Does teleology hang on in Venice? 18 Dec 201022 Jun 2018 Here’s an interesting paper, which I haven’t had time to digest, but which I thought I’d better mention before it enters the fog my brain contains these days… It’s by David Depew, one of my favourite philosophical writers on evolution (in no small part because he takes a historical approach to the topic): Is Evolutionary Biology Infected With Invalid Teleological Reasoning? A Review Of Not By Design: Retiring Darwin’s Watchmaker By John O. Reiss, University Of California Press, 2009, in Philosophy and Theory in Biology It’s open access right now. Depew argues against Reiss’ claim that teleological thinking infects evolutionary biology. As I tend to agree with that contention, I have to do some considered reflection after I mark all the exams and assignments. Soon. Sometime. For now let me say this: there is nothing wrong with using teleological language; but only when the subject is a teleological system. I can talk about the purpose of something when a purposive system has intended it, but natural selection is not purposive; it only appears to be to observers (who are). Natural selection is simply a process of thus and so a kind of mechanical causation (retentive, etc.). To assert that it is a property of the things being selected that they are “for” something, rather than a property of the investigator’s conceptual scheme, is what I call the ontological fallacy, basically to project the properties of ideas and words onto the world. Maynard Smith used to say to students “Is this [discussion] about words or the world? If it is about words, I will go, but if it is about the world, I will stay”. Elliot Sober famously wrote of a distinction between “selection of” and “selection for”, to cover the known issue of hitchhiking (pleitropy) in the selection of genes and traits: “Selection of” pertains to the effects of a selection process, whereas “selection for” describes its causes. To say that there is selection for a given property means that having that property causes success in survival and reproduction. But to say that a given sort of object was selected is merely to say that the result of the selection process was to increase the representation of that kind of object. … I offer the following slogan to summarize this logical point: “selection of” does not imply “selection for”. … “Selection for” is the causal concept par excellence. Selection for properties causes differences in survival and reproductive success … [The Nature of Selection (1984), p. 100.] I quote these because I have been debating Douglas Theobald in email about whether the selection-for distinction is even necessary; it looks like Reiss also thinks it is not. I am going to have to read his book. For my money (before I get back to examining) here is the way it should be conceived. There is no objective, real, observer-independent distinction between selection of and for. Selection occurs through causal differences, and every causal difference makes a difference. If there is a physical difference that is a trait of the organism, and it ends up spreading through the population, then it is selected. What the causal story is, can only be discerned, if at all, post hoc. Any actual causal difference may play some role, and probably does, in the selection process. Physical differences make a causal difference, and we cannot ignore them. For example, consider Gould and Lewontin’s famous attack on the “Spandrels of San Marco“. They argue that the spandrels (pendentives, actually, but that’s verbalistic pedantry) in the spaces between the columns and the dome, which show pictures of the Gospel writers, are not there to show those pictures, but are post hoc decoration. It would be a mistake to think they are the purpose of those spaces. Here’s the image in their paper: Taken from here. It’s a compelling point. Or it was, until I went there, and saw this: From here. The entire church is there solely to display decoration. It is as obvious a display of wealth and power as it is possible to imagine. The dome, the columns, and yes, the pendentives, are all there to display these gold mosaics. What level of description you choose to give of the cathedral determines the purposiveness of the structure and its parts. Gould and Lewontin might be accused of inappropriate atomisation of the church. Now I am not saying that some features of an organismic type are not more causally important than others. Obviously some must be. Instead I am saying that we cannot ever characterise what is, and what is not, important unless we have complete information, which we almost never do (the Grants’ study of Darwin’s finches, and the long-term study of the Soay sheep may count as sufficient evidence to make claims at least at the observable phenotypic level). And yet that caveat is almost never taken seriously. We talk unconstrainedly about “selection for” this or that, as if we had some basis for our claims apart from intuition. The reason why I object to selection for talk is that it usually if not always turns out to be talk about us and our dispositions rather than those of the organisms under study. And as the size of the potential data set increases, our intuitions are less reliable. Even with the use of statistical analyses of molecular data, we have limited warrant for our inferences if we do not already know (or intuit) what “the players” are in each selective sweep. That something has been the effect of a selective sweep is relatively (!) easy to identify. That it is the trait selected for is not. We use it out of all proportion to our knowledge. I am something of a panadaptationist, in this sense: I think that all traits at all times are subjected to some degree of selection, and almost all traits are maintained at a high level of fitness. Noise, in the form of drift, neutrality and so on, all apply, also, to all traits at all times. At best we can say that the rates of change of a trait or gene in a population are predominantly noisy or selective at a given time. We cannot, though, say with any real warrant that some particular trait is selected for, unless we have done a major study after the event and during. The reason this is uppermost in my mind right now, apart from my debate with Doug, is that I think this is where whatever philosophical purchase the recent Fodor and Piatelli-Palmerini book lies. Like their “Darwinian” opponents, FAPP, as I call them, consider that for a selective explanation to work you must identify the traits selected for (although I think they do real harm to that distinction in the book); only, they think you have to do this ahead of time for the explanation to be scientific. Because selection is not that sort of a theory (unlike, say, a physics theory), it is not, they argue, a scientific theory; the special pleading is obvious. But their confusion lies in thinking that we have to have a prior idea of what gets selected and what is causally significant; I think selection is a schematic explanation that is filled out in each case. Lose the of/for distinction, and we can say well enough that there is selection and that the spread of an allele or trait in a population is selected (or noisy). Anything more is about us and our way of describing, selecting for investigation, and understanding. Now, having made that blunt claim, I must appeal to the philosopher who wrote, “there’s the bit where you say it, and the bit where you take it back”.* Of course we will continue to say that this or that trait is the main, or even the sole, cause of a selective sweep. We almost cannot help it. And it is probably harmless in most cases. This is not about what scientists do, but about what philosophical implications one can draw from it. Philosophers like to privilege aspects of organisms and ideas as being somehow “the” point; in this lies the inherent teleology. Fine, but if we then conclude that selection, which is an entirely post hoc process, gives us intentionality, meaning, and purpose, well then I agree with Reiss and not, say, Millikan or Sober. In selection, stuff happens, and afterwards we admire the results. There’s a lot more to say about this, but I really must finish my marking before the Dean has a go at me… This is me in Venice, to prove I am not merely conducting a thought experiment about San Marco, which is behind me on the left: Photo by Jenny Webster. J. L. Austin in Sense and Sensibilia, page 2. Epistemology Evolution Metaphysics Philosophy Science EvolutionPhilosophy
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Evolution Myth 3: Darwin was a Lamarckian 16 Feb 2009 Myth 3: Darwin was actually a Lamarckian This one is subtle. It implies that Darwin, because he lacked a Mendelian account of heredity, was not actually a “true” (or Neo-)Darwinian. The error depends on the extent of what is named as a school of thought in science and why. Read More
Ecology and Biodiversity 50 words for snow 7: taxing attacks on taxa 1 Jan 2018 We should consider in each case what Question it is that is proposed, and what answer to it would, in the instance before us, be the most opposite or contrasted to the one to be examined. E.G. “You will find this doctrine in Bacon” may be contrasted, either with “You… Read More
Of course nature is purposive and teleological. Do you really think nothing but humans acts with purpose? All creatures act with purpose. It’s just a continuum of complexity in purpose and representational thought that informs each act of purpose. So to ignore teleology in biology is like ignoring gravity in cosmology. And hence some of the major problems in biology and other sciences remain today. Here’s a piece I’ve written on this topic recently: http://www.noetic.org/noetic/issue-four-november-2010/absent-minded-science-part/#comments
Of course nature is purposeless and a-teleological. Living organisms mechanically maintain their homeostasis or die. Rather than Natural Selection (which imports the implication of agency from our teleological English) think rather of natural winnowing. Stuff is thrown into the air and blind mechanical forces discriminate between stuff that is kept and stuff that is lost. In winnowing, stuff happens, and afterwards we admire the survivors. I’ve occasionally tried to restate Natural Selection in E-Prime (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eprime) to avoid the implicit assumptions of agency but alas I find it too easy to slip into habitual ways of speaking.
I like to think of this as the Autistic’s Eye View. Science should be autistic when dealing with the natural world…
John, the Autistic’s Eye View sounds like another name for what I call “absent-minded science.” This view allows us to learn about exactly half of the universe: the outsides of things. But our understanding is woefully incomplete (exactly 50% incomplete) if we ignore the insides of things – agency/purpose/consciousness.
DJ, are you telling me that humans have no agency? And if so, why on earth would agency stop at humans? Aren’t chimps purposeful in their behavior? Dolphins, cats, bats, rats, gnats, etc? And aren’t all of these creatures active agents in shaping their environments through their choices? Thus, even if we accept (which I don’t) that trait variation is entirely random, the processes of selection are certainly not random. Sexual selection, for example, is a well-known, but little-discussed agent/force in evolution. And this principle goes all the way down.
This needs a much longer reply than is feasible in a comment. First you have to define agency… Certainly humans behave as if they were agents, therefore they have the characteristic of ‘agency’, and appear to be tuned to detect it, whether it exists or not. But do humans have freedom to express agency any way they want? My contention is that they rarely, if ever, behave outside the tramlines of stimulus/response. Very complex and interwoven associations between stimulus and response, sure, but still determined. I suspect that the feeling of possessing agency is as real and motivational as the feeling of fear, or hunger, or desire for prestige, and possibly the feeling of self identification. Do feelings exist outside the mechanical cells and chemical reactions? They are certainly convincing but you would expect Natural Winnowing to leave survivors with more appropriate motivations to promote more appropriate behaviours, to leave more copies of their genes. But still no ‘Purpose’, still no external guide to behaviour.
The whole concept is a bit like the Pathetic Fallacy, however rather than implying purposeful choice to inanimate things and objects instead teleology implies willful choice of mutations towards some predetermined end. A bit like a group of Gorillas sitting around and deciding on a breeding program to “evolve” a super Gorilla to compete with humanity
I think the distincion Sober drew between what he dubbed ‘selection of’ and ‘selection for’ is important, though the redisual teleological flavor of ‘for’ is unfortunate (and Sober doesn’t interpret it teleologically). My guess is that a careful exposition in terms of factors that contribute positively, or negatively, or neither to changes in the relative frequency of organic traits could obviate debates about the telelogical character of natural selective processes.
A little more on the differences between sexual selection and natural selection below. Sexual selection is very much agentic/purposive – by definition. So to argue that evolution is blind/purposeless directly contradicts the well-accepted notion of sexual selection. Sexual selection is arguably a more general theory than natural selection. Historically, these two selective forces have been presented by biologists as parallel forces, but with natural selection as by far the more important force. In reality, of course, there is no “force” behind natural selection, as it is traditionally framed. It’s just physics and chemistry in action, so when we talk about natural selection as a force or an agent, it’s reification of a sort at work. Rather than being an actual force, natural selection is just a label for the collective forces of nature acting on organisms with various traits. Sexual selection is different, however, because there really is supposed to be a selective agent (a force of a sort) at work, which may not be explained wholly through physical and chemical forces that ignore mind in nature.
I’ve often thought that Sexual Selection was merely a subset of Natural Selection. Just an organism’s response to its environment, but an environment that includes the other sex. How much ‘mind’ is there in mate choice?
I’ve often thought that Sexual Selection was merely a subset of Natural Selection (although I appreciate that the usage is typically ‘separate’ selections). Just a special case of an organism reacting to its environment – where the environment includes members of the alternate sex. Is ‘mind’ involved? Look around at human couples. In almost all of them the male is taller and heavier than the female. Was this a conscious decision? In many of them the mate is selected from the immediate social network of 150 known people. Was this a conscious decision? A disproportionate number of couples will share similar names or initials. Was this a conscious decision? I contend that much of agency (in the sense of exercising free will) is an illusion. It’s a story we tell ourselves to consciously justify the decisions our unconscious has already made. Because we become adept at telling ourself stories to explain our actions we confabulate ‘stories’ behind external events. From these confabulated stories we infer some ‘purpose’. Is there any proof that ‘mind’ and ‘purpose’ exist outside our own subjective introspection? I suspect not, but would be willing to learn of any.
DJ, if you accept that there is any agency at all in human beings, you must also accept that mind has played a role in evolution. What you describe seems to be a fairly hard core behaviorist approach to psychology and biology. Behaviorism has run its course and is now rejected by the large majority of psychologists because it denies what is most real to each of us: our own consciousness. But behaviorism still crops up in biology unfortunately. In fact, it’s the mainstream position that I criticize in the essay I linked to in my first post here. Of course many of our choices are not really conscious choices. Do I choose to grow the hair on my head? Do I choose to digest the food I eat? Do I choose to beat my heart? No. But do I choose to type these words right now and choose each word as I type it? Yes. Choice and free will in humans is, like most things, a continuum. Libet’s experiments demonstrate that a lot of choices we think are conscious are in fact unconscious – that is, made by other parts of our selves, not the conscious part. But this doesn’t deny free will. While many aspects of sexual attraction are built-in, that is, unconscious choices, do I choose one girl over another when presented two options? Yes. And vice versa, to be more apt, because sexual selection is a lot more about female choice than male choice. We could certainly debate how much of each sexual choice is built-in and how much conscious, but even if there is a little iota of conscious choice involved then there is agency involved in evolution. Thus teleology/purpose. Nature is, then, teleological from the top to the bottom. Not because of some future force pulling evolution to an endpoint. Rather, it is teleological through and through because of the individual choices – a million million tiny pushes at all levels of life – regarding sexual preference and other ways choices affect the environment of our genes and epigenetic milieu.
DJ, as for proof of mind or purpose “outside our own subjective introspection,” are you suggesting that subjective introspection stops at humans? If not (I hope you say not because the only other view is that humans are somehow unique in this manner, which would contradict biology and the idea of evolution by common descent in the extreme), where does subjectivity arise? Mammals? Vertebrates? Chordates? This is obviously a slippery slope and establishing a spot at which the slide stops is extremely problematic. The solution is to just slide all the way to the bottom. I adhere to the notion of “panpsychism,” that is, all things have some degree of mind and mind is a continuum from the most rudimentary stuff of the universe up to us and perhaps higher levels of mind. As Sewall Wright, the American biologist stated in a 1977 article: “Emergence of mind from no mind is sheer magic.” In other words, mind is inherent in the universe and as matter complexifies mind complexifies (within certain confines).
PS. For a great defense of panpsychism more generally, check out David Skrbina’s Panpsychism in the West or Schopenhauer’s The World as Will and Representation (a 19th Century classic of philosophy but apparently not really grokked by modern thinkers in the way it should be).
Okay, Tam, you’ve said your piece. Enough now. The question is whether natural selection is intentional. Panpsychism aside, which is an impossible thesis to support or reject, given that it makes all evidence, evidence for it, selection is not an intentional process in any real sense of the word (i.e., the sense not adopted by panpsychists, where rocks do not intend to roll). Sure there are intentional agents in evolution – lions intend to eat gazelles and gazelles intend not to be eaten. But what actually ends up happening is the outcome of selection, not intention, because simply intending something doesn’t automagically make it happen. Or else, beggars would ride. For example I intended to be six foot six, muscular, and the desired mate of all beautiful women. Instead I ended up an albino gorilla. The best sense in which intentional behaviour could direct evolutionary processes is the “Baldwin Effect”, but here evolution is not directed by intentions, but intentions act to change the selective landscape. I do not know of a single case, humans included, in which intentions acted to achieve an evolutionary goal specified ahead of time. Even in the case of genetic manipulations, the outcomes are not what was intended, because success depends on a multivariate environment that the intenders cannot properly know. In economics this is known as the “law of unintended consequences”.
John, I’d appreciate your leaving the condescension out of this. If you invite others into your home (as you have with your blog), you should treat them as you would any other guests. As for the substance of your comments, you write: “Sure there are intentional agents in evolution – lions intend to eat gazelles and gazelles intend not to be eaten. But what actually ends up happening is the outcome of selection, not intention, because simply intending something doesn’t automagically make it happen.” First, I love your neologism “automagically” – or was that a typo? Second, the “outcome of selection” is what we call evolution, but “selection” IS intention in the context of sexual selection. That’s the whole point of sexual selection: intention and choice. Thus to ignore this agentic role is to ignore what is a major force in evolution. Last, intending something to happen doesn’t mean it has to happen, as you write, but that’s not the point. The point is that some intentions do come to fruition, and thus babies are born when a male and females’ intentions match. In a very real sense, females incorporate their mates’ genomes into their offspring through their active choices. It doesn’t matter how conscious, pre-conscious or subconscious such choices are – they are choices nonetheless. As for the Baldwin Effect, it’s always struck me that there is far too much “and a miracle occurs” going on. If a particular behavior is learned and then genetic variation arises that just so happens to codify (so to speak) this behavior such that it becomes genetically-based rather than behaviorally acquired is to really beg credulity. Particularly so for complex behavioral traits that are usually invoked when discussing the Baldwin Effect.
In my home, you get to deal with the host’s comments, whether or not you think them condescending. It’s my home after all. You have your own. I have not censored or deleted or spam-flagged you. But this is not where you change the subject as you wish; that’s what your home is for. Here, we are having a conversation that does not involve a ridiculous philosophical position (yes, I condescend to panpsychism, because it is meaningless). Sexual selection is not intentional. Sure, there are intentions in some species, but like the lion and the gazelle the outcome does not rely on what any particular organism intends, any more than the outcomes of the market rely on the intentions of the traders. And sexual selection involves, at heart, only dispositions to choose, whether or not they are intentional choices. I really doubt that Jamaican guppies intend for longer tails on their mates. Females have a prior disposition to choose a certain stimulus, leading to a runaway process, yes, but that is not the intention of any of the female guppies. Likewise, Wall Street traders intend to maximise their immediate profit, not to cause a bubble of bad mortgages, yet that is what happened. Intentions are not magic; and no, that is not my neologism, but it was used intentionally. If you re-read the post, around paragraph four you might note that I said that intentions exist: “there is nothing wrong with using teleological language; but only when the subject is a teleological system.” Naturally selected populations are not teleological systems, even if every member of them is. You are committing the fallacy of composition here. The process of selection remains unintentional even when it acts upon intentional agents. Again, I refer you to beggars and horses. Baldwin is not magical either. It has well developed mathematical models all of which can be realistically interpreted in physical terms. Basically if individual organisms achieve a developmental outcome that is advantageous, either through learning or accommodation (such as growing calluses), then any genetic variant that achieves this automatically will, in that environment, be selectively favoured. It is (evolutionarily speaking) cheaper than the hard-won variety. If we have to train hard to become running hunters, any genetic variant that makes running easier to develop will be favoured. That’s not magic, in any meaningful sense. A few who do not understand accommodation and canalisation think this somehow means that the novel variant is caused by the intentions; this is not the case. But any variant that does make a fitness-enhancing phenotype more likely will be selectively favoured. So animals can learn behaviours that make novel alleles more fit. I’m going to put a ban on further discussion of your favourite mysticism here: no more panpsychism. You are, of course, free to discuss the topic at hand.
John, as I was reading your last post I was looking forward to a real substantive debate. Then you decide censorship is the answer. Are you serious? I was actually discussing sexual selection and panpsychism came up as a directly relevant point. I really thought better of you. I’ve enjoyed your blog and I thought from your lefty politics and general worldview you would view censorship and high-handedness as anathema to modern society as I do. Wow.
Are you being censored? That’s awful! Let me know who I can send my objections to. Governments and public carriers should not prevent people from making comment. You should not be censored. On the other hand, in my blog, we talk about the topics I think are worth talking about. If you still have your blog, you are not being censored; merely kept on-topic here. I still would like you to contribute to this thread and other subjects, so long as you do not use my blog to promote your own agenda. I allowed you to make a lot of comments from the perspective of panpsychism. Enough now. Make your case on your own soapbox. If you get readers, then you are effective. Also, what made you think I was a “lefty”? I am neither right nor left, as those labels are vague and tribal, and neither position covers my thinking on politics. I am a party of one.
John, I’ll report you to the administrator. Wait, you are the administrator. Damn. Look, it’s your blog and your rules – but please resist the temptation to unilaterally dictate what is “on topic” or not. We were discussing teleology in evolution – purpose. Sexual selection is directly relevant to that discussion. Free will is directly relevant to that discussion. And panpsychism is directly relevant to that discussion. And to call my position “ridiculous” and not give me a chance to rebut is indeed dictatorial. (Calling my position ridiculous is not, however, condescending, but ignorant. If you’re interested in reading my fleshed out thoughts on panpsychism, I’d be happy to send you a pdf of a book I recently completed on this and related topics or a technical paper recently accepted by the Journal of Consciousness Studies). Why don’t you write a blog entry on Sewall Wright’s, C. H. Waddington’s and JBS Haldane’s panpsychism and discuss why you think these guys are wrong? Then I’ll comment substantively. Anyway, back to the substance of your arguments here. You write that “there are intentions in some species, but like the lion and the gazelle the outcome does not rely on what any particular organism intends, any more than the outcomes of the traders.” I don’t see how you can believe this. Of course sexual selection (and many other evolutionarily relevant situations) depend on what particular organisms intend. That’s what “sexual selection” means. Selection. Choice. This is a key difference between sexual selection, which is explicitly agentic, and natural selection, which is not agentic. If sexual selection is not agentic, it’s just natural selection. But as Darwin and many other biologists since have realized, there are certain traits that don’t appear to be adaptive in terms of food gathering or escaping predators, etc. The peacock’s tail is the classic example. The peacock’s tail, we surmise ex post (as with all evolutionary arguments) came about because females LIKED showy male tails. This is choice – again, no matter what degree of mind we grant to the choosy peahen. A small mind is still a mind. And a small choice is still a choice – agency. Teleology. Jamaican guppies don’t “intend for longer tails on their mates” I agree. But they do show preferences for certain males with certain traits (I’m actually assuming they do because I must admit I don’t much at all about Jamaican guppies – nevertheless the general point is valid). And this is choice/selection. You write: ““there is nothing wrong with using teleological language; but only when the subject is a teleological system.” All animals are clearly teleological systems – and in my view all life is teleological. Even if we agree, as we probably do, that choices are pretty rudimentary in most animals, if you assert that real choice only exists in humans and other higher animals, or something like this, we are back to that slipper slope. Why would choice suddenly pop into existence at a certain level of biological complexity? This is magic. As for Baldwin, let’s take a concrete example. Darwin wrote about birds on remote islands learning to avoid man and such avoidance behaviors becoming instinctual over time (Descent of Man). This was in fact a precursor to Baldwin’ theory and is Baldwin’s point. But the problem with the modern notion of the Baldwin Effect is that to suggest genes automagically (you write “automatically” but I liberally steal your similar term to describe this alleged process) appear that codify such behavior – in each island bird population no less – is really to strain credulity. It’s like Paley’s pocketwatch all over again – could such complex genetic/epigenetic structures really just appear by luck in each instance? And over and over again?
The comments are more interesting than the original post. That’s not to say that the original post is without interest. But I find the comments particularly interesting. I’ll have to bookmark this particular post. I am planning a series of posts on my own blog, starting January, with the topic of “purpose.” It will be an attempt to demystify purpose by suggesting a natural basis.
Tam Hunt. I spoke only of humans because I have no knowledge of what it is like to be a bat, or a mouse, or even a chimpanzee. I do not exclude them from consciousness or even some sort of ‘mind’. My contention is that ‘mind’ (or consciousness, or purpose) does not necessarily involve any mechanism beyond biochemistry. I can see how the process of evolution could give rise to very complicated mental and physical behaviour, and that what we ‘choose’ to do is constrained by our inherent and learned responses. Perhaps you would like to share with me what and where the ‘mind’ is? Is it something separate from biochemistry? An assertion of ‘higher levels’ and ‘universal mind’ is going to need some extraordinary proof.
DJ, mind is concomitant with matter. Matter is the outside, mind the inside. Physics describes the relational properties of matter – how outsides interact with each other. Biochemistry takes this analysis a step or two up the ontological chain. But neither address the insides of the objects they study. And if we are to explain mind in us (the only thing we know directly, all else being inference), we must naturalize mind in some manner. As Wright writes, “emergence of mind from no mind at all is sheer magic.” Ergo, unless we are to posit magic in our scientific theories – thus making them unscientific – it would seem we must adhere to some variety of panpsychism, as Wright himself did. See the link in my first post on this page for more on these ideas.
Tam, Perhaps you would like to discuss how many angels can dance on the head of a pin and how much said angels would weigh? That would be about as relevant discussion as you are proposing, especially since most don’t believe in angels.
Speaking of pedantry, I don’t consider “hitchhiking” and “pleiotropy” to beanything like synonymous. And does “pandaptationist” have anything to do with thumbs? As for the problem of assigning “for” in adaptation, you seem to be ignoring all experimental manipulation, which can certainly tell you.
True on the pleiotropy/hitchhiking point. Pandaptationism is the feeding of taters to pandas. It’s in all the Biology Dictionaries… On experimental manipulation: that will tell you if a factor is causally significant in a selective sweep, yes. It will not tell you that other factors are not, unless you do the experimental manipulation for each one. To say that X has been “selected for” implies (and I may not have made this clear) that other factors have not been (the green example in Sober’s toy), which is something we do not yet know. Assuming as I do that causal differences make a difference, we cannot privilege the “selected for” properties with full warrant. Instead, we are likely to find in any rigorously investigated case something like this: for some subset of all possible traits in the population, and the distinction collapses into an arbitrary cutoff. We can identify the most selectively favoured traits, yes, for those we have investigated but unless you already have some way of identifying what the salient traits are, you can’t say objectively what is selected for and what against of.
Tam wrote: Why don’t you write a blog entry on Sewall Wright’s, C. H. Waddington’s and JBS Haldane’s panpsychism and discuss why you think these guys are wrong? To which I answer: because I have no interest in their philosophical musings. Dobzhansky also thought Teilhard’s and Bergson’s weird philosophies were worth reading – I don’t. I am not obliged to take seriously every scientist who fancies themselves a philosopher, no matter how good a scientist they are. And while I know that philosophers are supposed to give honorary respect to every position in discussion, I fail to see why. Some positions are just silly; one of which is the claim that a fact about one small organism on one small planet in one small stellar system in one small galaxy, etc., has to be a fact about the entire universe. I can recognise a fallacy of composition, and projection, when I see it, and I’m looking at it right now. It’s a human failing to see themselves in the world, part of our Hyperactive Agency Detection Device. Doesn’t make it deep.
John, aren’t you writing generally about philosophy of biology on this blog? The first category listed on this blog’s topic areas is “history and philosophy of biology.” Then why on earth aren’t you interested in the philosophical musings of these eminent biologists? I forgot to add Bernard Rensch to this list, whose 1971 book, Biophilosophy, is also explicitly panpsychist. And there’s not really any dividing line between philosophy and biology anyway – it’s just another continuum.
Yes I am, but not about the philosophy of biologists. They are as prone to philosophical errors as everybody else. In general, the German-derived philosophies of biologists are overly influenced by Kant, Schopenhauer and Goethe, although I have more time for the latter. They are all stuck in a modality of Kantian idealism. It’s time to abandon that.
John, it’s not the philosophy of biologists at issue, it’s the philosophy of biology. Rensch, Wright, etc., were panpsychists because they were biologists first. Their panpsychism springs from their biological understanding. The bridge is clear: how do we explain the evolution of mind?
The fact that we can’t say objectively say what is selected for, or against, or of or not at all unless we do the proper investigations doesn’t entail that the relevant distinctions are arbitrary. Whether there’s a difference between selection for and selection of does not depend on what is investigated or how it is investigated.
I’m sure there are properties not significantly involved in the selection process in a particular case (they will be the ones that are of low to null selective advantage), but we cannot support the idea there is anything but a quantitative distinction between them (i.e., the real value of the fitness difference). Otherwise we set an arbitrary threshold, which is also a fact about us.
If my earlier suggestion about viewing selection simply in terms of (causal) contribution to changes in relative frequency of organic traits is right, then a quantitative distinction should be all we need for there to be a de re distinction between selection for and selection of. There is no need when articulating these concepts to set a threshold that reflects what is of significance for our investigations into particular selective processes.
I am arguing there is only a de dicto distinction. We say “selected for” because of how we think of the selected effects.
In saying there is only a de dicto distinction are you denying that there’s a de re difference between features of the world that casually contribute positively to a change in frequency of a trait, features that are neutral with respect to such change, and features that contribute negatively? That seems to amount to abandoning any causal understanding of the notion of natural selection.
If you look at my little diagram above, you will see that to the contrary I say that all traits potentially have some selective causal effect. What I am denying is that there is a de re distinction between those that do and those that do not, apart from a merely quantitative fact-of-the-matter. And in more general terms I think natural selection is a schematic of an explanation. In each case there will be a particular causal state of affairs, unique to it. Unlike a physics explanation where “mass” is a shared property at the physical level, for example, “fitness” is just a variable in a scheme that applies more or less.
John, now we are back to our much earlier discussion about FAPP and What Darwin Got Wrong. If natural selection is merely a schematic, it stands for nothing more than an assumption that nature is, well, natural and regular in its evolution, as opposed to supernatural. And if this is all natural selection stands for then it’s certainly not a theory. It’s just a postulate. As you write, “In each case there will be a particular causal state of affairs, unique to it.” And this is FAPP’s main point: natural selection is not a theory of evolution and probably the best we’ll be able to do (according to them) is “natural history,” which is another phrase for your quote in the previous sentence.
Like I said, there’s a kernel… never mind. Look, forget FAPP for now; they muddy the water too much. Just consider this (and it’s in Sober’s 1984): fitness is a supervenient variable. Think on that for a minute. If fitness, which is supposed to be the causal “force” of selection, is supervenient, that means it is not a physical property; it is merely a metric we apply to physical properties. A virus, a fungus allele, and a bacterium that reproduces asexually can all have exactly the same fitness and nothing else uniquely in common. Since fitness is a variable in an equation, then selection just is the equation. Like all equations, then, the question is to what extent it represents actual cases in interpretation (abstractions need an interpretation to represent or denote). I can come up with an indefinitely large number of formal models or equations. What counts is the degree to which they serve as representations and inferences. And that cannot be established a priori. But they can apply, which is where FAPP go wrong. Many models apply to the world and have (largely conventional) interpretations. So long as we can distinguish between the actual forces (physical causes) and the abstract models, all is (epistemically) well, and all shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well.
But John, fitness (as you have acknowledged in past posts) is generally defined tautologically. So it’s either tautological (and thus worse than useless b/c instead of being useful it’s just distracting) or based on untested propensities. If we take the “propensity interpretation” (Brandon, et al.) of fitness, which argues that natural selection as a theory is not about fitness per se but the propensity toward fitness, we must accept that rather than being tautological, NS is instead very untested as a theory. Orzack and Sober, in their SEP article on adaptationism, conclude after a comprehensive review of the literature that only four papers (in the history of modern biology) make an adequate case for adaptationism. I guess we can disagree with O&F’s particular criteria but it does seem, to me at least, and I am admittedly not a working biologist, that natural selection as a theory requires oodles more evidence to be called a theory, let alone established as the primary theory for explaining evolution.
(Late to the party as usual; chose not to reply yesterday because blood alcohol content was illegal.) Perhaps I misunderstand but I think the problem is not teleological thinking, but teleological presentation. Often, explanations of evolution are stated teleologically as (e.g.) “Skunks evolved bad smell to protect them from predators,” which implies that (e.g.) skunks assembled in a moot, evaluated the problem and decided to invoke a series of genetic mutations to evolve bad smell. This is obviously inane. The explanation is misleading shorthand for the wordy-but-correct “skunks that were stinkier than others of their species had the advantage over them in deterring predators; therefore, more of them survived to produce offspring that survived to reproduce than did their less-stinky mates, so over many generations, the frequency of genes that contribute to stinkiness became increasingly common in the skunk population.” Unfortunately, many people that I know who reject evolution do so because they take the teleological presentation at face value. This misinterpretation is the fault of the presentation. In fact many educated people that I know who do accept evolution think that it proceeds teleologically. (I recall explaining the peppered moth example to a colleague who has a Master’s degree, although not in biology. He believed that the [individual] moths turned black. When I explained that the change was in the population as a result of changes in the [tree-trunk] background color due to industrialization, I could see the sun dawn over his head [metaphor!]. Evolution is not teleological; it has no goal, for a goal implies intelligence. Nor is it a process; it is a consequence: differential success of organisms in producing offspring who survive to reproduce results in changes in the gene pool. Multiplied over millions of generations, incredible diversity results. Evolution is not teleological. Only flawed explanations of it are.
So, I know I’m joining the conversation late, but here goes. John thinks the selection of/for distinction is unnecessary, and the core of his argument is here: There is no objective, real, observer-independent distinction between selection of and for. Selection occurs through causal differences, and every causal difference makes a difference. If there is a physical difference that is a trait of the organism, and it ends up spreading through the population, then it is selected. What the causal story is, can only be discerned, if at all, post hoc. Any actual causal difference may play some role, and probably does, in the selection process. I have two objections to this argument. (1) Selection-of vs selection-for is nothing more than the standard correlation vs causation distinction (respectively), applied specifically to selection. If John’s arguments make selection-of/for unnecessary, then analagous arguments would dismantle the entire correlation/causation distinction that is fundamental to practical science. So, barring Feyerabendism, we have a reductio ad absurdum. I will admit, however, that from a certain POV I think John is formally, technically correct. Every distinguishable trait must have some selection coefficient, however small. By one interpretation of Sober’s distinction, then, the physical cause(s) of that selection coefficient are what the trait is selected-for, and since all traits have a selection coefficient, and corresponding causes, then all traits are selected-for something. There would never be simple selection-of. But again, a similar point applies to the rest of science. Formally, everything with mass exerts a gravitational force on every other massfull thing. Ergo, by John’s argument, I am wrong to claim that the apple fell to the ground due to Earth’s gravitaitonal attraction. Why? Because the Sun also had an effect, as well as the moon, all the other planets, the asteriods, the stars, me, John, you, and everything else in the universe. By John’s logic, it’s unnecessary to say the Earth’s gravitation cause the apple to fall — rather, what I should say is simply that gravitation caused the apple to fall, since everything in the universe had a part to play. But in practice, no scientist finds that to be a meaningful explanation. For all practical purposes, we are justified in saying that the apple fell due to earth’s gravitation. We might as well ignore all the other factors, because their contributions are negligible. We can make extremely accurate predictions (to well within experimental error) by only taking into account the gravitational attraction of the earth. The other (non-Earth) gravitational factors are so small that they are in fact swamped by local non-gravitationl factors, like air resistance and whatnot. Which leads to my second point … (2) Genetic drift. Sober is not completely clear on what he means by “selection” in the selection-of/for distinction, so I may be going beyond his original intent, but nevertheless I think the following is a valid point. Here we must separate ‘selection’ from ‘evolution by selection’. A non-zero selection coefficient indicates selection of some sort, and a physical cause for the selection coefficient. But having a non-zero selection coefficient does not guarantee that the trait will evolve due to selection. It is standard pop-gen that if s < 1/N_e (where N_e is the effective population size), then fixation (i.e. evolution) of the trait is random — it’s governed by genetic drift. So if we take selection-for to mean the physical causes of fitness differentials in traits that evolved by selection, then we have a way out of John’s argument. Contra John’s claim, every causal difference does not make a difference. Some are too small to escape from genetic drift. In this sense, then, there is indeed an objective observer-independent distinction between selection-of and -for. There is a fact-of-the-matter as to whether a trait that evolved by selection was selected-for (whether it caused a selection coefficient larger than N_e) or whether it was selected-of (having a negligible selection coefficient and was simply heritably correlated with another causal trait). BTW John, you can add me to your list of scientists with ridiculous philosophical musings, panpsychist that I am. But I’ll speak no more that here, as apparently I’ll get banned from this blog, you pedophilic communist sexist pig! 🙂
Well I think you have made my points for me. Physicists do not say that gravity caused the apple to fall to the ground; they say that the entire universe caused a relative motion between those two objects. In short, we are unable to say that the universe behaved so that apples fall; we say that the apple can be treated as if it fell for our purposes. These other influences are swamped to some level of precision such that we are unable to calculate or measure the effects enough to get some kind of “signal”. This is a fact about us, not the world, or rather it is a fact about the world and us. The same thing is true of drift. We set a threshold below which we cannot see what the effects of individual selection are because those effects are not salient and they are indistinguishable from chance. But again, this is a fact about us and the world, not the world alone. The point about correlation and causation is an epistemic point. You haven’t done a reductio against science; just against taking what we know to be facts about the world alone. [And you mistreat my academic grandfather!] Evry causal difference makes a difference, or else it is not causal. That we know that it does, or can see that difference among all the other differences, is beside the point.
Physicists do not say that gravity caused the apple to fall to the ground; they say that the entire universe caused a relative motion between those two objects. Hmmm. Got anything to back up that claim? The same thing is true of drift. We set a threshold below which we cannot see what the effects of individual selection are because those effects are not salient and they are indistinguishable from chance. But again, this is a fact about us and the world, not the world alone. As for the validity of the selection-of/for distinction, I don’t think this matters. What matters, scientifically, is the objectivity and the usefulness of the concept in terms of prediction (among others). The s < 1/N_e requirement is not a subjective threshold — it's not something we, as observers, chose. It’s imposed on us by the world. Hence the selection-of/for distinction, in this sense, is not just about us (or just about words). And now that I think about it a bit more, I think you are wrong that genetic drift is just our inability to get a “signal” from selection. If we pretend we are God, with exact knowledge of the deterministic causes and trajectories of the fixation of a certain allele with s << 1/N_e, in most cases we would not be able to say that the allele was fixed due to whatever properties are causally responsible for its selection coefficient. The actual cause would usually be something else (like freak weather, or stochastic molecular events that caused the most fit allele to be lost during meiosis). Genetic drift is not simply our inability to distinguish other causes from the causes of fitness.
Well, I’m even later to the party, and in some sense it’s my party! I agree with DJLactin that there is a common and easily dissmissed problem with teleological presentations of evolution, but even if we say “skunks that were stinkier than others of their species had the advantage over them in deterring predators; therefore, more of them survived to produce offspring that survived to reproduce than did their less-stinky mates, so over many generations, the frequency of genes that contribute to stinkiness became increasingly common in the skunk population” we still have the problem that we don’t really know this to be the case – we are inferring the process of selection from the end-point of the evolutionary process. In doing so we indeed implicitly think of evolution teleologically, proceeding from a past state of non-stinky skunks to a present state of stinky skunks, directed by the improving force of natural selection. To return to John’s original post, he noted that “We talk unconstrainedly about “selection for” this or that, as if we had some basis for our claims apart from intuition.” Exactly! And yet to disagree with him, if by natural selection we want to talk about a causal process, not just a result (differential survival and reproduction), as we must do if we want to say something about the function of organismal traits, then the selection of/ selection for distinction is indeed critical. The point (or at least one of them) of my book is that we can study selection in current populations and try to understand the causal processes involved in the maintenance (or lack thereof) of traits, without needing to fall into the trap of assuming that all “adaptations” we perceive in nature are the end result of a process of selection for those adaptations. What is the function of stinkiness in current skunk populations, and how is this trait maintained? That is something we can study. What happened in past pre-skunk populations is inaccessible. And if we want to take seriously other causal processes in evolution (e.g., genetic drift, correlated selection, mutation pressure) we must accept the possibility that they played some role in the emergence of any of the end results of evolution we study. If you want to argue that the “adaptations” of organisms are too perfect, complex, etc. to have emerged by any process other than selection for those adaptations, then you are buying into the same premise endorsed by the IDers – that adaptedness is something more than mere existence. You are forgetting that selection is not an agent but a process – a process that creates nothing, but only maintains what has previously come into existence. In this sense all “adaptations” have emerged randomly. I do contend that evolutionary biologists and philosophers have been misled by the metaphor of “selection” into thinking (and not just speaking) of evolution teleologically. And the solution? To think in terms of the “conditions for existence” of organisms (as Cuvier suggested) and their traits (as Darwin and Wallace suggested). A lot more on this in my book… ;{)
John Reiss – I must disagree with your claim that when we infer the process of selection from the end-point of the evolutionary process, we think of evolution teleologically. The inference here is, presumably, abductive — as is “inference to the best explanation” across all the sciences. In the present context, to explain how various evoultionary factors contributed (or not) to the current end-point of the process, that end-point surely influences our assessment of putative explanations, but that’s not an influence referred to in the explanations themselves.
And yet to disagree with him [i.e., me], if by natural selection we want to talk about a causal process, not just a result (differential survival and reproduction), as we must do if we want to say something about the function of organismal traits, then the selection of/ selection for distinction is indeed critical. “The” function is what bothers me about all this. I once wrote but never published a paper in which I argued that functions are artefacts of the interests of researchers, after a friend and medical researcher said to me how annoyed he was that the functions in the literature of the actin cytoskeleton he was researching weren’t the functions in which he was interested. Reflecting upon this I came to the conclusion that functions do not exist except in the models and characterisations of researchers (function eliminativism). In short, I hold that the function of something is literally a mathematical function: y = fx. It is a transformation that we represent formally. The “conditions for existence” are always post hoc. Things persist such that we find them worth investigating, and so we assign teleological properties due to that. It is all and only de dicto, as I say above to Bob. But I love that you appeal to Cuvier. Expect to be called anti-evolutionary as a result.
Bob- Ah, but why is selection the best explanation? And how much selection counts as selection? If 90% of the process of evolving increasingly stinky skunks occurred by selection for the change, 5% by genetic drift and 5% by correlated selection, is this sufficient? How about 50%, 25%, 25%? And what is there in the stinkiness of skunks that demands that selection drove the process of increasing stinkiness at all? It is at least possible that at every point along the evolutionary path, the costs of increasing stinkiness balanced the benefits, and drift resulted in the increase in stinkiness. “Inference to the best explanation” is all well and good if we have a way of collecting evidence to distinguish the best explanation from other possibilities, but if the only evidence we can bring to bear is how useful their stinkiness is to skunks today, we are only reading the “current utility” of the trait back into history as the “reason for origin” of the trait, and this is indeed teleological.
First, selection isn’t always the best explanation. Sometimes it might not even be a small part of the best explanation. Second, if by ‘current utility’ you mean current as of the given end-point serving as explanandum, then I think you are not accurately representing how selectionist explanantions for the evolution of specific traits are constructed. These are fundamentally historical explanations, in the sense that we can only surmise what conditions were present at any given point along the historical trajectory to the end-point. While it might be sketchy, we don’t ignore evidence about past conditions — we value it very highly. What we need to do is construct plausible stories, that do justice to whatever hard evidence we have at our disposal about the relevant historically changing conditions that terminate in our chosen end-point. However, no explicit reference to that endpoint should be necessary in the construction of plausible selectionist stories until we have actually arrived at the explanatory terminus. In short, these are not teleological explanations.
You sound like Fodor and P-P here Bob. But I think both you and he are right: it’s all about plausible/defensible narratives. Which is what FAPP call natural history.
… and I’m quite happy to view natural history as an integral part of science. As I’ve said many times, my beef with FAPP is their reliance on an account of scientific laws and their role in explanation that was rejected several decades back by most working philosophers of science.
Ernst Mayer defined several different kind of teleology, but I am unable to find a reference. Does anyone have them at hand, and are they useful to think about?
Mayr discussed this in, I recall Mayr, Ernst. 1988. Toward a new philosophy of biology: observations of an evolutionist. Cambridge MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. I should have added:Mayr makes a distinction between teleological and teleonomic processes. The latter are “goal-attaining” where the former are “goal-directed”. Both of these he (rightly, IMO) makes subsets of lawful dynamic processes. Teleology is a subset of teleonomy. The original distinction is Colin Pittendrigh’s in his Pittendrigh, Colin S. 1958. Adaptation, natural selection and behavior. In Behavior and Evolution, edited by A. Roe and G. G. Simpson. New Haven: Yale University Press:390-416.
John — you write: Fitness … is not a physical property; it is merely a metric we apply to physical properties. A virus, a fungus allele, and a bacterium that reproduces asexually can all have exactly the same fitness and nothing else uniquely in common. What, in your opinion, is a physical property? A virus, fungus allele, and a bacterium can all have the same temperature, or entropy, or free energy, in principle. Or they can have the same momentum, or velocity, or mass, etc. All these are classic physical properties. So what do you mean? How is fitness different from these, aside from having a different name?
Basically, an observable (i.e., measurable) property of an object. Temperature, etc., are all measurable with some apparatus that is able to measure a physical magnitude. When you come up with a commoditomometer that measures fitness, I shall retract. 🙂 More seriously, fitness is not a physical magnitude because it depends entirely upon the model being used for its measurement. But we can measure a physical magnitude like temperature or mass without a model of what those things are. There may not be a clear demarcation between theoretical metrics like fitness and observable metrics like temperature, but we can tell them apart most of the time, and here is one place I would say there is no ambiguity (or amphiboly).
we can measure a physical magnitude like temperature or mass without a model of what those things are. I’m unconvinced this is correct. How, for instance, can you measure negative temperature without a model for what that is? And mass — you can measure something’s weight, I suppose, without a model. People did for millennia. But mass? How do you estimate the mass of an object without reference to a scientific model of mass? The usual method is via the equation m=F/a, which is very theory laden. Or do you mean something different by “model”?
How, for instance, can you measure negative temperature without a model for what that is? In physics there are no negative temperatures.
Not sure if you’re playing word games or what, but I consider thermo to be physics: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negative_temperature
My god , all this talk of intention. Define intention as you wish and I’ll define it as I wish. In my definition the universe does intend to create all that it has created. Its nature is to create such and I insist that that nature entails the intention to create as it has. I think this makes more sense than saying the universe was created by accident and likewise the planets and man and so on. It seems to me that intention is grounded in the nature of the creature acting and that wanting and intending or desiring are about the same thing If something was done–there was fundamentally a desire, a wanting to do that. I don’t think one can intend and not want. Presuming the universe is the act of creating all this stuff–then it is its nature to do so. And SO it intends to do so. To me it is irrelevant whether or not there is some cosmic thought that says, as a person would, “I’m going to create such and such…” And I don’t think any agent–like a God— need be invoked at all. And I don’t agree that intention must apply to people or animals only. The moon intends to pull the oceans. The universe intends to create what it has created.