02.24.08

More on the d-word bugaboo

Posted in The Eonic Effect, History, Evolution at 6:27 pm by nemo

Greg Laden is from Greg Laden’s Blog at Scienceblogs and comments onThe d-word bugaboo, along with Hucklebird

Greg Laden said,
February 24, 2008 at 10:58 am
What do you mean by this:
“And concepts of evo-dynamics that are different from selectionist explanation, natural teleology.”

Good question, I was bit brief, since this has been discussed here a number of times.
The ID group has polarized the debate between ‘materialistic’ Darwinism and the ambiguous ’spiritual’ (?) ‘intelligent design’ argument.
My point was to claim that the real debate is always, and solely over natural selection. The failure of natural selection doesn’t require a religious perspective, but a naturalistic study of processes that aren’t based on natural selection.
Beyond that the question of design is crippled by the ambiguity that ID people have given it. We can’t really avoid the issue of design, taken in a very ordinary sense: biological structures show more than just mechanism, they show the design of functional processes that proceed with teleology: they do things as devices. It is a failure of our understanding that we can’t yet quite explicate such things.
The issue of natural teleology was raised by Kant, et al., and represents an attempt to consider the teleological aspect of nature without violating the basic premise of naturalism.

One can, by the way, approach this question very directly by looking at the eonic effect, and the question of ‘evolution in history’ as described by the eonic model. There we see that the question of ‘directionality’ arises naturally in the discussion of the disguised developmental sequence in history. We see a practical application of macroevolution also showing directionality, hence quite probably a form of natural teleology.
Natural teleology takes the phantom ‘designer’ out of design.
Here are some posts here at Darwiniana on:
Natural teleology,

G design, N-design

Permalink