Overview
- Offers a straightforward introduction to critical teleology for biologists
- Informed by discussions in philosophy and history while remaining focused on scientific concerns
- Provides an account of how modern biology has constrained teleological thinking and language over last three centuries
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About this book
This book provides a straightforward introduction to teleology in biology, the work it did and the work it can do. Informed by history and philosophy, it focuses on scientific concerns. Seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth century biologists proposed a menagerie of biological “actors” to explain power without appealing to Aristotelian vegetable souls and final causes. Three constraints on teleology narrowed the field, selecting among the various actors as they mutated and recombined. Methodological naturalism, local adaptation, and blind chance each represent a significant philosophical advance in biology. Kant, Darwin, and the Modern Synthesis provided a new teleology, grounded in natural selection, an etiological recursion of form and function, and the details of carbon chemistry on Earth. They naturalized teleology, but they also finalized nature, shifting conceptions about the world and science. Understanding these links – historical, philosophical, and theoretical – sets thestage for new work moving forward.
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Keywords
Table of contents (8 chapters)
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Front Matter
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Back Matter
Authors and Affiliations
About the author
Dr. Lucas John Mix is the Blumberg NASA/Library of Congress Chair in Astrobiology and an associate in Organismic and Evolutionary Biology at Harvard. He studies life concepts at the intersection of science, philosophy and theology and has worked with NASA Astrobiology programs for the last 25 years on understanding the meaning and extent of life.
His previous books include Life in Space: Astrobiology for Everyone (2009) and Life Concepts from Aristotle to Darwin: On Vegetable Souls (2018).
Bibliographic Information
Book Title: The End of Final Causes in Biology
Authors: Lucas John Mix
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-14017-4
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan Cham
eBook Packages: Religion and Philosophy, Philosophy and Religion (R0)
Copyright Information: The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022
Hardcover ISBN: 978-3-031-14016-7Published: 01 November 2022
eBook ISBN: 978-3-031-14017-4Published: 31 October 2022
Edition Number: 1
Number of Pages: VII, 149
Topics: Philosophy of Biology, Evolutionary Biology, History of Science