Activities and Publications

Purposiveness ‘Lab Meeting’ #1

3rd March 2023

Background to concepts of purposiveness in evolution

History of purpose in biology

·      The death and resurrection of the notion of purpose in biology (Ruse 2016; Perlman 2004; Oliver 2013)

Purpose in evolutionary biology

·      The ‘no-direction’ and ‘no purpose’ dogmas of the NeoDarwinian Synthesis (Gould 1997)

·      Meanings of ‘chance’ (Alexander 2022; Bartholomew 1984; Plutynski et al. 2016; Ramsey and Pence 2016)

·      Challenges to dysteleology: philosophical

o   The ‘proximate-ultimate’ distinction and the ‘teleomatic-teleonomic-adaptive’ distinction (Mayr 1992)

·      Challenges to dysteleology: scientific

o   Complexity and diversity increase (Lineweaver, Davies, and Ruse 2013; Brandon and McShea 2020)

o   Convergent/constrained solutions

§  Macro-phenotypic (Conway Morris 2006)

§  Molecular—'the arrival of the frequent’ (Louis 2016; Schaper and Louis 2014)

o   Self-directed evolution

§  Isotropic vs anisotropic variation; foregrounding vs backgrounding (Scholl and Pigliucci 2015; Bateson 2004)

§  Examples:

·      Niche construction (Odling-Smee 1996; Davison 2020)

·      Mutation bias (Monroe et al. 2022)

·      Baldwin effect (Simpson 1953)

·      Cultural ‘ratcheting’ (Tennie, Call, and Tomasello 2009)

·      Human technology (Askland 2011)

Providence and evolution

·      Human vs divine providence (Kopf and Silva 2021)

·      On the need (or not) for direction in providence (McMullin 1998)

·      On NeoPlatonic readings of evolution (Jackson 2021; Pigliucci 2016)

·      On the compatibility of chance with providence (Jaeger 2015; McCall 2019; Ehrman 2015; Collins 2009; Leidenhag 2021; Peacocke 1998; Stoeger 1998)

REFERENCE LIST

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Askland, Andrew. 2011. "The Misnomer of Transhumanism as Directed Evolution " International Journal of Emerging Technologies and Society 9 (1): 71-78.

Bartholomew, D.J. 1984. God of chance. London: SCM Press.

Bateson, Patrick. 2004. "The active role of behaviour in evolution." Biology and Philosophy 19: 283-298.

Brandon, Robert N., and Daniel W. McShea. 2020. The missing two-thirds of evolutionary theory.Cambridge Elements. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Collins, Robin. 2009. "Divine action and evolution." In The Oxford handbook of philosophical theology, edited by Thomas P. Flint and Michael C. Rea, 241-261. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Conway Morris, Simon. 2006. "Darwin’s Compass: How Evolution Discovers the Song of Creation (The Boyle Lecture 2005)." Science and Christian Belief 18, no. 1: 5-22.

Davison, Andrew. 2020. "All creatures that on earth do make a dwelling: ecological niche construction and the ubiquity of creaturely making." Philosophy, Theology and the Sciences 7: 181-204.

Ehrman, Terrence. 2015. "Evolution and providence: discovering creation as Carmen Dei." Theology and Science 13, no. 3: 271-287.

Gould, Stephen Jay. 1997. "Redrafting the tree of life." Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society141 (1): 30-54.

Jackson, Andrew P. 2021. "Theological implications of Simon Conway Morris’s portrayal of convergent biological evolution." Science and Christian Belief 33: 2-29.

Jaeger, Lydia. 2015. "Chance in a created world: how to avoid common misunderstandings about divine action." European Journal for Philosophy of Religion 7 (3): 154-169.

Kopf, Simon Maria, and Ignacio Silva. 2021. "Introduction." In Divine and human providence: philosophical, psychological and theological approaches, edited by Ignacio Silva and Simon Maria Kopf, 1-13. London and New York: Routledge.

Leidenhag, Mikael. 2021. "Purpose for and within creation: a theological appraisal of organismic teleology." Modern Theology.

Lineweaver, Charles H., Paul C.W. Davies, and Michael Ruse. 2013. "What is complexity? Is it increasing?" In Complexity and the arrow of time, edited by Charles H. Lineweaver, Paul C.W. Davies and Michael Ruse, 3-16. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Monroe, J. Grey, Thanvi Srikant, Pablo Carbonell-Bejerano, Claude Becker, Mariele Lensink, Moises Exposito-Alonso, Marie Klein, Julia Hildebrandt, Manuela Neumann, Daniel Kliebenstein, Mao-Lun Weng, Eric Imbert, Jon Ågren, Matthew T. Rutter, Charles B. Fenster, and Detlef Weigel. 2022. "Mutation bias reflects natural selection in Arabidopsis thaliana." Nature 602: 101-5.

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Pigliucci, Massimo. 2016. "The Neo-Platonic Argument for Evolution Couldn’t Be More Wrong." Nautilus. https://nautil.us/the-neo_platonic-argument-for-evolution-couldnt-be-more-wrong-236176/.

Plutynski, Anya, Kenneth Blake Vernon, Lucas John Matthews, and Daniel Molter. 2016. "Chance in the modern synthesis." In Chance in evolution, edited by Grant Ramsey and Charles H. Pence, 76-102. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press.

Ramsey, Grant, and Charles H. Pence, eds. 2016. Chance in evolution. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press.

Ruse, Michael. 2016. "Evolutionary biology and the question of teleology." Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 58: 100-106.

Schaper, Steffen, and Ard A. Louis. 2014. "The arrival of the frequent: how bias in genotype-phenotype maps can steer populations to local optima." PLoS One 9 (2): 1-9.

Scholl, Raphael, and Massimo Pigliucci. 2015. "The proximate-ultimate distinction and evolutionary developmental biology: causal irrelevance versus explanatory abstraction." Biology and Philosophy30 (5): 653-670.

Simpson, George Gaylord. 1953. "The Baldwin Effect." Evolution 7, no. 2: 110-117.

Stoeger, William R. 1998. "The immanent directionality of the evolutionary process, and its relationship to teleology." In Evolutionary and molecular biology: scientific perspectives on divine action, edited by Robert John Russell, William R. Stoeger and Francisco J. Ayala, 163-190. Vatican City and Berkeley, CA: Vatican Observatory Publications and Center for Theology and the Natural Sciences.

Tennie, Claudio, Josep Call, and Michael Tomasello. 2009. "Ratcheting up the ratchet: on the evolution of cumulative culture." Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B 364: 2405-2415.