It’s no exaggeration to suggest that Darwin’s account of speciation is the most revolutionary idea in the last two hundred years. In claiming this, I am not original, for this is also the thesis of Dennett in Darwin’s Dangerous Idea. I will never have words fine enough to capture the greatness of Darwin, but nonetheless it is important to at least attempt the articulation of what is so revolutionary in his thought. And if this task is so important, then it is because so little of Darwin has yet filtered into the humanities and social sciences. Oh to be sure we find discussions of him here and there as in the case of Dennett and the generally execrable evolutionary psychologists and sociologists. Yet few of us, including myself, have really managed to rise to the fundamental reorientation of thought the Darwinian hypothesis requires of us.
Darwin’s revolution is not restricted to biology. While his account of how species are formed is indeed magnificent, it is my view that his real contribution lies elsewhere. What Darwin proposes is not simply a reorientation of how we think “the origin of species”. No. Darwin’s hypothesis has implications well beyond the domain of biology, transforming our concept of nature and being (for me the two terms are synonyms). Like any great thinker, much of what Darwin thought was foreshadowed in the work of earlier thinkers, but it is his greater honor to have pulled it all together in a revolutionary conception of being. Here, then, are eight Darwinian theses that are particularly important to my own thought:
1) Nature is not supposed to be something. The great and most fundamental Darwinian ontological thesis is that nature is without teleology. In this declaration Darwin continues a long tradition characterized by thinkers such as Democritus, Leucippus, Epicurus, Lucretius, and Spinoza. All of these thinkers, each in their own way, declare that nature is without purpose.
In the academic world and, above all, in popular culture, few have yet caught up to this thesis. Two conceptions of nature persist that could not be more opposed to one another. The first conception is that of the old medieval, theological idea of nature that still dominates academic thought and popular culture, even where it is not registered as such. We here this conception of nature at work when opponents of marriage equality refer to homosexuality as “unnatural”, but also when intellectuals evoke a fundamental difference between nature and culture. The claim that homosexuality is unnatural is the claim that over and above individual organisms there are forms or species functioning as norms that govern and measure what an organism ought to be and what it ought not be. We are saying that there is some sort of teleology defining what entities should be. Similarly, we are doing exactly the same thing when we suggest that a human being that has been modified by some sort of prosthesis– say a computer chip in the brain –is “unnatural” or a deviation. The arguments are the same.
read on!
Likewise, when we claim that there are things that are so “by nature” and things that are so “by culture”, we are again slipping teleology in through the back door. What we are in effect claiming is that there are properties and qualities that arise from within the thing itself and that are therefore genuine and authentic (Nature), and that there are properties and qualities that are fabricated and therefore non-genuine. Again, we are saying that there are genuine teleologies (Nature) and artificial teleologies (Culture).
With Darwin this conception of nature as Nature is thoroughly abandoned. There is no way things are supposed to be, there is only the way things are and the way things are becoming. Species are no longer norms measuring the degree to which an individual entity approximates or deviates from that ideal form. To be sure, in a Darwinian universe there are regularities shared by members of a population in a “species”, but these regularities are no longer norms defining what these members ought to be. Rather, they are concentrations of similarities in a population not unlike a piece of land that happens to have a particularly high concentration of granite. Those individuals that depart from these similarities are no longer monsters, deviants, freaks, or “abominations of nature”, but are rather just different entities. Here the term “Nature” can no longer be used as a cudgel to beat those entities that fail to live up to a norm. Norms in nature are just statistical probabilities in a population, nothing more.
It’s notable that this point applies equally to much environmental thought. Often it seems that environmentalists are evoking the old theological and teleological conception of Nature when they decry technology, changes in ecosystems such as the appearance of zebra mussels in the Great Lakes, genetic modifications of various plants and animals, etc. All too often such arguments are premised on the illicit ontological argument that nature is supposed to be some way. The point is not that we shouldn’t prefer assemblages to be one way rather than another way, that we shouldn’t prefer certain ecosystems to be preserved, that we shouldn’t recognize that the destruction of these ecosystems might very well mean our own destruction. These judgments are perfectly legitimate. But such judgments are grounded in our preferences and values, not some teologically governed and designed Nature with a capital “n”. Nature is indifferent. There is simply how things are and how they become.
Moreover, the collapse of teleology also signifies the collapse of the Nature/Culture divide. The collapse of the Nature/Culture divide does not signify that all is Culture, but rather that all is nature, including culture. There is only nature and nothing else. Where species as eternally existing forms have been abandoned, where every “species” is the result of a fabrication, invention, becoming, or genesis, the distinction between Nature and Culture can no longer be sustained. In the old framework Culture was understood as that which was artificially fabricated while Nature was understood as the unfabricated, the original, that which arises from itself. Yet Darwin teaches us that all “natural” organisms are fabricated. Within this framework, the only difference between a cane toad and a cell phone is duration it required for each respective “type” to be fabricated. In the grand scheme of things, cell phones were invented in a fairly short duration. Cane toads took thousands and millions of years to be invented. But they were both invented. It is only a teleological and temporal prejudice that would treat the cell phone as somehow artificial while treating the cane toad as somehow authentic. If, by artificial, we mean “fabricated”, one of Darwin’s central revolutions was to declare that all organisms are artificial. As Deleuze puts it, Darwin showed us that all organisms are simulacra; which is to say that all organisms are copies without originals.
2) Difference is creative, not deviant. In the old Platonic-Aristotlean-Thomist model of nature, difference was seen as a deviation from form or essence. Organisms were measured or evaluated in terms of how closely they approximated an ideal form of what organisms are supposed to be. Thus, for example, a human that had the body of Brad Pitt coupled with the reason/intellect of Einstein would be considered more genuine and real than a human that had the body of Socrates and the intellect of Forrest Gump. Differences that did not approximate the essential features of the form were seen as deviations falling out of “true being” and even as potential monstrosities (and here, it bears noting that with Darwin the concept of monstrosity disappears as an ontological category, instead becoming a subjective category).
With Darwin all this changes. Far from being a deviation from “nature”, difference is now the motor, the engine, by which nature creates. The three pillars of speciation in Darwin are random variation (difference), heritability (the transport of difference across generations), and natural selection (the selection of differences carried on). It is now difference, not God, that creates. And the differences through which this creation and invention take place are without intention and purpose: they are random. “Random” does not mean that they are without “cause” (they are caused in all sorts of ways), but rather “without intention” or macro-scale predictability.
But there’s more to it than this. It’s not simply that there are random variations in nature, it’s that all replication (reproduction/copying) produces slight differences from the previous entity from which it is copied. In the Darwinian universe there are no perfect copies, only simulacra that deviate, ever so slightly, from the entity from which they were copied. In the old theological Nature, difference was seen as an abomination contaminating the purity of essence, form, the identical, and the same. With Darwin difference becomes the essence of nature. In Deleuze’s words, repetition is always repetition with a difference. As a consequence,
3) Nature is creative. In the old theological universe, Nature was sterile. Creation was reserved for, on the one hand, God that created all the essences or forms in one fell swoop, and humans, on the other hand, that created in the form of the fine and technical arts. However, this conception of Nature as sterile is not restricted to the theologically minded. We also find the thesis that Nature is sterile among the mechanical materialists of the 17th and 18th centuries (Diderot, Laplace, etc). There, matter was conceived as composed of indestructible corpuscles, hard atoms, that simply bumped into one another. It was impossible to see how self-regulating and enduring pattern (i.e., living organisms) might come into existence from such matter. To many philosophers– both those who defend and reject materialism –continue to defend this 18th century conception of matter.
Apparently these defenders and detractors have not kept up with advances in the physical sciences. We now know that matter is capable of generating pattern, of self-organizing, of maintaining pattern across time, and so on. Matter is not simply billiard balls bumping into one another on a pool table, it is not simply “stuff”, but is also energy, forces, flows of energy through systems and all the rest… And it is all this without need of recourse to vitalistic and animistic hypotheses. At the core of Darwin’s thought is the thesis that matter has the capacity to self-organize, to form pattern, to generate life.
4) Design without a designer. At the center of Darwinian thought is the daring hypothesis of design without a designer. Paraphrasing Cantor, we can say that nothing can dislodge us Darwinians from the conceptual paradise of design without a designer. Old theological thought is modeled on the work of artisans fabricating tools (and a mistaken conception of what takes place in production, at that). First, they say, there is the blueprint or model of the thing to be made in the mind of the artisan. Then there is unformed matter laying there in wait. The artisan then takes this matter up and forms it according to the blueprint he has in his mind. All of nature comes to be conceived in these anthropomorphic and analogical terms, treating God as an artisan that imposes form on unformed and passive matter. Forms are treated as ready-made and pre-existent in the mind of a creator (whether God or an artisan) and matter is treated as awaiting form by virtue of being unformed. Such is the thesis of “hylomorphism” which conceived substance (individuals) as resulting from ideal forms being imposed on passive matters through the agency of an artisan or God.
Darwin’s daring hypothesis– as Dennett puts it –is that design, well engineered and adapted entities, takes place without need of recourse to any Demiurge, Artisan, Architect, or God whatsoever. It is this that his three pillars of evolutionary theory are mobilized to conceptualize. What we thus get are form-generating processes that take place immanent to nature without being guided by any teleology to guide them. Pattern is something that emerges from blind and stupid processes, not something that is directed by any aim at the outset. It is for this reason that nature is not supposed to be any particular thing. There is no aim that directs these processes, no God that “selects” and “arranges”, for example, “eternal objects” or “potentialities” for the sake of “intensifying” being.
Many philosophers that ought to know better still carry vestiges of this hylomorphic theory of pattern and form. Thus, for example, in their analysis of mind and language, Fodor and Chomsky conceive mind as populated by a priori forms or structures that enable cognition and language. Now if this were just the innocent thesis that minds such as ours have evolved these sorts of structures from non-directed, self-organizing processes, this would be no problem. Yet insofar as they make a transcendental argument for the necessity of these structures, they foreclose this genetic/developmental perspective. Yet why should the development of brains be any different than the development of organisms? Why should we posit pre-existent forms in the mind, where we don’t posit them in organisms? Why not instead approach the development of mind-bodies as an undirected, non-teleological process where form/pattern is understood to be an outcome, a product of development, rather than a condition of development?
Too often we continue to look for a designer behind “design”. We explain social formations as arising from ideas (ideology) in the minds of persons (and certainly this is a part of why societies take the form they take, but only a part). We treat large scale institutions like corporations and their behaviors as resulting from leaders and CEOs. We explain the behaviors of governments by reference to leaders and presidents. Etc., etc., etc. Darwin invites us to abandon all of this and analyze the form or pattern assemblages come to embody as the result of processes of design without a designer: as self-organizing and aleatory results of blind and stupid processes.
5) Humans are animals. Darwin’s most controversial and (for some) disturbing thesis is, of course, that humans are animals. In the old theological model of Nature humans were conceived as sovereigns (or in kinder versions “stewards”) of Nature. Divinely created, we were understood to stand at the top of creation as that being closest to God and as that being for which all other being was created. Darwin thoroughly abandons this thesis. Insofar as being is without teleology or aim, humans are, like all other creatures, an accident. If the evolutionary processes that led to us were rewound and started all over again, it’s entirely probable that we wouldn’t come to be. Likewise, as the becoming of being continues apace– as it always and unceasingly does –humans will at some point pass out of existence either through being destroyed as a result of our own agency or the agency of some other cause or we will evolve into something else.
It is sometimes suggested that there is no conflict between theism and evolution. After all, the theist will say, who’s to say how God creates? But this misses the core of the Darwinian hypothesis: evolution is without any aim, goal, purpose, or design. It is design without a designer. Those theistic positions that strive to reconcile Darwin and theism still see humanity as an ordained and intended outcome of evolutionary processes. But first, there are no final outcomes of evolution. Second, there are no purposes in evolutionary processes. There’s only what comes to be and what doesn’t. There can be no compromise on this point. Humans are just one more animal among others. We are certainly important to ourselves and would like to preserve ourselves, but we hold no privileged place in nature. We certainly have our own unique capacities, but so does every other organism. We are not, above all, sovereigns of being. Right now, on our planet, that dubious honor continues to belong to bacteria, not humans. Indeed, 90% of our very own bodies is composed of microorganisms. We aren’t even ourselves.
A thoroughgoing posthumanism ought to be Darwinian. On the one hand, this entails overcoming humanistic/theological assumptions that continue to haunt contemporary thought. Such assumptions– often unconscious –are those that imply that there can only be design with a designer, that we can speak of a priorisms as in the case of Chomsky without discussing the genetic/developmental processes that generate forms, patterns, or regularities, that Nature and Culture are entirely distinct, and that there is purposiveness in nature such that there is a way things ought to be. A child’s pacemaker is no more artificial than a hermit crab’s shell. It is perfectly legitimate for us to judge that certain ecosystems should be preserved, that they shouldn’t be destroyed, that we should protect certain species, etc. What is illegitimate is the suggestion that these normative judgments belong to nature itself. 90% of species on this planet that have ever existed are extinct. There have been many different ecosystems (in the precambrian era, for example, the atmosphere was hypersaturated with oxygen, causing great fires during thunder storms and giant insects to evolve). Nature has no preference for Earth and its rich ecosystem over Mars and its desolate wasteland. Nature just is what it does… Including what it does through us and our technologies (we’re just more complicated beavers).
But above all, a thoroughgoing posthumanism is one that dislodges humans from being treated as privileged, special, unchanging sovereigns within being. This doesn’t mean denigrating humans or asserting the rights of everything else over humans. It means recognizing that we’re beings among beings that came into being like other beings and that will pass away. Posthumanism is not a focus on our cyborg nature, nor a focus on animals; though these are certainly interesting posthumanist themes. No, posthumanism is the recognition that we are not sovereign beings within existence, that we aren’t those beings to whom being is given, that we aren’t the cosmic stewards of beings, but that we are beings among minerals, stars, planets, neutrinos, bacteria, viruses, plants, animals, fungi, technologies, and much else besides. Posthumanism is the recognition that there’s far more to being than us.
Larval Subjects . 
April 2, 2012 at 7:48 pm
I agree with much of this, especially that repetition with difference is the engine of evolution. But I don’t think Darwin eliminates purpose from nature all together. He offered a way of thinking nature without purposes imposed by an external designer (as does Whitehead–recall his critique of imposed laws), but it remains impossible to speak about living things without some notion of purpose. Darwin’s theory can plausibly account for speciation without external design, but he offers no explanation for the immanent purposes of concrete individual living things. For this we need a theory of living organization and form like Varela’s (see “Life After Kant” (2001)), Kauffman’s, or Brian Goodwin’s.
For a fascinating application of Darwinian thought to ethnobotany, especially that oft neglected other form of selection, sexual selection, see Richard Doyle’s new book “Darwin’s Pharmacy”: http://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/0295990945
April 2, 2012 at 8:22 pm
very good, here is the possible case for our “infinite stupidity” to add to the mix:
http://www.edge.org/conversation/infinite-stupidity-edge-conversation-with-mark-pagel
April 2, 2012 at 9:12 pm
Matthew,
I still find guides intervention and selection of eternal objects within the order of being ontologically unacceptable. Wherever we evoke such an agency we’re basically conceding that we don’t have an account (“the God is in the gaps” style of argument).
Setting that aside, as I’ve argued on this blog many times, I have no problems with the concept of internal teleologies in organisms. However, this is entirely different from the concept of teleology I’m arguing against in this post and that I’ve argued against in the past. These teleological processes are the result and effect of non-teleological processes or of design processes without a designer. They played no role in the genesis of how these emergent, self-regulating patterns came to be.
April 2, 2012 at 9:16 pm
Put differently, beings do not “aim” at anything in the way that Whitehead suggests.
April 2, 2012 at 9:33 pm
Returning to the theme of internal teleology, let’s put the point a bit differently. In the traditional theological schema teleology is a cause that originates something, cf. Aristotle’s four causes. Teleology is here one of the grounds of being. In the case of contemporary concepts of internal teleology, by contrast, teleology is no longer an origin or ground, but an effect or product of the fundamental ontological indirection of nature. It is a result of the differential processes of random variation, heritability, and natural selection, not the cause of these emergent patterns.
April 2, 2012 at 10:18 pm
Levi,
I don’t see how random variation, heritability, and natural selection can cause the immanent teleology of concrete individuals. As Thompson argues in “Mind in Life,” self-production (autopoiesis) is at least logically, if not also temporally, prior to reproduction. Are you familiar with his argument?
In other words, Darwin’s account of speciation assumes the existence of self-producing organisms that reproduce. It doesn’t explain their existence, but offers an explanation, given their existence, of speciation.
April 2, 2012 at 11:16 pm
Yes, I’m familiar with the arguments. They’re variants of the intelligent design arguments from irreducible complexity. Biologists have shown again and again that we can account for complex organs without presupposing teleology. The sleight of hand in the argument you evoke always consists in assuming the function an organ COMES to have was the function of the organ over the course of its entire developmental history.
April 3, 2012 at 12:08 am
Biologists may be able to account for complex organs without presupposing teleology. I agree that the function of an organ often comes through exaptation. But the arguments I’m referring to above are not about organs, but about whole organisms/biological individuals.
April 3, 2012 at 12:36 am
Matthew,
This doesn’t improve your argument at all. You’re still making an argument from irreducible complexity and from “ignorance”, ie, “I can’t see how.” biologists argue that complex organisms arose from colonies of very simple organisms that internalized their relations to one another. While we certainly haven’t yet cracked the nut of how DNA and RNA arose yet, we have made tremendous progress in accounting for both in non-teleological terms. Once you have an account of the simplest organisms in place– and again, we’ve made huge strides in accounting for this –the three principles of evolution are able to do the rest of the work without recourse of irreducible teleology. Teleology becomes an outcome of non-teleological processes, not an irreducible cause that we need to include in our fundamental ontology. As I see it, the thesis that there is irreducible complexity and teleology is just a refusal to take the naturalist wager and the foreclosure of inquiry. This is an inadmissible or non-credible stance given that naturalism is the only successful explanatory hypothesis we’ve yet devised. Show me you can do real, non-armchair empirical work with your hypothesis. Absent that, I’ll just see you as another member of the Dover, PA school board.
April 3, 2012 at 2:59 am
Levi, how is “colonies of very simple organisms that internalized their relations to one another” not purposeful?
Whitehead’s eternal objects need not be Platonic forms. They could be immanent mechanisms of assemblage. This is the revolutionary meaning of teleology. Nature DOES prefer a “rich ecosystem” rather than a “desolate wasteland” wherever such can be assembled – always on a line of flight for new territory; always seeking a new niche along the energy gradient. Nor is it just Information opposed to Energy.
I don’t want to see OOO swallow the Digital Physics pill, yet. Our only choice is not between mysticism and science. What color is the pill of philosophy? A better axiology can be found. Perhaps eternal objects may be reducible to three: “Love, Work, and Knowledge are the wellsprings of our life” (Wilhelm Reich). And Knowledge, reciprocally shaped by Love & Work (Passion), is also Art. Teleology, in the sense I would use it, is the immanence of artful choices.
This has nothing to do with “Intelligent Design” by any singular Creator, just the teleology of the “People” defying the “Police” (quoted to let non-human objects join in the fun ; )
April 3, 2012 at 3:23 am
Mark,
The thesis about colonies of microorganisms is a historical thesis about what did happen through natural selection, not a thesis about what being aimed at. There’s nothing teleological about it. Whitehead’s eternal objects are certainly not Platonic forms (and I never claimed they were) but they’re still selections on the part of an agency, not immanent processes of being. That’s no different than a design argument. As far as I’m concerned if you introduce any explanation into nature that isn’t based on efficient causation, you’ve betrayed naturalism and evolution. I don’t think there’s any compromise here and beliefpve the burden of proof is on you, not me. I see this as being no more legitimate than Kentucky school boards and actually see it as fodder for their positions.
April 3, 2012 at 3:34 am
And I will confess that this is just one of those places where I draw my line in the sand. I have, I believe, all sorts of good metaphysical, epistemological, political, ethical, and pragmatic grounds for this position, but it is also my line. In the absence of good arguments (and not arguments from ignorance: “I can’t imagine so therefore x must be the case!”) I just won’t concede here. You side with naturalism and see purposiveness as having real effects while itself resulting from non-teleological processes or you don’t. It’s as simple as that.
April 3, 2012 at 3:51 am
A line in the sand, indeed. If naturalism means only efficient causes count as explanation, I am afraid naturalism is just greedy reductionism. For one thing, such a reductionistic naturalism cannot account for the conditions of its own possibility. How do you explain the existence of creatures capable of offering explanations based solely on efficient causation? When you refer to teleology as the outcome of non-teleological processes, you mean that the illusion of teleology is the outcome of non-teleological processes, right? In that case, are naturalistic explanations just the illusion of explanation? If what you’re saying is true, we need a whole new way of grounding scientific knowledge, since as most people understand it, science is based upon the fact that conscious scientists seek out knowledge of nature (on purpose), and that the highest sort of knowledge they can find is formal/mathematical. In other words, formal and final causes must at least be operative in conscious scientists, otherwise there is no epistemic basis for their naturalistic picture of reality.
I must say, though, that I would be on your side of the line if we were having a discussion with creationists/Intelligent Designers. You’ve collapsed my position into theirs, but I don’t see the resemblance. I argue for an organic cosmology against both ID and neo-Darwinism, both of which conceive of the biological world in terms of mechanism (the former as a mechanism whose design is by an external god, the later as a mechanism whose design is by an external nature).
April 3, 2012 at 3:59 am
Again, Matthew, like all theologians you give a “God in the gaps” or “argument from ignorance” argument. The burden is on you, not me. You’ve given no argument that isn’t overwhelmingly challenged by prevailing research. This is how metaphysics became a period active term. You call me the dogmatist, but you’re the one in the armchair.
April 3, 2012 at 4:04 am
And I haven’t “collapsed” your position, I’ve accurately described it. I’m not calling internal teleology an usion”, I’m saying it’s derivative of efficient causes. Once it emerges it can have real effects, but it is not primordial. Deleuze and DeLanda do a far better job thinking process. They need no primative teleology, no god electing eternal objects as lures for feelings, no subjective aims. That’s real metaphysical progress.
April 3, 2012 at 4:10 am
And to this ill add that the fact that you resort to conspiracy theories about greedy reductionism, materialism, and “Western thought” is confirmation of the weakness of your position. Everyone else is in the grips of a prejudice right? What’s next, crystals and star charts?
April 3, 2012 at 5:00 am
I don’t think greedy reductionism is a conspiracy theory. Greedy reductionists tend not to hide the fact that they are greedy reductionists.
I’m not sure what you mean by my resorting to a conspiracy theory about “Western thought.”
I’m not arguing from ignorance or based on any God of the gaps, I’m arguing that formal and final causation are as necessary as efficient and material causes to explain the natural world as we know it. Certainly, we cannot understand any of these modes of causation in exactly the way Aristotle did, but I believe they can be reformed and redeployed in light of modern science if we are able to think with Whitehead.
The validity of Darwin’s theory of speciation is a long way from doing the explanatory work you want it to do across all fields. You are over-extending its applicable range. There are plenty of biologists who disagree with your position, so I don’t think it is fair to marshall “prevailing research” against me.
You can disagree with my argument, but I’d prefer if you didn’t distort it by equating my position with creationism or ID.
April 3, 2012 at 10:06 am
“…in their analysis of mind and language, Fodor and Chomsky conceive mind as populated by a priori forms or structures that enable cognition and language.”
How so? As far as I know about Chomsky, all he argues is that a device capable of language has to have certain characteristics. That’s no different that saying that a device capable of flight has to have certain characteristics. This says nothing about just how such devices may have evoloved.
April 3, 2012 at 11:25 am
[…] Bryant as a post about Posthumanism (and Darwin) here. I agree with everything in […]
April 3, 2012 at 1:14 pm
But the position you’re advocating is a version of ID. And simply saying you can’t account for x without introducing final causation is not an argument. All you’re doing is 1) calling names with respect to well grounded accounts through efficient causation (“greedy reductionism”), and 2) saying “I can’t see how organisms could come into being without final causation, therefore there must be final causation governing these processes!” I have a difficult time imagining how heat is an agitation of particles, but that makes it no less true. My difficulty imagining heat as an agitation of particles is not an argument against this theory, but a failure of my own imagination. And it’s simply not true that there are many biologists that share your commitment to final causation as ontologically primative. All things being equal, I’m going to side with the theory that has had the most explanatory success and that allows for real empirical observations. That theory is naturalism based on efficient causation.
April 3, 2012 at 1:23 pm
The concept of attractors is able to do all the work that final causation is able to do without resorting to final causes. You roll a marble down the side of a bowl and eventually it will settle at the bottom. The bottom of the bowl is the basin of attraction. There is no mysterious final cause pulling the marble to the bottom of the bowl, just gravity and the constraints of the system determined by the curvature of the bowl. Features of an organism that developmentally tend towards a point such as the swirls in my finger tips are no different. There was no final cause that pulled towards these states, just a set of biochemical processes that result in a certain state as the efficient causes of the biochemical processes exhaust themselves. More complex certainly, but not different in kind. Likewise, it’s not a final cause that causes my air conditioning to kick in when the temperature of my house rises. Rather, it’s a structural feature of the thermostat that’s triggered when the thermometer hits a certain point. There’s no need to introduce these types of causes.
April 3, 2012 at 1:47 pm
Dr Sinthome, I am not quoting this because I believe in the Illuminati conspiracy, but because I think the Illuminati conspiracy hints on the sociopolitical reality of the fact that the ruling elites truly do see themselves as Gods – perhaps the ultimate ”transcendental error”.
April 3, 2012 at 1:54 pm
Bill,
I don’t have the references at my fingertips, but both Fodor and Chomsky have expressed a good deal of hostility towards developmental approaches. I do think there is something to both approaches, but that they need to be reworked within a developmental framework that doesn’t presuppose the existence of a priori categories as being there from the outset. This should be done, minimally, just because of the way the brain develops. A developmental approach would be far better equipped to account for how idiosyncrasies of language and language disorders occur. A lot of my criticism here has to do with how we tend to talk about genetics in general. We talk about genes as already containing a blueprint of the organism, failing to recognize that they are one causal-developmental factor among others, that they are potencies, and that depending on both environmental conditions as well as contingencies of protein assembly and cell development they can take a variety of different developmental trajectories. The developmental systems theorists are great on this, cf theorists such as Susan Oyama and Lewontin, for example. I think we need to take great care not to project outcomes of development into the beginnings of developmental sequences.
April 3, 2012 at 2:33 pm
There’s a 2000s dust-up in philosophy of biology that might be relevant, over whether natural selection itself is as “cause” (the “dynamical interpretation” of evolution), or an emergent statistical effect rather than an independent causal force (the “statistical interpretation”). Some teleological debates over whether traits evolve “because” of evolutionary fitness sort of lurk beneath the surface of that controversy.
This is one of the provocation-starting papers I believe, which seems to have accumulated a lot of replies marked by varying levels of anger.
April 3, 2012 at 2:35 pm
I’ll also add that the claim that “Darwin is far from doing the explanatory work of x” is a classic rhetorical strategy of ID. While Darwin might be the Galileo of biology, he is not biology. There’s been over a hundred years of work since then. Likewise, criticizing something for being “mechanistic” is a form of conspiracy denunciation, no different than denouncing a theory because it’s based on “Western presuppositions”.
Random variation does the work you’re asking for. We first get the variation in some property or structure of the organism. That variation confers an advantage or doesn’t. The variation only subsequently takes on function. Birds don’t have wings to fly, but can fly because they have wings. The function didn’t precede the variation. Now this hypothesis is able to explain far more than your teleological hypothesis. For starters, it’s able to integrate the truth that most variations are non-functional and that often they even place the organism at a disadvantage. Second, it’s able to account for the fact that the vast majority of DNA serves no function. It is also able to explain why so many features of organisms are so poorly “designed”. In a universe where there were final causes this would be extremely peculiar. All your argument is is a variation of the argument that, for example, the eye is too complicated to be explained through efficient causation and random variation. But, in fact, there are quite good evolutionary explanations of the eye.
April 3, 2012 at 2:50 pm
Hmmm. . . .
Back in the 1960s Chomsky made some important arguments about language acquisition. The arguments are certainly historically important but I do think they stand, in some suitable form, as a permanent contribution to how we think about language. He talked of a universal grammar being innate, that the child couldn’t acquire syntax simply from inspection of the utterances it heard. It had to start with some “knowledge” of syntactic structure.
Perhaps that’s what you’re vaguely calling “hostility towards developmental approaches”. But one could just as easily argue that Chomsky was arguing favor of a developmental approach and against a learning theory approach. It’s not the references I need, Levi, to understand your objection; it’s the actual arguments. What you’ve said is too vague.
I understand what you’re saying about genes and blueprints and I agree. But that doesn’t touch the arguments Chomsky made in the 1960s nor, do I believe, does it touch the aguments he made about language origins in conjunction with Marc Hauser and Techumseh Fitch in 2002. That kicked up a ton of debate, some of which is logged here:
http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/002422.html
April 3, 2012 at 3:11 pm
Right Bill, I’m familiar with all of this. I’m objecting to his positing of an innate proto-grammar as a condition for all and any language acquisition. I see this as no different than a blueprint.
April 3, 2012 at 3:54 pm
OK, Levi, then let’s look at it this way: What’s the difference between learning something and acquiring it, as in acquiring language? Descriptively, an acquisition process is relatively fast, automatic, and accurate. The child just picks up language by being among language-speaking people and interacting with them. Learning is labored and requires a great deal of conscious deliberation; think of learning arithmetic, the years of drill and practice. Learning arithmetic and acquiring language are very different kinds of processes.
Let’s say that difference involves a phi-factor; acquisition involves a phi-factor, learning does not. Chomsky called the language phi-factor universal grammar. At this point it’s just a label, like phi-factor itself. We don’t know where this universal grammar is in the brain or what its specifications are. But since we’re talking about language, universal grammar not an unreasonable label.
What label do you think would be better?
April 3, 2012 at 4:10 pm
Bill,
All I’m objecting to is the placement of forms as ready-made in the mind like Kantian a priori categories. I instead want a process where forms are generated from processes that do not yet have a formal structure like categories. While the argument you make is persuasive upon first hearing it– which is one of the reasons Chomsky has enjoyed such wide support –we’ve had a great deal of success with parallel processing neural network computers that don’t begin with a formal a priori stucture that is then “activated”. These models, I believe, are closer to what takes place. Also note that there’s a lot of confirmation bias in Chomsky’s deep structure theory. The linguist finds what he expects to find in language. However, there are all sorts of examples that violate Chomsky’s claims as to what should and shouldn’t be possible in language.
April 3, 2012 at 4:22 pm
Here’s a good summary of the criticisms:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_grammar#Criticisms
April 3, 2012 at 4:47 pm
I am by no means defending Chomsky’s general approach to language. I think he got some very basic things wrong. My argument is only about how we think about language acquisition. That neural networks are a plausible learning mechanism doesn’t tell us much about the difference between learning arithmatic and acquiring language nor, for that matter, does it tell us much about the difference between humans and infra-human primates.
April 3, 2012 at 4:53 pm
Bill,
Don’t you think what you’re asking is a bit too specific and technical for a discussion in comments on a blog? I’m talking about acquisition as well and was merely pointing out that there are alternative models of acquisition that both respond to the poverty of stimulus argument and that don’t require us to posit a mysterious, un-falsifiable, universal grammar that runs into all sorts of problems explaining linguistic change, evolution, variety, and linguistic disorders. Developmental approaches that reject the pre-existence of form as already encoded in some structure also have the added virtue of being more in line with what we observe in actual neurological development and elsewhere in biology. As for the nuts and bolts of how all this takes place, I’ll leave that to the linguists themselves.
April 3, 2012 at 5:37 pm
Bill, Don’t you think what you’re asking is a bit too specific and technical for a discussion in comments on a blog.
You’re right, too specific and technical for this forum. But . . .
Chomsky’s original argument was very abstract and mathematical in nature. It said nothing about the physical structure and operations of the device that actually implemented language. And that is what we’re now discussing, the physical mechanism.
April 3, 2012 at 5:48 pm
And my thesis is that we can’t separate form (abstraction), material embodiment and acquisition in this way.
April 3, 2012 at 5:58 pm
Why not? What’s the difference between saying that some device must have a certain computational property, without specifying how the device is to be built, and saying that an engine must be capable of so many horsepower without specifying how the engine is to be built?
April 3, 2012 at 6:11 pm
Bill,
Because I believe such an approach leads us to significantly distort what we’re trying to understand and account for. I get the feeling we’re talking about two different things. You’re saying language has such and such properties (I agree!), I’m talking about how those capacities come to be acquired. When we begin with a formal structure and then project it back into the origin of that developmental acquisition, we end up significantly distorting what really takes place. This has been born out again and again in AI. Early AI began with the premise that cognition was composed of encyclopedic semantic inventories and systems of rules that our minds then select from in interaction with perceptual cues. What they found in trying to program AI’s in this way was that they were extremely inefficient in dealing with the world, they were incredibly stupid in dealing with their environment, they were unable to respond well to variations in environment, have been poor at real-time response (required of any viable organism), and were extremely poor learners. Much to their surprise, subsequent AI discovered that “less is more”: that you can have a number of very stupid, very small, processors doing very limited tasks and get remarkable competence in navigating an environment and in learning. Andy Clark’s Being-There is a wonderful text outlining some of this history and the problems. Chomsky is basically repeating this same error with his deep grammar. He wants a pre-programmed, fairly elaborate, system of rules already there in the mind. His main argument is the “poverty of stimulus” argument, i.e., that infants aren’t exposed to enough language to account for the quickness with which they acquire language. Yet alternative explanations have been given that show how we can get by with less, without having to posit fairly elaborate systems of rules, and in a very short time. I think we should always be suspicious of projecting well developed forms back into the origins of a thing when trying to account for capacities and phenotypic properties. There’s really not much more I can say than this.
April 3, 2012 at 6:16 pm
In other words, that grammar doesn’t explain, but is the thing to be explained.
April 3, 2012 at 6:47 pm
In other words, that grammar doesn’t explain, but is the thing to be explained.
But you can’t come up with a good explanation unless you understand its properties. And that’s what Chomsky’s arguments were about. That business about an elaborate set of preprogrammed rules, that’s not essential to the argument. In the 2002 argument about language origins, which was about phylogeny, not ontogeny, all that was tossed out.
April 3, 2012 at 9:26 pm
Levi,
You are still construing the argument I referenced at #6 (it is not so much “my” argument as it is Varela and Thompson’s) as though it refers to the purpose or function of distinct traits or variations. That was never my claim. I fully accept that the function of an organ or a trait usually comes after its formation, and that in the course of evolutionary history, the same organ can come to have entirely unforeseen functions. The argument has to do with the immanent teleology of biological individuals, not with the contingent function of their parts. Darwin’s genius was to discover a non-teleological mechanism to account for speciation at the phylogenetic level due to chance variation and inheritance at the ontogenetic level. There is nothing in his theory, or in any additions to his theory in the last 150 years, that explains the existence of biological individuals with immanent purposes. Systems theory has offered descriptions of biological individuals in terms of attractors, but these are descriptions of behavior and not causal explanations. Efficient causality cannot offer a complete explanation for the sentient behavior of living beings. It is of course part of any explanation, but cannot be the whole explanation unless we are willing to ignore the distinct phenomenology of living systems by reducing them to the neutral language of physics (neutral in regard to the taking into account of the perspective of the system one is studying). As Etienne Gilson brilliantly argued (see “From Aristotle to Darwin and Back Again: A Journey in Final Causality” (1984)), no defender of teleology in nature has ever done so in order to deny the role of mechanism (efficient causation); it is only the mechanists who deny teleology. From Gilson’s perspective, while mechanistic biology can perhaps explain the specifics of the functioning of individual organisms (which is what you have been arguing), they cannot explain the existence of such individuals as such. To account for the existence of biological individuals requires a principle of immanent teleology. You’ve made reference to the reductionistic promissory notes that eventually an explanation in purely efficient terms will be provided for how DNA and RNA replication got started, thereby bypassing Varela/Thompson’s argument about the explanatory priority of autopoiesis; but as I understand the arguments of systems biologists like Stuart Kauffman (see “Reinventing the Sacred (2008)), any account of nucleic acid autocatalysis, due the inherently recursive nature of such reactions, will already be in terms of formal and final causes.
April 3, 2012 at 9:39 pm
[…] Levi Bryant and I have been going back and forth over at Larval Subjects about the role of formal and final causation in the explanation of living systems. He argues that Darwin forever banished teleology from nature, or at least showed how the apparent purposiveness of organisms is a result of an entirely non-teleological process. I’ll paste my latest response to him below: You are still construing the argument I referenced at #6 [it is not so much “my” argument as it is Varela and Thompson’s (see "Life After Kant," 2002, and Mind in Life, 2008)] as though it refers to the purpose or function of distinct traits or variations. That was never my claim. I fully accept that the function of an organ or a trait usually comes after its formation, and that in the course of evolutionary history, the same organ can come to have entirely unforeseen functions. The argument has to do with the immanent teleology of biological individuals, not with the contingent function of their parts. Darwin’s genius was to discover a non-teleological mechanism to account for speciation at the phylogenetic level due to chance variation and inheritance at the ontogenetic level. There is nothing in his theory, or in any additions to his theory in the last 150 years, that explains the existence of biological individuals with immanent purposes. Systems theory has offered descriptions of biological individuals in terms of attractors, but these are descriptions of behavior and not causal explanations. Efficient causality cannot offer a complete explanation for the sentient behavior of living beings. It is of course part of any explanation, but cannot be the whole explanation unless we are willing to ignore the distinct phenomenology of living systems by reducing them to the neutral language of physics (neutral in regard to the taking into account of the perspective of the system one is studying). As Etienne Gilson brilliantly argued (see From Aristotle to Darwin and Back Again: A Journey in Final Causality, 1984), no defender of teleology in nature has ever done so in order to deny the role of mechanism (efficient causation); it is only the mechanists who deny teleology. From Gilson’s perspective, while mechanistic biology can perhaps explain the specifics of the functioning of individual organisms (which is what you have been arguing), they cannot explain the existence of such individuals as such. To account for the existence of biological individuals requires a principle of immanent teleology. You’ve made reference to the reductionistic promissory notes that eventually an explanation in purely efficient terms will be provided for how DNA and RNA replication got started, thereby bypassing Varela/Thompson’s argument about the explanatory priority of autopoiesis; but as I understand the arguments of systems biologists like Stuart Kauffman (see Reinventing the Sacred, 2008), any account of nucleic acid autocatalysis, due the inherently recursive nature of such reactions, will already be in terms of formal and final causes. 37.774929 -122.419415 Rate this: Share this:FacebookTwitterDiggEmailPrintLike this:LikeBe the first to like this post. This entry was posted in Philosophy and tagged autopoiesis, biology, Darwin, Evan Thompson, Francisco Varela, Levi Bryant, Stuart Kauffman, teleology. Bookmark the permalink. […]
April 3, 2012 at 10:45 pm
Matthew,
You’re seriously citing Gilson, a Thomist, and trying to claim you’re not making a design argument? Whether we’re talking about teleology as a ground of individuals or organs, the problem is exactly the same and equally illegitimate in contemporary biology.
April 3, 2012 at 10:54 pm
And I’ll also add that you’ve misconstrued my position. I’ve never rejected teleology as an emergent property of certain systems. I said as much in my first post. What I reject is the thesis that teleology is an originary ground of biological individuals. Teleology comes after the fact from non-teleological processes. It is a capacity that certain types of systems come to be capable of. But it is not an origin, but rather an effect. The point here is no different than the one I made about wings. The point is that purposiveness arises from purposelessness. And you haven’t understood Kauffman’s arguments. He doesn’t defend teleology or the idea that beings are somehow drawn into existence by a final cause. Rather he argues that their are meta-biological ‘laws’ where, under appropriate conditions, pattern, replication, and recursion suddenly snaps into existence. The emergence of these patterns is of the same sort as a chemical clock governed by a periodic attractor (look it up if you’re not familiar) leaping into being when the solution is heated and stirred. Again, there’s nothing teleological about this. It’s highly complex efficient causes.
April 3, 2012 at 10:59 pm
Finally, all Varela is really saying is that the elements of biological organisms refer to each other and depend on each other. I don’t disagree with this at all (remember autopoietic systems theory is a cornerstone of my onticology). But nothing about this entails the need for spooky teleology or final causes as originary. You seem to think that you can dodge the organs argument by saying you’re talking about organs, not individuals. But a cell is an individual (as every autopoietic theorist well knows), an eyeball is an individual, a cat is an individual. We can give an evolutionary account of how eyeballs came to be without final causation. This doesn’t differ in kind from how cells came to be or how more complex organisms came to be.
April 3, 2012 at 11:30 pm
Levi,
Though I dispute your take on what Kauffman is up to, I will offer one more thing, then it’s probably best that we let this drop. I cite Gilson despite knowing he was a Thomist because contemporary ID arguments have nothing in common with Aquinas’ understanding of the natural world. Contemporary Intelligent Design comes out of William Paley’s natural theology, who not incidentally was a big influence on Darwin before his trip on the Beagle. The influence was never fully overcome, since Darwin and Paley both conceived of organisms as machines (i.e., to be explained by efficient causes alone).
April 3, 2012 at 11:31 pm
Paley thought a transcendent God designed organisms, but once so designed, they were thought to run like clocks.
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