sparc
Posts: 2088
Joined: April 2007
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Are they building James Barham up as the next pseudo-victim they claim to be expelled when he just doesn't get tenure?
He doesn't mention god. However, what else does the following imply? | Quote | Biological Purpose
The problem of the bifurcation of nature is above all that of understanding the place of human consciousness in the natural world. But I am not going to tackle that terribly difficult subject head on. Rather, I propose an indirect approach via the phenomenon of teleology or purpose. What, exactly, do I mean by „purpose“? I do not have anything obscure or difficult in mind. I just mean the everyday sense of the term, as applied to
living things. For example, everyone agrees that the purpose of the heart is to circulate the blood. Equivalently, we may say that the heart beats in order to circulate the blood, or that circulating the blood is what the heart is for, or what it is supposed to do. In general, we often speak of the goal of functional actions in living things. Let us call this the biological sense of the term.
This sense is to be distinguished from the intentional sense, in which my conscious purpose in writing this essay is to express my views on the subject of purpose. Of course, many philosophers are of the opinion that the intentional sense of purpose is the only proper use of the term, and that biological purpose is mere metaphor. I have no knock-down argument to give that would show that this view is wrong. However, it is
not the ordinary-language view, which certainly sanctions the ascription of purpose to the parts of organisms. Nor is it a view that can be warranted by biological practice. Although biologists may say that it is only a matter of convenience, the fact is that biological treatises and textbooks are saturated with teleological, normative, and even intentional terminology of every sort, and it would in fact be impossible to discuss the phenomena of life at all without recourse to such descriptors.
It is true that biologists speak more often of „function“ than of „purpose“, but in biology the word „function“ is also used in a clearly teleological and normative sense. Thus, biological purpose is universally recognized, both in everyday life and in life science. And one would think that the universal recognition of something would constitute a pretty strong prima facie case for the reality of that thing!
So, it seems that purpose is a property that we are compelled to ascribe to living things by the nature of the phenomena themselves. There is little reason to believe that it is an illusion of perspective, an anthropomorphic projection, or anything of that sort, since the phenomena would be the same – the heart of a dog would still circulate its blood in just the same way – even if there were no human beings around to describe the process in words. From this, we may safely conclude that biological purpose is a real or objective feature of the world. |
Let me get this straight: He distinguishes (without any bases I would say) biological purpose from intentional purpose and states that when scientists talk about function they actually mean purpose even if they explicitly state that something just appears purposefull and designed. He then says that in common lanuage biological purpose can be described like intentional purpose and concludes that there is purpose in nature. And he does so without even mentioning god or any other designer. Brilliant.
And it gets worse:
And all this is based on the fact that he doesn't understand evolution theory | Quote | Reduction via the Theory of Natural Selection There are two bodies of theory that reductionists often claim permit us to make the necessary substitution of the mechanical causation schema for the functional causation schema: the theory of natural selection and the theory of cybernetic control. Therefore, let us look at each of these in turn, to see exactly how it is supposed to effect the reduction of purpose to mechanism.
The theory of natural selection is invoked in many different sorts of explanatory contexts. However, the chief one that is relevant to us here is the claim that it reduces teleology to mechanism by explaining how biological functions can allegedly come about in a completely mechanical way. In this context, organisms are decomposed into a congeries of functional „traits“, which are considered to possess a certain property, „fitness“, which (on the non-circular, „propensity“ interpretation) bestows on the organisms which bear them a tendency to survive and reproduce in a given environment in greater numbers compared to other members of the same population that lack the trait in question. Let us call this „function-reducing role“ of natural selection.
The most obvious problem with the function-reducing role is that functional traits must already exist before they can be selected. After all, it is the relative functional success of traits that causes them to be selected in the first place. In other words, natural selection just is the differential reproduction of relatively more successful functional traits. As such, the theory of natural selection says nothing about how a functional trait originally comes into existence. It simply assumes that it does, and then goes on to show why it may be expected to proliferate through a population over time. But it is obvious that no theory that presupposes the existence of a thing can possibly explain the existence of that thing. So far as natural selection in itself is concerned, the existence of functions is just a brute biological fact. |
You see, there has to be something that can be selected before selection can work. He thus concludes that selection can't create purpose in nature.
And it still get's worse:
| Quote | Why, then, is the belief almost universal that the theory of natural selection does explain the existence and teleological character of biological functions? I believe it is mainly because selection is not being considered just in itself, but rather tacitly in conjunction with a further pair of biological claims that form no part of selection theory proper. One of these further claims is that novel functional traits arise in an entirely random fashion.
[...]
With regard to the claim that novel functions are generated at random, what is usually meant by this is that variant genotypes are generated by point mutations, sexual recombination, or some other seemingly mechanistic process. Even this much randomness is being called into question today by molecular biology, which is producing considerable evidence that genotype variation is itself under functional control, at least in lower organisms (Caporale 1999; Jablonka & Lamb 1995; Shapiro 2005; Van Speybroeck et al. 2002). But set that point aside. The more important point is that it is phenotype variation that must be random if natural selection is to play its function-reducing role, and in between genotype variation and phenotype variation comes phenotype construction. And phenotype construction is a distinctly functional – that is, teleological – process, not a random one. |
One wonders where this will end. Will he claim that gene expression is a teleological and under the premisses thus purposefull? | Quote | | How are phenotypes constructed from genotypes? In something like the following way. As we all know, the chief function of genes is to code for proteins. Without the necessary proteins, of course, nothing can be done. That is why genes are so important. But the proteins are only the building blocks out of which phenotypes are constructed. That construction itself is controlled by the myriad other interactions among macromolecules that constitute the living cell. This process of construction is highly goal-directed, but also highly flexible. That is to say, the cell reliably builds a particular structure with a given set of material resources, or „gene products“. However, when it encounters a somewhat different set of material resources – say, due to a gene mutation – it will attempt to find a way of constructing an alternate structure that is equally serviceable from a functional point of view. This inherent adaptive capacity of living things is often referred to in the literature as „plasticity“ (West-Eberhard 2003; 2005; see, also, Greenspan 2001; Moss 2003). Since plasticity involves adjusting means to an end, it clearly follows the functional causation schema. |
So indeed, he considers phenotypes and thus gene expression to be the result of purpose.
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"[...] the type of information we find in living systems is beyond the creative means of purely material processes [...] Who or what is such an ultimate source of information? [...] from a theistic perspective, such an information source would presumably have to be God."
- William Dembski -
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