Evolution: purpose not explained; Part 2 (Introduction)

by David Turell , Sunday, July 09, 2017, 19:48 (2695 days ago) @ David Turell
edited by David Turell, Sunday, July 09, 2017, 19:54

Excerpts from the essay continued:

"Nothing could be more evident than that whatever happens under the name of natural selection must arise within the “natural history of life.” The phrase “natural selection” adds nothing at all to this reality. What it does do, with its connotations of agency, is make it easy to project certain philosophical prejudices upon the pattern — for example, the belief that we are looking at a blind evolutionary mechanism acting upon machine-organisms and capable, with remarkable facility, of creating the observed diversity of life.

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" natural selection represents nothing other than the pattern of living activities within shifting environments. As an abstraction, it cannot even work with this pattern; it is just another name for it.

"We can now understand why the “two” problems of teleology — evolutionary origins and present functioning — are so readily conflated. Evolution is not a separate force or mechanism accounting for the origin of this or that feature of the pattern of life. It is that pattern, and the pattern alone bears the story of how organisms evolve new features. We understand life by studying life, not by picturing a vague mechanism capable of directing its course. There is no separate or second story. This is why the invocation of natural selection to explain the presence or functioning of teleological features ends up assuming, rather than explaining, the features under consideration. The attempt at a second story simply dissolves back into the only story there is.

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"Having inherited mind and matter as the incommensurable products of Descartes’s cleaving stroke, the scientist today rightly concludes that something is badly awry. But, rather than going back and undoing that fateful stroke in order to find a different way forward, he meekly accepts both mind and matter from Descartes’s hand, and then decides he can be rid of the contradiction between them only by throwing away one of them.

"And so not only is the world badly riven, but essential aspects of its nature are discarded. Form as a causal principle disappears from view, and any attempt at acknowledging it is likely to be condemned as an appeal to vital forces or to discredited ancient philosophy. At the same time, attempts to explain form mechanistically end up being circular, since the form one is trying to explain also appears in the explanation.

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"The attempt to sustain the materialistic view based on a single half of the crudely dichotomized Cartesian world is a sickness from which contemporary thought cannot seem to free itself. Yet biologists, like all scientists, inevitably acknowledge an undivided world in one way or another. This is why the organism’s well-directed forming and organizing activities provide the very principles by which biologists themselves define relevant fields of inquiry. Cells must divide, proteins must be synthesized, signals must be sent, received, and interpreted — all depending on local contexts and the needs of the organism as a whole. If the researcher does not have a well-formed narrative — an end-directed achievement — to investigate, he does not have a biological project, as opposed to a chemical or physical one.

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"According to the late William Provine, a distinguished historian of biology and contributor to theoretical population genetics, “naturalistic evolution has clear consequences that Charles Darwin understood perfectly.” In particular: “No gods worth having exist; no life after death exists; no ultimate foundation for ethics exists; no ultimate meaning in life exists.” These conclusions, Provine claimed, “are so obvious to modern naturalistic evolutionists” that they require little defense.

"Provine’s remark testifies to a science that has slipped its empirical moorings, unaware of its own biologically unsecured pretensions. Such unawareness is probably a prerequisite for his grandiose metaphysical pronouncements upon gods, death, ethics, and meaning. A similar unawareness seems to accompany the explanations of teleology we have heard.

"Evolution-based pronouncements have somehow become far too easy. When theorists can lightly pretend to have risen above the most enduring mysteries of life, making claims supposedly too obvious to require defense, then even questions central to evolution itself tend to disappear in favor of reigning prejudices. What is life? How can we understand the striving of organisms to sustain their own lives — a striving that seems altogether hidden to conventional modes of understanding? What makes for the integral unity and compelling “personality” of the living creature, and how can this personified unity be understood if we’re thinking in purely material and machine-like terms? Does it make sense to dismiss as illusory the compelling appearance of intelligent and intentional agency in organisms?

"It is evident enough that the answers to such questions could crucially alter even our most basic assumptions about evolution. But we have no answers. In the current theoretical milieu, we don’t even have the questions. What we do have is the seemingly miraculous agency of natural selection, substituting for the only agency we ever actually witness in nature, which is the agency of living beings."

Comment: Living organisms are more than DNA as a simple protein-producing code. Evolution and consciousness are not explained by materialistic science. Read the whole essay