Does evolution have a purpose? (Evolution)

by dhw, Thursday, October 09, 2014, 20:01 (3480 days ago)

DAVID (under “An inventive mechanism: Reviewing Talbott”): It occurred to me today that your review of Talbott mysteriously left out a comment on his huge section discussing fitness, and the inability to define it....
 
I skipped it because it was irrelevant to our discussion on an inventive mechanism, and I skipped his equally long section on randomness, because you and I have long since agreed that chance is not a convincing basis for an understanding of evolution. I like to focus on one subject at a time, which is why you and I sometimes talk at cross purposes!
 
DAVID: I am not sure that the basis of evolution is survivability. And that is why the Darwinian attempts to quantify fitness may be so important to them but not to me. -I'm inclined to agree, but you wrote: “Design of living things has the purpose of surviving. Since the time of Darwin and Wallace, only two choices have existed. Darwin chose chance and Wallace chose design.” I pointed out that you were actually echoing Darwin, who also chose survival as the purpose. However, I found your whole paragraph rather disjointed, so let's move to a much clearer and far more productive line of argument:
 
DAVID: I look at the obvious drive for complexity, the appearance of advances in complexity without a driving necessity, and with a possible IM producing a bush of living weirdness with some of the strange lifestyles I've shown in natures wonders, and Darwin's theory may not be on the mark. Is life in competition with itself and the environment the only reason for evolution? I strongly doubt it.-This is a rich subject. I agree with you, although survival still has to be a fundamental element. As the two of us have repeatedly told each other, if survival was the sole aim, evolution need not have progressed beyond bacteria. And as Margulis emphasized, cooperation is at least as important as competition. None of us would be here if billions of cells/cell communities hadn't decided to work together! An autonomous IM will go on inventing, and each invention will lead to further inventions, and each one will have its own “agenda”, as it either copes with or exploits new conditions. But this may be where you and I have to part company. Let's see.-Under “An inventive mechanism” we had the following exchange concerning the purpose of evolutionhw: Previously you have always insisted that its purpose was the production of humans, which ran counter to the higgledy-piggledy nature of the evolutionary bush.
DAVID: It is not counter to a bush, if the IM is somewhat on its own in originating changes.-I shall ignore “somewhat” as an unnecessary qualification! From the very start of this discussion, I have emphasized that the concept of an inventive mechanism explains the higgledy-piggledy bush, so it's gratifying to see you now using the same argument. However,let me repeat, the hypothesis that you had offered prior to your “conversion” was that evolution had been preprogrammed 3.7 billion years ago to fulfil the purpose of producing humans, and that does not fit into the higgledy-piggledy bush, unless you genuinely believe that rafting ants, silk-spinning spiders, myrmecophylous (I love that word!) beetles, trilobites and a billion other extinct organisms were essential for the production of you and me. Dabbling was your other option, but that conflicted with your belief that evolution happened. The theistic version of the inventive mechanism, i.e. that your God created it, raises the question of his motives for the bush, whereas your anthropocentric 3.7-year-preprogramming - while failing to explain the higgledy-piggledy bush - gives you a tangible purpose to cling to. It also ties in neatly with religion, since many religious people believe that God is interested in them, and loves them, and wants them to behave properly and be happy. Maybe they're right. Who knows? The theistic version alone may lead to some enlightening ideas (we need Tony for this too, but he disappeared at the very moment when we were about to discuss these matters), and of course I hold in reserve an agnostic/atheistic approach. Your anthropocentrism may well be enough, though, to get things going!