Delete comment from: Edward Feser
@Angra Mainyu, your interpretation of my usage of the term random is right. What was specially making me confused is that in some places in the TLS Feser seemed to say that natural selection exibited final causes, but than it arrived to me the question, through the objection i stated above:
“How can it be so if natural selection is an event and what possesses final causes are substances?”
But than latter on another thought arrived:
“Events are relation between substances so final causality may not be present in the event “natural selection” but in the substances that make such event happen in the first place.”
So I also think I made a mistake saying that mutations have final causes, since, as was shown, they are themselves events.
What seems to possess final causes after all are the genes. Mutations are events, and the substance of such events are the genes.
With that said, I could make a summary of my point as follows:
Genes have the final cause to make some protein. In some cases a perversion of this final cause happen and the genes start having a new final cause. This new final cause, depending on the way it will impact the organism and its relation to the environment in which it is living, may be stored or go to the trash can. In some cases those peversions are good for survival and are stored. With time and “accumulation of perversions” may happen. In such case you will probrably have two things:
1-The essential properties of the original substance are now gone, this means a new substance have arrive(new formal cause, new species), this does not happen if such perversions affect only the acidental properties of the organism, but if they affect the essential properties, then you a brand new thing (new formal cause);
2-The teleology found in such organisms will become more complex, since in various cases complexity will be good for survival. In these cases the telos of something will also be more apparent, the way the telos of the eye is not apparent than the telos of minerals say. So we could in such case, as Feser did, make an argument for final causes based on how to explain biological fenomena. Of course we could argue that telos is necessary any substance, living or non-living, but since I’m living thing telos is more apparent, we can use it specifically to argue for final causes in nature.
This answers objection 1, that final causes do not exist in the biological realm, since natural selection, being an event, does not seek any goal like survival.
And also objection 2, that natural selection is a fluid and continuous process and therefore we cannot really talk about when a species give way to another. Such objection begs the question even if made in a epistemological way, since Thomists would simply say we can look to the essential properties of a substance and compare it to the essential properties of another substances, if they are equal the substance is the same, if they are different, you have different substances. This applies to biology not less than to anything else, we really can compare substances and drawn real and objective distinction between a species and another.
I think this is enough to summarize the discussion an my position at the present point.
Any further contribution to it will be really appreciated by myself 👍👍
Nov 25, 2018, 1:20:16 AM
Posted to Byrne on why sex is binary