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Do We Need Purposes in Biology?

#1
C C Offline
https://www.bigquestionsonline.com/2017/...s-biology/

EXCERPT: Emily Dickinson often had a rather chilly view of things. Around the end of the Civil War, five years after Charles Darwin had published his Origin of Species, she wrote this short poem about the life of worms [...] Notice how, right at the beginning, the poet identifies us humans with worms. Things only go downhill from there! The worms are gobbled down by a bird, and much the same seems to be said of our relationship with God. [...] As we see the worm has a purpose, so God sees that we have a purpose; but just as the purpose of the worm has no connection to the worm’s wellbeing, so our purpose seems not to have much to do with our wellbeing.

[...] Breaking with tradition, Immanuel Kant argued in the eighteenth century that final-cause thinking is essentially heuristic: final causes don’t exist out there in nature, but are instead something we impose on nature to make sense of things. [...]

The answer is natural selection. So here we have the reason why final-cause talk is permissible and necessary. Thanks to the processes of evolution, organisms appear design-like, even though they are ultimately the result of random variations plus natural selection. In order to make sense of this fact, we often think and talk in terms of ends or purposes, although these ends or purposes don’t actually exist in the real world. So in a sense, Kant was right: teleological thinking is heuristic, something imposed on the world by us. It is no less useful or legitimate for all of that. Physics doesn’t have need of final-cause talk because, not having been produced by natural selection, the objects of physics do not appear designed in the same way.

While this takes God or occult forces out of the scientific picture, don’t think that going this direction means that all is secular or meaningless — Kant and Darwin today, Richard Dawkins tomorrow. Far from it! The believer can continue to see nature as God’s creation and natural processes as God working His purposes out. It is just that God does it through evolution, rather than by intervening miracle. Moreover...

MORE: https://www.bigquestionsonline.com/2017/...s-biology/
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#2
Yazata Offline
Why do animals have hearts? In order to pump blood, of course! Why do animals have eyes? To see!!

J.B.S. Haldane once said, 'Teleology is like a mistress to biologists. They can't live without her, but they don't want to be seen with her in public."

Philosophers of biology disagree on whether teleological language and thought can be eradicated from biology.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teleology_in_biology
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#3
Secular Sanity Offline
(Oct 13, 2017 09:05 PM)Yazata Wrote: J.B.S. Haldane once said, "Teleology is like a mistress to biologists. They can't live without her, but they don't want to be seen with her in public."

Good line!  

I loved Samuel Scheffler’s article.

I believe in life after death.

"In Death and the Afterlife, philosopher Samuel Scheffler poses this thought experiment in order to show that the continued life of the human race after our deaths - the "afterlife" of the title - matters to us to an astonishing and previously neglected degree. Indeed, Scheffler shows that, in certain important respects, the future existence of people who are as yet unborn matters more to us than our own continued existence and the continued existence of those we love. Without the expectation that humanity has a future, many of the things that now matter to us would cease to do so. By contrast, the prospect of our own deaths does little to undermine our confidence in the value of our activities. Despite the terror we may feel when contemplating our deaths, the prospect of humanity's imminent extinction would pose a far greater threat to our ability to lead lives of wholehearted engagement."

The Importance of the Afterlife. Seriously.

[…]I think this shows that some widespread assumptions about human egoism are oversimplified at best. However self-interested or narcissistic we may be, our capacity to find purpose and value in our lives depends on what we expect to happen to others after our deaths. Even the egotistic tycoon who is devoted to his own glory might discover that his ambitions seemed pointless if humanity’s disappearance was imminent. Although some people can afford not to depend on the kindness of strangers, virtually everyone depends on the future existence of strangers...

There is also a lesson here for those who think that unless there is a personal afterlife, their lives lack any meaning or purpose. What is necessary to underwrite the perceived significance of what we do, it seems, is not a belief in the afterlife but rather a belief that humanity will survive, at least for a good long time.

...our descendants depend on us to make possible their existence and well-being. But we also depend on them and their existence if we are to lead flourishing lives ourselves. And so our reasons to overcome the threats to humanity’s survival do not derive solely from our obligations to our descendants. We have another reason to try to ensure a flourishing future for those who come after us: it is simply that, to an extent that we rarely recognize or acknowledge, they already matter so much to us.[…]
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