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Author Topic:   Teleological Science?
Quetzal
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Message 1 of 2 (452745)
01-31-2008 9:22 AM


Somewhere buried in the Dover thread (see post 90) randman posted an interesting aside concerning teleology and science:
randman writes:
2. ID is a much broader concept than just biology. It's basically a reassertion of teleology into science. Secular scientists hate the concept but whether it's math or physics or biology, I think the idea is obtaining increasing merit as more facts are discovered and we move away from a strictly materialist understanding of the universe. In fact, if you believe God exists, then you probably believe in teleology because you believe the Creator purposed the universe into existence. It will become increasingly apparent there is a contradiction in maintaining there is no purpose to the universe and so cannot be considered as a valid scientific idea and belief God exists in any form at all, whether the Christian God, a New Age concept of God, or another religion, or Deism or whatever.
Although I don’t think anything would be served by directly addressing the contentions in this quote, it did serve to generate an interesting question in my mind: If teleology were in fact a valid, overlooked concept in the physical and life sciences, what would it look like? I’d like to explore the possibilities in this thread, mostly in the form of thought experiments. Note: I personally do not believe there is any positive evidence in favor of teleology writ large, but if there were, how would we know?
To stimulate further thoughts, here is one possibility I came up with: If it could be shown that the overall gene pool of any population of organisms changed in advance of a change in selection pressures on that population, even if (or especially if) the change temporarily reduced the population’s net fitness locally (i.e., moved the population “down” from a local fitness peak), this would be an indicator that something was going on that had nothing to do with the current understanding of evolution by natural selection. I don’t refer here to one or a collection of neutral alleles that might have arisen through mutation, etc, that are activated or selected for by a change in environment, but rather a change in genotype - or possibly even just phenotype - that anticipated the change in selection pressures. A case then might be built that this showed the possibility of teleology (or “purpose”) in nature.
Any other thoughts, ideas, possibilities?
ABE: Biological Evolution, please.
Edited by Quetzal, : preference

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Message 2 of 2 (452758)
01-31-2008 9:44 AM


Thread copied to the Teleological Science? thread in the Is It Science? forum, this copy of the thread has been closed.

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