Re: [asa] Biologic Institute

> If you really are not against 'teleology,' Rich, then why not
> confront the
> reality that the majority of evolutionary biological scientists are
> in fact
> a-teleological in their approaches?

This confuses several different levels of purpose:
a) does the thing in question have a particular function?
b) is there an overall goal or purpose within evolution, something
detectable by science?
c) is there any ultimate plan or direction to things, making use of
evolution?

For example, suppose I decide something by flipping a coin. The coin
has no goal or purpose in the activity. No amount of scrutiny of the
coin nor of the relevant laws of physics will discern a relevant
purpose. Knowing me is how you detect the purpose in the event.

Physicists do not claim that gravity has any purpose and direction.
Why do you not disparrage the accomodationist behavior of theistic
gravitationists? Neither evolution nor gravity provides any
teleological direction because science is no good at providing
teleology. This is precisely what we should expect from Genesis 1.
There are no rival gods out there, no chaos monsters. The forces of
nature are merely things created by God, with no goals of their own.

Trying to make a purely scientific teleology runs into three problems.
First, the claim that science provides moral direction is itself not
a scientific statement-you are making philosophical assumptions in
order to reach any philosophcial conclusions. Secondly, science tells
us "if this, then that." You must impose some sort of moral standard
to decide that outcome A is desired and not outcome B. For example,
if you are seeking to push along your evolutionary progress, why not
start by cutting off all but your middle digit on each limb to try to
catch up with horse evolution? Under a given set of circumstances,
biology can tell us that certain organisms or traits are more likely
to succeed, but it cannot tell the difference between Progress and
Going Bad (Prince Caspian)-neutral change is also a possibility.
Finally, the realities of biology rarely align precisely with the
moral standards that we want, so the claimed use of animal examples is
rarely honest. I don't think the individuals saying "Let's do it like
they do on the Discovery Channel" would follow through if the program
focused on black widows, banana slugs, orchids, or in fact in full
detail if the program was on anything else. A worker on deep-sea
cephalopods captured two octopi that at first appeared to be a mating
pair; however they were both male. "Gay octopus" was a media
senstion, but they failed to note that the two were not congeneric.
This would be a role model for bestiality, not homosexuality.
Furthermore, if you really think that, e.g., apes are good role models
for humans, you don't merely invoke sexual behaviors vaguely
resembling what you want to do. You should go live in the jungle and
eat leaves and termites for a while, and then I'll believe you really
take them as a model, not as an excuse.

Similarly, considering the ant only gets you wise when you already
know what you ought to do. Ants are diligent. Ants do tasks
mindlessly. Ants carry things with their mouths and use all limbs for
locomotion. Some ants kidnap young ants from other nests and enslave
them. Biology can't tell you which of those aspects should be
emulated, though it can tell us that carrying stuff with our mouths
and crawling on all fours isn't the most efficient approach for
humans.

Study of biological change indeed does not reveal any higher purpose.
Organism a changes this way, organism b changes that way. While there
are some statistical patterns, the only way to tell for certain which
of the species present before an extinction event will survive is to
sample after it. If you want higher purpose, you need to look
elsewhere. Note that this refutes all attempts to make biological
evolution the justification for a social agenda. Biology cannot
identify a master race, superior individuals or cultures, etc. I have
an evolutionary self-interest in promoting the success of my own
genes, but that is in your interest only insofar as we share genes or
are able to work together on something. There is no evolutionary
interest in bettering the human race, unless you allow each person to
define bettering the human race as making it more like themselves, in
which case you have a bunch of mutually conflicting goals. (Of
course, that's what purported schemes to evolutionarily better the
human race actually boil down to under scrutiny.)

The same goes for history. The main way that we see God at work in
history is hindsight; even then, there are a lot of points where we
wonder what He's doing. History is not obviously working towards any
particular goal. Good doesn't always win. Job's friends were wrong
in thinking they could inevitably judge one's spiritual condition from
his physical condition. God is inclined to overthrow the mighty, lift
up the humble, and confound the wisdom of the wise. Expectation to
find a clear directionality merely by examination of physically
observable patterns is misplaced, no matter how loudly Johnson says he
expects it.

With hindsight, we can see that God worked out things for some
relatively unpromising wormy things in the latest Precambrian to
earliest Cambrian to evolve into vertebrates and eventually into us.
 From biology, however, there's nothing to tell us why chordates
diversified and priapulids declined.

If we have some moral guidance from another source (e.g., Scripture),
we can then put the information from science to work. We know that
God is at work in evolution, whether or not we understand just why it
followed a particular course. We can learn ways to help our neighbors
and be better stewards of creation through a better knowledge of how
the physical world, including our bodies and our pathogens, work.

> Those biological evolutionists who pretend to appease teleological
> thinking
> are amateur philosophically, easy to see through, and rather
> innocuous using
> concepts such as 'fitness' and 'directed' without any identifiable
> 'agency.'

Evolutionary fitness is relative to the environment, whatever that
happens to be at the moment. No ultimate teleology is implied.
Likewise, social implies having significant interaction between
individuals, and does not entail ultimate goals.

> Just because TE/EC's propose to 'allow' some kind of mysterious and
> non-empirically verified 'guidance' (guided evolution) in the door
> (tack-on)
> does nothing to positively implicate 'teleology' in the rigorous
> (naturalistic) science of evolution.

Properly, evolution is the empirically observed physical pattern
tacked onto the theological presupposition that God is at work in all
events, whether they occur via ordinary physical patterns or not.

> Taking the discussion onto a more level playing field, the IDM
> (according to
> Dembski) is in part trying to re-legitimize (Aristotelian) formal
> and final
> causality in the scientific process.

Several issues are mixed up in the ID approach here:
a) the semantic question-what does the word "science" mean? In
practice, in modern English it typically refers to physical study of
the physical world. Some ID claims fail to conform to this, but they
want to claim that they are doing science and so complain about the
definition of science. Thereby, they are endorsing the claim that
non-science is lesser. However, they don't really want to revert to
an older definition of science. They want to claim that they are
really doing science in the modern sense, and all this theology just
happened to pop out of their scientific study. The fact that all the
focus is on evolution also conflicts with the claim to be interested
in the general definition of science.
b) the silly legal situation in the U.S. where religion gets banned
from public schools, so that a successful labeling of something as
science has legal implications. "It's not science" is thus being used
illegitimately to repress ID, etc. "It's partly bad science and
partly not science" is a more accurate assessment.
c) the misperception that science is more authoritative than other
types of information. It is very good at addressing questions within
its field, but that has made everyone want to claim to be scientific.
Why worry about whether "social sciences" are considered to be real
sciences or not unless being "science" is perceived as prestigious in
some way?
d) physical study of things simply isn't good at dealing with formal
and final causality.
e) No matter how we expand or restrict the definition of science, the
ID movement includes claims that are wrong and thus are bad science.

> But that is simply 'not science' (and by implication, according to
> neo-Darwinists, somehow 'lesser.')<

According to people like Dawkins, etc. "not science" implies inferior.
According to creation science and ID, "not science" implies inferior,
otherwise, why waste so much energy for such poor "scientific" support
for your claims? Why such efforts to have claims designated as
"science"? Why not just admit that the scientific data don't support
the view, but you think other evidence does? Individuals who favor a
neo-darwinistic view of biological evolution could have any number of
philosophical positions and may or may not consider science superior
to others.

> Such is a fragmented view of things, unintegrative, unholistic,
> incomplete. And if nothing else, some in the IDM are trying to
> change this
> outdated perspective, an unfortunate legacy of the mixture of
> neo-Enlightenment Science and Protestant Christian Faith.

Trying to change it by swallowing it, hook, line, and sinker, is not
very effective.

> "information is undeniably the stuff of science. It is also the
> stuff of
> technology
which is the stuff of design," it seems you natural scientific
> folks are going to need to speak the language of 'cybernetics' much
> more
> fluently than I've yet seen displayed on the ASA list in the past two+
> years. Please direct me to the discussions and speak of their
> updating on
> this topic(e.g. Prigogine and Stengers) if available.

There are some people on the list with strong backgounds in
cybernetics. As for me, I note that this reflects an incorrect
concept of information as it applies to biological evolution. The
information for biological evolution is the environment. Organisms
succeed if their genetic information adequately matches this existing
information. Mutation, recombination, etc. continually provides new
genetic information to test against the environmental information.
There's no mystery about where information could come from.

-- 
Dr. David Campbell
425 Scientific Collections
University of Alabama
"I think of my happy condition, surrounded by acres of clams"
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