Natural Teleology (The limitations of science)

by dhw, Thursday, January 24, 2013, 13:28 (4110 days ago) @ David Turell

GEORGE:
This is a review of a new book by the philosopher Thomas Nagel who argues for some form of natural teleology. It runs over two pages-http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2013/feb/07/awaiting-new-darwin/?page=1-DAVID: I've read Nagel's book and reviewed it here, but I really appreciate your providing H. Allen Orr's. Orr has been active in the origin of life efforts for years. His touting the RNA world start to life is old news. and lacks the analytical viewpoint of Robert Shapiro, but despite my poor opinion of Orr, his review is incisive. Nagel's problem is that he sees the teleology and can't explain why evolution looks that way. So he invents a 'third way' with no theory behind it, just a comment that it must exist, because chance and design are lacking something. Nagel, an atheist won't accept design, he doubts chance and is stuck in his thinking. He really smells more like our resident dhw.-Not so sure I like the verb "smell", but it seems to me that Nagel is groping towards some kind of panpsychism. Just to repeat my own tentative slant on this: The first cause would then be energy transforming itself into matter with a degree of intelligence akin to that of the first forms of life: capable of meaningful actions and combinations but without self-awareness. I think George might argue that these meaningful actions and combinations would be in accordance with natural laws. Don't ask who created natural laws, because the answer will simply be that they are part of the first cause. Simpler than a super-intelligence being the first cause.
 
I am puzzled by the following paragraph in Orr, so perhaps someone can explain it to me:-Nagel's astonishment that a "sequence of viable genetic mutations" has been available to evolution over billions of years is also unfounded.3 His concern appears to be that evolution requires an unbroken chain of viable genetic variants that connect the first living creature to, say, human beings. How could nature ensure that a viable mutation was always available to evolution? The answer is that it didn't. That's why species go extinct. Indeed that's what extinction is. The world changes and a species can't find a mutation fast enough to let it live. Extinction is the norm in evolution: the vast majority of all species have gone extinct. Nagel has, I think, been led astray by a big survivorship bias: the evolutionary lineage that led to us always found a viable mutation, ergo one must, it seems, always be available. Tyrannosaurus rex would presumably be less impressed by nature's munificence.-The only alternative to an unbroken line between first forms and us would surely have to be special creation (or life starting all over again in different ways, which would only redouble the mystery). As I see it, that unbroken line is the whole basis of evolution. Once multicellularity occurred, vast numbers of new combinations led to vast numbers of new organs, organisms and species. Of course billions went extinct, but every one that survived, and every one that "mutated", still descended from the original forms. As I say, I can't follow Orr's logic, but Nagel needn't be astonished either, if he forgets about random mutations and accepts the idea I have been proposing under "The intelligent cell" (which we latterly renamed "the intelligent genome"): namely, that the first forms of life contained a mechanism for endless replication, adaptation and innovation, acting in accordance with changing environments. Otherwise there couldn't have been any evolution.