My brush with ethology taught me three things. The first is that midnight black is the best hair-dye tint for painting patterns on ground squirrels. The other two are less practical. They are that organisms are fundamentally purposive entities, and that biologists have an animadversion to purpose. (Page 0)
Since its inception, biology seems to have been torn by the evidently incompatible demands of treating organisms as natural entities, like everything else, and as singularly peculiar (naturally purposive) things, unlike anything else. (Page 0)
Publicar y comentar sobre cómo esto chorrea hacia concepciones del ser humano como una máquina reactiva, sin agencia.
biología crítica dilema teleología cita
The Modern Synthesis theory of evolution is elegant and powerful. Inspired by the molecular revolution in biology, the Modern Synthesis circumvents the ‘organism’ issue by making genes the canonical unit of biological organisation. Modern Synthesis evolution is a fundamentally molecular phenomenon. It is the process in which a giant molecule, DNA, is replicated, and transmitted from one generation to the next, whereupon it builds entities (‘ vehicles’ or ‘interactors’) that help to spread further replicates. (Page 0)
Modern Synthesis thinking misrepresents the metaphysics of evolution. Evolution, properly construed, is not so much a molecular phenomenon as an ecological one. It arises out of what organisms do in the pursuit of their ways of life. That, I take it, is the lesson of cardinal importance to be drawn from Darwin’s Origin of Species. But it is precisely this perspective that has been obscured by the marginalisation of organisms that has taken hold under the Modern Synthesis. (Page 0)
Situated Darwinism is an account of how evolution falls out as a consequence of organisms’ purposeful pursuit of their ways of life. The central guiding idea is that organisms are adaptively engaged in what I call, borrowing a term from ecological psychology, their system of ‘affordances’. (Page 0)
organisms, as purposive agents, contribute to–indeed enact–evolution. (Page 0)
we should understand organisms as agents embedded in a system of affordances. (Page 0)
Introducing organisms Between unificationism and exceptionalism
organisms are exquisitely suited to their conditions of existence. They are highly complex stable, adaptive, purposive systems. In the pursuit of their goals organisms possess a prodigious array of capacities. They are self-reproducing, self-building entities. They manufacture the very materials out of which they are constructed. These structures, these activities, this diversity, set organisms apart in the natural world. Organisms are natural entities to be sure, but they are no run-of-the-mill material things. (Page 1)
The core of modern biology is the theory of evolution. It ranks among the most powerful, well-corroborated scientific theories ever devised. Its objective inter alia is to explain the fit, function and diversity of organisms (Lewontin 1978). Yet, the category organism has very little role to play in evolutionary theory. (Page 2)
Perhaps this observation is too banal, too familiar, to raise any concern, but it is at least counterintuitive that the special properties that mark out a domain of scientific enquiry shouldn’t have a place in the theoretical apparatus of that science. (Page 2)
teleología biología agencia teoría crítica autopoiesis
I. 1 Life’s paradox
biological exceptionalism risks misrepresenting the relation between biology and physics. The respective domains of biology and physics may be distinct, but they are not disjoint. The laws of physics apply to all natural phenomena, including living things and biological process. The distinctive features and capacities of biological entities must be reconciled with the laws of physics.
I. 2 Exceptionalism and unificationism (Page 4)