Some context on this subject, and then I have some comments on John's
comments.
One of my father's main secondary goals in everything he did and wrote was
to prove that biology WAS accessible through science; that the reasons for
life in organisms is knowable and explainable in scientific parlance, it
just wasn't quite the way we had expected. In the course of working through
this whole process, he discovered that the impediments in science were
almost always caused by attitudes in science itself-- attitudes that were
based on all sorts of things but, without exception, they were not based on
logic or truth.
In trying to understand why this should be so, he scrutinized the history of
scientific thought as well as the human societal contexts of the times each
development took place within. One of the contextual realities he
discovered, all through the history of science, was that "the truth" was
dangerous. There were forces in the Catholic Church, for example, that
literally tried to kill you if you reported anything that was in
contradiction to the current papal dictums. The antagonism of religious
dogma to scientific "truth" was a centuries-old tradition that held back the
pursuit of certain kinds of knowledge in Western Europe and elsewhere for
millennia. This led to a philosophical backlash, once science managed to get
out from under the threat of execution and could proceed unimpeded. The
result was that science became virulently intolerant of any hint of
religiosity in scientific explanations.
So, to John K.'s comments:
John K. wrote:
Thus vitalism is not necessarily about God -- that's a weapon, not a
legitimate characterization. It is about a vital force in nature, a life
force.
"A vital force", "a life force"... The problem is that those sound like
something that transcends the natural world. It talks about life as a
"free-standing thing" in itself, not the effect of some causal process. This
is why my father chose to not use that terminology. He believed that the
explanations for life in organisms was inherent in the natural world, not
transcendent or supernatural. He said the same about consciousness and wrote
several of the papers in "Essays on Life, Itself" about the "mind/brain
problem".
John K. Wrote: from Balckburn:
Teleology: The study of the ends or purpose of things. The idea that
there is such a thing as the end or purpose of life is prominent in the
Aristotelian view of nature (and ethics), and then in the Christian
tradition.
In the mid-1200's, Thomas Aquinas sought to reconcile Aristotelian
philosophies with Christianity in a series of written discourses on the
subject. On the one hand, this removed the stigma of "blasphemy" from the
pursuit of science which was important in human history, but unfortunately,
it also ended up kind of "discrediting" Aristotle for a long time within
science-- the two (Aristotle and Religion) had become equated with each
other, so during the post-Renaissance backlash against religion that
scientists indulged in to an extreme, Aristotle was a casualty
John K. wrote:The theory of evolution through natural selection allows
speculation about the function for which particular things are adapted,
and so permits assertions about the purpose an adaptation serves,
without any commitment to the idea of a designer who put it there for a
purpose, and without the unscientific belief that the future utility of
a feature somehow brings about its existence by a kind of backwards
causation.
This was not true when my father was writing his books-- natural selection
was considered to be a mechanical, reactive process whereby the "purpose" or
"function" that adaptations served was entirely a happy accident of random
mutation. In the traditional scientific view, my father said, the aspect of
evolution that he viewed as "the cart" was always put in front of "the
horse". The whole process was entirely looked upon as a "feed-forward only"
process: the past acting on the present creates the future. My father's work
on developing the concepts of Complexity Theory and the connected ideas
about Anticipation argued that function was a perfectly scientific concept
which emerged along with life at a certain level of complex organization in
a system. (Anticipatory Systems, remember, deals with Biology and
biological systems- a fact which easily gets lost when people start
engineering this kind of system control into technologies and disconnect the
human role in the whole process from the machines that have these mechanisms
built in.) "Anticipatory Systems" (the book) argued that Life is able to
exploit opportunities precisely because of the edge that functional
entailments create within these systems. Complex systems at this
"dimension/level" of complexity exhibit a host of new properties and/or
behaviors that are not seen in less complex systems (like the atom)-- LIFE
being a rather prominent one.
The scientific stamp of approval on the concept of function is not logical
unless it is kept within the framework of Anticipation. In other words, if
science is really trying to say that function is a scientific concept but
reject the notion that time is quite a bit more fluid than the linear
version put forward in explanations of evolutionary processes prior to my
father's work, they are indulging in a kind of ideological inconsistency. It
doesn't hold up and my father argued that it never DID hold up. He drew the
lines of logic together and what they illuminated was what he named
"Anticipation" in the systemic sense. But there's a whole lot more to it
than just what functional entailment means.Anticipation reveals that time is
something which can allow functional entailments to use the past to predict
the future, in the present. In a sense, all three concepts are present, in a
causal way, at once.
John K. wrote:
Continuing, the definition in this version of Webster is slightly
different than the one Judith quoted:
1 a: the study of evidences of design in nature b: a doctrine (as in
vitalism) that ends are immanent in nature c: a doctrine explaining
phenomena by final causes 2. : the fact or character attributed to
nature or natural processes of being directed toward an end or shaped >
bya purpose 3: use of design or purpose as an explanation of natural
phenomena.
My comments in reference: 1 a: Is an internal model not "evidence of
design" in nature? b: What are causal loops if not ends immanently
affecting causes? 2: Are organisms not to be discussed as being "shaped
by a purpose?" The only version of teleology that needs to be excluded
is the third one, using the purpose as an explanation. We are instead
explaining the origin and operation of purpose in terms of internal
models.
You're looking at this differently than my father did. There's a religious
connotation in some of those definitions (1 and 3). Evidence of design in
nature is seen as being akin to identifying a newly discovered painting as
being by one of the masters ("Ah, see that design element there, that's
proof this is a VanGogh-- I recognize his stylistic elements, which are
consistent all through his work!") The taint of creationism is all over it.
I've heard people point to the fact that water rivulet patterns and blood
vessel patterns and tree root branching patterns are all alike because the
same "artist" created them all. My father said that those patterns are
generated by a material "path of least resistance" effect.Similarly, atoms
resemble solar systems and galaxies spiral just like hurricanes. Lots of
people see "the mind of God" in these things and the definitions of
teleology that we see in dictionaries today are directly influenced by
Thomas Aquinas and his Scholastic movement in Christianity. The purpose
referred to in most definitions of the word Teleology is an overarching one
(the grand plan of divine origin). The concept of function is beginning to
creep in, apparently, through the side door of science, because it makes so
much sense. But it is not consistent with a mechanistic view to say that it
plays any role in driving evolution. Do you see what I'm trying to
articulate here?
I'll respond to the second half of John K's post tomorrow.
Judith