Teleology and Biology

In the ‘Moderation’ thread, William J Murray tried to make a case for ideological bias among evolutionary scientists by referencing a 2006 Gil Dodgen post, in which numerous authors emphasise the lack of teleology within the evolutionary process. I thought this might merit its own OP.

I disagree that authors are showing a metaphysical bias by arguing against teleology. I wrote

Evolutionary processes, conventionally defined (ie, variations and their changes in frequency due to differential survival and reproduction), do not have goals. If there IS an entity with goals that is also directing, that’s as may be, but the processes of evolution carry on regardless when it isn’t. It is important to erase the notion of teleology from a student’s mind in respect of evolutionary mechanisms of adaptation, and most of those quotes appear to have that aim. Organisms don’t, on the best evidence available, direct their own evolution.

To which WJM made the somewhat surprising rejoinder: “how do you know this”? Of course the simple answer is that I qualified my statement ‘on the best evidence available’ – I didn’t claim to know it. But there is a broader question. Is there any sense in which evolutionary processes could, even in principle, be teleological? I’d say not. You have a disparate collection of competing entities. Regardless whether there is a supervening entity doing some directing, the process of differential survival/reproduction/migration cannot itself have goals.

An example of evolution in action: the Chemostat.

The operator of a chemostat has a goal – often, to create a pure cell line. The process by which this is achieved is by simultaneous addition and removal of medium, which causes purification by random sampling, which is evolution (a form of genetic drift). How can that process have a goal? There is no collusion between the cells in the original medium to vote one to be the sole ancestor of all survivors. How do I know this? That would be a pretty daft question. I think it would be incumbent on the proponent to rule it in, rather than for me to rule it out.

690 thoughts on “Teleology and Biology

  1. William J. Murray,

    Gee, where were you guys when I was getting tarred and feathered for advocating a definition-of-scientific-process shift from the problematic, ontology-laden “methodological materialism” to the epistemology-restricted “methodological pragmatism” aspect of scientific investigation?

    Can’t be everywhere, William.

    My point was, the shift you are advocating is not a shift at all. I don’t know of anyone who would not fit the description of a ‘methodological pragmatist’, but would fit the description of a ‘methodological materialist’ – ie any scientist who has yet to make the supposed necessary shift. Which is why I asked for an example.

    All examples of paradigm shift, in that thread and this, relate to joining the dots between noted phenomenon and a theory of causation. All causative explanations that have changed paradigms happen to be ‘material’ ones. You haven’t noted a breakthrough where dispensing with the ‘material’ bore fruit – they all involved imaginative extension of the ‘rules’ of material causation.

  2. William J. Murray:

    Well I don’t know that the last part is true, but all science does now is “make believe” that it has provided explanations, when in fact all science can do is provide – at best – predictive descriptions of behaviors. There is no explanation for those behaviors.

    The nature of scientific explanation is another one of those unresolved issues in philosophy.

    Everyone agrees scientific explanation always stops somewhere. The Feynmann Youtube video on magnetism has been pointed our here many times as example of this agreement.

    Of course, science continually tries to push back on those limits, for example by generalizing and simplifying. But in the end, questions like “why is there anything” or “what are laws” are philosophical, not scientific, and seem to be beyond the limit of science (even if science is pushing the limits of its range of explanation for those questions by using multiverses).

    But it is these very limits and methodological constraints on scientific explanation that make science successful at what it is trying to do: Namely, to provide reliable ways of predicting and manipulating the world that work for all.

    Anyone is free to accept a philosophy that posits explanations that may work for oneself only. But such explanations are not scientific.

  3. William J. Murray: Now, if I had said this, I’d be skewered for it.

    I doubt that. I ignored that when KN said it, just like I ignore a lot of what you say. Disagreements don’t always warrant posting about them. But yes, in this case I do disagree with KN. Occasionally, a “why” question happens to have an answer, but that isn’t a required part of science.

    Similarly, I’m inclined to disagree with KN on ontological commitments. It would be better to do away with ontology.

    Sure, science makes ontological commitments. But they are often commitments to abstractions (or theoretical terms), so they are just pragmatic commitments for the sake of the theory. The ontological commitment to a gravitational force was dropped in favor of the alternative commitments of GR. It’s “easy come, easy go” for ontological commitments in science.

    Well I don’t know that the last part is true, but all science does now is “make believe” that it has provided explanations, when in fact all science can do is provide – at best – predictive descriptions of behaviors. There is no explanation for those behaviors. They’re just the way things happen to behave.

    You have said similar things in the past, and I haven’t commented. But, actually, I mostly agree with you about this. I sometimes say “explanations don’t explain” as a way of making the same point. Science tames nature, by giving us an ability to use it to our benefit, but it doesn’t really explain anything beyond how that taming works.

    Which, IMO, is represented in particular in the animosty towards intelligent design.

    Sorry, no. The “animosity” is because of the false pretense that ID is science, and because so much of ID consists of bogus attacks on science.

    Old earth creationists also believe in intelligent design. But they don’t attack the science and they don’t claim that they are doing science. And nobody objects (except the YECs and the ID people — and perhaps Jerry Coyne).

  4. BruceS,

    I think that “metaphysical presuppositions” was not what I should have said. I had in mind, and I think conflated, two quite different things: (1) the bare minimal metaphysical presuppositions of science: effects do not precede causes, there is a real causal order subsisting in space and time, empirical knowledge is possible, etc.; (2) the specific ontological commitments entailed by an accepted theory (e.g. quantum mechanics commits us to the existence of quarks, etc.). And when the theories change in light of new evidence, so too does the ontology.

    There is also a third thing, (3), scientific metaphysics, which is the metaphysics that results from synthesizing the discoveries of the sciences into a more-or-less coherent picture. As argued by John Ladyman and Don Ross recently, and less recently by philosophically-influenced scientists like Prigogine and Kaufman, a contemporary scientific metaphysics is not “materialism”. Prigogine, I know, is firmly grounded in the philosophical tradition of process ontology that include Bergson, Whitehead, and Deleuze. In fact Isabelle Stenger, who was Prigogine’s co-author on Order Out of Chaos, wrote a widely acclaimed book on Whitehead.

    It is true that I’ve trying to move my thought in a slightly more scientific direction post-book. My undergraduate degree is in biology, with an emphasis on paleontology, and that’s still important to me. My current long-term project is flesh out a little bit further a picture of animal cognition that could serve as an evolutionary precursor to a roughly Brandomian account of rational cognition. That’s going to involve reading a lot of of enactive cognitive science and a sustained foray into the arcane world of neuropragmatism. I just started reading Tomasello’s The Cultural Origins of Human Cognition and I also bought (but haven’t gotten into) this massive tome: Evolution of Mind, Brain, and Culture. The stuff about biological teleology is of interest to me as a way of sketching out some of the deeper evolutionary precursors of animal intentionality and animal inference.

  5. William J. Murray,

    It becomes a problem when the ontology becomes entrenched ideological bias to the point that empirical evidence is ignored or dismissed because it defies/contradicts the expectations of the narrative. It’s also a problem when this ideological commitment insists that all scientific descriptions must conform to its particular, current narrative.

    There is little reward or glory attached to conforming to a current narrative. Scientists tend to want to discover that which is presently unknown. I don’t think real scientists behave in the way you imagine they do. If they dismiss someone’s pet theory, they can almost always provide rational, not ideological, reasons for doing so.

    As to biological evolution, the underlying causative medium is actually very well characterised. Mutation, survival, migration, recombination and reproduction form the constituents of organic change. One cannot, and need not, supply detailed ‘atomic causation’ – why did this animal die; what caused the individual births and deaths by which this neutral allele became fixed – any more than one need account for every molecular trajectory and energy in order to have a valid theory of turbulence. It’s excessive reductionism – the very thing scientists are occasionally criticised for.

  6. My point was, the shift you are advocating is not a shift at all.

    I (and quite a few TSZers in that thread) would disagree – although there were a couple that appeared to agree with you and me, inasmuch as when I said in that thread that the progress of science is always (hopefully) adjudicated by pragmatism anyway, even if the metaphysics employed attempts to push it into non-pragmatic directions.

    I don’t know of anyone who would not fit the description of a ‘methodological pragmatist’, but would fit the description of a ‘methodological materialist’ – ie any scientist who has yet to make the supposed necessary shift. Which is why I asked for an example.

    What has been pragmatic about superstring, dark matter or multiverse theory or “research”? What is the difference between materialist/naturalist uses of design & intention-laden terms, and ID uses of such terms, other than ontological commitments? Anti-ID advocates often insist that DNA doesn’t “really” represent code, and that genetic translation isn’t “really” semiosis: why? Those are perfectly good terms that work as productive descriptions of what we obvserve; why bother insisting they are “metaphors” or “analogies”?

    All examples of paradigm shift, in that thread and this, relate to joining the dots between noted phenomenon and a theory of causation. All causative explanations that have changed paradigms happen to be ‘material’ ones.

    Characterizing a description of behaviors as “material” is simply a bald-faced, unsupportable metaphysical claim. Gravity is a description of behaviors of phenomena, not an explanation. To claim that what causes predictable, patterned gravitational effects is “natural” is an entirely unsupportable claim. It’s simply a term you have assigned to it without any reason other than that is how you have chosen to see “gravity”. You can say that whatever gravity “is”, it produces predictable, regular effects which we categorize (because of their predictable regularity) as “natural”, but you have no scientific footing to claim that what is producing those patterns of effects is itself natural.

    Therefore, calling gravity a “material explanation” for gravitational effects is a category error generated by the reification of a descrption of effects into a cause.

    You can label the category of effects “nature”, “natural”, or “material”, but gravity, taken as whatever it is that causes gravitational effects, cannot be subsumed by a description of its effects. One is what we call “nature” or “material”; the other is what is causing what we call “nature” or “material”.

    So no, when we talk about laws, forces or energy transfers, you don’t get to call how those patterns occur or what causes them – “natural” or “material” other than by a commitment to an ideology. So your claim that all causes we have found are “material” causes is a category error generated by metaphysical commitments that erroneously cause you to reify patterns of effects as the cause of those effects.

    You haven’t noted a breakthrough where dispensing with the ‘material’ bore fruit – they all involved imaginative extension of the ‘rules’ of material causation.

    Your terminological fiat of erroneously claiming as material (whatever that vague concept really means) whatever causes the patterns of behavior we have discovered is a case of metaphysical tautology. Newton and many others found patterns of behavior for which there is no known cause. We use those patterns of behaviors (reified as causes) as foundational causal explanations (which they are not) for primary effects (fundamental descriptions of patterns of behavior of matter and energy).

  7. Allan Miller said:

    There is little reward or glory attached to conforming to a current narrative.

    You mean, besides a regular paycheck, fat government and corporate grants and funding for delivering expected, politically conforming and financially rewarding research conclusions, and not risking being ostracized by the rest of the scientific community? Sorry, I just don’t buy into your idealistic narrative of what, for the most part, I think the institution of science is today: a politics, ideology and reputation-driven business that only presses forward eventually due to necessary, functionally constrained pragmatism.

    Scientists tend to want to discover that which is presently unknown. I don’t think real scientists behave in the way you imagine they do. If they dismiss someone’s pet theory, they can almost always provide rational, not ideological, reasons for doing so.

    This is just narrative-friendly rhetoric.

  8. walto,

    Even Whitehead’s former collaborator, Russell, didn’t take much time with Whitehead once the latter got into his process stuff. Didn’t like dealing with “jellymen,” Russell said.

    You inspired me to track down that quote. From a letter to the London Review of Books:

    In addition, I had this story from Dr Satish Kapoor, when he taught at the University of Washington (Seattle) in the early Sixties. Kapoor had done a thesis on PM, and had a chance – this would have been in the Fifties – to ask Russell why he and Whitehead did nothing together after it. ‘Well you know,’ said Russell, and one can hear the reedy tones floating high, ‘in cosmology, there are jelly men and there are billiard-ball men. Whitehead was a jelly man, whereas I, well, I have always been a billiard-ball man. When the fact of this difference was borne in upon us we of course recognised that further collaborative work was completely out of the question.’

    It reminds me of Wolpert’s funny article title:

    William Dembski’s treatment of the No Free Lunch theorems is written in Jello

  9. William J. Murray: You mean, besides a regular paycheck, fat government and corporate grants and funding for delivering expected, politically conforming and financially rewarding research conclusions, and not risking being ostracized by the rest of the scientific community?

    Kinda makes you wonder who built that computer you are using, if everyone is so corrupt?

    If you ever moved beyond your right wing talking points you’d perhaps be able to drop those scales from your eyes.

  10. William J. Murray: Sorry, I just don’t buy into your idealistic narrative of what, for the most part, I think the institution of science is today: a politics, ideology and reputation-driven business that only presses forward eventually due to necessary, functionally constrained pragmatism.

    How many scientific papers a published a day William? Care to take a guess?

    Do you know what a “research university” is?

    I would say that if you got to know a scientist personally you’d fine out that they are not the person that Fox news has taught you they are.

  11. First, the opposition between pragmatism and metaphysics seems quite badly mistaken to me. If “pragmatism” here means working in a philosophical tradition begun by Peirce, James, Dewey, then taking on a pragmatist methodology affects how one does metaphysics (and epistemology, and ethics, etc.). It does not mean, in that sense, adjuring from metaphysics and just doing epistemology.

    Second, I am deeply skeptical of the thought that we can adjure from metaphysics and just do epistemology, or adjure from metaphysics and just do science. In the 20th century, the two most significant attempts to do away with metaphysics entirely — phenomenology and logical empiricism — both ended in failure. I think there’s something to be learned here. That is not to say that individual practicing scientists should concern themselves with metaphysics — I’m not arguing against the division of intellectual labor! — but it is to say that how we understand science will involve, as well, exploring the metaphysics of science.

    Third, part of what is at work here is the long-running debate between scientific realism and instrumentalism. I accept that scientific realism has its difficulties, but to my mind, the no-miracles argument against instrumentalism is decisive. Briefly, and to quote Putnam, scientific realism is the only view that doesn’t turn scientific progress into a miracle. Somewhat more explicated: scientific progress would be inexplicable and unintelligible if it were not the case that theory A predicts and explains better than theory B because theory A is an more adequate map than theory B of the structure of reality.

    So, while I am strongly in favor of pragmatism (as a philosophical method in the tradition that runs from Peirce through Dewey to Sellars and to contemporary philosophers like Bob Brandom, Mark Johnson, Owen Flanagan, and many others), and also strongly against materialism (which I think is basically just Epicurean metaphysics dressed up in early modern mathematical physics and deployed as the legitimizing ideology of bourgeois capitalism), I do not think that either my admiration for pragmatism or my opposition to materialism requires me to adjure from metaphysics or to prioritize epistemology over metaphysics.

  12. William J. Murray: What has been pragmatic about superstring, dark matter or multiverse theory or “research”?

    I don’t know enough about superstring theory to comment, though I tend to be a skeptic.

    Dark matter is surely pragmatic. It’s an attempt to account for observed gravitational fields in galaxies. The cosmology books that I have looked at do openly admit the possibility that our current theories of gravity might be wrong. So the idea of dark matter is not blocking that consideration.

    The multiverse, at least originally, allowed a deterministic theory instead of a probabilistic theory. This greatly simplified the mathematics. So I see that as pragmatic. I have not closely followed recent developments in multiverse theory, but I some reservations about the direction that it seems to be taking.

  13. Neil Rickert,

    I mostly agree with those assessments. Superstring theory looks like a lot of fun mathematics with no experimental support, so I just shrug my shoulders at it. Likewise, I have no idea what could confirm or disconfirm the multiverse; it makes for good science fiction but I don’t see it as a scientific hypothesis.

  14. William J. Murray:
    You mean, besides a regular paycheck, fat government and corporate grants and funding for delivering expected, politically conforming and financially rewarding research conclusions, and not risking being ostracized by the rest of the scientific community? Sorry, I just don’t buy into your idealistic narrative of what, for the most part, I think the institution of science is today: a politics, ideology and reputation-driven business that only presses forward eventually due to necessary, functionally constrained pragmatism.

    This is just narrative-friendly rhetoric.

    So true. So true.
    And rather ignorant rhetoric, to boot.

  15. William J. Murray,

    You mean, besides a regular paycheck, fat government and corporate grants and funding for delivering expected, politically conforming and financially rewarding research conclusions, and not risking being ostracized by the rest of the scientific community? Sorry, I just don’t buy into your idealistic narrative of what, for the most part, I think the institution of science is today: a politics, ideology and reputation-driven business that only presses forward eventually due to necessary, functionally constrained pragmatism.

    Shrug. You believe what you choose to believe, at the end of the day, which renders such dialogues ultimately fruitless.

    Fact remains, confirming existing results is tedious, and is definitely not what we do it for (did, in my case). Fat government grants? For what? Confirming the existing narrative? Who have you been talking to? 🙂

  16. Allan Miller,

    It’s surely true that confirming existing results is tedious, though one wonders what to make of that sociological fact in light of some recent retractions of seemingly established results.

    That said, it’s also true that researchers need to make their work “sexy” for grant committees, and that often means spinning their research in a way that connects it with well-established and well-funded initiatives (e.g. the Human Genome Project). And I’m not sure we should blithely dismiss the worry that competition over corporate funding corrupts the process of inquiry.

    Then again, I’m not a practicing scientist, and perhaps it’s not as bad it can look from the outside.

  17. William J. Murray,

    What has been pragmatic about superstring, dark matter or multiverse theory or “research”?

    If we understand pragmatism as ‘doing what works best’, they are all attempts to find workable solutions, first to a unified theory, second to ‘missing’ mass on observation, third to implications in the maths. They are not all equally (or even particularly) successful. They prompt further work.

    What is the difference between materialist/naturalist uses of design & intention-laden terms, and ID uses of such terms […]?

    Metaphor vs a description of reality.

    Anti-ID advocates often insist that DNA doesn’t “really” represent code, and that genetic translation isn’t “really” semiosis: why? Those are perfectly good terms that work as productive descriptions of what we obvserve; why bother insisting they are “metaphors” or “analogies”?

    Because they are metaphors and analogies. Explanation in terms of analogy is fine as far as it goes, and is very frequently done. The difficulty arises when people over-extend the analogy without evidential support. ID is, effectively, one big argument from analogy. If you really chose your beliefs, you wouldn’t be so influenced by such superficially persuasive fluff!

  18. Kantian Naturalist,

    I’m not a practising scientist either, and haven’t been for some years. I don’t know to what extent the landscape has changed. People certainly have to do a dance for funders – but that dance can’t possibly be appealing if the research proposal says “I am going to confirm the existing paradigm”.

  19. That said, confirming (or disconfirming) results is a vital part of the process.

  20. KN, to Neil:

    I mostly agree with those assessments. Superstring theory looks like a lot of fun mathematics with no experimental support, so I just shrug my shoulders at it. Likewise, I have no idea what could confirm or disconfirm the multiverse; it makes for good science fiction but I don’t see it as a scientific hypothesis.

    I think everyone agrees that falsifiability is desirable, but let me sketch out a scenario in which string theory, with its concomitant multiverse, could come to be regarded as our best theory even if the multiverse remains unfalsifiable.

    String theory is largely motivated by the desire to unite quantum mechanics and general relativity by explaining gravity in quantum terms. Let me stress that IANAP, but my understanding is that string theory is currently the most promising approach toward that unification. String theory happens to imply a multiverse, but this is an implication, not an assumption (which puts to rest the common ID claim that the multiverse is a transparent attempt to obviate the Designer).

    If at some point string theory succeeds in uniting QM and GR, matches our experimental results to date, and we can find no other theory that does so without implying the existence of a multiverse, then I would say that we are justified in accepting the existence of the multiverse despite being unable to test it directly. As with all scientific conclusions, our acceptance would be provisional.

    Of course the hope is that we will come up with a way to test the multiverse directly. Here’s one proposal, although I don’t know if the multiverse being tested for here is the same kind as the one predicted by string theory:

    How Do You Test The Multiverse? With Bubbles

  21. Science is biased toward accepting the simplest description as the best, provided its simplicity is mathematically complete.

    Goddidit is simple but lacks numbers.

  22. Kantian Naturalist:

    It’s surely true that confirming existing results is tedious, though one wonders what to make of that sociological fact in light of some recent retractions of seemingly established results.

    That said, it’s also true that researchers need to make their work “sexy” for grant committees, and that often means spinning their research in a way that connects it with well-established and well-funded initiatives (e.g. the Human Genome Project). And I’m not sure we should blithely dismiss the worry that competition over corporate funding corrupts the process of inquiry.

    There are many problems with the current practice of science, but I don’t think your specific diagnoses rank high on the list. Corruption by corporate funding is real, but it is primarily a problem for in-house corporate research, especially pharma research, and thus not really a matter of competition.

    Competition to produce high profile publications — which are valuable for prestige, tenure and future grants — drives a lot of bad or oversold science, but it has little to do with large research projects. Rather, what’s valuable is either the unexpected finding, or a positive finding in a hot field (e.g. stem cells). Competition for grants, on the other hand, pushes toward conservative research proposals that have a high probability of success and that already have preliminary data. Either that, or affiliation with one of the large projects. (That’s the primary complaint about the large projects: they distort funding and the peer review process.) It’s a strange system.

    At least that’s my take on the situation in biomedical research. Other fields may be different.

  23. keiths: String theory is largely motivated by the desire to unite quantum mechanics and general relativity by explaining gravity in quantum terms.

    I see the idea of a unified theory as a forlorn hope.

    Good luck to them if they succeed, but I won’t be holding my breath.

  24. keiths,

    I accept the logical coherence of your scenario but I think it’s pretty far-fetched, in part because there are — as I understand — competing accounts of how QM and GR could be reconciled. For one thing, there is “loop quantum gravity” (about which I know nothing apart from the phrase).

    That said, I have other reasons — based on Ladyman and Ross’ use of Dennett — for being extremely suspicious of the thought that a unified theory of fundamental physics, even if we were to arrive at one, would be a theory of everything. The empirical and conceptual arguments against reductionism are simply far too compelling.

  25. Neil Rickert,

    History is littered with examples of unfulfilled predictions of the future. Though I often wonder why we (not sure who we is in this context other than I’m one of them) expect to be able to decipher all the mysteries of the Universe.

    ETA to clarify, why we should have sufficient mental capacity for the task.

  26. Kantian Naturalist:

    It is true that I’ve trying to move my thought in a slightly more scientific direction post-book. My undergraduate degree is in biology, with an emphasis on paleontology, and that’s still important to me.

    That explains your pale-ontological bias then.

    fG

  27. KN,

    I accept the logical coherence of your scenario but I think it’s pretty far-fetched, in part because there are — as I understand — competing accounts of how QM and GR could be reconciled.

    Sure, but that doesn’t mean that one of them won’t prevail. And my limited layman’s impression is that the money’s still on string theory as the most promising among the competing accounts.

    That said, I have other reasons — based on Ladyman and Ross’ use of Dennett — for being extremely suspicious of the thought that a unified theory of fundamental physics, even if we were to arrive at one, would be a theory of everything.

    I’m not arguing that a unification of QM and GR would necessarily be a final theory or a TOE, and my argument doesn’t depend on that assumption.

    My argument is more a general one about falsifiability than a specific one about the multiverse, so let me express it abstractly:

    1. Suppose we have a theory T with an unfalsifiable entailment E.

    2. Suppose T is the hands-down winner over all competing theories: it’s the most complete, it matches observations best, etc.

    3. If #1 and #2 are true, we are justified in accepting entailment E (provisionally, like every other scientific conclusion) despite the fact that E is unfalsifiable.

    Falsifiability is preferable, but not always essential.

    Note that T is still falsifiable. Its predictions could still, in principle, clash with observation. It’s just that entailment E can’t clash with observation because it is unfalsifiable.

  28. keiths,

    That seems right to me, esp in light of the constraint that T be falsifiable even if E is not.

  29. On the topic of “the multiverse”: Planets in Other Universes: Habitability constraints on density fluctuations and galactic structure:

    Abstract: Motivated by the possibility that different versions of the laws of physics could be realized within other universes, this paper delineates the galactic parameters that allow for habitable planets and revisits constraints on the amplitude Q of the primordial density fluctuations. Previous work indicates that large values of Q lead to galaxies so dense that planetary orbits cannot survive long enough for life to develop. Small values of Q lead to delayed star formation, loosely bound galaxies, and compromised heavy element retention. This work generalizes previous treatments: [A] We consider models for the internal structure of galaxies and find the fraction of galactic real estate that allows stable, long-lived planetary orbits. [B] We perform a large ensemble of numerical simulations to estimate cross sections for the disruption of planetary orbits due to interactions with passing stars. [C] We consider disruption due to the background radiation fields produced by the galaxies. [D] One consequence of intense galactic background radiation fields is that some portion of the galaxy, denoted as the Galactic Habitable Zone, will provide the right flux levels to support habitable planets for essentially any planetary orbit. As Q increases, the fraction of stars in a galaxy that allow for habitable planets decreases due to both orbital disruption and the intense background radiation. However, the outer parts of the galaxy always allow for habitable planets, so that the value of Q does not have a well-defined upper limit. Moreover, some Galactic Habitable Zones are large enough to support more potentially habitable planets than the galaxies found in our universe. These results suggest that the possibilities for habitability in other universes are somewhat more favorable and far more diverse than previously imagined.

  30. William J. Murray
    What has been pragmatic about superstring, dark matter or multiverse theory or “research”?

    It’s not the theories that are pragmatic.

    What’s pragmatic is the justification for the process which develops and assesses them.

    Specifically, given the function of science is to develop theories/explanations that let anyone predict and manipulate the world, the norms for judging good theories are pragmatically justified because they work best to achieve the function.

  31. William J. Murray,

    Just noticed this

    Characterizing a description of behaviors as “material” is simply a bald-faced, unsupportable metaphysical claim. Gravity is a description of behaviors of phenomena, not an explanation. To claim that what causes predictable, patterned gravitational effects is “natural” is an entirely unsupportable claim.

    To which I must just say ” … wha …?”.

    ‘Material’ does not just apply to matter as an existent commodity, but to its interactions. In fact, matter that does not interact with anything is undetectable.

    eta – Which also addresses this barking paragraph:

    Your terminological fiat of erroneously claiming as material (whatever that vague concept really means) whatever causes the patterns of behavior we have discovered is a case of metaphysical tautology.

  32. We have already noted that essence has a material cause, in the sense that all material substances are compounds of form and matter. For substances that have a natural goal or purpose (paradigmatically, living things), there is also a final cause – that to which substances with teleology naturally tend. Substances have in additon … a formal cause – the substantial form that makes them what they are. But they also have an efficient cause – that by which they come into existence.

    – Real Esseintialism (p. 101)

    What is up with people thinking that teleology requires a Big Teleologist in the Sky or that it involves effects causing their own cause or the future causing the past?

  33. BruceS: But in the end, questions like “why is there anything” or “what are laws” are philosophical, not scientific, and seem to be beyond the limit of science (even if science is pushing the limits of its range of explanation for those questions by using multiverses).

    If you’re saying that science itself cannot tell us the nature of “scientific laws” I have to agree with you. Do people here believe the “laws of science” are descriptive?

  34. Mung: If you’re saying that science itself cannot tell us the nature of “scientific laws” I have to agree with you.

    Do people here believe the “laws of science” are descriptive?

    Yes, that is what I am saying. I am further saying that is does not need to answer that question to be successful.

    Philosophy of science does try to answer questions about the nature of scientific laws and explanations. Current thinking on the answer to your ending question is in the SEP and IEP summaries of these topics.

  35. Allan said:

    ‘Material’ does not just apply to matter as an existent commodity, but to its interactions. In fact, matter that does not interact with anything is undetectable.

    “Interaction” is just another word for “behaviors”. You can use the term “material” to categorize behaviors (which includes “interactions”) that are deterministically predictable and/or stochastic, but that description doesn’t include whatever is causing that behavior (which we call laws, forces and energy transfers). The descriptive category “natural” or “material” doesn’t extend to what is causing those behaviors because you simply do not know what is causing them.

    Therefore, the claim that all known causes are material is not a scientific claim at all; it’s a metaphysical claim. Science hasn’t revealed **any** fundamental natural or material causes. It has only categorized deterministic and stochastic patterns of behavior. “Natural” and “material” are ontological commitments when asserted as the cause of such behaviors.

  36. Why are scientists looking for a “theory of everything” in the first place? What makes them think one would even exist?

  37. To be ‘teleological’, we will agree, an explanation must have such forms as ‘A is present/occurs because A is necessary or best for some end B’. …to be an end is to be what a potential being actualized is actually and irreducibly for. This is a factual or objective matter and does not depend on imported normative notions.

    – Teleology, First Principles, and Scientific Method in Aristotle’s Biology (p. 30)

  38. William J. Murray: Why are scientists looking for a “theory of everything” in the first place?

    For most scientists, a “theory of everything” is an in house joke. Very few, if any, expect there to ever be such a theory.

  39. “The novelty,” writes David Balme, “in Aristotle’s theory was his insistence that finality is within nature: it is part of the natural process, not imposed upon it by an independent agent like Plato’s world soul or Demiourgos” (Balme 1987:275).

    – Physiologia: Natural Philosophy in Late Aristotelian and Cartesian Thought (p. 187)

  40. It would appear that physics itself is irreducibly complex.

    I also recently read that there even exists doubt that chemistry can be reduced to physics, but I have not had a chance to follow up on that. Is that news to folks here?

  41. Mung: I also recently read that there even exists doubt that chemistry can be reduced to physics, but I have not had a chance to follow up on that. Is that news to folks here?

    It is not news to me. It has been my viewpoint ever since I took high school physics and chemistry.

  42. …is it possible, within the context of contemporary philosophy and science to revive the Aristotelian notion of immanent finality

    Not only is such a revival possible, it is actual. Recent decades have seen, within mainstream academic philosophy, a renewed interest in traditional Aristotelian notions like substance, essence, causal power, act versus potency (these days referred to as the distinction between “categorical” and “dispositional” properties), and finality (these days referred to as “physical intentionality” or the “directedness” of dispositions toward their manifestations). Moreover, this revival has taken place among secular metaphysicians and philosophers of science with no Thomistic or theological ax to grind.

    – Neo-Scholastic Essays (p. 189)

  43. It seems to me that here is a clear difference between an outcome and a goal (or an end). For an outcome to be a goal, it must satisfy a precondition. For us to decide after the event that an outcome is a goal is not sufficient to make a process teleological, imo. We would be confusing the map with the territory. Which goes right back to Dembski’s specification of course.

    fG

  44. Mung: And that just is teleological. The effect is always, or almost always the same.

    telos means end

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telos_%28philosophy%29

    In that case there is no argument over teleology and evolution. Evolution is definitely guided, and it will end up somewhere.

    If that’s all “teleology” means, then it’s a superfluous description.

    The interesting issue (maybe) is whether any knower knows what the end is before it gets there and whether that knower tweaks things to produce one end rather than another.

    Sometimes higher-level words like “design” and “purpose” just get in the way.

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