First Post

It was my idea to start this blog, so I thought I should do the first post.

Recently I've been interested in teleology, the appearance of purposes in nature, and the closely related notion of final causes, or action directed towards a goal.  One of the major characteristics separating our present tradition of science from ancient and medieval science is the rejection of final causes and the limitation of explanations to efficient or mechanical causes (one billiard ball hitting another and causing it to move would be an example of an efficient or mechanical cause - it's not that the billiard ball wanted to go into the pocket, it's that it was hit in a certain way with a certain force that determined it's motion with a push.)

An ancient scientist, witnessing the growth of an oak from an acorn, thought that the acorn developed towards the goal of being an oak - it almost "wanted" to be an oak.  Modern scientists don't think that things move towards goals; they think they are determined by prior causes (like the billiard ball was).  A modern scientist would look for the various tiny proteins in cells that push developmental changes from behind.  This causes this, causes this, causes this.  What we call the goal comes about, but not because it was a goal.

The rejection of final causes in favor of mechanical causes and the conviction that nature is deeply mathematical are the two defining characteristics of modern scientific thinking.  The break from the ancient and medieval scientific tradition began in the 1600's with thinkers like Galileo Galilei and Isaac Newton.

My recent reading has centered around these themes.

I've been reading some medieval philosophy to get a better grasp on what thinking about the world teleologically (in terms of final causes) was really like.  It's a very foreign way of thinking for someone brought up with modern common-sense conceptions (conceptions deeply based in the modern scientific view of the world).  While I'll admit that I don't find every argument convincing, I am drawn to medieval thought's concern with Being over beings - with the problem of understanding what it is to exist, to be, over analysis of things that do exist.  (This is exactly the kind of concern that the first modern scientific thinkers were eager to abandon.)

I've also been reading a collection of papers on the philosophy of science.  Most of the readings are by logical positivists, a group of early 20th century scientists and philosophers who believed that only scientifically verifiable statements are meaningful.  The essays I've been reading are attempts to deal with the problem of teleology in biology.  For the most part, they've been arguing that any teleological statement (e.g., ascribing a "function" to an organ) can be translated into a mechanical statement without loss of information.  

A Cell Biology textbook has been taking up a lot of my night-time reading sessions.  Beyond the thrill I get from learning how weird everything really is, I like thinking about the tension between seeming purposes and mechanical causes in the most basic processes that constitute life.