Re: Teleology and Biology

From: (John Wilkins)

...the claim that evolution
is teleological is an old one
- Asa Gray made that claim
in correspondence with Darwin.
"Teleology" is ambiguous.
It might mean that something
has a function that makes it turn
out in a particular way, or
it might mean that future
goals affect present states.
Darwinian evolution explains
the former, but many leap
immediately to the latter.
--
John S. Wilkins, Postdoctoral
Research Fellow, Philosophy
University of Queensland -
Blog:
scienceblogs.com/evolvingthoughts

Teleology has its roots in Aristotelian biology as physical function.
This was the case that Randall made in 1960. But Aristotelian teleology
was never about evolution. I am not familiar with Asa Gray's
correspondence to Darwin. But in modern scientific terms, Aristotelian
teleology is linked to DNA and human genome analysis of future
functioning physical states.

The idea of teleologic evolution is problematic in the backdrop of
Aristotelian teleology which was about the structure of matter in
biological systems to form only into what the physics dictated. This led
directly to the serach that ended in the discovery of DNA. The purpose
of a physical structure for Aristotle was determined by its potential
physical states of power. His complex natural processes, Randall pointed
out, was application to the living and the knowing. Lee M Silver noted
that Aristotle was the first biologist to separate the metabolic and
mental functioning or what Randall called Aristotle's complex natural
process.

"...while he [Aristotle] was an object of execration to the early modern
scientists who were concerned exclusively with mathematics and
mechanics, Arsitotle's greatness as a scientific observer and theorist
began to be appreciated as biology felt the impact of Darwin and
Wallace; for the central Aristotelian ideas of process and function are
fundamental in biology...."

[For Aristotle]]..."His physics was qualitative, not mathematical; it
was teleological and functional, not exclusively mechanical."

"...a thing can be understood only as that kind of thing that has that
kind of a specific power; ...the power of its subject or bearer."
["Aristotle" by John Herman Randall, Jr. 1960.]

This last quote is teleologic. As Lee M. Silver pointed out in his book
"Challenging Nature" [2006]- "Aristotle's sense that the essence of life
exists within- rather than transcendent to- organic bodies and his
distinction between metabolic and mental life, provided a useful
philosophical paradigm for understanding and categorizing biological
systems in modern scientific terms." The paradigm which Silver implies
led to the structure of DNA by Crick and Watson.

"At the beginning of the twentieth century, Aristotle's vegetative soul
was truley a mystery....By the end of the century, the mystery of the
vegetative soul had been extinguished by scientists working in a field
that had not even existed 100 years earlier...molecular biology, and its
birth ...February 28,1953, the day Francis Crick ... with James Watson
... exclaimed...'we have found the secret of life' ." ["Challenging
Nature", Lee M. Silver 2006]

Vjillar


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