This offers the simplest “neutral” colloquial mixture of “design” and “evolution” that I’ve seen in a long time. The site is no longer maintained, but the language persists.
“As a designer it is important to understand where design came from, how it developed, and who shaped its evolution. The more exposure you have to past, current and future design trends, styles and designers, the larger your problem-solving toolkit. The larger your toolkit, the more effective of a designer you can be.” http://www.designishistory.com/this-site/
Here, the term “evolution” as used just meant “history”. The author was not indicating “design theory evolution”, but rather instead the “history of designs” themselves, which have been already instantiated.
The topic “design is history” nevertheless enables an obvious point of contact between “evolution” and “design”. They both have histories that can be studied. Present in the above meaning of “design” are the origin, processes and agent(s) involved in the “designing”. This differs significantly from the Discovery Institute’s version of “design theory”, when it comes to history, aim, structure and agency, since the DI’s version flat out avoids discussion of design processes and agent(s). The primary purpose of the DI’s “design theory”, meanwhile, is USAmerican religious apologetics and “theistic science”.
The quotation above likely didn’t come from an IDist, and it isn’t referencing “Intelligent Design” theory as a supposed “scientific theory”. The “designer” in the quotation above is a (more or less intelligent) human designer, not a Divine Designer. This fact distinguishes it “in principle” from the Discovery Institute’s ID theory, which is supposed to be (depends on who you’re speaking with in the IDM) about first biology, then informatics, and statistics. The DI’s ID theory is not actually focused on “designing by real designers”, but rather on apologetics using “design” and informational probabilism.
The Discovery Institute’s failure to distinguish or even highlight the differences and similarities between human design and Divine Design, and instead their engagement in active distortion, equivocation, double-talking, and obfuscation between them, are marks of its eventual downward trend to collapse.
Purpose is shorthand for evolutionary history.
Because it helps us to ask the right questions in our attempt to understand what we observe.
Think about a bird’s nest and try to understand it using Aristotles four ’causes’. As you probably know these the material, the formal, the essential and the final. Although I prefer to think of them as four aspects of existence.
The material cause is self-explanatory as is the formal. Both vary greatly depending on species. The form can be anything from a scrape in the ground to an intricately woven masterpiece. Its essential cause would be the bird/s that constructed it. And its final cause has to do with its purpose, the reason for its existence. It is built to provide a safe place to lay and brood a clutch of eggs.
Getting the right answers will enable us to distinguish between, say, witches broom and a bird’s nest.
If you cannot see that a nest is extrinsically teleological in the same way that human artefacts are then there is little point in discussing intrinsic teleology with you.
It seems to me that some people are so fearful of the concept of a divine designer that they are unwilling to admit to the notion of any purposeful activities in nature.
There is a middle way between everything being divinely designed and it all being accidental.
And your goal in life is to dwell on the past 🙂
True.
Also, I would substitute “pedagogical” where Stanford uses “explanatory”; for instance:
There are no accidents when omnipotence is in play.
And this bothers you for reasons that have nothing at all to do with science.
Yes, that’s entirely correct. A person could be a medical doctor, a brain surgeon, a rocket scientist or a big data visualization ninja, and they would still count as a child on the other topics (like when Omnipotence is at play).
There’s an effort at compartmentalization for some that keeps “philosophy” and “theology” apart from “science”. Others need not follow that sophisticated detour.
The quote Mung responds to reminds me of a recent post at Swamidass’ site, about a certain person who has posted here, and of this place elsewhere, that was flagged by that community:
Probably not exactly what Swamidass had in mind as a flattering description of the “first follower” of his TGAE hypothesis, eh? Ah, those ornery, crusty (reformed, reforming, reformational!) Calvinists. =~}
You missed the question mark there.
No, it does not bother me because I think it’s all a load of old bollocks. Why bother doing something you already know the outcome of. Just imagine you did it.
I know why parasitic worms blind children. Nature is red in tooth and claw. What’s your excuse? It can’t be whipped cream all the time? Go stand in the corner with phoodoo….
I accept this. But on the other hand I think discussions of this amounts to basically navel gazing. Mind-masturubation. Pointless speculation on what cannot be known. After all, it’s not like any of you agree on anything is it?
Theology is just a load of old wank that keeps people busy who can’t contribute in actually worthwhile ways to society. Keeping a divine foot out of the door is only sensible as otherwise who can say anything about anything?
Go lock yourselves up in monasteries for another 1000 years why don’t you? Nothing worthwhile came of the last 1000 so not sure what you think is going to be happening in the next 1000 to make theology worthwhile. It’s all ungrounded nonsense.
You opinion may differ, of course, but as a big data visualization ninja I have better things to do then worry about what Mung thinks bothers me with his magic mind reading powers.
May I suggest you add your ‘answer’ here: https://philosophy.stackexchange.com/questions/2752/does-the-notion-of-an-all-powerful-god-conflict-with-the-idea-of-free-will
and see how it competes in the marketplace of ideas .
In fact, do feel free to point out which, if any, of those answers are ‘correct’. If none, then why not add your own? I mean, if you have no separation between “philosophy” and “theology” and “science” then you can give an answer that is valid in all those ways can’t you? A better answer then I can, with my unsophisticated view, right? Share your knowledge on Stack and build a better world!
I’ve got a reach of over a million people on Stackoverflow. A million people+ have seen my answers or comments. So it’s the perfect place to let all the other ignoramuses like me know how it really is.
This is a thread about Intelligent Design, remember, you have to pretend that’s it’s not about your god at the very least. tisk tisk.
Substitute “unconvinced by current candidates on offer for a divine designer” in my case. I don’t hate God and I don’t fear God (I’m using God as shorthand for all purported divinities). I’m just not convinced the God stuff is anything other than human imagination..
Exactly so. And hence ‘theology’ is just pointless. How could those who think as that think otherwise?
I think you’re missing something important here. Analytic philosophers of biology use “teleology” when talking about biological functions. By their lights, “the function of the heart is to pump blood” is a teleological statement just because it tells us what the heart is for. (Cf. Dennett’s “design stance”). The function of the heart — to pump blood — plays an explanatory role in answering the question “why do animals have hearts?”
Q: “why do animals have hearts?”
A: “to pump blood”
is therefore a teleological explanation as analytic philosophers of biology use that word.
This is not to say that analytic philosophers of biology have complete ownership over the word “teleology” or that there aren’t legitimate uses of that word beyond philosophy of biology. It is only to explain what analytic philosophers of biology mean by that term, and that’s how the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry is using it.
Personally, I far prefer what Allen and Neal (the SEP entry authors) call “organizational approaches” over “direct natural selection approaches”, for two reasons.
First, the organizational approaches are much closer to what Aristotle and Kant were talking about (esp. Kant’s idea that living things display “purposiveness without purpose”), whereas the selectionist approach is more like changing the question. Selectionist approaches have explanatory value but they don’t quite capture what’s going on with the idea of teleology per se.
Second, because evolution describes what happens to populations of organisms over time, at a conceptual level we need a good theory of what organisms are in order to understand what evolution is.
A lot of 20th century evolutionary theory followed population genetics in just forgetting about organisms and development, and I worry that selectionist accounts of teleology follow that tradition: just talk about the selection pressures acting on “traits” as atomic units of evolutionary theory, and don’t mention the fact that traits are always abstractions from what organisms do in their environments. It’s the tyranny of statistics over natural history, population genetics over ecology and developmental biology.
Anyway, I’m thinking a lot about this stuff because I’m writing a chapter on cybernetics in my book project about how to naturalize Kant’s philosophy of mind. Sorry I got carried away!
Gregory is not an American and doesn’t care about the restrictions that the First Amendment places on separating church and state, the history of creationism in public schools, etc. I believe he agrees with Steve Fuller’s view that ID proponents should just stop pretending that they’re not talking about God and embrace the slogan “biology is divine technology” for their position.
At least that’s something.
It’s not as simple as that. 😉
I know that! 🙂
I was just pointing out that teleological explanations, as philosophers of biology think of them today, are ubiquitous and innocuous.
Kantian Naturalist,
Looks like Gregory has taken over FMM’s duties here at TSZ 🤔
Odd as it seems, I like Gregory but despise FMM.
dazz,
Gregory is too smart to be a presuppositionalist.
You’d be wrong. Or rather, I don’t know who those people are. I see this rationalisation a lot, and find it irritating and empty. Can’t possibly be that the arguments are unconvincing, must be because the atheists are shitting themselves. Sure.
I’m not remotely fearful of a divine designer, I just find the concept to be ludicrous, and your muddled, vague ‘middle way’ no better.
How can you be scared of what you don’t think exists?
I can’t believe you recommended this book.
What are you, some sort of hyper-selectionist?
It was more an ironic mirror of a prior comment of Charlie’s. But any book about genetics is likely to be mainly about the selectable part of the genome, and not that evolving mainly under drift – which most people pushing teleology are not that interested in in any case.
In any event your recommendation led me to take a look at it. 🙂
They place great stock in “Nothing in Biology Makes Sense Except in the Light of Evolution” yet replace it with “Nothing in Biology Makes Sense Except in the Light of Natural Selection” while relegating “Nothing in Biology Makes Sense Except in the Light of Population Genetics” to a chapter at the end of the book.
So I propose the following: Nothing in Evolution Makes Sense Except in the Light of Evolution.”
I know, I know, although that’s a pretty low bar to clear 😅
Mung,
Me, I’d just be happy if people wishing to relegate genetics, in favour of their own pet theory of explaining shared traits among various taxonomic ranks, first understood the genetics they thought inadequate.
Some people are just fearful of the concept of having human characteristics determined outside of anyone’s control.
Heh, a similar riposte occurred to me! Also, hardly worth learning a paradigm that’s on the way out … 😁
……
If you use terms like ‘epigenetic’ and ‘behaviour’ in a nonstandard manner, you should expect to be misunderstood. Why do we discard genetic changes, here? You don’t really say.
If you can’t detail the specifics of consciousness in your view either, this is a pointless rhetorical device. I was talking much more generally, about the causal relationship between genotype and phenotype, which is well established, ‘explain X then’ challenges nothwithstanding.
Not much more. As I doggedly and repeatedly point out, epigenetic states last a couple of generations at best, and are tightly associated with chromosomes – ie, genes. You need a lot more than this ‘your philosophy, Horatio’ handwaving to establish a nongenetic rationale for any given shared feature, be it behavioural or morphological.
Yeah, very clever. I would, however, draw a sharp distinction between the use of words whose metaphorical sense has all but disappeared through common usage and attempts to analogise unrelated systems.
Yeah, metaphors, huh? 🙄
Sez you.
By … ?
It’s a group with the same genome. So you need to do more to establish that the behaviours are nongenetic (ironically, this capacity of generating multiple types from the one genome is accomplished epigenetically, much as in different tissues in a body).
Organisms can be said to have goals (the most pressing, funnily enough, being to get their genomes replicated), but this does not make them the product of anything with higher goals.
Good point.
As their children grow up loving parents slowly relinquish their power over them. They have to lose power in order for their children to gain power over themselves.
An omnipotent being that cedes power to other beings must on doing so lose their own omnipotence. Love is different. It can be given freely without the giver losing anything.
Quite true. This is why debates over teleology need to make careful distinctions — is teleology functioning as a descriptive term or an explanatory term? Is teleology at the level of individual organisms or at the process that generates species? Does purposiveness require an intentional agent or can it emerge spontaneously via self-organizing processes?
This is all falsely dichotomous again. Cuckoos provide a strong pointer that there is an innate component to birdsong, because they have no opportunity to learn. When we move to species that might have a learnt component, or indulge mimicry or song adjustment, you dust your hands: case dismissed. But in all cases, you are unwittingly calling upon species-wide traits. Starlings are mimics, huh? 🤔 It’s characteristic of the species, you say? 🤔🤔🤔. Likewise one could look at chaffinches – they have local ‘dialects’, but their song is still distinctively chaffinch-like. So I would argue that sometimes there is both a genetic and a learned component. It is not simply one or the other.
By avoiding false dichotomy. I know gay and trans people who have had children. Indeed in one case I often mention, I know a male -> female trans who had a son who also transitioned. That’s not conclusive proof of a genetic relationship, but it seems more likely than environmental influence.
Using twin studies, sexual orientation is about 50% heritable. It’s not all one cause; universals are rare in biology.
So you don’t think that science is worthwhile? Does the name Gregor Mendel ring any bells with you? 🙂
I didn’t say that some people fear God. I was alluding to the fact that because some people are so against the very idea of control coming from a higher order they even deny it in limited, observable cases. Bird’s nests are not made by genes they are made by birds. The bird is the creative, unified being that creates the nest. To separate the genes from this being is to imagine an abstraction which leads away from reality.
Can you explain what you take teleology to mean in a way that excludes this nest building activity?
I happen to think that without religion humanity would have reached this point of scientific achievement long ago.
Apocryphal no doubt, but religion needs not look in the telescope to see what it already knows, why would it?
I agree.
Alan Fox?
I wasn’t talking about fear of any beings, real or imaginary, I am talking about fear of considering the concept, or maybe better put, for fear of even being thought of by one’s peers as considering the concept.
An simple way round a fear of the unknown which most people would admit to having, is to deny the extent of the unknown. If there was such a thing as a higher existence then surely we would know about it!
We like to think of ourselves as having outgrown these fears.
Where on Earth did you get that idea?
I was brought up Roman Catholic and went to a school run by monks. I’ve fucking considered it.
This is kind of true. I would feel extremely embarrassed if I someone I respect thought I might be inclined to believe that shit
I just want to go on record as saying that most historians of early modern science recognize that the scientific revolution came out of medieval logic, theology, and engineering. I know it’s a popular view amongst atheists that medieval philosophy held back the rise of modern science, but serious historians don’t think there’s much evidence for that belief. A lot of prejudice against “the Dark Ages” goes back to 19th century apologists for imperialism.
CharlieM,
Genes are just as much a part of reality as nests – which incidentally play a vital role in propagating them, an activity one can view as teleological with some justification. But to the ultimate ends of which entity, the ephemeral bird or its eternal(ish) lineage?
Nests are just another phenotype, adopting an interestingly consistent pattern, varying much more between than within species groups – a phenomenon I could advance a broad explanation for, but I bet you can guess.
Interesting. I have read some books about the history of science, and those authors at any rate did NOT argue that it arose from medieval theology and engineering. Instead, they observed the renewed interest in Greek natural philosophy, and (especially Bacon) rejected Aristotle’s concepts of formal and final cause (as being unnecessary and perhaps meaningless). “Modern” science seems to have evolved from two developments: the use of math in studying nature, and the emphasis on observation and experiment over contemplation. To the extent that these trends arose out of the renaissance, they represent a rejection rather than outgrowth of medieval theology.
From my reading, I do not get the impression that medieval theology held back the development of scientific thinking, but neither was it really instrumental in the advent of science as we know it. At most, theological institutions inhibited science much as the current US administration does today, and for similar reasons.
We can still see it today, indeed.
I suspect they could have dropped the theology and done just as well. That’s kind of the point.
I understand the argument that without religion there would not be specific universities etc. I just believe on the whole it would have advanced further then it has.
If we include, say, global warming in ‘science’ we can see the rejection of science on religious grounds is rampant.
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/0096340215599789
just one of many.
She argues that the architects of the modern evolutionary synthesis excluded many factors beyond the level of the gene. She agrees with what the modern synthesis included but thinks that factors were neglected and so brought about a marginalisation of these factors within biology.
You imply that you agree with this yet you single out the gene as the leader with the rest following behind. Jablonka argues that this is the wrong way of looking at it. There is no particular leader. The process must be treated as the combined workings of the whole.
The gene can be isolated in thought for analytical purposes but it must be remembered that it cannot be so isolated in reality. It will always be a part of the living process.
I’ll continue my reply later when I find the time.