nwr writes:
Evolutionary biologists are usually careful to avoid language that suggests teleological committments. That is, except when talking about mutations. There they use terms such as "mistakes in copying" or "copy error", which suggests that the purpose was to make an identical copy but some sort of error crept in.
The literature seems to strongly suggest that evolution would not occur if there were none of these "copy errors". So we have an apparently strange system that only works because it doesn't work.
Why not a different terminology, such as using "different" or "discrepancy" instead of "error".
It seems to me that we could consider reproduction to be a creative process of constructing the next generation, with "variation on a theme of ..." as part of the creative process.
Well, this could, I suppose, spawn yet another thread. However, I personally have very little problem with teleology in the description of biological systems. What is the purpose (or if you prefer, "function") of an eye? To see. And of course we could come up with a vast number of other examples, whether they involve a variety of enzymes, intracellular structures, endogenous retroviruses which become active when needed to create a barrier to the mother's immune system in the placenta, or what have you. The important thing is that there is no externally-imposed teleology to the evolutionary process itself. But the biological world is rife with teleological (goal-directed) action and organs for performing such action. The important thing (in terms of naturalism) is the fact that such causation is an emergent phenomena -- and it is internal to the system which exhibits it.
If one attempts to avoid such language (where we understand the form of causation of biological systems by analogy with the goal-directed causation of our own existence), trying instead to state things in purely mechanical, reductive, value-free language, one loses sight of the biological systems themselves as
systems. For example, how would one explain in thoroughly mechanical terms the function of an eye in relation to an organism's surivival or interaction with its environment (e.g., a cheetah hunting its prey) without any explicit or implicit reference to its function or purpose? How much much more would one have to write in order to avoid the role of vision while describing the role of vision in life -- and what precisely would be the point? So in this respect, I see no problem with the terms "mistakes, copying, errors, purpose" or for that matter, "reproduction, construction" or "creative" (although the last of these would be more at the level of a metaphor -- unless one considers the possibility that the capacity to evolve may itself be something which has evolved -- but that probably belongs to yet another thread). It may be possible to avoid teleological language in biology, but I cannot see how it would be desirable, and in all likelihood, the attempt to do so would simply result in a great deal of violence being done to one's logic and prose.
This message has been edited by TimChase, 12-10-2005 07:19 PM
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