You are imposing philosophy onto biology that cannot exist without ID.
Growth is not directed as such. If there is a fault in the system it can go wrong or grow something erroneous, but that has nothing to do with teleology.
Direction and “building” has always been a thorn in Evolutions side because they need a consciousness to happen. The answer has always been the Scattershot I hinted at earlier. There are so many deviations one will work. But, this ignores the futility of the thousands or so that don’t work and even implies that the majority are inert rather than detrimental. Unfortunately Nature does not seen to echo that notion. The net result is a gene lottery, whereby it churns out thousands of variations but the only ones that matter are the “jackpots” wrong number sequences are ignored because they are meaningless?
This is why I have always claimed that fully understanding genetic code, as opposed to mapping it, is essential to evolutionary theory. Without it you are playing with half a deck. Is gene sequence a code? If so, how could it be without “design”? Such a complex system to arrive by fluke would be beyond any statistical value. If gene sequences are not a code, what are they? how do you account for a sequence creating a bone, or a lung if it isn’t some sort of code? Not to mention the difficulty of ancillary details such as blood and nervous systems.
The logical answer is the equivalent of a “plug and play” system where the construction includes everything needed, but that would take some doing if it were just a random deviation or two.
There just has to be a base code equivalent of the “laws of Physics” that is inbuilt into the Universe. The atheistic view of that would be along the lines of “essential to exist” as in: If it didn’t exist nether would life (multiverse etc) making the Earth the biggest fluke in creation, let alone us mere humans.
It is this “Philosophical” criticism that Biologists seem to need to resist or refute on the grounds that it isn’t science!
@Vinnie That sounds like deism of some kind. It differs from theism drastically. It’s also like someone telling, “to me John is Vinnie. Vinnie may be Vinnie under neo-personalism but I’m an Aristotelian blah blah blah.”
Think about that. You can’t go wrong or grow erroneously unless there is a standard for “growing right.” The entire language of it makes absolutely no sense without goal-directedness. The acorn can fail to achieve its intended ends. Eyes sometimes don’t see. Hearts poorly pump blood or sometimes stop pumping blood altogether. The world consists of competing teleologies (e.g lions and zebra). The flourishing of some things comes at thwarting of others. All of it is based on intrinsic teleology.
The entire system is teleological (intrinsic) as the regularity of nature shows. It is baked into it. ID typically deals with watches and artifacts and external teleology. Before we even get to biological systems, we can start with pure physics and chemistry where regularity is observed. This post above laid out the basics of it:
So when you say this:
My argument is there is intrinsic teleology every step of the way. But I would also contend that biological organisms are not reducible to just random mutations or lines of code.
We call this immanent teleology for organisms. An oak tree has parts that are directed inherently toward the good of the organism itself. Organisms act as unified wholes in my mind directed toward their own survival. This is not a fake view of reality whereas the underlying bits and pieces view is the only real one. That is a prejudice of modern materialism and a world that has purposefully remove formal and final causality. Material and efficient causation only gives you a really rough skeleton like outlook on the world. It reduces a table to wood and nails as it reduces an organism to just mutations and code. I would never think “wood and nails” and “a carpenter banged the nails
into the wood” (efficient and material causes) are a complete description of a table. A table is of course an artifact but without formal and final causality, our description is incomplete. Just the same for natural substances.
I think computer code is an artifact. It is something created by humans that has its meaning imposed on it by an external mind. Biological organisms are natural substances. So there might be a category error in here somewhere.
I see the world differently. You seem to be operating in the realm of only efficient and material causes. In my mind an organism doesn’t develop a lung because an external line of code told it to, but because it is the nature (the substantial form) of that specific living thing to develop parts for its own flourishing (immanent teleology). The code or sequence of DNA is the material cause but it’s the formal cause that directs the organism as a unified whole. I think you are getting at a real problem but you are playing with the materialists deck of cards and using their rules.
This isnt deism at all. Deism actually makes the same error neo theistic personalism does but goes the opposite direction. It sees God not as the ground of being but as essentially a creature that created the world and left it on its own. Classical theism says God not only created the universe but sustains it all the time. To quote Hebrews 1:3, speaking of Jesus “He is the radiance of the glory of God and the exact imprint of his nature, and he upholds the universe by the word of his power.”
Actually, it is classical theism, the Orthodox foundation of Christian philosophy and doctrine that dominated the Church, scholastic thought and is still used by Catholicism and many philosophers today. You call it blah blah blah but you appear to be vastly unacquainted with it and I’d guess are only used to engaging in poor arguments with theistic personalists on the internet.
If someone wants to knock down and attack caricatures of God that is their business. If they want to seek truth then I would recommend they steel-man classical theism as that is the strongest and best formulation.
Maybe not in your version of evolution, but in ecology courses it was clearly evident that evolution tends towards balance. I doubt that has changed in thirty years.
“Explained away”? They’re explained by genetic deviation: other species are part of the environment to which species have to adapt.
Obviously not, since over 99% of all the species that have ever dwelt on this earth aren’t around any longer.
Nope. That’s so far from right I don’t even know where to start in addressing it.
I am sorry, but we are not communicating here. We may as well be asserting black is white or the grass is green. It is a matter of personal perspective not right or wrong, or even actuality.
Comparing natural selection to a filter is a crude attempt to make the phenomenon understandable - it tells that natural selection is not an active agent selecting anything, just a title for something that is observed in populations. There are no actual filters that organisms try to beat. The organisms just live their life, eat, reproduce and try to avoid dangers. Some manage better than the others and get more grandchildren than the others. That may change the genetic composition of the following generation(s) and that is evolution.
Biological systems hardly have goals. Individuals try to stay alive, reproduce and maybe help their offspring survive, which could liberally be called a goal. Population is just a theoretical concept, an invented label for the sufficiently similar individuals that live in the same area at the same time. Population is a useful concept for practical work but a population has no goals. Species is an even more vague theoretical concept. Species have no goals, they do not aim towards saving the species or anything else.
Biologists sometimes use expressions that may be misleading for those who do not understand the system or biological processes. ‘Advantageous mutations’ is one of such expressions. Mutations can be harmful, neutral or beneficial. When someone wants to talk of the subgroup of mutations that apparently are beneficial for the individuals in that environment, they may use the expression ‘advantageous’. Mutations are not inherently advantageous or harmful, they just may affect the fate of an individual. The effect depends on the environment; a mutation may be harmful in one environment but beneficial in another type of environment.
Traits do not survive. We may observe a trait in a population and note that the same trait can be seen also in the following generations. Maybe someone can call it ‘survival’ but that is just a poor expression.
Technically, evolution doesn’t do it - ecology does, usually via a feedback mechanism.
Nor are they necessarily finely tuned, they’re more usually cyclic:
increased prey numbers → more food for predators → increased predator numbers → more predation → reduced prey numbers → less food for predators → reduced predator numbers → less predation → increased prey numbers.
This can be simulated/modelled as well as observed in the wild, and there are many known examples of the predator/prey balance not being finely tuned, leading to (near) extinction or massive population increase of one or the other, especially when invasive species are involved. See e.g. rabbits/mice/toads in Australia, pythons in Florida, cats on St Stephens island, rodents in New Zealand, jellyfish in the Black Sea, etc etc etc.
