It's not at all startling if you're versed in some of the more recent developments in evolutionary theory. That evolution is simply a matter of 'random changes' is now a bit of an outdated notion, although it still serves well in serving as a bulwark against creationist or theological views, which is why, perhaps, it is so often repeated. In any case, there's a ton that could be said here, but I'll take as representative this statement from Jablonka and Lamb's magnificent book, Evolution in Four Dimensions:

"Contrary to current dogma, the variation on which natural selection acts is not always random in origin or blind to function: new heritable variation can arise in response to the conditions of life. Variation is often targeted, in the sense that it preferentially affects functions or activities that can make organisms better adapted to the environment in which they live. Variation is also constructed, in the sense that, whatever their origin, which variants are inherited and what final form they assume depend on various “filtering” and “editing” processes that occur before and during transmission.

Some biologists have great difficulty in accepting this “Lamarckian” aspect of evolution. To them it smacks of teleology, seeming to suggest that variations arise for a purpose. It appears as if the hand of God is being introduced into evolution by the backdoor. But of course there is nothing supernatural or mysterious about what happens—it is simply a consequence of the properties of the various inheritance systems and the way they respond to internal and external influences."

Elsewhere you can check out the work of Mary Jane West-Eberhard on developmental plasticity, or Wanger's Arrival of the Fittest, or Scott Turner's The Tinkerer's Accomplice.

There seems to be some equivocation going on here, as evidenced by Metaphysician Undiscovered's definition of "chance" as "the absence of design or discoverable cause". There's a very big difference between there being a design and there being a discoverable cause. The former implies intention whereas the latter doesn't.

If a window breaks, the question isn't "is the breaking of the window an inexplicable event?" but "did someone intend to break the window?" It's quite ordinary to say that if nobody intended to break the window – if it was just a very windy day and something heavy was blown into it – that the window broke by chance. Such a claim doesn't reject the notion of causation (whether predictable or probabilisitic). All it does is say that the window wasn't broken on purpose.

And that's what is meant when it is claimed that genetic mutations are chance occurrences; that the mutations weren't made to happen intentionally.

There's no intelligent designer or genetic gremlin that realises that a certain mutation needs to happen for the organism to survive and so works to make this necessary change.

It's not at all startling if you're versed in some of the more recent developments in evolutionary theory. — StreetlightX

Interesting stuff. It's also controversial (the quote you provided is, anyway.) It's speculative. And that's great. .

At this point, the prevailing view in biology (essentially a branch of physics), is that "Shit Happens" is a fair description of the driving principle in nature.

I think an alteration in that situation would require a more profound cultural alteration in perspective (something Kantian, perhaps.) I say it's a mistake to sniff at the magnitude of such a shift by imagining that a few imaginative scientists could dictate it. Yea... no.

No, I simply imagine that the facts of nature don't care for the whims and fancies of 'cultural alterations' and 'prevailing views'. If not Jablonka and Lamb, or Turner, or West-Eberhart, or Wager, perhaps you can try Pigliucci and Muller's The Extended Synthesis - an edited collection with more than just 'a few imaginative scientists', or Sean Carroll's Endless Forms Most Beautiful, for a nice pop-science overview of this stuff. And for the mistaken view the biology is a branch of physics, you can try something like Robert Rosen's Life Itself. Alternatively, one can appeal to the general cultural consciousness which is about twenty or so years behind the actual science itself, although that, more than anything, seems like the far graver mistake.

--

Even Dawkins, that doyen of evolutionary ‘reductionism’ is all too happy to admit that natural selection does and can in fact favour certain ‘directions’ of evolution: “A title like ’The Evolution of Evolvability’ ought to be anathema to a dyed-in-the-wool, radical neb-darwinian like me! [Yet ]…there is a sense in which a form of natural selection favours, not just adaptively successful phenotypes, but a tendency to evolve in certain directions." (Dawkins, "The Evolution of Evolvability").

And for the mistaken view the biology is a branch of physics, you can try something like Robert Rosen's Life Itself. — StreetlightX

I appreciate your mentioning those various authors. This is one I actually did read, though. A lot of this book is borderline filler. His point is summed up in the last chapter. It's Kantian. Obviously. If that's the view you're advocating, that's fine. But it doesn't make sense to do that and then claim that "the facts of nature don't care" for prevailing views. Rosen's point is that our definition of life contains apriori forms such as final cause.

Even Dawkins, that doyen of evolutionary ‘reductionism’ is all too happy to admit that natural selection does and can in fact favour certain ‘directions’ of evolution: — StreetlightX

Dawkins is an adaptationist, which means his views are out of date. It's true there's some telos to his outlook. That's due to his project of using adaptation to understand everything everywhere. He hasn't been a practicing scientist for several decades.

I agree with your point about Dawkins (his gene-centrism irks me to no end!), but I only mention him to show that even the most hardcore of old-schoolers need to admit such views into their frameworks. As for Rosen, I'm referring to his point that biology contains entailment structures far richer than physics, which renders it a far more general science, to the degree that it's subject of study - life - is more formally generic than physics, making it a mistake to say that biology is a 'branch of physics' (also, filler?? No way!). But that's off topic.

but I only mention him to show that even the most hardcore of old-schoolers need to admit such views into their frameworks — StreetlightX

I'm sympathetic to the attitude that we need to slip from the grip of a strict naturalist outlook. And maybe you're right... that we'll do it a little at a time without anybody making a big deal out of it.

Emergent purpose... that would be a big deal. Future historians of science would want to pinpoint exactly how and when scientists started thinking in those terms.

(also, filler?? No way!).. — StreetlightX

It occurred to me after I read it that the last chapter could have been presented as a stand-alone essay. I don't know if anybody would have read it, though.

I suspect that random mutation does not account for the speed of phenotypic changes in the given examples of selective breeding of plants and animals over just a few generations.

The traits already have been selected for (or are apparent) in a breeding pair of animals and are a part of the genetic diversity of the species. A very well practiced horse or dog breeder might have an idea what traits are possible or likely given pedigrees over a few generations.

The variation made possible from genetic diversity of a species (shuffling the gene pool by a lottery of chances) is vastly different from the variation made possible by random mutation. Maybe this highlights a problem with the given example of animal husbandry.

It's not at all startling if you're versed in some of the more recent developments in evolutionary theory. That evolution is simply a matter of 'random changes' is now a bit of an outdated notion, although it still serves well in serving as a bulwark against creationist or theological views, which is why, perhaps, it is so often repeated. In any case, there's a ton that could be said here, but I'll take as representative this statement from Jablonka and Lamb's magnificent book, Evolution in Four Dimensions: — StreetlightX

For a refutation of Jablonka et. al. see http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10539-006-9033-y

I challenge you to find a single case in which an adaptive change in an organism—or any change that has been fixed in a species—rests on inheritance that is not based on changes in the DNA.

This is a useful distinction, between teleology and teleonomy, between the transcendent, logos and the imminent, nomos. But, a third possibility, I think, is that of a telos that is "pre-existent" and yet not "external to the system", not transcendent but nonetheless infinite and eternal, and yet a fully immanent telos.

This conception could be somewhat along the lines, for example, of Whitehead's process philosophy, where the "direction" is seen not as "generated from within the system", an idea which suggests that it is generated from scratch from the brute, so to speak, but is understood to be immanent from the beginning and evolving right along with the system. It would be a kind of heart, mind and soul, as well as spirit, of the system.

So, the "necessity of survival" would be the most basic kind of 'inner directive'. You ask the question in your second paragraph as to whether they would be "pre-programmed". I think this question reflects our anthropomorphic understanding that there must be an 'external' programmer, analogous to the way we understand ourselves to be external to our own programs. So, the two possibilities seem to be confined to something external to the system, that is something necessary, or something internal to the system, or something mechanically contingent, something causally determined by the system itself.

I'm not convinced that we really can "account for the generation of necessity" at all, or even,more modestly, account for necessity. Necessity is always presupposed in all our thinking and we are hobbled by the inevitably mechanical, that is deterministic, nature of our models, which is really to say the same thing.

The point about chance in biology is that it is something life has to mechanically manufacture because it doesn't really exist in nature.

Now that is a confronting way to put it perhaps. But consider the parallel with a tossed coin or rolled die.

As humans, we can imagine this Platonic thing of pure or crisp chance. Following the laws of thought, we can imagine reality being divided in a digital or binary fashion into a definite set of possibilities that then either definitely happen or definitely don't happen.

And then we can produce physical models of such absolute chance. We can really go to town to machine a flat disk so that it has an insignificant degree of asymmetry to bias any fair toss. We can really go to town to produce a perfect cube, with rounded corners, so that it to will have only inconsequential levels of bias when rolled on a flat surface.

So the physical world is analog. But we can make digital devices. Or at least we can approach our Platonic notion of absolute chance so closely as not to make any practical difference, given our purposes - which can be using chance to gamble, or chance to decide who serves first, or whatever.

So the point is that a world with digital perfection of this kind - a perfect symmetry of an outcome-generating process that removes any predictability from some assignable cause - does not exist normally in the world. It has to be made. And to get made implies someone with an interest in that happening. It is already a purposeful act to arrange reality so as to produce chancy outcomes.

We think of natural systems being intrinsically chancy. So a tornado could take any path, a thunderstorm could pop up anywhere. But this is vague chance, or analog chance. Yes, there is unpredictability, But it is just as mixed with inevitability. In hindsight, the thunderstorm had to happen the way it did because so many confluent events panned out that way. However there is not the sharp binary consequence that is taking one path and not another. Instead there was an infinity of trajectories - and most of them were bunched together in the way described by a chaotic attractor. So you have this muddy form of chance, this analog chance, where generally things pan out in a certain direction, and the finer detail of what happens doesn't make much difference.

With life however, it was all about sharpening up muddy chance into sharp chance. The genetic mechanism separated aspects of structure so they became discrete traits. You could take bits of the whole and ask whether going in direction A or B was the better binary choice.

So life always was about the evolution of evolvability. Life arose out of the analog organic soup by being able to pose digitally crisp questions. Intelligibility in a logical sense was the big move.

And its more than just about DNA. Bacteria have unfocused sexual lives. They can share genes at any time across different species. But multicellular life developed a more binary approach to sex. You eventually get individual acts of breeding where sharp mating choices are being made. It now becomes an either/or fact of history whether A mated with B, rather than C, D or E.

So a simplistic ontology of life does stress that what is different is that evolution is ruled by chance. It is a story of the blind watchmaker and cosmic contingency. But this is a view of chance that already presumes a digital physics - a world where absolute determinism rules, and so chance is defined in terms of there naturally always being absolute crispness about what did happen vs what didn't happen in a material sense.

But a more organic conception of reality sees it as analog or muddy when it comes to its variety. Nothing actually starts in sharp distinction. Distinctions or individuations are things that have to be developed. And to varying degrees, material individuation can arise of its own accord due to contextual factors. Yet it all remains entangled or unseparated in some degree too. A bit soupy.

Life then came along and imposed a Platonic digital rigour on this soupy organic possibilty. It framed the chemistry with cell walls, enzyme rate knobs, molecular motors, receptor pores and all other kinds of digital devices. The chemistry was organised by a tight set of yes/no paths and switches.

So developmentally, chemistry became informationally regulated. And as the flip side of this coin, the regulating information was made exposed to blind evolutionary selection. Ways were found to put as much of this digital machinery on show, out in the world for natural selection to play its part, as made sense, given the purpose of wanting adaptive plasticity to go along with the adaptive stability.

So chance - as we digitally conceive of it in its Platonically-ideal splendour - is something that life has become good at manufacturing as it is so useful. Just as life has become good at manufacturing its opposite - a regulated, homeostatic, stability. The kind of purposeful state in which strong determinism appears to rule rather than strong chance.

This is a view of the Universe that can't be seen from a classical Newtonian perspective. But it is the thermodynamic view of a Universe that is mostly a vague entropic mess spreading and cooling its way downhill to a heat death. And out of this sludge, life arises by a negentropic dichotomy. It divides the sludge into a more regulated aspect, and a more chancy aspect. It creates a new, more mechanical, level of self-interaction that makes the sludge both more self-organised, and less self-directed, than was the case.

So the "paradox" is that life seems both more purposeful and more chancy than the world it arises in. For monistic thinkers, this creates a deep problem. Life as a phenomenon ought to be reduced to one of these two ontic categories - necessary or contingent, determined or random, cosmically inevitable or cosmically accidental.

But a systems approach to existence says instead that reality is triadic. It always has this extra dimension which is the developmental one of the vague~crisp. The laws of thought, with their insistence on classical binary possibilities, is just one end of this spectrum - the crisply developed limit. And so our logic has to be larger. It must include the more radical kind of ground that is the muddy analog swamp out of which crisp counter-factually has to emerge.

And it is this triadicy which explains why there are always the dichotomies. For life to be more self-determining, it had to also be more deliberately chancy. It had to go in opposite directions within itself as a material phenomenon to break away from the entropic muddiness that was its initial conditions.

That is why theoretical biologists like Rosen break life down into the dichotomy of metabolism and replication, why they talk about the centrality of the epistemic cut. It is not about which came first - the development or the evolution, the metabolic processes or the genetic regulation. The first thing to happen is the division itself - the division that sets deterministic development and chancy evolution apart.

Emergent purpose... that would be a big deal. Future historians of science would want to pinpoint exactly how and when scientists started thinking in those terms. — Mongrel

Most accounts - 'the future' is already here: they've already been written! People just need to read them! - begin with Kant's third critique, where he recognizes the inability of mechanism to account for organization in nature, but ended up domesticating his own insight by putting it down to a matter of (human) judgement rather than nature itself. For Kant, the experience of the sublime was nothing but the experience of purpose in what ought to be 'purposeless things' in nature. Here is Alicia Juarrero, who has written plenty about this too:

"Although organisms cannot be explained mechanistically because of this strange kind of recursive causality unknown to us, Kant concluded that the impasse is due to a limitation of reason. His solution: relegate teleology and purposiveness to the "regulative judgment" by virtue of the self-organization that is their hallmark. By appealing to the critical turn, Kant thereby avoided an antinomy between mechanism and finality while allowing that mechanism and finality can perhaps be reconciled in the supersensible, a reconciliation, unfortunately, that we will never know. The assumption that only external forces can bring about change thus continued to deny causal efficacy to nonlinear feedback loops, and there- fore to self-organizing processes, which were accordingly dismissed as a form of causality unknown to us.

Even though Aristotle's Posterior Analytics was the first systematic attempt to examine the concept of cause, modern science summarily dismantled his system of four causes, and it is since mentioned for the most part only with a certain embarrassment. Despite opting in the end for a mechanistic understanding of causal relations, at least Kant recognized and addressed the problem of self-cause. Philosophers since, however, have for the most part ignored Kant's third Critique, the Critique of Judgment. By discarding Aristotelian appeals to formal or final cause while at the same time retain- ing his prohibition against that unknown form of causality, self-cause, modern philosophy of action effectively boxed itself into a corner". (Dynamics in Action).

Evan Thompson's Life in Mind - again about the same ideas - similarly begins it's history with Kant: "My starting point is to examine the theory of autopoiesis in relation to Kant's classic treatment of organic nature in his Critique of Judgment, first published in 1790 (Kant 1987). Kant gave an original and visionary account of the organism as a self-organizing being, an account close in many ways to the theory of autopoiesis."

So again, all the resources are there! We know all about this stuff, in detail, with plenty of scientific backing. People just need to read them, take them up, and digest them.

So again, all the resources are there! We know all about this stuff, in detail, with plenty of scientific backing. People just need to read them, take them up, and digest them. — StreetlightX

Yep. But I would add two things stand in the way of a widespread understanding of four causes holism.

First, classical reductionism sells itself not just because it is simple, but because it has good immediate pay-back. If you imagine all reality to be a machine, then that is how you get good at building machines and imposing machinery in ways that control existence. There's a lot of dollars in that.

Then related to that, no-one has produced a proper mathematics of holism. There is a ton of mathematical bits and pieces, like chaos theory, tensegrity, or whatever. But no-one has boiled it all down in the way Newton boiled down the mechanics of dynamics. So building holism in the world is hard due to a lack of first principle mathematical models.

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. — StreetlightX

I think immanent telos is a good idea. But immanent implies inherent within, so to think that it is generated, or emergent from the system is somewhat contradictory, it must be inherent within the system. Besides, we know that the existence of the intention (telos) is always prior to the existence of the thing created (in this case, the system itself). So I prefer something more in line with John's description.

But, a third possibility, I think, is that of a telos that is "pre-existent" and yet not "external to the system", not transcendent but nonetheless infinite and eternal, and yet a fully immanent telos. — John

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. — StreetlightX

I think that you, as well as apokrisis, are too quick to jump to this conclusion (premise) of necessity. Where do you draw this "necessity" from? As extinction demonstrates, existence is just as much a contingency as anything else.

But there is also another view that can be developed by focusing in the necessity and teleology involved. — apokrisis

The whole point of teleology is that there is no necessity, that is what gives us free will. We are free to choose our ends, and the means. Necessity is artificial, created, it is not natural. We, as individuals, historically have created a sense of what's needed, food, shelter, etc. From this we develop a communal necessity, morality, laws, and eventually a logical necessity. Logical necessity is derived from this need, what is desired for a purpose, and this need is chosen.

We cannot confuse the two basic senses of "necessity", logical necessity, and that which is designated as necessary for a particular end, needed. The latter, is actually a contingency, and open to choice. The former being artificial and therefore unnatural, is a refined form of the latter.

I'm not convinced that we really can "account for the generation of necessity" at all, or even, more modestly, account for necessity. Necessity is always presupposed in all our thinking and we are hobbled by the inevitably mechanical, that is deterministic, nature of our models, which is really to say the same thing. — John

This is not logical necessity referred to here, above, it is necessity in the sense of needed for an end.

And that's what is meant when it is claimed that genetic mutations are chance occurrences; that the mutations weren't made to happen intentionally. — Michael

When you consider the immanent nature of intentionality, purposefulness, and observe that it is inherent within all living beings, it is hard to deny that it is prior to living bodies, and realize that mutations were intentionally made to happen.

There's no intelligent designer or genetic gremlin that realises that a certain mutation needs to happen for the organism to survive and so works to make this necessary change. — Michael

It is not that "a certain mutation needs to happen". It is the case that the living being does not know what mutation needs to happen, because the organism emerges in an environment of unknowns. Therefore, seemingly random mutations need to happen, in order that they can be judged in a process of trial and error, as the organisms become accustomed to the environment.

One way to think about this is to make the distinction between teleology and teleonomy. — StreetlightX

I meant to add that there is also Stan Salthe's hierarchical approach to a definition here that recognises various grades of telos, ranging from the brutely physical to the complexly mindful.

Salthe offers the stepping stones of {teleomaty {teleonomy {teleology}}}. Or in more regular language,
{propensity {function {purpose}}}.

See for instance: http://www.cosmosandhistory.org/index.php/journal/article/view/189/284

So rather than getting stuck in an either/or argument, a hierarchical definition says that the whole of existence is teleological in a generic (and quite dilute) sense. And then a strong version of teleology is what arises intensionally - immanently within the generic condition - via semiosis, or the growth of reasonableness in complex systems.

The whole point of teleology is that there is no necessity, that is what gives us free will. We are free to choose our ends, and the means. Necessity is artificial, created, it is not natural. We, as individuals, historically have created a sense of what's needed, food, shelter, etc. From this we develop a communal necessity, morality, laws, and eventually a logical necessity. Logical necessity is derived from this need, what is desired for a purpose, and this need is chosen. — Metaphysician Undercover

Again, this seems right to you because of your ontological commitments. You are thinking in terms of directed outcomes - action that is the result of a big psychic hand reaching down to control material events.

But I am talking about an ontology based on constraints. So telos is about the evolution of such constraints. It is finality that is emergent and only "pre-exists" in the sense that even a chaos of possibility has only one generic way it will wind up organised. In hindsight, nothing else could have been possible as the way to average over all the tensions to result in an action that is the most efficient path connecting a start and its end.

So yes, humans are individuated within a historically-evolved social context. We are the product of a system of constraints. We are shaped by the culture within which we have no choice about growing up.

And yet that very culture - which has historically become pretty sophisticated - encourages this new thing of "freewill". We are encouraged to believe we all start off equal, the blank pages of an unwritten novel, and our job is to ink in that exciting life story. We are invited to demonstrate our individuation by kicking against the very thing of cultural constraints.

But as you say, this carte blanche is rather misguided. We actually still do depend on a social organisation to give us a place where we can actually live and flourish. So - if you go down the rabbit-hole of romanticism/existentialism - you wind up calling inauthentic the thing you most need to exist.

So one view is based on the notion that a positive form of freedom is what results from breaking free of all social and material constraints.

The other view says that is simply a recipe for chaos or vagueness. It is the evolution of constraints that are responsible for powerfully shaped degrees of freedom. To remove those constraints results in psychic collapse. You can't make definite choices unless you exist within a sharply definite reference frame - one that includes purposeful directions that you can either then go with, or act against, as a further locally individuated fact.

This is a useful distinction, between teleology and teleonomy, between the transcendent, logos and the imminent, nomos. But, a third possibility, I think, is that of a telos that is "pre-existent" and yet not "external to the system", not transcendent but nonetheless infinite and eternal, and yet a fully immanent telos.

This conception could be somewhat along the lines, for example, of Whitehead's process philosophy, where the "direction" is seen not as "generated from within the system", an idea which suggests that it is generated from scratch from the brute, so to speak, but is understood to be immanent from the beginning and evolving right along with the system. It would be a kind of heart, mind and soul, as well as spirit, of the system. — John

This is a point well taken, and I appreciate you pointing it out. That said, the only way I know how to make sense of a telos in this 'third' sense you mention here is through the notion of entropy, where the (necessary) cosmic dissipation of energy prompts the formation of local (contingent) negentropic eddies - one of which is life with it's concomitant processes of evolution. The article by Salthe that Apo cites introduces a third term, teleomaty, which he correlates to 'propensity', which more or less characterizes the entropic drive of the universe - the full hierarchy, which Apo also quoted, is:

{teleomaty (propensity) {teleonomy (function) {teleology} (purpose)}}.

Perhaps another way to put this is that entropy is a necessary question to which local (self-)organization are the (contingent) answer(s).

I meant to add that there is also Stan Salthe's hierarchical approach to a definition here that recognises various grades of telos, ranging from the brutely physical to the complexly mindful. — apokrisis

Mm, I have Salthe's Evolving Hierarchical Systems sitting on my shelf where it's been for about a year now, but it hasn't yet found it's way into my reading schedule. Hopefully I'll get to it by the end of the year, but so much else on the priority list right now.

When you consider the immanent nature of intentionality, purposefulness, and observe that it is inherent within all living beings, it is hard to deny that it is prior to living bodies, and realize that mutations were intentionally made to happen. — Metaphysician Undercover

Living things have intentions (assuming some level of consciousness), but they don't have the power to intentionally alter their genetic code (the emerging field of genetic engineering not withstanding).

Mutations don't happen because the organism wills it. They happen because a mistake is made as DNA copies itself or when ultraviolet radiation damages said DNA.

It's absurd to suggest that this radiation-induced damage or copy-failure occurs intentionally, as if DNA and electromagnetism have a will and want this to happen. Mystical nonsense.

It is not that "a certain mutation needs to happen". It is the case that the living being does not know what mutation needs to happen, because the organism emerges in an environment of unknowns. Therefore, seemingly random mutations need to happen, in order that they can be judged in a process of trial and error, as the organisms become accustomed to the environment. — Metaphysician Undercover

I don't understand what you're trying to say here, but it seems inconsistent with the above.

That said, the only way I know how to make sense of a telos in this 'third' sense you mention here is through the notion of entropy, where the (necessary) cosmic dissipation of energy prompts the formation of local (contingent) negentropic eddies - one of which is life with it's concomitant processes of evolution. — StreetlightX

Try as I might I cannot begin to grasp how it could be that entropy "prompts" the formation of local negentropy. This may well be due to my lack of proper education in these matters, and I would certainly appreciate any help in understanding this that anyone might be able to offer.

Intuitively it has always seemed to me that any departure from absolute homogeneity and equilibrium represents a kind of disorder, so I cannot get my head around what local negentropy (order) could actually consist in, or how self-organization (is it really a kind of order or a kind of disorder?) could come about. If it is a kind of order, then is it a 'reconcentration' of some vestiges of order left over from the posited almost perfect original homogeneity? What about the large scale homogeneity and equilibrium of a 'heat death'? Is that maximal disorder or a magnified return and perfection of the absolute stasis almost achieved in the original moment? Is entropy anything more than the arbitrary brute behavior of matter/energy, entirely encapsualted in the efficient realm? How could we justify a belief that it must be a formal principle or a necessary telos?

It's absurd to suggest that this radiation-induced damage or copy-failure occurs intentionally, as if DNA and electromagnetism have a will and want this to happen. Mystical nonsense. — Michael

Quite! The fact that information from the environment (which for the genome includes the organism) cannot be transferred to the genome is so important that it has it's own name:

THE CENTRAL DOGMA OF MOLECULAR BIOLOGY

Now watch, someone is going to complain that it is a "dogma". Sure, and the Standard Model of Particle Physics is only a "model". Sorry, but in reality, information flows in one direction only:

DNA -> RNA -> Proteins. And there is no mechanism for the reverse.

But actually the truth is even more fundamental. Von Neumann showed that an accurate self-reproducer must consist of a replicator and a vehicle.

So yes, humans are individuated within a historically-evolved social context. We are the product of a system of constraints. We are shaped by the culture within which we have no choice about growing up. — apokrisis

That said, the only way I know how to make sense of a telos in this 'third' sense you mention here is through the notion of entropy, where the (necessary) cosmic dissipation of energy prompts the formation of local (contingent) negentropic — StreetlightX

Now you have both turned to an external telos. But there is no reason to drop the notion of immanent telos, which is prior to, and acts as the cause of living organisms. Just because the science isn't there, to understand this immanent telos, doesn't mean that to speculate in this direction is a lost cause. Nor does it mean that we cannot produce a coherent understanding in this direction. What is needed is a proper understanding of existence in relation to the passing of time.

Living things have intentions (assuming some level of consciousness), but they don't have the power to intentionally alter their genetic code (the emerging field of genetic engineering not withstanding). — Michael

I do not conceive of intention requiring consciousness, I understand consciousness as requiring intention. This positions intention as prior to consciousness. This is consistent with observations that plants and animals which do not appear to have developed consciousness, still act purposefully. Therefore intention (purposefulness) appears to inhere within all living things. It appears to exist primarily as an instinctual directing of the activities of living things. This goes right to the molecular level, and the activities of DNA, such as mitosis, whatever it is which "acts" at this level. I don't think biological science has properly identified what it is which is acting, because it must be acting at a sub-atomic level to produce such molecular changes. But this thing which is acting, is clearly acting purposefully, or intentionally. And it is also responsible for genetic changes.

The key to this conceptual scheme is to understand all living activities as caused from within. The external shapes and affects the internal activities, but does not cause them. This means that we distance ourselves from Newton's first law, which implies that a thing will persist unchanged until acted upon by an external force. We must dismiss this law to account for living activities which have an internal source of movement. Now the determinist, physicalist, models, which represent the living organism as being caused to do this or that, by external causes, are rejected, in favour of a model which represents the cause of living activity as emanating from within, and being affected by external obstacles.

Plants don't act purposefully, they act reactively. Animals act purposefully to the extent that they have consciousness (although a determinist or compatibilist would argue that even the intentionality in consciousness is itself a reactive phenomenon).

Either you're misusing the words "purpose" and "intention" or you're arguing for some sort of mysticism with no scientific support.

The only "telos" in genetic mutation and evolution is one that is the necessary or probabilistic consequence of physical causation. But it's important not to conflate this sense of telos with that of intention (which is a feature of consciousness).

And what do you mean by "internal source of movement"? Do you just mean movement caused by things behind a body's surface, e.g. inner organs and whatnot?

Plants don't act purposefully, they act reactively — Michael

This is the misunderstanding that we must reject in order to properly understand the existence of life. Do you think that photosynthesis is not a purposeful act?

And what do you mean by "internal source of movement"? — Michael

Reread my post, I think there is a preliminary answer to this question there. If you have a specific problem, please address it to me. But don't ask me to rewrite what I just wrote, if you skipped over the passage, not taking the time to understand the words.

This is the misunderstanding that we must reject in order to properly understand the existence of life. Do you think that photosynthesis is not a purposeful act? — Metaphysician Undercover

Yes, I think that photosynthesis is not a purposeful act. A purposeful act is an act done by conscious determination.

Reread my post, I think there is a preliminary answer to this question there. If you have a specific problem, please address it to me. But don't ask me to rewrite what I just wrote, if you skipped over the passage, not taking the time to understand the words.

I read your post, and nowhere do you explain it. You simply say that "all living activities as caused from within", that we must reject the claim that "a thing will persist unchanged until acted upon by an external force", and that "living activities ... have an internal source of movement".

What is the distinction between an "internal" and an "external" cause? I understand these terms as referring to the spatial location of an object, such that a thing located on one side of a wall, under a roof, is inside the house and a thing located on the other side of the wall, under the open sky, is outside the house, and that a thing located between my chest and my back is inside me and a thing located between my chest and your chest – whilst facing each other – is outside me.

You seem to be using the terms in a very different way, so I'd like it explained.

Try as I might I cannot begin to grasp how it could be that entropy "prompts" the formation of local negentropy. This may well be due to my lack of proper education in these matters, and I would certainly appreciate any help in understanding this that anyone might be able to offer. — John

It's one of the more counterintuitive facts when it comes to entropy, but the idea is actually quite simple: local negentropy accelerates - and thus increases - global entropy. Think about it: any sort of organisation (your bedroom, a city, an ecosystem) requires that work be constantly put into sustaining that organization; without work, organization dissipates (thanks to the second law: the total entropy of an isolated system always increase over time). Thus, there is a price to pay for any local organization. The interesting point however, is that any work put in to sustain local organization generally ends up producing more entropy at a global scale - think waste products, waste processing, energy expenditure, etc. This is especially evident when it comes to living systems, which sustain their local organization at the price of dissipating the energy gradients available in the immediate environment. Hence: local negentropy accelerates global entropy in a way that doesn't violate the second law.

In truth however, this is only half the story. While the above explains how it is possible for organizing systems to arise in the first place, the question remains how such self-organizing systems actually arose. Why did the energy gradient that existed at the beginning of the universe not simply 'wind down' without creating all the 'intermediary' self-organizing structures that accelerated it? The answer has to do with the lack of symmetry in the universe - the universe - and life especially - is full of asymmetries. From the abundance of matter over anti-matter, to the curious exclusivity of 'left-handed' neutrinos in nature, to the 'right-handedness' of the DNA helix and the asymmetries of animo acids, these asymmetries basically 'force' organization to happen. An entirely symmetrical universe would dissipate symmetrically, foreclosing any sort of self-organizing capacities. The exact source(s) of cosmic asymmetry are hotly debated, but it's these asymmetries which account for self-organizing tendencies which do not violate the second law.

Taking it back to evolution, the point is that entropy, together with cosmic asymmetry - provides the base of 'propensity' that drives organization in the universe. The argument is that together with the right conditions - one of the leading being the environment created by hydrothemral vents at the bottom of the ocean - life - and with it evolution - becomes a quite likely outcome of these initial conditions. Anyway, I'm trying to pack alot of info - the beginnings of life and the cosmic development of the universe! - into a few paragraphs, but I hope it provides an understandable, if very basic picture, of how a telos might arise naturally based off of entropic principles.

Sorry, but in reality, information flows in one direction only:

DNA -> RNA -> Proteins. And there is no mechanism for the reverse. — tom

This is true, but it paints a misleading picture of the complexity of gene expression. First of all, the process of gene expression is multi-final. That is, the same DNA codon can produce different proteins, depending of the state of the cell at any one time. Moreover, proteins themselves also function differently depending on the environment in which they are themselves found in. John Protevi puts it as follows: "So we've gone from "one string of DNA = one gene = one protein = one function" to "one string of DNA (structural / hereditary gene) = many (functional) genes (many mature mRNA transcripts) = many proteins = many functions. ... gene formation and expression depends on cell dynamics which are part of larger networks."

So while the central dogma remains inviolable - in ontogenesis, neither environment nor phenotype can alter genotype - the idea that DNA simply codes for a protein in a simple, unambiguous manner is incredibly misleading. This is why Jablonka and Lamb, and West-Eberhard are not Lamarckians. It's not that the environment acts directly upon genotype, but rather, to quote Eberhard: "a new phenotype develops (developmental plasticity) by being induced via a genetic mutation or an environmental difference. What has happened here in the latter case is that the new environment has brought forth an untapped potential of the pre-existing genetic variation." - the 'potential' here being the differential manner in which genertype can code for different proteins which in turn can function in different manners. the simple picture of DNA -> RNA -> Proteins paints a picture of equifinality (same starting point = same results) whereas the actual process of gene expression is multi-final.

That is, the same DNA codon can produce different proteins, depending of the state of the cell at any one time. — StreetlightX

Genes can be turned on and off. I think the question on the table was whether epigenetics is an evolutionary factor... so for instance: what did the unprecedented scale of violence in the 20th Century do to us (in terms of our hardware)? It's unknown.

It's not even that genes can be 'turned on and off'; it's that even when they are 'on' they can do 'different stuff'. In some ways, even speaking about 'the gene' is a kind of outdated manner of speaking; more and more, what is important is the very process of gene expression itself, a process in which the gene plays a necessary but differential role. Here is Fox-Keller again (writing before the human genome was fully sequenced - but vindicated all the more so after we realized how preliminary such sequencing actually is for our understanding of biology) :

"The prominence of genes in both the general media and the scientific press suggests that in this new science of genomics, twentieth-century genetics has achieved its apotheosis. Yet, the very successes that have so stirred our imagination have also radically undermined their core driving concept, the concept of the gene. … Now that the genomes of several lower organisms have been fully sequenced, the call for a new phase of genome analysis—functional genomics rather than structural genomics—is heard with growing frequency … For almost fifty years, we lulled ourselves into believing that, in discovering the molecular basis of genetic information, we had found the “secret of life”; we were confident that if we could only decode the message in DNA’s sequence of nucleotides, we would understand the “program” that makes an organism what it is. And we marveled at how simple the answer seemed to be. But now, in the call for a functional genomics, we can read at least a tacit acknowledgment of how large the gap between genetic “information” and biological meaning really is".

Yes, I think that photosynthesis is not a purposeful act. A purposeful act is an act done by conscious determination. — Michael

This is where we have a difference of opinion, as to what constitutes "purposeful". I think that the carbohydrates produced by photosynthesis are useful in the plant's future, perhaps in the flower, to attract bees. Therefore the plant produces this sugar with the intention of producing a flower, and that is done with the intention of attracting insects, and that with the intention of fulfilling reproductive needs. You restrict "intention" to "that which is carried out with conscious determination". But there is no need for such a restriction. Intention has been observed to go much deeper than the conscious level. Habitual acts are carried out intentionally, without conscious direction.

What is the distinction between an "internal" and an "external" cause? I understand these terms as referring to the spatial location of an object, such that a thing located on one side of a wall, under a roof, is inside the house and a thing located on the other side of the wall, under the open sky, is outside the house, and that a thing located between my chest and my back is inside me and a thing located between my chest and your chest – whilst facing each other – is outside me.

You seem to be using the terms in a very different way, so I'd like it explained. — Michael

Yes, this is a good description, so I am not using terms in a very different way. You distinguish between the internal and external of an object. Now consider an object, a body, in relation to Newton's first law. That body will continue in the state that it is, unless acted upon by a force. Let's say that the force is the cause of change, or motion. The force could have a source outside that body, or it could have a source from within that body. This is the difference between internal and external cause.

So, in my post, I questioned:
"the activities of DNA, such as mitosis, whatever it is which "acts" at this level. I don't think biological science has properly identified what it is which is acting, because it must be acting at a sub-atomic level to produce such molecular changes".
Consider activities such as mitosis and meiosis. What do you think is the active agent in such activities, what is acting? We could say that the cell is acting, then we assume an internal cause. What is this internal cause, or force?

Interesting stuff. I might point out, because it is not clear in the thread, that selection, in the short term of plant breeders and so on does not rely on novel mutations but variability within the gene pool of populations. There is a nice sloppiness about a gene pool that allows the peppered moth to adapt to the industrial revolution and then adapt back without having recourse to happy accidents of mutation and then of re-mutation. And all the intention required is that of water to run downhill.