I am not generally averse to your point of view, MoS! And i thought your first post above was well-stated.

I think the problem with the OP is that it doesn't really identify what 'chance' means in relation to biology. I understand 'chance' to be a factor in evolutionary biology, in that it operates on the level of cell division and reproduction: the process by which DNA governs mitosis is subject to transcription errors, which are the source of mutations. Most mutations are harmful and result in changes which are fatal for the organism, but some are beneficial in that they cause a change in the organism which provides a selective advantage (the proverbial longer beak, or whatever). The cumulative effect of a number of these mutations gives rise to speciation - that is the sense in which 'chance' is causative in this contet.

I think on the level of micro-evolution that makes sense. I think where the philosophical questions come up is, whether the existence of life in the first place, is a matter of the 'chance collocation of atoms' (per Russell); and also whether the processes of evolution are indeed teleological, i.e. directed by a development towards such attributes as higher intelligence, for reasons other than those of survival. Rejection of those ideas leads to 'biological materialism', which is the view that life itself really is nothing other than the fortuitous combination of complex molecules. And that view is presented as being a scientifically superior alternative to any suggestion of 'top-down causation', whether that be depicted as special creation, intelligent design, or theistic evolution or whatever.

The most robust statement of chance in the above sense, is the 1970 book Chance and Necessity, by Jacques Monod. Monod was a Nobel laureate in biochemistry and the book is the most rigorous and uncompromising presentation of biochemical materialism that has ever been written. And I think that is the sense in which "Chance' is being referred to by the OP - that life itself got started because of a roll of the cosmic dice, simply because things came together in a certain way. That has philosophical implications, as Monod himself said:

the scientific attitude implies what I call the postulate of objectivity—that is to say, the fundamental postulate that there is no plan, that there is no intention in the universe. Now, this is basically incompatible with virtually all the religious or metaphysical systems whatever, all of which try to show that there is some sort of harmony between man and the universe and that man is a product—predictable if not indispensable—of the evolution of the universe.

That is very similar to the 'blind watchmaker' quote above, which is not a coincidence. So it underwrites a particular kind of mentality, or mind-set, which is writ large in Richard Dawkin's anti-religious polemics, and is implicitly or explicitly visible in a lot of other modern secularism.

So as soon as the conversation starts to involve the application of theory to biology itself, it actually misses the metaphysical point, which is in some basic way prior to the consideration of the particular processes by which species develop.

I am not generally averse to your point of view, MoS! And i thought your first post above was well-stated. — Wayfarer

I have the feeling that this "at odds with another" was in a different time, in a different space (well... different forum) under a different name. I'm kind of mellowing with time. ;)

Off-topic indeed, but so what!

Meow!

GREG

I see that direction in evolution has come up, as supposedly being inconsistent with Darwinian theory and supportive of Lamarck. I'll let others argue against this, but I thought it might be worth pointing out that the arch-materialist villain of the piece, Richard Dawkins, is one of those who argues for the notion of progress in evolution, against those like Stephen Jay Gould, who as far as I can tell are in a minority, who characterize apparent progress as a statistical anomaly--for example, he sees bacteria as the most successful organisms, and they haven't changed much.

I think the key popular books here are The Blind Watchmaker by Dawkins, which @Wayfarer has mentioned already, and Gould's Full House (re-titled "Life's Grandeur" in the UK). Though they disagree, both books are thoroughly Darwinist.

This is useful too: http://bioscience.oxfordjournals.org/content/50/5/451.full

Yes, on the direction issue, Dawkins talks the talk but fails to walk the walk. Whilst he denies the idea that evolution is directed towards a goal, he still asserts the oh so human teleological notion of progression. He's a bit of a disappointment; philosophically naive in the extreme.

It has also been expressed that Darwin, although presented natural selection as one of the means of evolution, did not reject the idea of Lamarck - acquired characteristics. And together with his cousin Francis Galton tortured 100s of rabbits in order to prove the case. He fondly wished for the improvement of mankind and being embroiled in inheritable determinism hoped that what a person did in his own life could be passed to his children, especially in the matter of the improvement of slave families.

He and Galton gave up the failed experiments in 1871, and Darwin broken by his own "genetic" determinism looked at the horror of his own conclusions. It is sad that he did not give more credit for learning, as his own experience with Jemmy Button and his acquaintance with other black people offered him a very modern view of equality.

It has also been expressed that Darwin, although presented natural selection as one of the means of evolution, did not reject the idea of Lamarck - acquired characteristics — charleton

I agree, Darwin did not flatly reject Lamarck's ideas of habituation. But Darwin was producing a refined scientific theory, adhering to empirical facts, unlike the speculative theory of Lamarck. So the evidence for variation through habituation, just wasn't there.

Suppose that someone wanted to prove, through empirical evidence, something like chance, or the randomness of random genetic mutations, how would one proceed?

Suppose that someone wanted to prove, through empirical evidence, something like chance, or the randomness of random genetic mutations, how would one proceed? — Metaphysician Undercover

The question is why the existing empirical evidence doesn't satisfy you. I mean, considering the fact that significant work and thought have gone into these issues since Darwin, I would think the most fruitful approach here in tackling the philosophical problems is to discuss what the existing evidence does and does not prove.

Suppose that someone wanted to prove, through empirical evidence, something like chance, or the randomness of random genetic mutations, how would one proceed? — Metaphysician Undercover

But neo-Darwinism does not require "randomness" or "chance", but simply that there is no mechanism for systematically feeding back to the genome. It is essentially a mechanism of trial and error. How the trials are achieved is not specified beyond the fact that they are unrelated to the phenotype, the success or failure of the animal. How the error correction is performed *is* specified.

You seem to be forgetting that nothing can be proved in science. Testing for "randomness" in any particular field is fraught with difficulty. I believe that any finite sequence of numbers will fail some test of randomness.

Anyway, it is not just change neo-Darwinism has to explain, but stability. Don't scientists believe that the Nautilus has remained unchanged for 500 million years?

I think the over-arching philosophical issue is actually a very simple one: why? Why do living things exist at all? Not 'why do pelicans have capacious beaks that are able to contain many fish' (which is exactly the kind of 'why' that evolutionary theory does explain.)

That might seem trite, but during a televised debate on Religion and Atheism, this exchange occured between a bishop of religion, and of atheism, respectively:

what is the reason that science gives why we're here? Science tells us how things happen, science tells us nothing about why there was the big bang. Why there is a transition from inanimate matter to living matter. Science is silent on we could solve most of the questions in science and it would leave all the problems of life almost completely untouched. …

Why we exist, you're playing with the word “why” there. Science is working on the problem of the antecedent factors that lead to our existence. Now, “why” in any further sense than that, why in the sense of purpose is, in my opinion, not a meaningful question. You cannot ask a question like “Why down mountains exist?” as though mountains have some kind of purpose. What you can say is what are the causal factors that lead to the existence of mountains and the same with life and the same with the universe. — Richard Dawkins

Plainly, Dawkins doesn't understand the sense in which there could be a 'reason for existence', in that broader, and indeed teleological, sense.

Now to say that, is not therefore to say 'well there's a reason, namely, that God made it so' (and for that matter, I was certainly not impressed by the performance of the actual bishop in that debate.) But regardless, I don't think that the religious attitude is something so trite as the dismissive ''cause God did it' (much less it being simply an outmoded scientific hypothesis). It is more that the religious view, of which 'creation' is one aspect, constituted the fulcrum around which all the thinking about the meaning of human existence turned throughout the history of culture. Remove that fulcrum, and a great deal else is removed with it. Existentialism understands this; Dawkins just thinks it's a silly question.

I suspect that is the sense of 'chance' which the OP is driving at - chance as distinct from intention, chance in the sense of saying that life has no cause or raison d'etre other than those which can be characterises as 'antecedent factors'. Like, if we find a cause, it will be in the composition of the mud of undersea vents, or the residue of a comet, or something of that ilk.

Why? might be a good question, but asking Dawkins why there is life is a bit like asking a military historian why there is war: given that there is war, he wants to know how it works. Which is to say that evolutionary theory doesn't even address the question. Indeed, even aside from the "why" question, as fields of study I think the origin of life is quite distinct from evolution.

To what extent evolutionary theory lends weight to the dethronement of meaning as understood in Christian faith and doctrine is another matter. I happen to think it does, but there have been Christian evolutionary scientists.

It is evident that chance, is understood by many to be play an important part in the evolutionary process, especially in relation to genetic mutations. But chance is not necessarily integral to evolutionary theory. If we consider the evolutionary theory of Darwin's predecessor, Lamarck, we find a theory in which behavioural habits are the cause of physical variations. Due to the close relationship between behaviour and genetic disposition, speculations such as Lamarck's would be extremely difficult to falsify, or verify. Darwin opted for a scientific, objective theory, which stated the facts of variation, without speculating as to the cause of variation. Modern proponents of Darwinian evolution posit random (chance) mutations as the cause of variation, and this is directly opposed to Lamarck's position of habituation. — Metaphysician Undercover

Lamarck was wrong about the basics of evolution. Darwin was right. Epigenetics is an interesting addition to modern evolutionary theory that demonstrates that Lamarck's approach was not entirely misdirected (although there's no consensus on the significance of epigenetics to evolution or whether it can even truly be considered Lamarckian) but the discovery in no way invalidates neo-Darwinism according to which chance genetic mutations are a necessary ingredient of the evolutionary process. And no respected scientist in the world would claim it does.

I believe that the art of husbandry demonstrates to us that physical variations are most likely not the effect of chance. Domesticated plants and animals evolve in ways which are desirable to us, not in ways dictated by chance. If we had to wait for random mutations to produce the desirable changes which have resulted in the many varied domestic species, we would still be waiting. No, these changes were actually caused by human manipulation rather than random mutations which were selected for by those who were practising husbandry. — Metaphysician Undercover

Chance mutations in domesticated plant and animals provide a pool of genetic variation from which human agents select desirable changes. It's not clear to me why you think that random mutations accreted over time through human selection are not enough to produce the changes we see in husbandry. It sounds simply like an argument from incredulity, and your alternative that we produce the mutations from which we then select makes no sense to me. Can you explain?

We find this in human evolution as well. Philosophers, religious leaders, moralists, have long ago produced ethical principles, which were followed religiously by human societies. Consistently adhering to such moral principles, over centuries of time, has produced the disposition of well-mannered human beings which we take ourselves to be. The substance of the issue is not that we cause ourselves to be a certain way, by trying to be that way, but that we are trained to select for desirable individuals in our breeding practises. — Metaphysician Undercover

It's hard to unpack what you are trying to say here but we are genetically virtually indistinguishable from the humans that were around before philosophy and religion developed as disciplines. And a quick look at the recent violent history of the 20th century should dispel the notion that we are somehow less genetically disposed to savagery than we were previously. Also, we don't on the whole select for more "desirable" individuals in our breeding practices where "desirable" means well-mannered. As a crude approximation, men select primarily for physical attractiveness in terms of sex and females for status.

Now the principle of natural selection is where Darwinian evolutionary theory is really deficient. Survival is defined in relation to a species, or variation of a species, not in relation to the individual. This places survival as a function of reproductive capacity rather than as a function of an individual's capacity for subsistence. The conclusion which should be drawn from this, is that the behaviours, and physical traits, which are selected for, are the ones which are conducive to reproduction, not the behaviours and traits which are conducive to survival. Reproduction is more substantive as an element of evolution than survival of the individual is. This means that the substance of evolutionary change is to be found in those physical traits and behaviours which prove to be desirable to a reproductive partner, or in the case of asexual reproduction, desirable for reproduction in general. Instead, Darwinian evolutionary theory concludes with natural selection, or survival of the fittest, which states that the substance of evolution is survival, rather than reproduction. This is an invalid conclusion. Continued existence of a variation or species is dependent on its capacity to reproduce. Nature does not select which variations will carry on with the act of living, by selecting the fittest, through natural selection, the reproducing organisms make this selection themselves, in the act of reproduction. — Metaphysician Undercover

As has been pointed out already, this represents a serious misunderstanding. Suffice to say that the mechanisms of sexual selection are well understood and covered in modern evolutionary theory.

The notion of "chance" within evolutionary theory is simply a myth. It is a myth propagated by the scientific community in its refusal to face the difficult subject which we know as the facts of life. Rather than accept the facts of life as real brute facts, the scientific community would rather hide behind the myth of "chance". — Metaphysician Undercover

The notion of chance within Darwinian evolutionary theory is as much a myth as the notion of gravity is in Einstein's general theory of relativity. And the attempt to deny its essential role is honestly not worthy of serious discussion (unless you want to completely ignore the science). What is worth debating for a variety of reasons is the extent chance plays in evolution. That's a huge area though and probably too much for one thread.

The notion of chance within Darwinian evolutionary theory is as much a myth as the notion of gravity is in Einstein's general theory of relativity. And the attempt to deny its essential role is honestly not worthy of serious discussion. What is worth debating for a variety of reasons is the extent chance plays in evolution. — Baden

Apart from the fact that there is no force of gravity in GR. Instead objects follow geodesics in space-time in the *absence* of a force.

Also, if you invoke "chance", though I'm sure you only have a vague idea what you might mean by the word, you are proposing that Evolution and General Relativity are incompatible theories.

Evolution does not require "chance", rather it demands no systematic mechanism for variation exists, which by the way, maintains the theory's compatibility with GR.

Apart from the fact that there is no force of gravity in GR. Instead objects follow geodesics in space-time in the *absence* of a force. — tom

What a silly nit-pick. I didn't use the word "force". General relativity is a theory of gravitation. The notion of gravity is obviously essential to it.

Also, if you invoke "chance", though I'm sure you only have a vague idea what you might mean by the word, you are proposing that Evolution and General Relativity are incompatible theories. — tom

No, I'm clearly not doing that.

Evolution does not require "chance", rather it demands no systematic mechanism for variation exists, which by the way, maintains the theory's compatibility with GR. — tom

I was using the word "chance" in the sense it was invoked in the OP referring particularly to random mutation (as opposed to design or other forms of directedness) as the major cause of variation. I hadn't got on to your posts yet, but I will in due course.
.

General Relativity is a theory of space-time. It is a fully deterministic theory. Reality is a static block-universe.

This is incompatible with a theory that relies on "chance", "randomness", or stochastic processes.

If by "chance" or "randomness" you *mean* the absence of design, well of course design is absent under neo-Darwinism.

If you think I was implying evolution happens purely by chance or something along those lines, you haven't fully read or understood my post. In fact, I would essentially agree with this:

Under neo-Darwinism, the requirement is that there is no systematic mechanism of variation. That is all "chance" and "randomness" mean in this case. — tom

The question is why the existing empirical evidence doesn't satisfy you. — jamalrob

I'll explain why the existing evidence doesn't satisfy me. Any so-called random occurrence only happens within very specific parameters. This is necessarily the case, or else any form of randomness would be absolute randomness A coin toss is constrained to two possibilities. A toss of a die is constrained to six. A draw in a lottery is constrained to the number of possible combinations.

If the parameters are defined, and the method of randomly choosing one of the numerous possibilities is verified as truly random, then we have evidence that the possibility which actually occurs is truly a random occurrence. But when the parameters of possibility are unknown, and the method by which one possibility out of the numerous possibilities is produced, is unknown, then where is the empirical evidence of randomness? Randomness is proven by knowing the parameters and the method. The unknowns here act as evidence against the likelihood of randomness.

But neo-Darwinism does not require "randomness" or "chance", but simply that there is no mechanism for systematically feeding back to the genome. It is essentially a mechanism of trial and error. — tom

Trial and error consists of a number of essential elements:
1. The choice of a trial
2. Associating the effects of the trial toward some intention, or judgement of the effects, concerning good and bad.
3. Remembering the association mention in #2
4. Applying what is remembered in #3 toward the choice of a future trial.

If your claim is that genetic mutations are typified as trial and error, then clearly there is a mechanism for systematically feeding back, as this is an essential aspect of trial and error. In trial and error, we learn from the mistakes, such that we do not repeat them. This is facilitated by memory. What is a gene other than a basic form of memory? And what is it remembering other than a past successful trial? So why do you not believe in #4? Why do you not believe that the gene itself, as #3, would influence the choice of a future trial (mutation). .

If this is the case, then the mutation is not random, the parameters of possibility for mutation, and the means for choosing one possibility out of the many, are directed by a process of trial and error.This is what we can call "progress". But this necessitates that the trials (random mutations) are not actually random. The parameters of possibility, and the process of selecting a possibility are evolving.

Lamarck was wrong about the basics of evolution. Darwin was right. Epigenetics is an interesting addition to modern evolutionary theory that demonstrates that Lamarck's approach was not entirely misdirected — Baden

I dislike how you make the unqualified assertion, "Lamarck was wrong", then you proceed to qualify this with "Lamarck's approach wasn't entirely misdirected". Why make such an assertion when you're only going to back it up with such indecisiveness?

It's not clear to me why you think that random mutations accreted over time through human selection are not enough to produce the changes we see in husbandry. — Baden

Let me get back to some examples then. I mentioned the horse. The horse didn't suddenly get much bigger than it was, with one sudden chance mutation which was selected for. The horse evolved in a way that it continuously got bigger over an extended period of time. If changes were random, and selected for, it would have gotten bigger, then all the other billions of random possibilities would pass randomly, as we would expect according to odds, before it randomly got bigger again. Instead it continuously got bigger and bigger. Either the possibilities for change were severely restricted, such that getting bigger kept coming up over and over again, or the method for choosing a possibility was not truly random, such that getting bigger kept being drawn in the lottery an unusually large amount of times.

There are many examples, the root of the beet got bigger, the kernel of the corn got bigger. Now we have dogs, and breeders can increase particular traits at an extremely rapid pace. These are not one time random changes, but continual increases over generations. In the case of pit bulls, a relatively small number of dog breeders have produced traits so strong over a small number of generations, that they have become undesirable to the human population in general.

It's like I said to Wayfarer, if your neighbour kept winning the lottery on a fairly consistent basis, wouldn't you think there was something other than random selection going on.

As has been pointed out already, this represents a serious misunderstanding. Suffice to say that the mechanisms of sexual selection are well understood and covered in modern evolutionary theory. — Baden

Huh, jamalrob said the opposite, that it represented a fair understanding of the mechanisms of sexual selection. Why the adversity?

The notion of chance within Darwinian evolutionary theory is as much a myth as the notion of gravity is in Einstein's general theory of relativity. And the attempt to deny its essential role is honestly not worthy of serious discussion (unless you want to completely ignore the science). What is worth debating for a variety of reasons is the extent chance plays in evolution. — Baden

I intentional avoided the topic of "the role" that chance plays, because "role" implies purpose, and purpose implies intentional design. This would draw us directly into the issues which Wayfarer brings up, without first obtaining a fundamental understanding of what chance and randomness actually are.

Suppose I am to flip a coin, there is a random chance, 50/50, heads or tails. This random occurrence only plays a role if I act, or make a decision to act, based on the outcome. The coin flip itself is just a coin flip, it doesn't play a role in anything, on its own. However, the case is that I choose to flip the coin, and I choose to do this for the purpose of making a random choice. Now the coin flip plays a role in something, it is a designed act, and the outcome of that act has an influence on my future behaviour, and therefore all that follows from this. Without purpose, direction, the random act cannot play a role.

If I wanted to choose one out of six possibilities, I'd roll a die. If I wanted to choose one out of a large number of possibilities, I'd choose a random number between one and whatever number of possibilities I wanted, through a draw, or random number generator. In each case, the random, chance, occurrence is designed for a specific purpose, to choose one specific number out of a specific number of possibilities. And so the act which produces the random number plays a role in some bigger intentional act.

That is why I wanted to avoid the question of the role that chance plays. Once we assume that an occurrence is chance, or random, it necessarily follows that the parameters under which the chance occurrence occurs, were designed, or else the chance occurrence could not be playing a role in something. If instead, we look first to understand the parameters of possibility, and the act by which the one possibility is "chosen", out of the many, then we can come to understand if any aspect of evolution is truly "chance", and therefore necessarily designed.

Hmm, the discussion on this thread seems confused so far. Here's an attempt to clear things up. There are at least three sources (but not only three) of 'chance' or contingency with respect to evolution. The first is what we might call external chance, and bears on natural selection, which is one of the mechanisms of evolution (but not the only one). 'External chance' is what happens when an environment changes. The case of the peppered moth is the most famous: thanks to the pollution of the industrial revolution, dark colored moths gained an evolutionary advantage because they were better able to blend into the background and thus avoid predators - their population subsequently exploded, especially with respect to lighter colored moths. With the cleaning up of industrial pollution around the world, this trend has steadily declined. This is perhaps the best example of the way in which chance operates in natural selection: the evolutionary advantage of the back peppered moth was totally contingent on it's environment. The role of chance at this level cannot be disputed.

The second source of chance in evolution has to do with genetic mutation. We can call this internal chance. In this case, changes at the level of the geneotype occasionally produce evolutionary advantages at the level of the phenotype (and sometimes evolutionary disadvantages). The question to is what degree 'chance' is at work here. In the classical view, these changes were put down to random coding errors during the processes of transcription (DAN to RNA), splicing and editing (RNA to mRNA), and translation (mRNA to protein). Modern evolutionary theory today however recognizes that these changes aren't all entirely random; that in fact, there are mechanisms of mutability that in certain circumstances, force or otherwise increase the chances for variation. Another way to put this is that evolution has evolved mechanisms to increase evolvability; it's the ability of evolution to feedback upon itself that accounts for the relative 'rapiditiy' of evolution.

At this level, the role of chance is of the second-order. While part of the capacity to produce variation is not 'random' (it is a result of evolution), this mechanism itself is. In fact, we're able to simulate this 'evolution of evolvability' without 'pre-progamming' it in. Here is Evelyn Fox Keller: "New mathematical models of bacterial populations in variable environments confirm that, under such conditions, selection favors the fixation of some mutator alleles and, furthermore, that their presence accelerates the pace of evolution. Recent laboratory studies of bacterial evolution provide further confirmation, lending support to the notion that organisms have evolved mechanisms for their own “evolvability. ... 'Chance,' as one of the organizers of a recent conference on “Molecular Strategies in Biological Evolution” puts it, 'favors the prepared genome.'"

Third and finally, there are the contingencies involved in sexual selection, which account for another level of 'chance' operative in evolution. I confess I can't made heads nor tails of the OP - which doesn't seem to actually discuss any science whatsoever - but hopefully this contributes to clearing up some of the discussion here.

'External chance' is what happens when an environment changes. — StreetlightX

Why would you call this "chance", something which has deterministic causes. If the weather forecaster forecasts no rain for tonight, then it rains, would you say that this was a chance event, even though there are identifiable causes for why the forecast was wrong. Why would you say that changes to an organism's environment are chance events?

Modern evolutionary theory today however recognizes that these changes aren't all entirely random; that in fact, there are mechanisms of mutability that in certain circumstances, force or otherwise increase the chances for variation. Another way to put this is that evolution has evolved mechanisms to increase evolvability; it's the ability of evolution to feedback upon itself that accounts for the relative 'rapiditiy' of evolution. — StreetlightX

If there are mechanisms of mutability at work here, which are assumed to act in a way to minimize randomness, why assume that these came about through some random process? It doesn't make sense to assume that a non-random process evolved from a random process.

According to the way that I laid out the principles of trial and error, even if the first trial is a random choice, the mechanism to judge, remember, and produce the next trial, must already be in place. And if this is the case, then the first trial is not actually random, it is chosen by that mechanism.

I confess I can't made heads nor tails of the OP — StreetlightX

When the two possibilities are heads and tails, the third option is to not flip the coin, or not read the results. Your so-called inability to make heads nor tails of the op is an expression of that third option, refusal.

Why would you call this "chance", something which has deterministic causes. — Metaphysician Undercover

What are 'deterministic causes' even supposed to mean? As distinct from 'non-deterministic causes'? Just another example of why your OP seems so confused to me. Then again, this is perhaps why you're making the claims you do - 'chance' is not opposed to causality (as if chance simply means 'uncaused' or some such nonsense); chance is a modality of causality - contingent causality, to be contrasted with necessary causality. The whole success of the theory of natural selection is precisely in it's ability to give an account of the kind of causality at work in evolution - it specifies one of the mechanisms by which evolution takes place. One of it's corollaries is that it says that there is nothing necessary about the evolutionary advantages conferred upon the peppered moth, say; the causes themselves are contingent.

As for the idea that it doesn't 'make sense' to assume that 'a non-random process evolved form a random process', all I can do is point you to the evolutionary modelling that says not only does it make total sense, but that it can and in fact has happens. Again, I refer you to the Fox Keller quote where she says that the studies done confirm that selection for mutability is not only possible, but incredibly likely. So if it doesn't 'make sense' to you, then what you require is a renovation of your sensibilities.

Finally, mutability does not 'minimise randomness' - it does almost the exact opposite: it encourages variation for the sake of proliferating differences. Again, if you can't get these simple facts right, its hard to take much of what you say serioisly.

Why would you say that changes to an organism's environment are chance events? — MU

Even determined (or selected) events (ie. you deciding to brush your teeth this morning) are chance events in the sense that they are contingent (subject to chance) upon unknowns.

If your tooth brush falls in the toilet by accident and you don't have a back up, what is the "chance" (probability) you'll brush your teeth?

What is the chance (probability) I will die from a coconut falling on my head today?

We don't yet have Laplacian-Demon computers to tell us the grand unalterable choreographed nature of life.

There seems to be some ambiguity with the use of the word "chance" in this thread. Allow me to clarify please.

The principal use of the word, is to refer to something which is possible. "There is a chance that X will occur." This use lends itself to the concept of contingency, a contingent event being one which is dependent on something else, possible. The contingent event is one which is possible, it may or may not occur. Therefore there is a chance that it may occur. Notice that "chance", and "contingent", when used in this way, refer to something which is possible, in the future.

That is not the way that I used "chance" in the op. I used it in another way, which is defined as "the absence of design or discoverable cause". When we talk about existing things, and occurrences which have taken place in the past, and call them chance events, this is the way "chance" is used.

Modern proponents of Darwinian evolution posit random (chance) mutations as the cause of variation, and this is directly opposed to Lamarck's position of habituation. — Metaphysician Undercover

I believe that the art of husbandry demonstrates to us that physical variations are most likely not the effect of chance. — Metaphysician Undercover

StreetlightX appears to desire confusing the issue through equivocation, first using "chance" in my way, in one post, then using it in the other way in the following post. Failing to properly distinguish these two uses of "chance" only propagates the myth of chance, through the apparent contradiction that something with an "absence of design or discoverable cause", is also caused. This allows those who support "chance" to argue that there is no design or discoverable cause behind things such as some specific mutations, yet these things are still caused. Does this indicate that there is a belief within the scientific community that there are causes which are undiscoverable? What type of causes would these be, final causes?

Absence of design <> discoverable cause. You're working with an incoherent notion of chance.

The point there is no contradiction: states of causality are without design but the cause. In the end, there is no final cause. Any causal relationship if defined by a prior state and the states it causes.

Whether there is unknown cause or not doesn't matter to this point. No matter what causes we find, the "why" question is never answered. If we find cause to specific mutations, we still don't have the desired answer because there's the question: "Why those specific mutations and not something else?"

What's at stake is not unknown causes, but the logical necessarity of causal relationships. The point is final cause is incoherent. No casual relationship is logically necessary. States are themselves, rather than present out of design.

StreetlightX appears to desire confusing the issue through equivocation, first using "chance" in my way, in one post, then using it in the other way in the following post. Failing to properly distinguish these two uses of "chance" only propagates the myth of chance, through the apparent contradiction that something with an "absence of design or discoverable cause", is also caused. This allows those who support "chance" to argue that there is no design or discoverable cause behind things such as some specific mutations, yet these things are still caused. Does this indicate that there is a belief within the scientific community that there are causes which are undiscoverable? What type of causes would these be, final causes? — Metaphysician Undercover

Yeah. There is an issue here as SX is promoting a reductionist paradigm - one that is antithetical to the reality of formal/final cause. So what he says is a good way to think about it from that particular view, but a holist would want a fuller view of "chance".

So for example, where SX wants to treat peppered moths and the soot blackened trees of the industrial revolution as a kind of contextual accident - a contingent fact - I would instead see it as a global constraint and so a source of teleomatic necessitation.

Predators have eyes because they need to eat. Prey has camouflage as they need to hide. This is the relationship that captures to necessary aspect when it comes to evolutionary causality. There are real desires in play. Then changes in the wider world that are unpredictable from that point of view are contingent in a sense, but not in the sense that the relationship itself is already developed to a point where it must track any such change.

So SX focuses on the contingency of the situation. But there is also another view that can be developed by focusing in the necessity and teleology involved.

But even so, SX is right in drawing out how chance and determinism are not cleanly separated in the way most people imagine from, for example, mechanics. Really, they are two ends of a spectrum - a spectrum which I, as a holist, would describe as the difference between the strongly constrained (the most mechanic) and the weakly constrained (the most randomly free).

For example, one naturalistic way of talking about this is common cause vs special cause....
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_cause_and_special_cause_(statistics)

The causes of things going in some direction might be strongly identifiable - a strong constraint or special cause. The tree fell because the axeman chopped away at the base. Conversely, the causes might be due to "noise" or random fluctuation. This is saying that the small things that can't be constrained, or prevented happening, can accumulate in a way that makes a difference. A tree might get so rotten that any breeze at any moment becomes the fluctuation that proves its final straw.

So there is always some event that "is the triggering cause". And yet there is a spectrum that runs from the highly purposeful kind of directed action - the woodsman - to the highly unconstrained and unpredictable outcome that is a rotten tree suddenly giving way.

And so overlaying this apparent tale of efficient cause determinism is a counter-tale - a teleological tale - of a well-formed state of desire (the woodsman) vs a well-formed state of indifference (the decay). The holist view presumes there is always a well-formed state of teleology of some kind. And indifference is marked by the point where a system ceases to care about the detail. Desire just has no reason to control events beyond the limits of having its desires generally serviced. Noise is defined by the fact it can be safely ignored.

This constraints-based view of chance makes better sense of the proven evolvability of evolution. Chance is noise and the degree of noise is something the biology gets to define for itself. It wants a useful level. And what counts as a useful level can depend on things that biology learns over time.

Pure chance for biology would be noise or fluctuations so extreme that biology could not survive. On the whole, biology knows that every next generation is going to need eyes, legs, guts - a standard complement of organs. So mutation is restricted accordingly. It is scaled so that height, weight - developmental trajectories in general - shoot for an average and thus result in tightly limited Gaussian bell-curve variety. A purer (less constrained) form of chance would be log/log or powerlaw, not normal/normal or bell curve.

So chance in nature is in fact a really complex subject. But the use of theory of truth concepts - contingent vs necessary truths - does fit with this contrast between free noise as a cause of events, and constrained action as a cause of events. Things can happen either because of probabilistic inevitability, or because of orderly direction.

But biology is then deeply teleological in attempting to suppress noise - as much as necessary to ensure the regularity of development - and equally, to harness noise, as much as necessary to ensure the production of evolution's requisite variety.

Most natural processes, like soil erosion or weather patterns, don't have this kind of choice - to either suppress or harness noisy chance. But biology is all about about this duality of desires - the duality of metabolism and replication, or developmental regularity vs evolutionary variety.

Classical Darwinism focuses on the one at the expense of the other. Blind contingency is said to explain biological complexity because the harnessing of genomic noise is what evolvability is about. However the importance of developmental regularity is now much better understood, no longer taken for granted. And so the suppression of noise is likewise seen to be at the root of biological complexity.

And the ability to arbitrate between plasticity and stability in this fashion is then the further thing that makes for a real model of biological complexity. It shows that chance or noise isn't just shit that happens for life. As much as it can afford to, life is about setting the levels of chance that can be either welcomed or tolerated. Chance for life is framed by its own historically-emergent purpose. And to point out that the future is always still irreducibly chancy does not mean that a considerable measure of finality is not in play.

Possible equivocations:

To say that genetic mutations are random could mean:

• that they are not caused by anything. Determinism is not the case.

• that they are not directed by anything. There is no telos. The genetic mutations may still, on this view, be either causally determined, or not. However the condition that there is no telos operating requires that there be no causal determination beyond merely efficient causation. There must be no direction, of either formal or final cause, in nature, on this view.

Next there is the related question of whether there is any determining relation from natural selection to genetic mutation. It would seem there must be a determining relation in the other direction or else the notion of natural selection becomes unintelligible. So according to Darwinian theory certain mutations must bring about an enhanced ability in the organisms in which they occur (compared to those organisms in which they do not) to reproduce. But it would seem to be impossible to make sense of even this posit, if our ideas are limited to efficient causation. Telos may not so easily be escaped, except illegitimately in the confused minds of the reductionists.

According to neo-Darwinism, whatever physical process brings about variation, there is no mechanism by which that physical process can be systematically affected by the environment.

We can dispense with ill defined notions such as "chance" or "randomness" and can even admit processes that may indeed turn out not to be "random" so long as we do not allow the environment to systematically affect the genome.

The confusion arises when we create systems that model the theory. Typically "randomness" is employed to ensure the absence of systematic feedback, but in doing so, we use a sledgehammer to crack a nt.

Desire just has no reason to control events beyond the limits of having its desires generally serviced……biology learns………biology is then deeply teleological in attempting to suppress noise….biology knows…..As much as it can afford to, life is about setting the levels of chance that can be either welcomed or tolerated — Apokrisis

These are metaphors of agency. Parallels from the Origin of Species:

It may be metaphorically said that Natural Selection is daily and hourly scrutinizing, throughout the world, the slightest variations; rejecting those that are bad, and adding up all that are good; silently and insensibly working whenever and wherever opportunity offers, at the improvement of each organic being.

1876 edition, 68-69

Absence of design <> discoverable cause. You're working with an incoherent notion of chance. — StreetlightX

Are you saying that "chance" in the sense of an occurrence which has neither a design nor a determinable cause is an incoherent notion? I tend to agree, because as I argued earlier, random occurrences must be designed to be that way. The toss of the coin, or dice, the lottery, the random number generator, they're all designed.

My contention is that the scientific community propagates a myth of "chance" in this incoherent sense of "chance", insinuating that there are random occurrences which are "chance" events.

According to neo-Darwinism, whatever physical process brings about variation, there is no mechanism by which that physical process can be systematically affected by the environment. — tom

What would you mean by "systematically affected"? Doesn't consistency in the world fulfill the conditions of "systematic"? So if the world behaves in a consistent way, as it appears to according to the laws of physics, and the way that the world behaves affects the evolutionary process, wouldn't this constitute "systematically affected"?

To say that genetic mutations are random could mean .... that they are not directed by anything. There is no telos. The genetic mutations may still, on this view, be either causally determined, or not. However the condition that there is no telos operating requires that there be no causal determination beyond merely efficient causation. There must be no direction, of either formal or final cause, in nature, on this view — John

One way to think about this is to make the distinction between teleology and teleonomy. The difference is between a telos which is in some way 'pre-existant' and 'external' to the system, and a telos which is generated internally by the system itself. A difference between transcendent and immanent telos. Evolutionary processes, to the degree that there is 'directedness' involved, involves teleonomy, and not teleology. Thus Apo is perfectly right to note that the necessity of survival itself 'makes' the contingencies involved 'matter', and that it is the interplay of necessity and chance that drives the evolutionary process as a whole (Why he thinks I somehow deny this is beyond me, then then again, confrontation and disagreement is simply his modus operandi).

In any case, the question is about the modality of these necessities themselves. Are they themselves necessary ('pre-programmed' and thus teleological) or contingent (a result of process and thus teleonomic)? This is complicated territory because it involves modality to the second degree, but it is here that the question over telos is settled. And the answer, as far as we can tell, is that we can account for the generation of necessity without any appeal to any transcendant teleology. Teleonomy is engendered within the process of evolution's unfolding without it having been 'put there at the beginning'. To the degree that evolution entails necessity - and it does - it does so without design.

What would you mean by "systematically affected"? Doesn't consistency in the world fulfill the conditions of "systematic"? So if the world behaves in a consistent way, as it appears to according to the laws of physics, and the way that the world behaves affects the evolutionary process, wouldn't this constitute "systematically affected"? — Metaphysician Undercover

There exists no mechanism by which the environment can program the genome. Neither the organism that the genome encodes, nor the wider environment, contains the knowledge or capacity to alter the genetic encoding in any systematic way.

One way to think about this is to make the distinction between teleology and teleonomy. The difference is between a telos which is in some way 'pre-existant' and 'external' to the system, and a telos which is generated internally by the system itself. A difference between transcendent and immanent telos. Evolutionary processes, to the degree that there is 'directedness' involved, involves teleonomy, and not teleology — StreetlightX

It looks like you're carving a system out of the sexual and asexual reproduction of plants and animals. That's a little bit of a startling proposition. We could think of a single organism as a system.

Which evolutionary biologist talks about "directedness" in evolution? I think the prevailing assumption is that random (or to avoid a philosophical quagmire, what appears to be random) changes are involved. The principle is exactly the same as the foundational statement of statistics: "Things vary."