Kant on biological teleology: Towards a two-level interpretation

According to Kant's Critique of the power of judgment, teleological considerations are unavoidable for conceptualizing organisms. Does this mean that teleology is more than merely heuristic? Kant stresses the regulative status of teleological attributions, but sometimes he seems to treat teleology as a constitutive condition for biology. To clarify this issue, the concept of natural purpose and its role for biology are examined. I suggest that the concept serves an identificatory function: it singles out objects as natural purposes, whereby the special science of biology is constituted. This relative constitutivity of teleology is explicated by means of a distinction of levels: on the object level of biological science, teleology is taken as constitutive, though it is merely regulative on the philosophical meta level. This distinction also concerns the place of Aristotelian teleology in Kant: on the object level, the Aristotelian view is accepted, whereas on the meta level, an agnostic stance is taken concerning teleology.     

Natural selection and the conditions for existence: representational vs. conditional teleology in biological explanation

Human intentional action, including the design and use of artifacts, involves the prior mental representation of the goal (end) and the means to achieve that goal. This representation is part of the efficient cause of the action, and thus can be used to explain both the action and the achievement of the end. This is intentional teleological explanation. More generally, teleological explanation that depends on the real existence of a representation of the goal (and the means to achieve it) can be called representational teleological explanation. Such explanations in biology can involve both external representations (e.g., ideas in the mind of God) and internal representations (souls, vital powers, entelechies, developmental programs, etc.). However, another type of explanation of intentional action (or any other process) is possible. Given that an action achieving a result occurs, the action can be explained as fulfilling the necessary conditions (means) for that result (end), and, reciprocally, the result explained by the occurrence of those necessary conditions. This is conditional teleological explanation. For organisms, natural selection is often understood metaphorically as the designer, intentionally constructing them for certain ends. Unfortunately, this metaphor is often taken rather too literally, because it has been difficult to conceive of another way to relate natural selection to the process of evolution. I argue that combining a conditional teleological explanation of organisms and of evolution provides such an alternative. This conditional teleology can be grounded in existence or survival. Given that an organism exists, we can explain its existence by the occurrence of the necessary conditions for that existence. This principle of the 'conditions for existence' was introduced by Georges Cuvier in 1800, and provides a valid, conditional teleological method for explaining organismal structure and behavior. From an evolutionary perspective, the conditions for existence are the range of boundary conditions within which the evolutionary process must occur. Moreover, evolutionary change itself can be subjected to conditional teleological explanation, because natural selection theory is primarily a theory about the relation between the conditions for the existence of organisms and the conditions for the existence of traits in populations. I show that failure to distinguish representational from conditional teleological explanation has confused previous attempts to clarify the relation of teleology to biology.     

Darwin was a teleologist

It is often claimed that one of Darwin's chief accomplishments was to provide biology with a non-teleological explanation of adaptation. A number of Darwin's closest associates, however, and Darwin himself, did not see it that way. In order to assess whether Darwin's version of evolutionary theory does or does not employ teleological explanation, two of his botanical studies are examined. The result of this examination is that Darwin sees selection explanations of adaptations as teleological explanations. The confusion in the nineteenth century about Darwin's attitude to teleology is argued to be a result of Darwin's teleological explanations not conforming to either of the dominant philosophical justifications of teleology at that time. Darwin's explanatory practices conform well, however, to recent defenses of the teleological character of selection explanations.I would like to thank John Beatty, David Hull and one of this journal's readers for constructive comments on an earlier draft of this paper.     

Theses on Darwin.

The received view that teleology has been successfully eliminated from the modern scientific worldview is challenged. It is argued that both the theory of natural selection and molecular biology presuppose the existence of natural teleology, and so cannot explain it. A number of other issues in the foundations of biology are briefly examined, while stress is laid throughout on empirical evidence of the rational agency inherent in life. It is urged that teleology be rehabilitated and that the reigning functionalist philosophy be replaced by a realistic view of biological functions as emergent properties of living matter within a broad, selforganization framework.     

A case reopened: teleology and its consequences for the units of selection discussion.

Darwinian explanations for teleology are often imprecise, and justify the occurrence of teleological features by referring to natural selection in a vague and unspecified sense. In this paper, the Darwinian account for teleology is further analyzed. It is argued that in theory only a specific form of teleology--teleology that is caused by and directed towards the preservation of the genetic program--can be explained in a naturalistic way by employing Darwin's theory of natural selection. This observation links teleology with the units of selection discussion, as for both discussions the end-direction of teleological processes and behavior is of elementary importance. According to Dawkins' analysis, the unit of selection is an active germ-like replicator with a sufficient degree of longevity-fecundity-copying fidelity. From the teleological point of view, the unit of selection should additionally incorporate the genetic program in order to naturalize teleology. It is shown that within sexually reproducing species these two requirements cannot be met. Dawkins' concept of genic selectionism cannot be maintained without violating the naturalistic claims on teleology, and none of the other frequently proposed unit of selection candidates can adequately meet the demands as developed by Dawkins and those developed in the light of teleology.     

How was teleology eliminated in early molecular biology?

This paper approaches the issue of the status of teleological reasoning in contemporary biology through a historical examination of events of the 1930s that surrounded Niels Bohr’s efforts to introduce ‘complementarity’ into biological discussions. The paper examines responses of three theoretical physicists who engaged boundary questions between the biological and physical sciences in this period in response to Bohr—Ernst Pascual Jordan (1902–80), Erwin Schrödinger (1887–1961), and Max Delbrück (1906–81). It is claimed that none of these physicists sufficiently understood Bohr’s ‘critical’ teleological arguments, which are traced to the lineage of Kant and Harald Høffding and their respective resolutions of the Antinomy of Teleological Judgment. The positions of these four historical actors are discussed in terms of Ernst Mayr’s distinction of ‘teleological,’ ‘teleomatic,’ and ‘teleonomic’ explanations. A return to some of the views articulated by Bohr, and behind him, to Høffding and Kant, is claimed to provide a framework for reintroducing a ‘critical’ teleology into biological discussions.     

Children’s Intuitive Teleology: Shifting the Focus of Evolution Education Research

Research has shown that children usually provide teleological explanations for the features of organisms and artifacts, from a very early age (3–4 years old). However, there is no consensus on whether teleological explanations are given in the same manner for non-living natural objects as well. The present study aimed to document the teleological explanations of 5- to 8-year-old children for particular features (color and shape) of organisms, artifacts and non-living natural objects. In addition, it was examined if there was any correlation between these explanations and children’s explanations for the usefulness of those features. Our results indicate a developmental shift in children’s teleological explanations, from a non-selective teleology in pre-school to a selective one in the second grade. In the latter case, children provided teleological explanations mostly for the shape of the feet of organisms and for the shape of artifacts, whereas pre-school children provided teleological explanations for non-living natural objects as well, both for the color and for the shape in all cases. Our results are not conclusive and further research is required, including a larger spectrum of students, since teleology is one of the most important conceptual obstacles in understanding evolution that persists even into adulthood. We conclude by proposing a particular research program for this purpose.     

Order without design

Experimental reality in molecular and cell biology, as revealed by advanced research technologies and methods, is manifestly inconsistent with the design perspective on the cell, thus creating an apparent paradox: where do order and reproducibility in living systems come from if not from design?I suggest that the very idea of biological design (whether evolutionary or intelligent) is a misconception rooted in the time-honored and thus understandably precious error of interpreting living systems/organizations in terms of classical mechanics and equilibrium thermodynamics. This error, introduced by the founders and perpetuated due to institutionalization of science, is responsible for the majority of inconsistencies, contradictions, and absurdities plaguing modern sciences, including one of the most startling paradoxes - although almost everyone agrees that any living organization is an open nonequilibrium system of continuous energy/matter flow, almost everyone interprets and models living systems/organizations in terms of classical mechanics, equilibrium thermodynamics, and engineering, i.e., in terms and concepts that are fundamentally incompatible with the physics of life.The reinterpretation of biomolecules, cells, organisms, ecosystems, and societies in terms of open nonequilibrium organizations of energy/matter flow suggests that, in the domain of life, order and reproducibility do not come from design. Instead, they are natural and inevitable outcomes of self-organizing activities of evolutionary successful, and thus persistent, organizations co-evolving on multiple spatiotemporal scales as biomolecules, cells, organisms, ecosystems, and societies. The process of self-organization on all scales is driven by economic competition, obeys empirical laws of nonequilibrium thermodynamics, and is facilitated and, thus, accelerated by memories of living experience persisting in the form of evolutionary successful living organizations and their constituents.     

Synthetic Genomics and Synthetic Biology Applications Between Hopes and Concerns

New organisms and biological systems designed to satisfy human needs are among the aims of synthetic genomics and synthetic biology. Synthetic biology seeks to model and construct biological components, functions and organisms that do not exist in nature or to redesign existing biological systems to perform new functions. Synthetic genomics, on the other hand, encompasses technologies for the generation of chemically-synthesized whole genomes or larger parts of genomes, allowing to simultaneously engineer a myriad of changes to the genetic material of organisms. Engineering complex functions or new organisms in synthetic biology are thus progressively becoming dependent on and converging with synthetic genomics. While applications from both areas have been predicted to offer great benefits by making possible new drugs, renewable chemicals or clean energy, they have also given rise to concerns about new safety, environmental and socio-economic risks – stirring an increasingly polarizing debate. Here we intend to provide an overview on recent progress in biomedical and biotechnological applications of synthetic genomics and synthetic biology as well as on arguments and evidence related to their possible benefits, risks and governance implications.     

Organisms as natural purposes: the contemporary evolutionary perspective

Kant's conception of organisms as natural purposes raises a challenge to the adequacy of mechanistic explanation in biology. Certain features of organisms appear to be inexplicable by appeal to mechanical law alone. Some biological phenomena, it seems, can only be accounted for teleologically. Contemporary evolutionary biology has by and large ignored this challenge. It is widely held that Darwin's theory of natural selection gives us an adequate, wholly mechanical account of the nature of organisms. In contemporary biology, the category of the organism plays virtually no explanatory role. Contemporary evolutionary biology is a science of sub-organismal entities-replicators. I argue that recent advances in developmental biology demonstrate the inadequacy of sub-organismal mechanism. The category of the organism, construed as a 'natural purpose' should play an ineliminable role in explaining ontogenetic development and adaptive evolution. According to Kant the natural purposiveness of organisms cannot be demonstrated to be an objective principle in nature, nor can purposiveness figure in genuine explain. I attempt to argue, by appeal to recent work on self-organization, that the purposiveness of organisms is a natural phenomenon, and, by appeal to the apparatus of invariance explanation, that biological purposiveness provides genuine, ineliminable biological explanations.     

Are attractors 'strange', or is life more complicated than the simple laws of physics?

Interesting and intriguing questions involve complex systems whose properties cannot be explained fully by reductionist approaches. Last century was dominated by physics, and applying the simple laws of physics to biology appeared to be a practical solution to understand living organisms. However, although some attributes of living organisms involve physico-chemical properties, the genetic program and evolutionary history of complex biological systems make them unique and unpredictable. Furthermore, there are and will be 'unobservable' phenomena in biology which have to be accounted for.     

An untold story in biology: the historical continuity of evolutionary ideas of Muslim scholars from the 8th century to Darwin’s time

Textbooks on the history of biology and evolutionary thought do not mention the evolutionary ideas of Muslim scholars before Darwin’s time. This is part of a trend in the West to minimise the contributions of non-Western scientists to biology, human anatomy and evolutionary biology. Therefore, this paper focuses on the contributions of pre-Darwinian Muslim scholars to the history of evolutionary thought. Our review of texts from a wide range of historical times, and written in various languages, reveals that there were in fact several Muslim scholars who postulated evolutionary ideas, some with remarkable similarities to Darwin’s theory. These ideas included the adaptation and survival of the fittest, a specific origin of humans from apes/monkeys, the notion of evolutionary constraints, the occurrence of extinctions within taxa and hereditary variability. Moreover, while both the scientific community and the broader public generally base their knowledge on Western textbooks, several parts of the Muslim world have indicated an overall rejection of biological–including human–evolution. Therefore, to improve historical accuracy and create a better understanding of scientific history, the world’s diverse civilisations and their philosophies, this untold story should be widely disseminated to the scientific community and the general public.     

Early 20th-century research at the interfaces of genetics, development, and evolution: reflections on progress and dead ends

Three early 20th-century attempts at unifying separate areas of biology, in particular development, genetics, physiology, and evolution, are compared in regard to their success and fruitfulness for further research: Jacques Loeb's reductionist project of unifying approaches by physico-chemical explanations; Richard Goldschmidt's anti-reductionist attempts to unify by integration; and Sewall Wright's combination of reductionist research and vision of hierarchical genetic systems. Loeb's program, demanding that all aspects of biology, including evolution, be studied by the methods of the experimental sciences, proved highly successful and indispensible for higher level investigations, even though evolutionary change and properties of biological systems up to now cannot be fully explained on the molecular level alone. Goldschmidt has been appraised as pioneer of physiological and developmental genetics and of a new evolutionary synthesis which transcended neo-Darwinism. However, this study concludes that his anti-reductionist attempts to integrate genetics, development and evolution have to be regarded as failures or dead ends. His grand speculations were based on the one hand on concepts and experimental systems that were too vague in order to stimulate further research, and on the other on experiments which in their core parts turned out not to be reproducible. In contrast, Sewall Wright, apart from being one of the architects of the neo-Darwinian synthesis of the 1930s, opened up new paths of testable quantitative developmental genetic investigations. He placed his research within a framework of logical reasoning, which resulted in the farsighted speculation that examinations of biological systems should be related to the regulation of hierarchical genetic subsystems, possibly providing a mechanism for development and evolution. I argue that his suggestion of basing the study of systems on clearly defined properties of the components has proved superior to Goldschmidt's approach of studying systems as a whole, and that attempts to integrate different fields at a too early stage may prove futile or worse.     

Species concepts and the ontology of evolution

Biologists and philosophers have long recognized the importance of species, yet species concepts serve two masters, evolutionary theory on the one hand and taxonomy on the other. Much of present-day evolutionary and systematic biology has confounded these two roles primarily through use of the biological species concept. Theories require entities that are real, discrete, irreducible, and comparable. Within the neo-Darwinian synthesis, however, biological species have been treated as real or subjectively delimited entities, discrete or nondiscrete, and they are often capable of being decomposed into other, smaller units. Because of this, biological species are generally not comparable across different groups of organisms, which implies that the ontological structure of evolutionary theory requires modification. Some biologists, including proponents of the biological species concept, have argued that no species concept is universally applicable across all organisms. Such a view means, however, that the history of life cannot be embraced by a common theory of ancestry and descent if that theory uses species as its entities.These ontological and biological difficulties can be alleviated if species are defined in terms of evolutionary units. The latter are irreducible clusters of reproductively cohesive organisms that are diagnosably distinct from other such clusters. Unlike biological species, which can include two or more evolutionary units, these phylogenetic species are discrete entities in space and time and capable of being compared from one group to the next.     

Organic Codes: A Unifying Concept for Life

Although the knowledge about biological systems has advanced exponentially in recent decades, it is surprising to realize that the very definition of Life keeps presenting theoretical challenges. Even if several lines of reasoning seek to identify the essence of life phenomenon, most of these thoughts contain fundamental problem in their basic conceptual structure. Most concepts fail to identify either necessary or sufficient features to define life. Here, we analyzed the main conceptual frameworks regarding theoretical aspects that have been supporting the most accepted concepts of life, such as (i) the physical, (ii) the cellular and (iii) the molecular approaches. Based on an ontological analysis, we propose that Life should not be positioned under the ontological category of Matter. Yet, life should be better understood under the top-level ontology of “Process”. Exercising an epistemological approach, we propose that the essential characteristic that pervades each and every living being is the presence of organic codes. Therefore, we explore theories in biosemiotics and code biology in order to propose a clear concept of life as a macrocode composed by multiple inter-related coding layers. This way, as life is a sort of metaphysical process of encoding, the living beings became the molecular materialization of that process. From the proposed concept, we show that the evolutionary process is a fundamental characteristic for life’s maintenance but it is not necessary to define life, as many organisms are clearly alive but they do not participate in the evolutionary process (such as infertile hybrids). The current proposition opens a fertile field of debate in astrobiology, epistemology, biosemiotics, code biology and robotics.

     

Species monophyly

In biological systematics, as well as in the philosophy of biology, species and higher taxa are individuated through their unique evolutionary origin. This is taken by some authors to mean that monophyly is a (relational) property not only of higher taxa, but also of species. A species is said to originate through speciation, and to go extinct when it splits into two daughter species (or through terminal extinction). Its unique evolutionary origin is said to bestow identity on a species through time and change, and to render species names rigid designators. Species names are thus believed to function just like names of supraspecific taxa. However, large parts of the Web of Life are composed of species that do not have a unique evolutionary origin from a single population, lineage or stem-species. Further, monophyly is an ambiguous concept if it is defined simply in terms of 'unique evolutionary origin'. Disambiguating the concept by defining a monophyletic taxon as 'a taxon that includes the ancestor and all, and only, its descendant' renders monophyly inapplicable to species. At the heart of the problem lies a fundamental distinction between species and monophyletic taxa, where species form mutually exclusive reticulated systems, while higher taxa form inclusive hierarchical systems. Examples are given both at the species level and below to illustrate the problems that result from the application of the monophyly criterion to species. The conclusion is that the concepts of exclusivity and monophyly should be treated as non-overlapping: exclusivity marks out a species synchronistically, i.e. in the present time. Monophyly marks out clades (groups of species) diachronistically, i.e. within an historical dimension.     

合成生物学及其在生物技术中的应用进展

合成生物学是一门21世纪生物学的新兴学科,它着眼生物科学与工程科学的结合,把生物系统当作工程系统"从下往上"进行处理,由"单元"(unit)到"部件"(device)再到"系统"(system)来设计,修改和组装细胞构件及生物系统.合成生物学是分子和细胞生物学、进化系统学、生物化学、信息学、数学、计算机和工程等多学科交叉的产物.目前研究应用包括两个主要方面:一是通过对现有的、天然存在的生物系统进行重新设计和改造,修改已存在的生物系统,使该系统增添新的功能.二是通过设计和构建新的生物零件、组件和系统,创造自然界中尚不存在的人工生命系统.合成生物学作为一门建立在基因组方法之上的学科,主要强调对创造人工生命形态的计算生物学与实验生物学的协同整合.必须强调的是,用来构建生命系统新结构、产生新功能所使用的组件单元既可以是基因、核酸等生物组件,也可以是化学的、机械的和物理的元件.本文跟踪合成生物学研究及应用,对其在DNA水平编程、分子修饰、代谢途径、调控网络和工业生物技术等方面的进展进行综述.     

Thermodynamics and the conceptual structure of evolutionary theory

Thermodynamics and evolutionary theory have spent most of their shared history in adversarial relationship to one another. The point of this paper is to consider some qualitative ways in which thermodynamics can enrich both the theory and epistemology of evolution. The "autonomy of biology" posture in evolutionary theory hangs on the supposed uniqueness of why-questions in biology. With this posture, and with the general obstruction of constructive dialogue between evolution and the physical sciences it fosters, come the perennial accusations that Darwinism deals in adaptational teleology but not mechanisms. Thermodynamics provides for a two-tiered hierarchy of causation in nature in which the why-question is rendered not only legitimate materialistically, but essential to understanding the evolutionary process in its totality--from the emergence of life to the branching of lineages in speciation.     

The cell theory--history, present state and prospects (on the 150th anniversary of the development of the cell theory)

The main stages of history of this most important biological conception are presented and the state of the modern cell theory and its future prospects are considered. Since 1839, when T. Schwann expounded his conception of the cell, a long pathway in cognition of the cell function and organization has been covered. From the original picture of the complex organism as a "cellular state", made up of relatively independent "elementary organisms", i.e. cells the modern biology has come to the idea of the cell as an integral system either being a part of a complex organism, or living free in the nature (protists). The cell represents certain qualitatively peculiar level in a complex evolutionary established hierarchy of biological systems. Some particular tight relations, existing between cytology, as a fundamental biological science and molecular biology, genetics, ecology and other biological disciplines are considered. The importance of the cell conception is ascertained for practical aims, especially in medicine.