The Paradox of Evolution by Stephen Rothman

Author:Stephen Rothman
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781633880733
Publisher: Prometheus Books
Published: 2015-11-03T16:00:00+00:00

THE TELEOLOGY OF DANGER

It should be understood that introducing purpose into biology is not an argument for higher purposes. As I have described them, they are ordinary, not higher or divine purposes. They are nothing more than aspects of the physical world. This brings us to the question of final causes, their final cause, the final cause of living things. Remember, I said that for the teleological claim to be justified, we must be able to locate and identify the final cause of expressed purposes, most generally the final cause of survival.

If our intentions arise from within us, then at least at first glance it would seem that so would the final cause of our expressed purposes. For instance, for human artifacts it is our purpose to bring them into being. Are we not then the final cause of this desire, its inventor? If by lived experience or by our actions as artificers, purposes exist and arise within us, then so, it seems, must their final causes. But this is not the case. Final causes, even those of our inventions, come from the outside world. This is so even though an environmental source of a final cause may not only seem wrongly conceived but also vague and nebulous, evoking thoughts of metaphysics. This raises what at first glance is a breathtaking question: Putting godly causes aside, if the final cause of our purposes is to be found in the external world, what in that world could it possibly be? Happily, Darwin's theory provides a simple, even a mundane, all-purpose answer to this question.

As has been pointed out, the victim of a deadly assault acts with the purpose of staying alive and employs various means to that end. These purposes inhere to the quarry. The gazelle's purpose in running is to escape the cheetah, to elude the danger it presents, to escape death. Everything it does in response to the attack, whether running, jumping, going fast, changing speed, taking evasive action, increasing its heart and respiratory rate, or decreasing its gastrointestinal activity, and so forth has the common purpose of prevailing in spite of the danger, all of it with the intention of surviving.

Though survival is the gazelle's purpose, the final cause of that purpose is not found within it. Nor is it found in the attacking cheetah, notwithstanding the fact that it is the reason for the gazelle's action. It is not found in either place or for that matter in an object, but in the danger to survival. The cheetah does not pose a danger to the gazelle by merely being but by its action. Without the threat, without the attack, the cheetah poses no danger, and there would be no need for action on the gazelle's part, no need to run, to escape. It was the extant danger that was the final cause of the gazelle's purpose; it was the reason for its actions.

That danger, whether exigent or merely perceived, is the final cause of the actions taken by any and all organisms to survive any and all assaults.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.