Star Larvae: Teleology

The Star Larvae Hypothesis
Nature's Plan for Humankind
Part 2. Star Larvae

Teleology

Science and religion are at odds over whether nature and history participate in a program—whether they serve a purpose.

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A basic scientific explanation of any natural phenomenon should include correlations among variables. And the correlated variables should be organized to suggest causal relationships. These causal relationships ostensibly explain why things occur as they do—why the correlations hold. But no scientific theory should be expected to include in its casuistry any concept such as purpose, goal, objective, intention, aim, or any similar notion of planfulness. God might have a plan for Creation, but science cannot invoke it or any other plan when science explains nature.

Natural processes are not programmed to achieve any predetermined end, in the scientific view, because natural processes occur ad hoc. The particularities of any given environment at any given moment impinge on whatever objects reside or systems operate in that environment at that moment, come what may. Natural processes and, by extension, human history, do not work to get anywhere in particular, in the scientific view. The storyline of the world proceeds—one thing follows another—but without the benefit of a plot.

What science rejects, in a word, is teleology. The telos, the unfolding according to a plan, is anathema to the scientific understanding of nature.

Here’s an example of telophobia (fear of teleology) in contemporary science writing, from "The Ages of Gaia" (Bantam, 1990) by James Lovelock (Pseudomonads are microorganisms that produce macromolecular nucleation sites that cause water droplets to condense from the atmosphere):

"Pseudomonads have an ancient history, and maybe their ice-nucleation trick goes back to the Archean. If so, were they the rain makers that led the colonization of the land? A question that always arises at this point in speculation is: How did it happen? Surely the bacteria did not decide to make the ice-nucleating substance. At this point, serious–minded microbiologists grow anxious and fear the proximate occasion of teleological heresy. Fortunately, we can easily make a plausible model of the evolution of close coupling between a large-scale environmental effect and the local activity of microorganisms—a model, moreover free of any taint of purpose."

He goes on to make the case that the ability to freeze water must have benefited the ancestors of extant pseudomonads and that the talent therefore spread from generation to generation of the microorganisms. The effect of rain on later evolution is merely incidental. (Try to imagine what the Earth’s biosphere might be like if rain was an occasional atmospheric quirk rather than an ecological driver.)

"The controversy between those who see both our species and our society as a lucky accident, and those who find an immanent teleology in both, is too radical to permit of being judged from some neutral standpoint."

-- Richard Rorty
Philosophy and Social Hope

Lovelock might be more sensitive to accusations of "teleological heresy" than most scientists, because early criticism of his Gaia concept targeted Gaia’s teleological implications. Nonetheless, nature is perfectly capable of executing plans, as happens every time a fertilized ovum matures to adulthood. Don’t plans serve purposes?

In fairness to Lovelock and other telophobes, then, "taint of purpose" needs a clearer definition. Purpose might be defined in a limited way, in terms only of human ways and means, in which case no scientist need fear the teleological heresy when describing nature. Alternatively, it might be sensible after all to assign purpose to all kinds of cause-and-effect sequences in nature. What exactly is it that Lovelock thinks might make microbiologists uncomfortable?

If we ask a computer programmer about a section of code, she might tells us that that section of code ensures that when a particular dialog box appears on a user’s screen it contains data pulled from a particular field in a particular database, so that’s the purpose of that section of code—to make that data appear in the right place at the right time. It seems straightforward.

Now, if we ask a geneticist about a section of DNA—genetic code—and he tells us that that section of code ensures that a particular protein contains a particular amino acid at a particular position in the sequence of amino acids, we might be less eager to say that that section of code has a purpose, for fear of committing “the teleological heresy.”

But in both cases a code contributes something necessary and specific to a larger program. Purpose is granted in the one case; but not on the other. Might the relevant concepts be too imprecisely defined? Let’s see if we can achieve clarity be scrambling them even more.

Let’s say that DNA hackers drop new genes into the genome of a variety of tomato and that the new genes ensure that the fruits of the plants contains large amounts of caffeine, or sugar, or [insert favorite substance]. In this case some of the genes in the revised tomato genome have a purpose, but the rest do not?

Here’s a sequence of genes. Look it over carefully. Which ones have purpose?

What if the sequence of inserted genes incorporated some genes from the original tomato genome—then would those genes be transformed from being purposeless to being purposeful, even though they correspond to the same amino acids after the insertion as before? This thought experiment should serve as therapy for anyone suffering from telophobia.

Maybe the problem gets fixed if the operative term is changed from purpose to function.

Is the function of a thing merely whatever the thing can be observed to do—or only what it is intended to do? The function of a jet engine is to propel a plane. But the engine also produces heat. That is not its function, though the function of some devices is precisely to produce heat. It looks like function is a function of human intent. This is a troubling observation, because it means that although we observe nature doing things, nothing in nature has any function whatsoever. The stomach makes food suitable for passage through the intestine. Do we really want to say in the next breath that stomachs have no function—serve no purpose?

The terms attached to teleology: purpose, meaning, function, code, plan, program, information—these all are problematic concepts, because they subside in the no-man’s land between science from religion. And for that they hold the promise of a reconciliation of the mighty ideological antagonists.

Scientific telophobia is understandable, given the vagueness of the terms that carry the "heresy of teleology." An unwary scientist might too easily step off the nihilistic path of scientific orthodoxy into a pile of sentimental/superstitious teleological goo. But the solution to the teleological conundrum is not to cast meaning, purpose, etc., into the wilderness, but to give precise operational definitions to these problematic terms.

The distinction between natural law and God’s law—between unplanned and planned nature—is a nuanced one.

"He expected to find that Anaxagoras would explain the world order as a work of design, not a result of blind mechanical necessity. The reason of that order would then be found, not in some previous state of things from which it had emerged, but in some end or purpose that it could be shown to serve. Reasons of that sort seemed to Socrates intelligible and satisfying."

-- F. M. Cornford
Before and After Socrates

Although science rejects the idea that ends are imminent in the means of nature, it nonetheless insists that nature proceeds in a preferred direction. The second law of thermodynamics asserts that structures and processes tend to change over time specifically in a direction away from organized complexity and toward equilibrium. That certain dynamic structures can grow in the opposite direction, away from equilibrium, and operate stably in a state of disequilibrium, is a readily observable phenomenon. But, according to science, these anti-entropic systems, such as ecosystems and galaxies, do not rely on teleological programs to arrive at their stable forms. They are flukes or, in the context of complexity theory, "emergent" systems of self organization, but even so, nonteleological. Even though it pulls things in a certain direction, the inexorability of entropy does not constitute a teleological program, in scientific thinking. Scientific theories must restrict themselves to causal explanations that work without resort to planfulness or inherent ends. The planlessness of biological evolution, in particular, remains among the most hallowed of scientific anti-teleological doctrines.

The high priest of evolutionary planlessness, the late Harvard paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould, accounted for the apparent progress of evolutionary change with the metaphor of "the drunkard’s walk." In this thought experiment you must imagine a drunkard staggering along a wall. He ventures varying distances from the wall as he makes his way along it. The distance from the wall at any particular instant is just whatever it is. An increase in average distance over time is merely a function of time passing. The more time that passes, the greater the number of opportunities for the drunk to stumble even farther from the wall than he or she previously had ventured. Distance from the wall corresponds to complexity arising from evolution (chance), with the wall representing the unicellular limit of biological simplicity. (The metaphor is presented in Gould's book, "Full House".) This strange metaphor demonstrates the contortions that scientific reasoning will subject itself to in order to avoid invoking an operational plan in nature. Chance and coincidence, in the scientific view, conspire to create an illusion of evolutionary progress.

Alternatively, we can see the violent churning of history as the metabolic churning of an organism.