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

by David Turell , Saturday, March 13, 2021, 22:27 (1140 days ago) @ David Turell

Back to teleology and natural selection:

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

s Teleology Disallowed in the Theory of Evolution?

An animal’s development from zygote to maturity is a classic picture of telos-realizing activity. Through its agency and purposiveness, an animal holds its disparate parts in an effective unity, making a single whole of them. This purposiveness informs the parts “downward” from the whole and “outward” from the inner intention, and is invisible to strictly physical analysis of the interaction of one part with another.

Biologists in general have failed to take seriously the reality of the animal’s agency, and have considered it unthinkable that something analogous to this agency could play through populations of organisms in evolution, just as it plays through populations of cells in an organism. I have tried to suggest that there are no grounds for making a radical distinction between the two cases.

"And then, addressing the idea that natural selection explains (or explains away) biological purposiveness, I focused on three closely related problems:

"• The preservation of purposive (functional) traits — or any traits at all — by natural selection neither explains their origin nor shows how they can be understood solely in terms of physical lawfulness.

"• Selection itself is defined in terms of, and thoroughly depends on, the purposive lives of organisms. This purposiveness must come to intense expression in order to provide the basic pre-conditions for natural selection. These conditions are the production of variation; the assembly and transmission of an inheritance; and the struggle for survival. Since the entire logic of natural selection is rooted in a play of purposiveness, it cannot explain that purposiveness.

"• Finally, the understanding of organisms in physical / mechanistic / machine-like terms offers no solid purchase for the evolutionary tinkering through which teleological traits are supposed to arise. An organism is first of all a characteristic activity, not a tinkerable machine, and its drive toward self-realization explains its developing structure at every level of observation much more than that structure explains its drive toward self-realization. In particular, genes have no way to guide the moment-by-moment, purposive activity of extended molecular processes such as RNA splicing and DNA damage repair.

"All this has been to clear away some of the major stumbling blocks biologists inevitably feel whenever evolution is said to have a purposive, or teleological, character."

Talbott adds this in his next not fully written chpter:

"We should be clear about the real sticking point for biologists. The fact that most of the cells in a tightly knit body are physically contiguous and therefore subject to certain physical causes does not in any relevant sense distinguish the working of biological intention in such a body from its working in evolutionary transformation. The organisms in an evolving population have no fewer causal connections than the cells in an individual. Eating and being eaten are surely causal! — a fact that, quite reasonably, figures centrally in conventional theory. And there is also the role of cognition. If, as many do today, we acknowledge a kind of cognition in cells sensing and responding to each other, how much more should we acknowledge the causal (not to mention the intentional) connections between all those organisms possessing specialized sense organs!

"But while physical and chemical causal relations are certainly prerequisites for coherent transformation, whether in development or evolution, causal events do not explain their own coordination in extended living narratives. This is the crux of the matter. The reluctance of biologists to face the evident reality of evolution as a coherent narrative does not lie in the very real differences between development and evolution, but rather in a refusal to deal seriously with the problem of active biological wisdom and intention in either case."

Comment; all of this struggle to understand is easy if you realize a designing mind is behind all of it. Talbott is pure ID without being ID.