Dr Adequate
Banned
- Joined
- Aug 31, 2004
- Messages
- 17,766
Hi. This is part of something I'm writing, which explains why I keep mentioning what "we" have discussed when we haven't.
I thought that maybe some of you would like to shoot me down.
Comments, please?
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Nowadays, when the words "Intelligent Design" are a cloak for ignorance and prejudice, it is easy to forget that for a few hundred years true scientists truly believed that species had been designed. Unlike their modern successors, they did not sit in armchairs dreaming up wordy, flimsy arguments. They spent their lives looking closely at nature, describing it, cataloguing it, thinking about it.
According to the view of science that we have developed, this approach to biology must have been a useful way of looking at the world which made predictions and fruitfully suggested research programs. I shall call this approach to nature, when carried out by real scientists, teleology. Teleology is the attempt to understand a living thing, or some feature of a living thing, by asking: "What is it for?" I say that this can be useful, predictive, and fruitful.
As an example: if you discover a moth with an oddly shaped proboscis (feeding organ) and you could then do as a teleologist would do, and ask youself: "What is it for?" And you would then come to the correct conclusion. Knowing that moths feed on the nectar of night-flowering plants, you would deduce that there is one particular plant (or maybe more) which is so shaped that the moth's proboscis fits it exactly, and that the moth is "for" feeding on the nectar of the plant, and pollenising it. In the same way, shown the strange convolutions of the flower, you could, on teleological principles, deduce the moth --- or maybe some sort of nocturnal beetle or hummingbird, but you'd put your money on a moth.
Or a teleologist, starting from the properties of water, might deduce that swimming creatures should be streamlined along their axis of travel. Indeed, the perfect, ideal teleologist would be able to look at a fish and deduce the existence of something very like water.
And, as ever, the old theory is explained by the one that replaced it. If Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection is correct, then this too explains why the moth fits the flower, and why the fish fits the sea. It also explains what would be paradoxical from a teleological point of view. For example, there are herd animals in which a few bull males rule over the herd, and have their pick of the females. If you consider the surplus males, and ask what they are "for" --- for their species or themselves, the answer is nothing much. Yet evolution by natural selection makes it compulsory that the male to female birth rate should be fifty-fifty, It is not "for" anything, but it's true.
What sunk teleology, however, was not the observation of such anomalies in botany and zoology (the fields that it was suppposed to explain). It was sunk by biogeography, morphology, paleontology, geology, and genetics. It is not just that the teleological view fails to explain these sciences: it is flatly contradicted by them.
As with other cases we've looked at, the old theory is still often a good way to explain things --- within the fields of botany and zoology in which it was applied. We still talk of the sun rising, rather than the Earth rotating, and in the same way the teleological approach is in ordinary trivial cases a very useful way of looking at things. If you ask me: "Why is a fish that shape?" then I will certainly begin by explaining that streamlining is useful to the fish. It is only if you put the question more carefully: "How did fish evolve so that this fish is this shape?" that I should go into the details and explain how this is a product of evolution by natural selection. So the teleological view of nature was indeed useful, predictive, and fruitful, and, within the fields of zoology and botany, it is still a good approximation to the truth nine times out of ten.
I thought that maybe some of you would like to shoot me down.
Comments, please?
_____________________________________
Nowadays, when the words "Intelligent Design" are a cloak for ignorance and prejudice, it is easy to forget that for a few hundred years true scientists truly believed that species had been designed. Unlike their modern successors, they did not sit in armchairs dreaming up wordy, flimsy arguments. They spent their lives looking closely at nature, describing it, cataloguing it, thinking about it.
According to the view of science that we have developed, this approach to biology must have been a useful way of looking at the world which made predictions and fruitfully suggested research programs. I shall call this approach to nature, when carried out by real scientists, teleology. Teleology is the attempt to understand a living thing, or some feature of a living thing, by asking: "What is it for?" I say that this can be useful, predictive, and fruitful.
As an example: if you discover a moth with an oddly shaped proboscis (feeding organ) and you could then do as a teleologist would do, and ask youself: "What is it for?" And you would then come to the correct conclusion. Knowing that moths feed on the nectar of night-flowering plants, you would deduce that there is one particular plant (or maybe more) which is so shaped that the moth's proboscis fits it exactly, and that the moth is "for" feeding on the nectar of the plant, and pollenising it. In the same way, shown the strange convolutions of the flower, you could, on teleological principles, deduce the moth --- or maybe some sort of nocturnal beetle or hummingbird, but you'd put your money on a moth.
Or a teleologist, starting from the properties of water, might deduce that swimming creatures should be streamlined along their axis of travel. Indeed, the perfect, ideal teleologist would be able to look at a fish and deduce the existence of something very like water.
And, as ever, the old theory is explained by the one that replaced it. If Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection is correct, then this too explains why the moth fits the flower, and why the fish fits the sea. It also explains what would be paradoxical from a teleological point of view. For example, there are herd animals in which a few bull males rule over the herd, and have their pick of the females. If you consider the surplus males, and ask what they are "for" --- for their species or themselves, the answer is nothing much. Yet evolution by natural selection makes it compulsory that the male to female birth rate should be fifty-fifty, It is not "for" anything, but it's true.
What sunk teleology, however, was not the observation of such anomalies in botany and zoology (the fields that it was suppposed to explain). It was sunk by biogeography, morphology, paleontology, geology, and genetics. It is not just that the teleological view fails to explain these sciences: it is flatly contradicted by them.
As with other cases we've looked at, the old theory is still often a good way to explain things --- within the fields of botany and zoology in which it was applied. We still talk of the sun rising, rather than the Earth rotating, and in the same way the teleological approach is in ordinary trivial cases a very useful way of looking at things. If you ask me: "Why is a fish that shape?" then I will certainly begin by explaining that streamlining is useful to the fish. It is only if you put the question more carefully: "How did fish evolve so that this fish is this shape?" that I should go into the details and explain how this is a product of evolution by natural selection. So the teleological view of nature was indeed useful, predictive, and fruitful, and, within the fields of zoology and botany, it is still a good approximation to the truth nine times out of ten.
