Natural Selection Teleologists

There are different approaches towards the concept of “teleology” and in many ways it is related to a particular view or concept of “matter” and “change”. The Scholastic approach towards matter and change is described here and here respectively. The approach is Aristotelian by nature. Darwin had good things to say about Aristotle. From Allan Gotthelf's article "Darwin on Aristotle": Darwin in a letter to William Ogle:

It is safe to say that Darwin did not model his concept of natural selection from an Aristotelian or Scholastic point of view as Gotthelf points out that Darwin was familiar with Aristotle's work but his respect for him only grew after he published The Origin. Mechanistic philosophy of matter and change was prevalent during Darwin's era. Paley's watchmaker analogy was the basis for the argument from design whereby reality was like a machine composed of parts with no intrinsic relationship between them. The designs in the system (or reality) were imposed from an outside agent.

Darwin came along and developed his concept of natural selection and attributed the designs in nature to be the result of natural selection. James Lennox argues that Darwin was indeed a teleologist ("Darwin was a teleologist") and as Ariew points out (in his article "Platonic and Aristotelian Roots of Teleological Arguments in Cosmology and Biology") it has to do with his particular conception of natural selection as some sort of “teleological force”. Like Paley, Darwin most likely had a mechanistic view of matter and he modelled his idea of natural selection on this view. Like Aristotle (as Ariew argues) Darwin's idea of natural selection preserves elements of Aristotle's final (functional teleology) and formal causes.

However, Aristotle's formal and final causes where intrinsic features of substances and substances on this view where NOT mechanical parts of a machine whose actions were attributed to an outside/extrinsic force. Darwin's idea of natural selection is some sort of force that is part of reality but extrinsic from the substances (or parts as per mechanistic philosophy) of reality.

So there you have it, Darwin was a natural selection teleologist whereby natural selection is king of extrinsic teleological force (a force driving the population toward this improved future state) that preserves elements of Aristotle’s functional teleology (final causality) and formal causality but based on a mechanistic view of matter.

In evolutionary theory today natural selection is not described as some sort of cause or force or mechanism. Instead, natural selection is either
1) Just a descriptive term to describe when you have individuals in a population that have some kind of variation and fitness differences and are able to pass on their traits. Or...
2) An outcome.

1) Are there people that seem to use natural selection as some sort of cause or force or mechanism of change or evolution?
2) Any natural selection teleologists around?

 

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Evolution is a process, a causal process. It is just another term for "change".

"Evolution by natural selection" seems to be a nonsensical if we are to accept that natural selection does not play a causal role in evolution since it is not a force or a cause or a mechanism (see links in OP). By thinking of NS as something that "preserves" or "maintains" or "filters" traits (i.e. taking the metaphor literally), it becomes some sort of "teleological force" with "filtering" or "maintaining" or "preserving" being its natural ends or final causes as per Aristotelian teleological explanations (that is why Darwin was a teleologist, see Lennox and Ariew).

No-one takes these metaphors literally, NS really is NOT a force or a cause or a mechanism (again, see links in OP). However, if we are to accept that natural selection is the result of (in line with Endler and Provine) biological change, then it is simply nonsense to assert that the result of biological change (aka natural selection) also "guides" or "maintains" or "drives" biological change. Statements such as "evolution by natural selection" and "natural selection can produce an uncanny illusion of design" and "natural selection is quintessentially non-random" are simply nonsense if natural selection is the result of biological change. The same of course applies to natural selection as a concept if it is merely a descriptive term.

The following two sentences cannot logically be simultaneously true:
1) Biological change happens as a result of natural selection and random variation.
2) Natural selection is the result of biological change.

It is like saying:
1) Sublimation is the result of a process whereby a transition of a substance from a solid phase to a gas phase occurs without passing through an intermediate liquid phase.
2) The addition of a sufficient amount of energy is a causal factor in the transition of a substance from a solid phase to a gas phase without passing through an intermediate liquid phase.
3) But, sublimation is also a causal factor in the transition of a substance from a solid phase to a gas phase without passing through an intermediate liquid phase.

or

1) Natural selection is the outcome when you have individuals in a population that have some kind of variation and fitness differences and are able to pass on their traits.
2) Environmental and genetic factors are causal factors when you have individuals in a population that have some kind of variation and fitness differences and are able to pass on their traits.
3) But, natural selection is also a causal factor when you have individuals in a population that have some kind of variation and fitness differences and are able to pass on their traits.

 

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And one's broader metaphysics, I guess.

Aristotle was perhaps the first experimental biologist of whom we have record. His observations on the reproductive behaviors of inter-tidal tide-pool life are still impressive today. He also had interesting things to say about subjects like embryology. So yeah, Aristotle was a giant in biology, particularly given his date, in the 4'th century BCE.

I'm not familiar enough with Darwin to comment on that. I would guess that Darwin might have had a number of things to say about teleology, not all of them consistent. One of the cool things about Darwin is that he exchanged countless letters with many of the leading thinkers of his day, and many of those letters still exist. So it's possible for scholars to trace out Darwin's thinking at different points in time and to get an idea what his assumptions and hypotheses were. I'd guess that teleology belongs among the hypotheses that he speculated about in his letters with his correspondents.

So is mathematics.

Even today, I think that evolutionary biologists would locate natural selection among the functional behaviors of self-reproducing systems, as opposed to trying to derive it directly from the characteristics (charge, mass etc) of subatomic particles (or whatever current physics treats as 'substances' analogous to the billiard-ball atoms of old-style mechanistic philosophy). So I guess that questions about emergent properties of systems arise here that we can speculate about, in something like the style of Darwin 150 years ago.

As I said, I don't know enough abut Darwin to opine on how convinced he was of that. And modern evolutionary biology is inspired by Darwin, but doesn't adhere to every one of his ideas as if they were 19'th century sacred scripture. (I'm sure that Darwin wouldn't have wanted that.)

Darwin after all was very ecological (in the non-trendy scientific sense) and definitely interpreted natural selection in terms of fitness in various ecological niches. His discussion of finches in the Galapagos islands was a classic example of that. Birds would colonize a new island and then evolved to exploit foods available there and so on. So the birds on different islands ended up with differently shaped beaks.

Modern evolutionary biology seems to think in a similar manner, not so much in terms of a one-dimensional ladder ascending from 'lower' to 'higher', but in terms of an adaptive radiation in all directions in which lifeforms adapt to better succeed in countless different modes of life.

Of course, human beings can and do (with considerable justification) assume that their own neural adaptations towards increased processing power, quick adaptibility to new conditions and large-scale social coordination through language use represents something of a quantum leap.

But... that's a human-centric view. I was just reading something (in the 6/21/11 NYTimes) about the tiny roundworm C. elegans. This organism's entire body is composed of only 959 cells. Yet it still has a mouth, digestive tract and anus, gonads and a nervous system. That nervous system consists of only 302 neurons. The completeness and simplicity of C. elegans has made it an organism of choice for many biological investigations, such as developmental biology of how genomes generate anatomical structure and the cognitive biology of how neural networks function.

When biologists poked into it, those 302 neurons were found to be orgnized in an extremely sophisticated manner. The 302 neurons have about 8,000 synapses, creating an already very complex network. Then it was discovered that the worm has many genes that are activated by environmental conditions and that cause particular neurons to drop out of the network or to function differently. So the precise topology of the network is constantly changing. For example, sometimes the worm displays social behavior, other times it's solitary. It's significant that despite its anatomical simplicity, C. elegans has a genome that's almost as large (in terms of number of genes) as a human being's. So it's likely that the worm's genome is busily intervening in its neural functioning far more aggressively than we see in humans.

So the conclusion that I take away from all that is that despite its simplicity, despite its only having 959 cells and 302 neurons, our C. elegans roundworm really is elegant. The worm truly is highly evolved, perhaps even more so in some ways than human beings. What it seems to be evolved for is maximum efficiency, for getting the most sophisticated functionality possible out of the least number of body cells and the least nervous-system processing power.

And the conclusion that I draw from that, in turn, is that there isn't just one kind of success in biology, illustrated inevitably by ourselves. There are all kinds of success and all kinds of successful organisms, leaving evolution advancing in all possible directions, trying out all available possibilities.

 

James R, the point is to draw a distinction between the prescriptive and descriptive usage of natural selection.

In (1), natural selection is used in a prescriptive manner whereby it is some sort of cause or force that "maintains" the prevalence of beneficial mutations, or "limits" or "favours" some variations over other variations, or "steers" biological change toward the local maxima in the "fitness landscape". In other words, these metaphors are taken literally.

In (2), natural selection is used in a descriptive manner to describe when you have individuals in a population that have some kind of variation and fitness differences and are able to pass on their traits.

The second view is more in line with modern evolutionary theory as Endler stated:
John A. Endler states you have natural selection when:
1) You have a population (of anything, be it molecules, organisms etc.) where the individuals have variation.
2) Fitness differences, meaning differences in the propensity of certain individuals to survive change.
3) Inheritance. Meaning certain traits are passed on irrespective of environmental factors.

Ariew and Lennox (see OP) argue that Darwin used natural selection as some sort of cause or force or mechanism (in other words the metaphor is taken literally) that has a causal influence on evolutionary change. That is why he is argued to be a teleologist since this view of NS closely echoes features of Aristotle's teleology.

 

The application of the distinction between the prescriptive and descriptive usage is often a problem as such, as there is an implicit conflation of the two.
It seems that such conflations are very common too.

What is the point of describing something if no prescription (or instruction) is to be gained from that description?

 

What's wrong with calling it a 'mechanism', albeit of a rather abstract sort?

That's kind of a conceptual artifact of how we choose to describe the situation, isn't it?

Imagine a population of individuals, with a variety of heritable traits. Some of those traits are conducive to survival and reproductive success in the environment that the population lives in, other traits aren't. 'Natural selection' is just the recognition that we are likely to find the conducive traits in a larger percentage of individuals in future generations.

I don't think that idea necessarily implies teleology. It's not as if there is some final goal, task, completion or perfection that somehow is driving the process of natural selection. There isn't necessarily any final teleological end that biological evolution is striving to realize.

The first, 'Biological change happens as a result of natural selection and random variation', appears to be referring to genetic change on the population level over generations.

The second, 'Natural selection is the result of biological change', appears to be referring to heritable changes in individual organisms that increase or decrease their chances of survival and reproductive success.

In other words, individual organisms can embody heritable genetic changes and variability. Some of these changes increase or decrease the organism's odds of reproductive success. Individuals displaying changes that increase their chances of reproducing viable offspring are more likely to have offspring living in succeeding generations. So the traits that are associated with their success will have a greater prevalence in the population's gene pool as time goes on.

Changes taking place at the individual organism level are in effect selected or rejected by natural selection. That phrase is just a way of saying that some variants are more successful than others, without any teleology being implied. That kind of differential success on the individual level results in more gradual changes in the genetic makeup of the whole population over time.

Species often become very well adapted to their environments, achieve a sort of stasis and don't change a whole lot. Natural selection in that case largely consists of disfunctional individual mutations failing to propagate through the population. But if the environment changes, if new foodstuffs, new predators or new diseases appear, then there's apt to be new selective pressure towards variants that are better able to handle the new conditions. So there might be a sudden new spurt of change in the genetic makeup of the broader population as new individual variations prove advantageous and more likely to be present in succeeding generations. Darwin hypothesized that was what was happening when his birds colonized new islands where conditions were different than the birds had already adapted to on the islands they came from. The end result was closely related species of birds displaying adaptations such as different beak shapes that almost seemed 'designed' to correspond to the kind of foodstuffs that the birds were eating on the different islands.

 

I suppose there isn't anything wrong per se with calling it a force or a cause or a mechanism.
The question is just whether it is a literal or figurative description.

The way you describe it seems to fit the Aristotelian teleological view.
As pointed out in the OP:
Ariew:

As pointed out to James R, the point is to draw a distinction between the prescriptive and descriptive usage of natural selection. Which usage do you think is appropriate?

 

That will depend on which end of natural selection one is at.

As long as one seems to be "the fitter" one or "the stronger one", it's fine to talk about natural selection in a prescriptive manner.

For example, when humans are talked about as "controlling nature" and seen as being successul at that, it seem feasible to talk about natural selection in a prescriptive manner. (e.g. "Humans are at the top of the food chain.")

But when a person is killed by a pack of dogs or street thugs - who is the fitter, stronger one then?
When reporting on crime and natural disaters on the news, why don't they say that it was all natural selection?

 

I don't know enough about forces or causes in general to have much of an opinion on how the words 'literal' or 'figurative' apply to them. What kind of ontological being do forces and causes typically have?

As for 'mechanism', natural selection obviously isn't a physical machine. But it does seem like it might conceivably qualify as an abstract machine.

There might not be very much harm in describing natural selection in modest teleological terms as an optimization process or something. By selecting the more successful variants in a particular ecological niche, it does tend to optimize a population's adaptation to that niche.

But I don't perceive natural selection as a teleological process in the larger and more Aristotelian sense. Biological change doesn't seem to be advancing towards any ultimate goal or perfection. Aristotle (I'm no authority on Aristotle) seems to have thought that all change in nature is moving towards realizing some goal, namely the perfection of each thing's natural kind. The classic example is an acorn, which undergoes developmental change in order to realize its destiny as a tree. Gravity represents physical matter's seeking its proper place at the center of the universe.

As I argued in my earlier remarks about the roundworms, I don't think that biological evolution is a natural motion pushing life towards realizing some 'higher' completion or perfection, whether that's represented in mankind or still to come in some superhuman apotheosis.

Natural selection just maximizes reproductive success in particular environmental niches. As such, it kind of radiates in all directions, with life eventually finding its way into just about every available mode of life. It's countless small-scale occasions of opportunism, not the unfolding of a grand plan.

I don't really understand your distinction. How would 'prescriptive' even be applicable here?

Prescriptive meaning appears to be characteristic of moral language and of goal-directed behavior. It's used for guiding action, as opposed to stating facts. It tells people what to do.

That doesn't seem to be what's happening with natural selection. It isn't someone (who?) instructing nature, providing it with a prescription on how to achieve some goal, even if it's maximizing reproductive fitness. It's just a description of how the simple logic of the situation tends to increase the aggregate reproductive fitness of populations.

 

Apparently somebody thought that either the subject of this thread or its content isn't sufficiently philosophical and demoted it to Free Thoughts.

And if that's the case, then it's a mistake. The relationship of teleology to natural selection is currently an active topic of discussion in the academic philosophy of biology. As such, I believe that it's an entirely appropriate subject for the philosophy forum. In fact, it's one of the best philosophy thread topics to come along in months. (And its originator seems to be one of a minority of people on the board who actually knows something about philosophy.) If the thread really must be moved out of philosophy, then it probably belongs in life sciences.

See the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy article on teleology in biology:

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/teleology-biology/

And here's the results of a Google search for 'teleology' and 'natural selection' on .edu (American university) websites.

If this isn't an appropriate philosophy topic on Sciforms, then maybe Sciforums isn't an appropriate place for me. (My undergraduate majors were biological science and philosophy/religion.)

 

Incorrect.

Techne has been advised numerous times to restrict the scope of his OP's so as to make them amenable to discussion.

 

It seemed amenable to discussion to me. I've been discussing it in several posts, at any rate.

Techne composed kind of a short survey of the issue, with links to further discussion for those who were interested. (A good way to start a thread in my opinion.) Then he expressed his own ideas on the subject. Finally, he asked if anybody agreed with him. I basically didn't, I guess, and tried to produce some reasons why. Some of the others expressed their own ideas. Techne posted a few replies. The thread looked fine to me.

 

That's your opinion.

To be clear, I agree with you that Techne does have a knack for interesting topics. However, much greater restraint is need in the OP's as presented. All too often here discussions go awry due to an OP that is far too wide in scope.

Techne has been advised of this requirement numerous times, to no avail.
There is much more to promoting a good discussion in this medium than good content...

 

Well yeah, that's why I posted it.

I thought that if there was a flaw to the original post, it was that its scope was too narrow, not too wide. It didn't just talk about teleology and natural selection, it introduced Aristotle's take on teleology. And then it discussed that in terms of several contemporary authors' publications on the subject. (Ariew etc.)

Frankly, I haven't followed the subject closely enough to be up to speed on all the different players and their various positions. But it looks like Techne has studied it, either in a university classroom or by independent study. And although that puts me at a bit of a disadvantage, I think that it's very cool that somebody is interested in this stuff and has read some of the technical literature on it. I respect that a great deal. I'm certainly not going to criticize him for it.

I'm curious what you think the problems with this thread are. I have some professional interest in this, since it happens that I'm a community college philosophy/religion/humanities instructor. (Actually, the subject of this thread is rather more advanced than the introductory survey courses that I'd be teaching.) If there's some glaring defect in what Techne is doing that I'm not seeing, then I probably need to know what it is. As things stand, I'd be very pleased if I had a student who ended up like Techne.

It might very well be true that Techne sometimes talks over the heads of much of Sciforums' readership. But that's probably inevitable on a board like this where most participants have probably never taken a philosophy class or done any serious philosophical reading. The same thing happens in science and mathematics when discussion becomes too technical for laypeople to easily follow.

 

All good points.
Nonetheless, you're still misunderstanding.
History has proven time and time again on this site that such far-reaching topics, when given such a wide scope, are doomed to spiral off into multiple tangential discussions.

The 'problems' with his posts are not of content, but rather of form.

Similarly, this very sidebar discussion we're now having is a fine example.
Discussions about discussions are, technically, verboten, and to be removed from the thread by Moderators....

That being said, I have yet to wholesale delete any of Techne's OP's, because, as you note, they are typically interesting. However, I cannot leave them in GP where he begins them because he refuses to pay attention to instruction. The very nature of this medium requires that one can compose stimulating thoughts not only with good content but also with requisite form.

 

Sure.

Are they going astray, if they push that kind of mental shorthand approach too far?

Sure, again. But it's complex.

One complexity comes from the tendency of any given evolutionary lineage to incorporate itself into what we recognize as feedback loops or mutually reinforcing contexts - what McGilchrist calls "reverberations" in our mental descriptions or comprehensions - as it progresses in time.

 

"What kind of ontological being do forces and causes typically have?"
It is an interesting question and one that is (I think) related to the discussion about natural laws. With regards to natural selection being a cause or a force literally or figuratively, I think the distinction between descriptive and prescriptive comes in again (explained below).

Sure, such a view is definitely teleological and I would argue compatible with the Aristotelian view (see below). John O. Reiss also noted something similar. Implicit in the fitness landscape metaphor (i.e. natural selection as some sort of optimizing cause or force) is the view that natural selection acts "as a force driving the population toward this improved future state". One can see how Darwin's idea of natural selection as a "teleological force" in the prescriptive sense creeps back again. By talking about natural selection as some sort of cause or force that "maintains" the prevalence of beneficial mutations, or "limits" or "favours" some variations over other variations, or "steers" biological change toward the local maxima in the "fitness landscape", and using it in a prescriptive sense, then it is fundamentally a teleological cause or force. Of course, many use it metaphorically and/or descriptively (not prescriptively), meaning natural selection does not really limit or favour or steer or guide etc. in a prescriptive or causal manner.

To be fair, what Aristotle (and the Scholastics) thought is something like this.
In the acorn example:
The acorn is an agent and the Scholastic aphorism “Every agent acts for an end” (Summa Theologiae I.44.4) is relevant.

An agent can be described in terms of the four causes. From a Scholastic view, an acorn has a “standing tendency” or a “second potentiality” or a "first actuaity" to certain kinds of behaviour as Aristotle and Aquinas would say..

An acorn has the potency or power to become an oak tree. This potency is derived from what kind of thing it is, its formal cause. It’s potentiality is also “restricted” in a sense by its formal cause, meaning it does not have certain potentialities like for example to become a house or a sun or a tiger etc.

An acorn can thus be described as follows:
Material cause: What it is made of.
Efficient cause: Grew on a tree.
Formal cause: What kind of thing is it? A nut of an oak tree.
Final cause: Grows into an oak tree. It is just a natural end. Another one is that ir is food.

It's final cause or natural end might not always be realized, but given the right conditions, it just naturally follows (as a result of what kind of thing it is, it's formal cause) that it will be eaten or change into an oak tree.

Gravity can similarly be described as follows:
Gravity has the potency or power to attract objects of mass with a force proportional to their mass. This potentcy is derived from what kind of thing it is, its formal cause. It’s potentiality is also “restricted” in a sense by its formal cause, meaning it does not have certain potentialities like for example to push masses away from each other or attract massless objects.
So gravity is an efficient cause of the rock falling to the ground. The fact that gravity is an efficient cause of the falling rock (actually the attraction of two objects of mass with a force proportional to their mass) entails that generating the effect of the falling rock is the final cause of gravity. Again (from a Scholastic view) “if there is a regular efficient causal connection between a cause A and an effect B, then generating B is the final cause of A.”

Gravity can thus be described as follows:
Material cause: What does loop quantum gravity or M-theory suggest?
Efficient cause: Again, this depends on what physics discover.
Formal cause: An agent that gives weight to objects of mass and attracts them with a force proportional to their mass.
Final cause: Attracts objects of mass with a force proportional to their mass.
From a Scholastic view we seem to know more about the formal and final causes of gravity than its material and efficient causes.

Note, Aristotelian teleology does not deal in "some 'higher' completion or perfection" or "perfection of each kind". It can basically be summed up as “Every agent acts for an end”.

The reason why using natural selection in a prescriptive sense (see below) makes it a teleological cause or force is that it satisfies Aristotle's notion of final causality in the sense that the final cause of natural selection is just that it tends to "maximize reproductive success in particular environmental niches" or "maintains the prevalence of beneficial mutations", or "limits" or "favours" some variations over other variations, or "steers" biological change toward the local maxima in the "fitness landscape". Again, if we are to think of natural selection in a prescriptive manner as an actual cause or force, it thus makes it a causative agent (with formal and final causes) from an Aristotelian view.

To be sure, what I mean by prescriptive is the following.
Prescriptive in the sense that an agent (impersonal or personal is irrelevant) is causally instructing or guiding something or causally interacting with something else.

So if natural selection is used in a prescriptive manner then it is some sort of causal force or cause that determines the direction of biological change (i.e. maximizes reproductive fitness of populations).

If natural selection is used in a descriptive manner then it is just a descriptive term to describe when you have individuals in a population that have some kind of variation and fitness differences and are able to pass on their traits.



Many people appear to use it in a prescriptive manner (as if natural NS literally acts on something like it is some sort of causal agent e.g. maximizing) when in fact the correct view IMO is the descriptive manner.