

"While DNA and its genes have been advertised as containing a program that explains the directive life of the organism, they appear to be not so much an explanation as an expression of that life. This emerges more clearly when we take a closer look at the performances in which DNA is caught up.

***

" The last decade, they say, has taught us that “gene expression is not merely controlled by the information contained in the DNA sequence,” but also by “higher-order” interactions and the features of nuclear organization and context.

"What this shows is that the idea of a DNA code with “controlling information” is a one-sided caricature. We are looking not at a code but at a play of animated cellular substance caught up in meaningful form. The moment-by-moment outcomes look more like balletic expression than like the results of a digital logic.

***

"The mechanistic, programmed organism is a deception. It turns out that nothing is controlled in the required way. The relevant processes — generally involving trillions of diffusible molecules making their way in a watery medium — remain “on track” only because the organism, as a unified center of agency, is being-at-work-staying-itself. It is wisely coordinating, redirecting, revising, and sustaining the overall form and coherence of countless interactions, including all those interactions involving what once was thought to be the explanatory program.

***

" Darwin’s biology does not deny — rather, it reaffirms — the immanent teleology displayed in the striving of each living being to fulfill its specific ends.... Reproduction, growth, feeding, healing, courtship, parental care for the young — these and many other activities of organisms are goal-directed.”

***

"Whatever role we imagine natural selection to play in generating functional adaptations such as hands and eyes, it does not account for the fact of end-directed behavior, which is inseparable from the fact of life itself. It relies on all the fundamental living activities that must already have been displayed in the very first organisms available for selection.

***

"All this usefully underscores a still more general problem — and source of perennial abuse — in evolutionary theory. At least part of the reason so many can easily imagine natural selection doing things to transform our understanding of teleology is that they can so easily imagine natural selection as an agent capable of doing things.

***

"The frequent references, in the literature, to the “mechanism of selection” bear witness to the beguiling influence of the term “natural selection,” which seems to refer to an act, or at least a function, of some specific power. “Natural selection” is a historical pattern, not a mechanism; (continued)