Delete comment from: Edward Feser
Let’s not lose ourselves so much on a discussion about what the word “random” means at the context of biology.
If we define it, at least for present porpuses, as: “Mutation that is only accidentally, or merely happens in some cases to be helpful and therefore does not “aim” (telos) at survival.
Given such definition, is it the cases that evolution exhibits final cause? If so, how?
But to give my personal opinion I think we could say that the teleology is to be found, at least especially if not totally in this context, in the organism where such mutations occur. The flexible relations of such organism to its invironment would determine what is good for survival and what is bad for survival. Here it seems to me that we already see teleology language since it is good or bad “for” survival, or, to be more precisely, since survival consists in the relation of an organism to its environment, the mutations even if random in the relevant sense will point beyond themselves to the effects the have in the relation: organism-environment. If they are good for such relation the mutations are stored and accumulated over time, if they are bad they go to trash, but either way each variation would point beyond itself to its effects on the survival of an organism (as described above as its relation to the environment in which it found itself)
TheOFloinn, correct me if i’m wrong, but it seems to me that your position would be to deny that mutations are really random (not on the sense of being unpredictable but rather in the sense described above)?
Nov 24, 2018, 1:13:49 AM
Posted to Byrne on why sex is binary