Life, Reproduction, and the Paradox of Evolution

https://sciendo.com/article/10.2478/biocosmos-2025-0003

by danielam • 1 year ago

1 2 1 year ago

purports to show that reproduction cannot be explained by natural selection and is irreducibly teleological

Anyone who's looked into creationist arguments, or argued with creationists, will immediately be put on guard by this sentence fragment.

First, reproduction is necessary for natural selection to take place. It's a precondition, not something to be explained.

Second, "irreducible" is one of those words that is somehow never given a definition that an observer can use to decide that a process or feature is "irreducibly complex", or "irreducibly" anything, really. When you peel off the layers, you end up having to rely on some authority to say, "Feature X is irreducibly complex".

Third, "teleological". A philosophical or theological term that invariably gets misused in discussions of biology as a kind of disguised circular argument.

I'm not saying that this paper is garbage disguised by a big vocabulary, but I would certainly be alert for rhetorical sleight of hand sneaking in creationism of one kind or another.

danielam• 1 year ago

Anyone who's looked into creationist arguments, or argued with creationists, will immediately be put on guard by this sentence fragment.

This is neither here nor there, as the paper does not defend "creationism". The sole purpose of this paper is modest: to argue (or cite authors who argue) that natural selection cannot account for reproduction. The subjective suspicions, impressions or concerns a reader might have are totally irrelevant.

reproduction is necessary for natural selection to take place. It's a precondition, not something to be explained.

Natural selection is taken to be the explanatory mechanism par excellence of evolution and the definitive instrument by which teleology may be eradicated from explanations concerning biological organisms and their origins. Reproduction itself requires an explanation, and as the paper notes, attempts to account for the origins of reproduction through natural selection have been made. What the paper argues, however, is that these attempts are fallacious and circular, precisely because they must presuppose reproduction.

Neither the author nor those he cites deny natural selection or evolution as such. They only argue that natural selection is not capable of explaining reproduction. Their argument allows room for some other explanation of reproduction, but those who reject teleology are now saddled with the burden of providing a non-teleological explanation that does not appeal to natural selection.

"irreducible" is one of those words that is somehow never given a definition [...etc, etc...]

This is a well understood term in this context, but also not something you need to get hung up on. You can understand the essential argument without worrying about it.

A philosophical or theological term that invariably gets misused in discussions of biology as a kind of disguised circular argument.

It is more definitely not circular, certainly not according to an Aristotelian understanding (the paper's arguments may be interpreted according to either an Aristotelian or a "Platonic" reading of the term, which is to say, according to either an intrinsic or extrinsic view of telos).

I'm not saying that this paper is garbage disguised by a big vocabulary, but I would certainly be alert for rhetorical sleight of hand sneaking in creationism of one kind or another.

Again, the reader's vague, subjective worries and fears are of no relevance. The reader must actually address the arguments in the paper. The impression is that you've either not read it or have not understood it, and so you are not yet in a position to critique the arguments made. (I don't know where the accusation of jargon comes from. Very few technical terms are used, but even those that appear in the text are not esoteric, even if commonly misunderstood. It is also not the purpose of every paper to define established terms in a domain of discourse. It is the reader's responsibility to locate these in the appropriate literature.)

The author of the paper is well known for defending Aristotelian-Thomistic metaphysics, and as such, rejects what often falls under the name of "creationism" or "intelligent design" on account of its bad metaphysics, so suspicions along these lines are gravely misplaced.

Life, Reproduction, and the Paradox of Evolution

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