"In the 1930s the biologist J. B. S. Haldane remarked that ‘Teleology is like a mistress to a biologist: he cannot live without her but he’s unwilling to be seen with her in public.’ Today the mistress has become a lawfully wedded wife. Biologists no longer feel obligated to apologize for their use of teleological language; they flaunt it. The only concession which they make to its disreputable past is to rename it ‘teleonomy’."Perhaps it is the associations with subjectivity and agency, even mind and consciousness, that have made teleonomy a difficult topic to approach, making reductive explanations easier to formulate and test. But as Hull noted, that has changed. Norbert Wiener coined the term 'cybernetics' to denote the study of "teleological mechanisms." And evolutionary biologist Ernst Mayr had much to say on the topic, from a recorded interview:
"The term 'teleological' has been used for five entirely different sets of phenomena... The fourth one is something I long, in my earlier papers, ignored because it bothered me, and that is purposive activities, and I thought it was something strictly human. But, in the meantime, the studies of the animal behavior people have shown that purposive behavior is widespread in higher organisms, particularly the mammals and birds, and is connected with the existence of a considerable amount of intelligence that permits planning. If a pride of lions, for instance, splits into two parts in order to surround a victim, then it is a… a purposive action based on planning, and that's the fourth of the teleological process."In his paper Evolution 'on purpose': how behavior has shaped the evolutionary process, Peter Corning describes one of the main themes in the evolutionary story of how we got to where we are today:
"Many things, at many different levels, may be responsible for bringing about changes in an organism–environment relationship, and differential survival. It could be a functionally-significant mutation, a chromosomal transposition, a change in the physical environment that affects development, a change in one species that affects another species, or it could be a change in behaviour that results in a new organism-environment relationship. ...Indeed, one of the important themes in evolution, culminating in humankind, has been the ‘progressive’ evolution of self-determination (intelligence) and its ever-expanding potency. I call this agency ‘Teleonomic Selection’."In Corning's earlier book, "The Synergism Hypothesis," the combined effect of teleonomic selection and synergistic selection is explored. The resulting explanatory power goes deeper than accounts of the philosophy of mind, in my view, as it is capable of illuminating how superorganisms composed of numerous individual parts could have evolved (in fact are evolving) over time:
"My theory ...applies the principle of natural selection to a central aspect of the evolutionary process while introducing and adding the concepts of functional synergism and teleonomic selection, the latter being a modernized and Darwinized version of an evolutionary principle advanced by one of Darwin's most important predecessors, Jean Baptiste de Lamarck. ...the process has been deeply interactional but the leading edge has been "downward causation" - teleonomic selection at the behavioral level, involving novel forms of functional synergism (both technological and social) that have served to canalize our biological and sociocultural evolution."
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| Source: Jared Diamond, "Collapse" (2005) |
James Shapiro was clear about this causal agency: "The capacity of living organisms to alter their own heredity is undeniable." Or as Theodosius Dobzhansky characterized it, evolution is an open-ended challenge, an adventure with an ultimate outcome that cannot be foretold. I find it fascinating how behavioral influences contribute to the ongoing evolutionary process. The implication is that we are the authors of our destiny, and capable of writing any future we want. Like all life before us, we influence the next chapter by our daily choices and actions. It's a radically free idea, and it should inform our current situation - we need to be very conscious about the decisions we make (as individuals and as collectives), because they in turn make us. I'll venture to suggest that the "teleonomic perspective," which maintains that living systems evolved internal purposiveness, necessarily prompts one simple question: Which behaviors best achieve our desired ends, such as continued survival? If we ask this question, a whole myriad of new questions will be raised, but it is the necessary starting point from which the next chapter in our adventure begins.
"It is not the organs ...of an animal's body that have given rise to its special habits and faculties; but it is, on the contrary, its habits, mode of life and environment that have in the course of time controlled the shape of its body, the number and state of its organs and, lastly, the faculties which it possesses."To address the notion that this is a meaningless, or purposeless, existence, you have to consider teleonomy. And that is very different from Robert Wright's teleological arguments in his article. Why is this overlooked? We are under the impression of a false dichotomy and an entrenched dualism. The dichotomy we are presented with is that there is either a grand purpose to life or there is no purpose at all. The third option is that organisms evolved their own purposes. And though not as often discussed, that is established canon within evolutionary biology.
- Jean Baptiste de Lamarck, "Zoological Philosophy," 1809
"Every reform deliberately instituted in the structure of society changes both history and the selective forces that affect evolution — though evolutionary change may be the farthest thing from our minds as reformers. We are not free to avoid producing evolution: we are only free to close our eyes to what we are doing."
- Garrett Hardin, 1971
"The game of chess illustrates precisely why any laws or rules of emergence and evolution are insufficient. Even in a chess game, you cannot use the rules to predict “history” — i.e., the course of any given game. Indeed, you cannot even reliably predict the next move in a chess game. Why? Because the “system” involves more than the rules of the game. It also includes the players and their unfolding, moment-by-moment decisions among a very large number of available options at each choice point. The game of chess is inescapably historical, even though it is also constrained and shaped by a set of rules, not to mention the laws of physics. Moreover, and this is a key point, the game of chess is also shaped by teleonomic, cybernetic, feedback-driven influences. It is not simply a self-ordered process; it involves an organized, “purposeful” activity."
- Peter Corning, "The Re-emergence of “Emergence”: A Venerable Concept in Search of a Theory"
"Perhaps the most distinctive property of life, what distinguishes living systems from all of the other kinds of agglomerations in the natural world, is its dynamic goal-directedness. For life is a process with a purpose. Living systems have a vocation. They actively pursue survival and reproduction, and they do so by deploying an immense variety of different survival strategies in an immense number of different environments. This internal teleonomy, which humans have in common with all other living organisms (though our cultural cocoons sometimes insulate us from this reality), remains something of a “black box” for evolutionary biology."
- Peter Corning, "What is Life? Among Other Things, It’s a Synergistic Effect"
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| Source: Peter Corning, "Synergistic Selection" (2018) |
The very factors that contributed to our economic progress as a species also created opportunities for economic exploitation, social inequality, and political conflict (and regression). The egalitarian social contract that had sustained our hominin ancestors for millions of years was undermined, and this resulted in a deep structural defect that has plagued modern human societies down to the present day. (189) What is most troubling about our current predicament is that we do not have the cybernetic/political machinery to deal with the emerging environmental crisis. There is a deep and ominous structual flaw in modern societies that did not exist among our hunter-gatherer ancestors. The traditional reverse dominance hierarchy in humankind has devolved into various forms of exploitative hierarchical systems, for the most part. (202)Perhaps, if we are to gain the cybernetic/political machinery to address the structural flaw in modern society that Corning (as well as Grinspoon and others point out) it will be through some sort of "cognitive niche construction theory." A purpose-driven behavioral innovation, a putting together of things, for the first time or in new ways, that had formerly been separate or misaligned.
The collective survival strategy that our remote ancestors evolved over the past five million years or so remains at the core of our modus operandi as a species down to the present day. Most of us live in deeply interdependent "tribes" that are organized to pursue our basic survival and reproductive needs cooperatively. Whatever may be our perceptions, or our illusions, a complex modern society is, in essence, a collective survival enterprise. We depend for the satisfaction of our basic needs on an elaborate division (combination) of labor supported by an awesome and ever-growing repertoire of tools and technologies, some of which we owe to the inventiveness of long-ago ancestors. Although the course of human history has been far from smooth, the dominant trend has been an expanding and thickening web of economic and cultural synergies - and synergistic selection. ...In the final reckoning, if our species fails to meet this great survival challenge, we will squander our evolutionary inheritance and betray what untold generations of our ancestors struggled to achieve over millions of years." (187, 233)
Anthropologist Joseph Heinrich points to the rise of what he calls the "collective brain," our shared cultural capacities. He notes: "Our collective brains arise from the synergies created by the sharing of information among individuals." He also describes our cultural evolution as "a broad and synergistic process." (159)
Some insights on teleonomy from Stephen Talbott in his article "Evolution and the Purposes of Life," The New Atlantis, Number 51, Winter 2017, pp. 63–91:
The idea of teleological behavior within a world of meaning is rather uncomfortable for scientists committed — as contemporary biologists overwhelmingly are — to materialism or naturalism. The discomfort has to do with the apparent inward aspect of goal-directed behavior. But as the Chilean neuroscientist and philosopher of biology Francisco Varela wrote: “The answer to the question of what status teleology should have in biology decides about the character of our whole theory of animate nature.”I think the idea of teleonomy is uncomfortable due to the subjective nature of goal-directed behavior, and a long habit of excising agency from scientific explanations. But dynamic goal-directedness is the most distinctive property of life. Hence, it serves no benefit to erase the subject-object dichotomy, or rid ourselves of the mind-body dualism, by throwing half of either away. Instead we must conceive of an integrated agent-environment system that entails the properties of both, and which should inform the causal relationships and explanatory mechanisms we employ. Teleonomy is already one such mechanism rooted in an integrated agent-environment world view.
Biologists’ discomfiture with inwardness in any form is presumably why, in 1958, Colin Pittendrigh proposed “teleonomy” as a kind of de-psychologized substitute for “teleology.” The new word was intended to capture the physically lawful character of end-directed biological activity (nomos meaning “law”), while avoiding any “spooky” suggestion of familiar intention, purpose, or intelligence — any suggestion, that is, of reasoned and meaningful behavior analogous to conscious human activity. [...]
Paul Weiss writes that in a machine the operation of the parts determines the outcome of the whole. While in a biological system, the structure of the whole coordinates the play of the parts. Exactly the opposite of a machine. He reminds us that, for organisms, the end is more constant than the means. We habitually want parts, as mere physical causes, to explain wholes.
When we truly recognize biological wholes, we are mentally participating in reasons and meanings, which alone can establish a contextual unity, and which can never be explained by the constituent physical events through which they achieve their expression. The purposive end is more constant than the physical means.
How, then, can we conceive the organism as a center of activity? What is meant by its agency? One way to answer this question is by beginning with the fact that every organism is narrating what we might refer to as its life story. So when I speak of the organism’s wise agency and its purposive striving, I refer to its capacity to weave, out of the resources of its own life, the kind of biological narrative we observe, with its orchestration of physical events in the service of the organism’s own meanings. I make no hypotheses to explain this intentional agency and story construction. I only note that the fact of story construction is immediately demonstrable in every organism. The narrative of tasks undertaken and accomplished is there to be seen. [...]
...the question about the organism’s purposeful activity has disappeared in favor of the question about whether the design of the artifactual organism was purposeful or not.
Dawkins’s own strong predilection runs toward purposeless design by natural selection, a “blind watchmaker” who gives us an apparent purpose that — not to worry! — isn’t quite the real thing. On the other hand, the opponents Dawkins seems usually to have in mind prefer an intelligent designer. What seems to have fallen out of the argument on both sides are the living powers of the organism itself, which have vanished into the automatisms of engineered machinery. For many intelligent design advocates, those powers have been transferred to a mysterious designer who, having messed around with everyone’s ancestors, remains conveniently obscure for current scientific investigation. [...]
Everyone agrees that natural selection cannot work unless the organisms available to it are capable of carrying out all the activities necessary to their life and survival, while also reproducing and preparing an inheritance for their offspring. But these are the very activities that presented us with the problem of teleology in the first place. If natural selection must assume them in order to do its work, then to say it solves the problem of teleological origins looks very much like question-begging.
This becomes clearer when we realize that purposiveness is not merely a feature of this or that particular trait. It is inseparable from life as such — you could almost say it defines those self-organizing, self-maintaining, and self-expressive activities we call “living.” Whatever role we imagine natural selection to play in generating functional adaptations such as hands and eyes, it does not account for the fact of end-directed behavior, which is inseparable from the fact of life itself.
This truth has not been entirely missed. In 1962, the philosopher Grace de Laguna wrote a paper on “The Role of Teleonomy in Evolution” in which she said of natural selection that it is only on organisms “as teleonomic systems that it can operate.” And, she explained, “only when we think in teleonomic terms, and regard the structure as end-directed, does it make sense to speak of ‘selection’ at all.” [...]
The concern about effective mental intentions alien to the material world is, I am convinced, produced by the entrenched dualism that has given us a long-running “mind-body problem,” and it shows every promise of disappearing when we manage to let go of that dualism. But, having inherited mind and matter as the incommensurable products of Descartes’s cleaving stroke, rather than going back and undoing that fateful stroke in order to find a different way forward, the scientist meekly accepts both mind and matter from Descartes’s hand, and then decides he can be rid of the contradiction between them only by throwing away one of them.
And so not only is the world badly riven, but essential aspects of its nature are discarded. Form as a causal principle disappears from view, and any attempt at acknowledging it is likely to be condemned as an appeal to vital forces or to discredited ancient philosophy. At the same time, attempts to explain form mechanistically end up being circular, since the form one is trying to explain also appears in the explanation. The attempt to sustain the materialistic view based on a single half of the crudely dichotomized Cartesian world is a sickness from which contemporary thought cannot seem to free itself.
"The current crisis that seems to be gripping the modern world is in large part a reaction to a vision of reality that has no place for subjectivity or value."It's easy to see that all life is a dynamic goal-directed process. Our lives are part of a symphony of such small purposes as live around us. We're just part of the gang. So (if living systems have goals that can be inferred from system behavior) then when I look out upon a landscape filled with plants and animals engaged in all manner of activities, I am seeing a plurality of implicitly goal-directed behaviors, each of which requires the fulfillment of various basic needs in order to be pursued. People seem much the same, with several purposes to reach, and always striving to see clearly what each of them are. A fair number of the posts on social media is just a record of goals achieved or failed, things desired or avoided, and various states in between.
- Terrence Deacon, "Incomplete Nature" p544
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| Source: Joseph Henrich (2015) |
I am tempted to extend this to the subject of comparative civilizations, or revisit the work of Gregory S. Paul on "Cross-National Correlations of Quantifiable Societal Health..." Or even ask what impact developments in genetic, genomic, and reproductive technologies (aka eugenics) are having in this context. (Insofar as eugenics presupposes an external ideal, it is teleological, and has caused historical abuses in the pursuit of nationalistic ideology.) Thankfully however, we are capable of more than enough behavioral plasticity to address contemporary problems by means of adapting our social institutions.
“Society grows great when old men plant trees whose shade they know they shall never sit in.” There are short term goals (usually to meet basic needs), and long term goals (taking years or sometimes decades to reach). Then there are also very long term, intergenerational goals. What changes will occur over generations? Carl Sagan once said we are a transitional species... (So live for today, but make your plans with a full understanding of evolutionary selection.)
A teleonomic biography (of an individual, community, species, or superorganism):
All kinds of biographies have been written. I'd like to read a biography of dreams and aspirations, both those fulfilled and those that were never fully realized. There could be a few simple rules for inclusion in the book. The aspiration would have to be recognized by the individual, articulated in sufficient detail, and at least have preliminary steps towards its realization pursued. And in fact, those dreams left incomplete are some of the most interesting. I've known people who thought of moving to another place to live, visited said place, maybe even bought land there, but never moved and eventually decided to not act on that particular thought for a variety of other reasons, many of which were unrelated. The formation and pursuit of dreams is like watching a pack of wolves on the hunt. It's been said that for every 10 pursuits of prey only one chase ends in a successful kill. The same may be true of dreams and goals. But we don't always abandon them due to failure, sometimes a better future path opens up, and we take that one instead. So looking back at life, whether yours or that of someone you know, how many goals were set, how many reached?
The other half of life includes those things we benefit from that have little or nothing to do with our personal agency - the happy accidents, and sometimes unfortunate events, that we have no control over. Meeting your husband or wife, in the way it actually unfolded, is more often a chance event than the result of careful calculation - that kind of happy accident rarely happens the way we planned. Being diagnosed with a debilitating medical condition is also not something one can easily anticipate and can have a devastating impact upon our future dreams. So I'm not suggesting that an exploration of personal aspirations offers a full account of life, but it offers an account of the role of one's personal agency, motivations, and how those change under shifting circumstances. As we grow older, they also change in characteristic ways that say a lot about who we are and how we see ourselves.
Over 15 years ago, when we hit a moose while driving 60 miles an hour, my wife and I walked away from the accident with a few new scars but our bodies intact. After seeing our totaled vehicle, some of those close to us said it seemed to be a miracle. At times like that one wonders about whether there was some greater purpose, as yet unrealized, that our lives should be spared. But even without death defying survival, children will casually wonder why, out of the entire world, that they find themselves living the particular life they have and not the life of someone else. "Why am I me?" Is it chance or design? The most familiar design perspective is provided by religion. A chance perspective is provided by the notion of the anthropic principle and survivor bias (and more controversially Hugh Everett's MWI). But the grasp of teleological purpose in life upon the human perspective is all the more firm when our own agency is threatened or frustrated.
To provide an example, when a person struggles with creating and achieving their own goals, but continually fails as a result of roadblocks set up by others, by circumstance, or by self sabotage, it is tempting to wonder if there are principles of fate and destiny operating in the world, as personal agency has not produced the results they had hoped for. Maybe there is simply a "misalignment" between individual and eternal/universal values and purposes. There is no better example of this perspective than the verse "And we know that all things work together for good for those who love God and are called according to his purpose."
The agency of every individual has definite limits, but as the extent of human agency and understanding has grown, and as formerly inexplicable phenomena can be predicted, understood, or even harnessed, the role of teleology has changed, and the existential question of teleonomy asserts itself. People will always ask and seek teleological questions and explanations, that will never change, but the teleonomic process of purpose creation is increasing in step with growing human agency.
Returning to the question of why we walked away from our collision, there is a teleonomic explanation. We survived because improvements in automotive design and testing led to the creation of new vehicles that allow their occupants to survive collisions at much higher speeds. We were the direct beneficiaries of this research to reduce fatalities, a goal that was purposefully embarked upon at the urging of consumer groups and political bodies concerned by the issue. So in a sense, it was a greater purpose that saved our lives, but not as most people imagine it.
It is a story, a narrative that we author. It is enactive, performed, embodied. It is living, not static. Always changing. Within certain limits, we are capable of directing the course. Behavioral goals are like species - they display convergent evolution, occupy ecological niches, sometimes go extinct. They follow "evolutionary transitions" that show a general trend toward synergism. And like the branches on a tree, when one falls off another may grow to fill the void it left. Purpose driven goal directed behavior is the most distinctive characteristic of life.
5/30/2018:
In the continued pursuit of survival, goal directed behaviors evolve like species (or taxonomic characters), and as these goals are responsible for coordinating the parts of a system, those parts get reappropriated to serve new functions whenever goals change. One of my favorite examples of reappropriation in biology is the evolution of the jaw from the gill arch. So how does this reappropriation/reconfiguration occur within our lives? As our goals change, the effects can ripple outward through all aspects of life. This disruptive influence may be underappreciated.
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| Source: Steven Pinker, "The Better Angels of Our Nature" (2011) |
A changing environment, leads to changing behavioral
goals, leads to system reconfiguration, leads to a changing environment
(and so on). ...But the system reconfiguration step is the hardest
part. Steven Pinker doesn't say teleonomy, but
that's arguably what he's talking about in the preface to his book "The Better Angels of Our Nature." Whether this has
actually occurred, and in the way he later describes, is debatable, but
it is certainly possible.
"The objects of biological analysis are organizations (organisms) and, as such, are end-directed. Organization is more that mere order; order lacks end-directedness; organization is end-directed... The most general of all biological 'ends', or 'purposes' is of course perpetuation by reproduction. That end [and all its subsidiary 'ends' of feeding, defense and survival generally] is in some sense effective in causing natural selection; in causing evolutionary change; but not in causing itself. In brief, we have failed in the past to unconfound causation in the historical origins of a system and causation in the contemporary working of the system..."- Teleological and Teleonomic: A New Analysis, Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science, Volume XIV, pages 91-117 (1974)"There is a teleonomic character to the nested chemical systems that interact to comprise what we call life and connect the inanimate->living system continuum. Before we have clearly understood the less complex transition from inanimate to living systems, it may be premature to think we can create conscious AI by reduction to computation and elimination of the importance of the chemical substrate as part of the process that links systems."
See also: "Social Evolution: State of the Field," by Kathryn Denning, 2009. (in "Cosmos & Culture: Cultural Evolution in a Cosmic Context")
[1] Grinspoon was clear about the teleological aspect of the noosphere. There may be a connection between the noosphere and teleonomy, but that is a different story.
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