Hi Platt and all,
My e-mail was down for a bit, so I had to go into the MoQ web site and do a
rush job of catching up.
Unless I missed something, it seems that the argument about the mechanics of
evolution has now died down.
The outcome appears to be that Darwin is vindicated - evolution by mutation
and selection is a viable explanation for biological speciation. As far as
conventional biology is concerned, it is the best explanation anyone has
come up with so far.
What we are left with is the argument about teleology and purpose. My
question "does teleology have a purpose?" was supposed to be
tongue-in-cheek, but generated some serious answers. I also answered Platt's
great question:
PLATT
>Is it possible to measure and quantify the desire on the
>part of organisms to live?
Platt, are you asking what the purpose of survival is? I've gone on more
than once about what I consider to be "the purpose platypus". My own take on
this is that we can only know purpose or desire as conscious intention when
it is our own intention. Attributing desire to anything else is unscientific
conjecture. As for "unconscious" intention, that would be either an
oxymoron, or another expression for tendency. To put it another way, I don't
know if positive and negative charges "desire" to move towards each other
(in a purposeful sense), but I do know that they TEND to move together.
Platt's question, therefore seems to be about whether we can measure the
TENDENCY of organisms to survive. The answer is trivial - we measure it by
observing their survival. Creatures that have a strong tendency to survive
tend to survive. Creatures that don't, tend not to survive. I think that
this is the MoQ way to tackle the question, and as so often happens, the
answer is a tautology - a simple truism.
Jonathan
PS.
IMO, "tendency to survive" can be equated with quality, i.e. quality is what
tends to survive. I'm not sure if that is ALL of quality or just the static
(survivable) part.
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