Talk:Teleonomy

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The links attached to this stub are questionable. Would others please take a look???? NickThompson@earthlink.net

Yes they are bad. I've written a full entry. Foggg 22:27, 24 February 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Problems with the present article: Nagel versus Mayr

I agreed those links were inappropriate, and I do appreciate the work that has been done (predominantly by Foggg) to include material on evolution, and the discussions about the agency of biological organisms. However, I note there has been significant shift towards a (seeming exclusive) biological character, some lack of accuracy and coherency arising from copying/pasting, and a lot of potential for confusion. While evolutionary biologists have discussed the issue a lot, it is not exclusive, or specific to "structures and functions in living organisms that derive from their evolutionary history and adaptation for reproductive success." Furthermore, it is critical to distinguish discussions about presumed agency (e.g., did the Wood Thrush do something "so as to escape", or "thereby escaping") and the end purpose of a process itself (e.g., humans were the unavoidable and ultimate result of evolution). This latter statement on human evolution, is teleonomic, though it is also, of course, incorrect because evolution in not teleonomic.

Furthermore, I am not confident in the texts cited because, after re-reviewing Wiener's "Behavior, Purpose and Teleology" (available in JStor), I see no mention of the word teleonomy. Which page does it appear on? (Googling the word I see some people mentioning that perhaps it was first used in cybernetics, and now people are linking to this article to say Wiener coined it! Perhaps he did, but I don't see a verifiable source to that end.) The material that I'm familiar with respect to its provenance is "Programmed behavior is not teleological but teleonomic, a term introduced by the biologists Colin Pittendrigh (1958), Julian Huxley (1960), and Ernst Mayr (1961, 1974b), among others, in an effort to rid their discipline of both teleological explanation and a long-standing contradiction: insistence that all natural processes have mechanistic interpretations." (Beninger 1986:41) It also appears that many of the quotes are cobbled from sources on Google like this.

Aside from the scholarly issues, or perhaps as a result of them, we seem to have a serious problem here. Is teleonomy:

  • as originally suggested in the article, like teleology, the presumption of end purpose, but through means other than a deity, or
  • as the current article sometimes suggests, the opposite of teleology: no prior purpose. This seems supported by Oxford's A Dictionary of Zoology: "teleonomy: The hypothesis that adaptations arise without the existence of a prior purpose, but by chance may change the fitness of an organism. Compare TELEOLOGY."

And the difficulty between these two options is what if something has a tendency (or, a *very* strong tendency) towards some end, without this being purposeful? On this point, Mayr (1988) in Toward a New Philosophy of Biology has a great chapter (3) entitled "The Multiple Meanings of Teleological", where he distinguishes between:

  • teleomatic: processes have an end point, but never a goal; the automatic application of natural laws to phsyical actions (e.g. gravity and a falling rock) (Mayr 1988:44)
  • teleonomic: a program and end-point/goal produced by a natural cause (e.g., ontogeny, or a beaver building a dam) (Mayr 1988:45)

Because I find Mayr to provide the greatest clarity on this point, I also object to evolution being characterized as teleonomic in the present article: "A teleonomic process, such as evolution, produces complex products without the benefit of such a guiding foresight." (He disagrees with Nagel who is quoted in the present article). While the beaver's behavior might be described as teleonomic, because its DNA is a control program influencing it towards the goal of building a dam, the evolution of the beaver and that behavior itself is not teleonomic, but what Mayr calls teleomatic (like the pull of gravity on a falling rock). Consider the following:

Is Biology an Autonomous Science?

There is nothing in the physical sciences that corresponds to the biology of ultimate causations. The claims that the evolution of galaxies or radioactive decay correspond to biological processes are quite erroneous. Evolution in galaxies is transformational, not variational, evolution (Lewontin 1983), and radioactive decay, controlled by physical laws, is a teleomatic process, not a teleonomic one, as claimed by Nagel (1977). (Mayr 1988iba:17)
Since adaptedness is a result of the past and not an anticipation of the future, it does not qualify for the epithet "teleological." (Mayr 1988iba:20)

-Reagle 16:58, 2 May 2007 (UTC)