intelligent design in Nature

[Frederick W. Schueler]

pierre deleporte wrote:

> The salamander is not born "for the purpose of laying eggs", it just hatches, develops and lives its salamander life according to both past remote and past recent causes.
> The trick is that our human ability to predict and act "on purpose" can too easily be projected (at least in sloppy formulations) on the "mere functioning" of the living world. But anthropomorphism is no argument and no excuse in science.

* well, that's a popular argument, but it makes the human purpose we
experience within and among ourselves an autapomorphy. And if we're
treading around ID, it may suggest a Special Creation of Human People,
in order to imbue us with this purpose (soul?) which is somehow
different from the functionally identical purposes we see expressed in
other species. Language is the apomorphy, but while ic can channel
pupose, I don't think it's the same as purpose. "Salamander,
spring-tail, fungus, Alder, are all as self-directed as the
herpetologist, because self-direction is the product of natural
selection."

"John Grehan" wrote:

> I'd written:_

>> well sure -- purpose (survival, reproduction, agrandizement of
resources) is the first product of natural selection.

> None of these outcomes have empirically been demonstrated to be purposes.

* if these aren't purposes that [seem to] direct organisms, then what
is?

>> Around the level of the 'units of selection' attributing purpose is a useful shorthand

> I would not see it 'useful' if it is not true.

* no scientific statement purports to be true: it's just the best we've
managed to come up with so far. And utility in language is very much
about symbolizing accepted stories in as few words as possible. So by
"to breed" we encapsulate a whole corpus of life history theory in two
words. If we were talking about ovulation induced in female Ambystoma by
chemoreception of vernal pond odors, we'd use a different set of words,
and if we were talking to an ID maven about how natural selection
produces design we'd use still another set.

>> the salivary gland secretes amylase to digest starch

> I have yet to be able to ask the salivary gland. The glands do secret amylase and the amylase does disgest starch. These are empirical observations and therefore scientific. Imputing purpose to these actions and outcomes is all ID theory.

* no, it's just incorporating those functions in a broader explanatory
story (sort of like Darwinian biogeography) that claims that the ability
to digest starch increases fitness. You don't have to speak with the
gland, you just tell a story about it, and then try to see how the story
might be falsified (as it might be if [I'm just making this up] salivary
amylase titers were equal in strictly carnivorous and strictly
granivorous Mammals). A story doesn't become less scientific for being
told more compactly or for being more inclusive

> (I apologize if this seems too much "flaming", nothing personal).

* no, these are real questions.

fred.
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Frederick W. Schueler, Aleta Karstad, Jennifer Helene Schueler
      RR#2 Bishops Mills, Ontario, Canada K0G 1T0
   on the Smiths Falls Limestone Plain 44* 52'N 75* 42'W
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