David's theory of evolution: Stephen Talbott's view IV (Evolution)

by David Turell , Saturday, March 13, 2021, 22:06 (1132 days ago) @ David Turell

How evolutionists avoid purposiveness:

https://bwo.life/bk/evo_s.htm

"All biologists find themselves saying that organisms, in their physiology and behavior, carry out functions. These functions broadly constitute the subject matter requiring biological explanation. References to them are one way of acknowledging the task- and future-oriented character of living activity, since to carry out a function is to coordinate means in the service of an end.

"This end-directed activity seems to imply what we might call “interior being” — some form of intention and purposiveness in particular — and therefore demands that taboo-conscious biologists find a means to explain it away. The standard expedient is to say something like this: “Functions express the adaptedness of organisms, and adaptedness in general results from natural selection”. Every well-adapted trait exists because it (or a precursor) was once evolutionarily selected for its machine-like effectiveness as a function. This supposedly has nothing to do with any actual agency or intention on the part of organisms.

"And yet, anyone who considers the core logic of natural selection, as discussed in Chapter 17, can hardly help noticing that the logic relies centrally upon organisms being capable of carrying out all the activities necessary to their life and “struggle for survival”. It also requires organisms capable of reproducing and preparing an inheritance for their offspring. In other words, it requires living beings with precisely those features that presented us with the problem of purposive activity in the first place.

"But if natural selection, in order to operate, must take for granted all the familiar forms of living activity — and who does not see this? — then to say selection explains biological purposiveness looks very much like question-begging.

"Putting it a little differently: purposiveness and agency are not particular functions, or traits, that arose at some point in organisms previously lacking the trait. They are, rather, features synonymous with life as far as we know it. They are necessarily assumed in any evolutionary process we can even conceive as such, and therefore cannot be explained as the result of an evolutionary process.

"The problem has not been entirely missed. In 1962 the philosopher Grace de Laguna wrote a paper in which she remarked that only when we regard the organism as already “end-directed” does it “make sense to speak of ‘selection’ at all."

Comment: It is obvious first life came with the ability to survive and procreate. What built that into the first forms of life? There is no natural selective answer. 'Origin' does not ever imply 'survival' since there was no survival need before origin. And at origin death was built in. Did the first organism foresee that? Talbott asks interesting questions. Talbott takes this approach:

"The bare logic of natural selection, after all, makes no reference to the specific potentials concretely realized in the distinctive evolutionary trajectories leading from the simplest cells to redwoods and wildebeest, crayfish and cormorants. On the other hand, do we not discover something very like those potentials playing out in the distinctive developmental trajectories leading from a single-celled zygote to osteoblast and endothelium, neuron and neutrophil? And also when we watch the goliath beetle larva (or human embryo) metamorphosing into the adult form?

"Only when we ignore the living powers required for such transformations can we subconsciously transfer our ineradicable sense of these powers to the working of a blind evolutionary algorithm."

It is easy for me to see the necessity for a designing mind as the 'evolutionary algorithm'. Every Talbott insight leads me to God. I wonder where is leads Talbott?