Teleology in Biology

[Secular Sanity]

There's not much at Sciforums these days but this caught my eye.  

David Hull (1974, p.102) put the matter very nicely:

"Just as a physicist might say that heating a gas causes it to expand, a biologist might say that heating a mammal causes it to sweat. But a biologist might also say that a mammal sweats when heated in order to keep its temperature constant, while no physicist would say that a gas expands when heated in order to keep its temperature constant --- even though that is exactly what happens.

What, then, are the theoretical commitments implicit in the biological concept of function that distinguish the case of the sweating mammal from that of the expanding gas? Why is constant temperature merely an effect of gas expansion while being the "function" of sweating in mammals? Explicating the biologist's concept of function in order to answer these questions is one of the problems for a philosopher of science interested in biology...

An obvious way to think about the difference between the sweating mammal and the expanding gas is in terms of goals or purposes: sweating is in some sense "goal directed" or "purposive"...

But, while we have a firm grasp of teleological processes in the behavioral arena (we know that it is for a person to act purposively or in a goal-directed manner), how can a process such as sweating be teleological (purposive or goal directed)? This question cuts to the heart of a long-standing philosophical problem. For ever since the scientific revolution, one of philosophy's foremost problems has been whether, and if so how, teleology is possible in nature. This problem has its roots in the conflict between Aristotelian metaphysics, which dominated philosophical thought before the scientific revolution of the 16th and 17th centuries, and the "corpuscularian" or "mechanical philosophy" that accompanied the scientific revolution.

http://www.sunypress.edu/pdf/54101.pdf

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

What role do functions play in biology? Biological explanations and theorizing seem to be hugely teleological. Is it possible to banish teleology from biology entirely?

This is something that I think about. I said once that there’s a reason why things happen but things do not happen for a reason.

Is there no progress or direction?

What did you think of James R’s answer?

[C C]

While there can be peripheral and interdisciplinary departures, biology treated as a discrete subsection of science seems to exclusively deal with complex structures of interacting components that are hell-bent on replicating or preserving their patterns. Accordingly it can't completely avoid the conceptual interpretations and resonances like "specialized functions" and "purposes" that reside under such a general umbrella of "studying systems with configurational, mechanistically expressed self-interest".

Being a distinct discipline entails distinguishing itself from other areas like physics, in both nomenclature and outlook, and posturing itself as explanatorily independent of the latter as much as circumstances will allow. There's a grudging acknowledgement of cells and bodies having to be ontologically constituted of atoms and elemental conditions made possible by fundamental forces / agencies. But there might be certain matters which could be brought up in a forum inhabited by biologists, about how _X_ likewise needs to incrementally develop from precursors. With the ensuing responses possibly illustrating how fiercely biology can occasionally or reflexively deem itself as floating on its own, featuring its own brutely emergent or conjured properties / capacities.

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[C C]

Setting aside the supposed descriptive conventions of physics or other "non-life" physical sciences as a whole to get to the original provenance... Should biology be totally beholden to the invented prescriptions of naturalism or the latter's "let's pretend philosophical naturalism is the case" methodological game?

Naturalism: Naturalism, challenging the cogency of the cosmological, teleological, and moral arguments, holds that the universe requires no supernatural cause and government, but is self-existent, self-explanatory, self-operating, and self-directing, that the world-process is not teleological and anthropocentric, but purposeless, deterministic (except for possible tychistic events), and only incidentally productive of man; that human life, physical, mental, moral and spiritual, is an ordinary natural event attributable in all respects to the ordinary operations of nature; and that man's ethical values, compulsions, activities, and restraints can be justified on natural grounds, without recourse to supernatural sanctions, and his highest good pursued and attained under natural conditions, without expectation of a supernatural destiny. --Runes Dictionary of Philosophy

process: "A particular course of action intended to achieve a result."

All those proscriptions against "supernatural" this and that apparently don't forbid natural operation from referring to itself (via human mediators) as its own version of procedure / functioning / producing and selecting results orientation.

~

[Secular Sanity]

All those proscriptions against "supernatural" this and that apparently don't forbid natural operation from referring to itself (via human mediators) as its own version of procedure / functioning / producing and selecting results orientation.

It boggles the mind, that’s for sure. I’ll have to do a little more reading on it. That does sound reasonable, though.

Thanks, C C!