Ch. 1: Tell Me Why

[Chris OConnor]

Ch. 1: Tell Me Why

Please use this thread to discuss the above listed chapter of "Darwin's Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meanings of Life" by Daniel Dennett.

[Harry Marks]

The point that Dennett seems to me to be making here is mainly that an "argument from design" seemed unanswerable before Darwin. That is, even skeptics like Hume found the world to be so full of what we now call "adaptations" (ways that living things are adapted to perform well at keeping them alive - cactus in the desert, fur that thins out in spring, etc.) that it must have been created that way by some kind of mind.

Obviously this is a persuasive point, and those with leisure to reflect on such matters must have recognized the revolution created by Darwin's insight. I am not sure it is worth getting into the controversies over the length of time involved, some of which paved the way for acceptance of Darwin, but it is worth noting that Lord Kelvin showed, with perfectly good thermodynamics decades after Darwin, that the earth was far too warm for a planet old enough to support the lengths of time proposed by geologists. Of course, he did not know about atomic decay and the radiation that results from it.

I am more interested in the general subject of the relation between mind and purpose. Even after we dispense with the argument from design, we are left with the issue of discernment of purpose and its role in understanding. That will be, I hope, the point that Dennett takes us to once he has made his points about the difference between "cranes" and "skyhooks."

My point would be that discernment of purpose seems to be a complex matter. To create an idea of purpose from the outside of the process, as an observer, we have to create an inner model of the process. To answer the question, "What is Putin trying to accomplish in Ukraine?" we have to create simulacra of the agents involved, and decide at what point we are going to settle for heuristics like "spheres of influence" in our construction of those simulacra, or whether we need to know all the ins and outs of the agent's working before we reach conclusions about our response.

We know from experience that we operate in our own lives with some sense of purpose, so it will not do to take a B.F. Skinner approach of abstracting entirely from an inner model of purpose in drawing conclusions about the operations of purpose. We are led, essentially, to think about what the world is like from the perspective of, say, a bat.

Thus I generally find myself dissatisfied with scientists, when engaging with, say, creationists, who operate from the assumption that we only need to evaluate the correctness or incorrectness of people's beliefs, completely ignoring the question of the function and "telos" of holding those beliefs. For an academic argument about biology, obviously that is what matters. For a discussion at the level of society and world, pretending that a discussion of God is a discussion of the academic issues of explaining biological phenomena is a recipe for disaster.

[Dexter]

Thus I generally find myself dissatisfied with scientists, when engaging with, say, creationists, who operate from the assumption that we only need to evaluate the correctness or incorrectness of people's beliefs, completely ignoring the question of the function and "telos" of holding those beliefs.

Scientists are generally fine with admitting that holding certain beliefs can be comforting, provide subjective meaning, etc., it's fairly self-evident. Going into that further would be a matter for psychology and sociology I suppose.

On an unrelated note, I enjoyed Dennett's discussion of earlier thinkers, particularly Hume, who as he put it, came tantalizingly close to embracing evolution but couldn't quite accept it without any further available mechanisms or explanation for all the diversity and adaptation around us.

And seeing how Darwin took some existing ideas just a step further, and really having an understanding of how far-reaching his idea would take him. It's one of those historical cases where you wish you could bring him back to life and show him the discovery of DNA, imagine how satisfying it would be.

[Harry Marks]

I enjoyed Dennett's discussion of earlier thinkers, particularly Hume, who as he put it, came tantalizingly close to embracing evolution but couldn't quite accept it without any further available mechanisms or explanation for all the diversity and adaptation around us.

I also enjoyed Hume's character Philo engaging in the thought, "If God designed all this, why are there so many errors?" The point has been made by biologists many times, in many forms, but it was worth raising even at the philosophical level. We see a number of marvelous adaptations, and a number of inadequate kludges. We need a framework which can accommodate both.

[DWill]

Are there really any errors, though? The poor design features of the human spine haven't stopped us from from breeding well, which is the whole advantage conferred by natural selection. Elegance isn't the point, even though we do recognize elegance in many of the solutions natural selection has engineered.

[Harry Marks]

Are there really any errors, though? The poor design features of the human spine haven't stopped us from from breeding well, which is the whole advantage conferred by natural selection. Elegance isn't the point, even though we do recognize elegance in many of the solutions natural selection has engineered.

Hume and Dennett recognize the persuasiveness of adaptation. Certainly some elegance can be found. So if you are reflecting on an argument from elegance (watches don't assemble themselves randomly - they demonstrate design for intent) then weaknesses in the adaptation count.

Why didn't God give the whales and dolphins gills? They would have come in so handy for those deep dives! Why didn't God give echolocation to birds? Why are we so vulnerable to predation by microorganisms? It is hard to consider elephantiasis or guinea worm to be created by a benevolent architect, and the cheat of ascribing it to sin works no better than Pandora opening a box. Sin simply provides no mechanism.

There is actually an important point buried here. In Ch. 2 Dennett gives an account of natural selection which simply ignores the role of randomness and variation. The truth is that adaption is imperfect in a Darwinian model as well. We can sometimes find optimality in balance between calorie expenditure of a feature and return in the form of survival likelihood, for example, but the typical case is a range of values reflecting a range of circumstances. As a result many individuals will be less than optimally adapted within a population which only roughly approximates optimality.

The case you mentioned, DWill, of the weaknesses in the human spine, provide an excellent example of the true situation. Adaptations need to be "good enough" to do their job within the variation our biology can manage, and will not necessarily achieve any theoretical optimality. I suspect this will emerge as a topic when we get to cranes and skyhooks.

[DWill]

The case you mentioned, DWill, of the weaknesses in the human spine, provide an excellent example of the true situation. Adaptations need to be "good enough" to do their job within the variation our biology can manage, and will not necessarily achieve any theoretical optimality. I suspect this will emerge as a topic when we get to cranes and skyhooks.

As a aging person, I've occasionally had the thought that evolution is "done with me," and my declining fitness due partly to the warranty on my body reaching expiration has no bearing, since I've done the duty of passing on a unique genetic mix to the next generation. I can leave the stage now, says evolution.

Well, Dennett seems to promise that by showing me the telos, the purpose, goal, or why of evolution, I might feel a little better. This will be a trick, indeed, since Dennett tells us that up until now, even religious attempts to answer the why of life have substituted the how, in the form of various cosmogonies. Dennett will do this on what we might call a purely materialistic foundation. Science has made it impossible to believe that pre-existing mind created matter and then animated it as life. But, he implies, science has shown how thought or mind might have arisen from matter.

I was also interested in Dennett's claim that even those who think they're okay with evolution may not have absorbed its full implications. He suggests that since the theory is still relatively young in historical terms, we might also be young in our understanding of it. To me, this seems to point to "theistic" forms of evolution as not being compatible with Darwin's actual theory. Not scientifically compatible, anyway. But no doubt even a non-theist like myself might not have processed it fully--surely not, in fact, because the stuff Dennett will taking us through looks like heavy lifting.

I like the beginning position he stakes out with regard to the certainty of what we refer to as evolution. As to the truth of forms of life having undergone continual modification and generated new species, there is about as much doubt as Copernicus being wrong about his cosmology. As for the mechanism of change that Darwin proposed, natural selection, intellectually respectable doubt about particulars exists, and it would even be possible, but extremely unlikely, that something else is driving evolution.

I did not get all of the meaning in your first post, Harry. Maybe what I've just said accidentally touches on some of it.

[Robert Tulip]

The point that Dennett seems to me to be making here is mainly that an "argument from design" seemed unanswerable before Darwin. That is, even skeptics like Hume found the world to be so full of what we now call "adaptations" (ways that living things are adapted to perform well at keeping them alive - cactus in the desert, fur that thins out in spring, etc.) that it must have been created that way by some kind of mind.

Yes, it raises the interesting example of the cultural evolution of the theory of evolution, the fact that before the idea of natural selection had been thought through by Darwin, it did not exist explicitly, even though it may be seen implicitly in the ideas of writers such as Hume. The rival hypotheses of God as intentional mind and accidental mechanical process could not be assessed until Darwin provided an explanation of how mechanical causality could produce the complexity of life.

Obviously this is a persuasive point, and those with leisure to reflect on such matters must have recognized the revolution created by Darwin's insight.

Meaning, before Darwin hit upon his mechanical theory of evolution, an intentional mind of God seemed the best available explanation. That is despite the paradigmatic anomalies such as stupid bugs that could never be installed as features by a smart designer but could only occur by accident, like the neck nerves of a giraffe.

It is just like how before Copernicus and Kepler geocentrism seemed the most elegant explanation despite its anomalies. By the way, I don't agree with Dennett's claim that Darwin's revolution is bigger than heliocentrism. Dennett is neglecting how geocentrism, and its popular simplification in flat earth theory, supported the traditional triple decker theory of heaven above and hell below. Removing that idea was central to the popular mythology of the Reformation.

I am more interested in the general subject of the relation between mind and purpose.

Me too. The traditional theory of purpose was that God created the world intentionally and deliberately for the purpose of his greater glory.

A purpose is a deliberate intention. It seems to me, the core of Darwin’s Dangerous Idea is the removal of personal divine intent from any theory of cosmic purpose. It means that if we wish to salvage any concept of divinity, we have to remove from it the attributes of personal intent, which means removing the idea that a divinity can be an entity.

Salvaging purpose within an evolutionary framework could therefore be as mind-bending as the quantum mechanical ideas that the universe is stranger than we can imagine. It could mean that our sense of purpose becomes entirely accidental and natural.

My view is that evolutionary purpose can be defined as achieving possibility. When an organism fills the niche that the limits of nature provide for it, it has achieved its possible purpose. For a plant or animal, achieving its purpose might mean inhabiting all of the ecosystems on earth that can support it. For humanity, achieving our purpose might mean expanding to colonise the galaxy over the next billion years.

This gets back to some ideas I have presented here before, around how ethics requires axioms. The moral axiom that human flourishing is good seems to me to provide a sense of evolutionary purpose for ethics. Unlike in the traditional AMDG idea of divine purpose, that we exist to glorify God, we cannot say that human flourishing reflects the wishes of our creator. But even this statement about what evolution has to say about a possible creator is complex. We cannot rule out that achieving an intelligence that can reflect natural law in symbolic language is somehow an inherent purpose of the existence of the universe. That is how I understand the Biblical idea that man is made in the image of God.

[Robert Tulip]

As a aging person, I've occasionally had the thought that evolution is "done with me," and my declining fitness due partly to the warranty on my body reaching expiration has no bearing, since I've done the duty of passing on a unique genetic mix to the next generation. I can leave the stage now, says evolution.

In fact, humans are unlike most other species in being genetically adapted to provide care to grandchildren. That means that genomes that survive to the third and possibly fourth generation have an advantage, so evolution is not done with you when you breed, as it is with most species.

Well, Dennett seems to promise that by showing me the telos, the purpose, goal, or why of evolution, I might feel a little better. This will be a trick, indeed, since Dennett tells us that up until now, even religious attempts to answer the why of life have substituted the how, in the form of various cosmogonies. Dennett will do this on what we might call a purely materialistic foundation. Science has made it impossible to believe that pre-existing mind created matter and then animated it as life. But, he implies, science has shown how thought or mind might have arisen from matter.

My opinion is that mind is a complex pattern of matter. I do not accept that there is an ontological difference between spirit and matter. So this problem of material purpose, escaping the abyss of nihilism, is the great problem of the philosophy of science. Religion does provide a reason why, with the claim that we exist to glorify God. Recasting that vision into a materialist framework, for example by explaining how previous supernatural theories of God are allegories for material realities, should be the aim of evolutionary teleology.

I was also interested in Dennett's claim that even those who think they're okay with evolution may not have absorbed its full implications. He suggests that since the theory is still relatively young in historical terms, we might also be young in our understanding of it. To me, this seems to point to "theistic" forms of evolution as not being compatible with Darwin's actual theory. Not scientifically compatible, anyway. But no doubt even a non-theist like myself might not have processed it fully--surely not, in fact, because the stuff Dennett will taking us through looks like heavy lifting.

In science, where you have an explanation that provides a full account for observations, other rival explanations are rendered redundant. The theory of evolution has in this way rendered the traditional idea of a personal intentional creator entity God existing outside the universe. However, the psychological belief in such a God appears to be highly adaptive, so the challenge for evolutionary theory is to work out how to retain the adaptive content of religion while placing it within a materialist scientific framework. I think that is what Dennett means by absorbing the full implications of evolution, instead of inhabiting an incoherent lukewarm halfway house that is neither fully traditional nor fully scientific.

[Harry Marks]

As a aging person, I've occasionally had the thought that evolution is "done with me," and my declining fitness due partly to the warranty on my body reaching expiration has no bearing, since I've done the duty of passing on a unique genetic mix to the next generation. I can leave the stage now, says evolution.

I've thought the same myself. Robert gives a good response, about grandparent wisdom being valuable and so evolution delaying the removal from the stage. But I would observe that what looks like a "why" question (why am I still here?) is really a "how" question (how does survival of the old improve their reproductive fitness?).

It's good to keep that distinction clear, because when we get to social processes, whys are not mainly disguised hows. And the fact that my wife and I are of value to each other is sufficient reason to prefer that neither of us take a bunch of sleeping pills. Why? Because another person, who cares, would be hurt by that (not to mention life has more adventures to offer, still).

Well, Dennett seems to promise that by showing me the telos, the purpose, goal, or why of evolution, I might feel a little better.

I rather suspect he isn't going to try to show that. Rather, from reading blurbs, I suspect he is going to argue that most "Why" questions will not have a well-defined meaning, and are instead a weak substitute for understanding of mechanism (for "how", in a sense).

This will be a trick, indeed, since Dennett tells us that up until now, even religious attempts to answer the why of life have substituted the how, in the form of various cosmogonies.

Do you really think so? Do you think that Calvin's declaration that the chief end of man is to give glory to God is a cosmogony? I rather think it is like Socrates arguing that we are seeking the good. And declaring that the unexamined life is not worth living. And surely you would not consider either of those to be a cosmogony.

Dennett will do this on what we might call a purely materialistic foundation.

I have no problem with materialistic frameworks. I would simply point out that there are levels of complexity which are "emergent" from the lower levels of complexity in ways which make the lower levels inadequate to analyze the higher. So, for example, we would not try to understand biology by starting with the principles which make chemistry useful, but look at biological phenomena as processes in their own right, made up from chemical materials. In the same way, a biological process capable of reflecting on its telos, and of modifying it, is an emergent level of complexity, whose proper name is "spirit". We do not observe elephants or even chimps reflecting on what kind of elephant they will be, and deciding to be a different kind. (Maybe in chimps - judgment reserved.) The dynamics of such reflective, self-modifying properties are, to say the least, of interest to humans.

To me, this seems to point to "theistic" forms of evolution as not being compatible with Darwin's actual theory.

Right. It is too bad that so many people are still hung up on making sure some entity fitting traditional ideas of God is in the picture of causation. Or, for that matter, that non-religious people take this to be the essential telos and function of religion.

I did not get all of the meaning in your first post, Harry. Maybe what I've just said accidentally touches on some of it.

Sorry for being less than clear. I am mainly trying to lay the groundwork for interesting discussion that I hope arises later. Perhaps you were referring to my final remark about scientists restricting their discussion of religion to its usefulness or accuracy in explaining natural phenomena such as adaptations within species. What I was hinting at was that religion is densely involved with telos. And its purpose is almost never to explain natural phenomena. It purposes are virtually all social, psychological and spiritual. So addressing it as "bad science" is correct, but missing most of the point.

I hope we will eventually arrive at ideas which help illuminate the issue of purpose within religion. And I was saying that scientists should be interested in religious phenomena as shedding light on the whole matter of "purpose".

For instance, one of the fundamental observations on the subject is that the telos of religion viewed from outside, such as its role in maintaining a social order or keeping aggression largely within a hierarchy framework to minimize unnecessary conflict, can differ dramatically from its telos as perceived, and described, from the inside, such as coming to terms with one's tendency to do wrong, and defining criteria for activities to count as meaningful and fulfilling. Anthropologists even have terms to describe these different modes of understanding purpose.