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Philosophers

Mortimer Adler
Rogers Albritton
Alexander of Aphrodisias
Samuel Alexander
William Alston
Anaximander
G.E.M.Anscombe
Anselm
Louise Antony
Thomas Aquinas
Aristotle
David Armstrong
Harald Atmanspacher
Robert Audi
Augustine
J.L.Austin
A.J.Ayer
Alexander Bain
Mark Balaguer
Jeffrey Barrett
William Barrett
William Belsham
Henri Bergson
George Berkeley
Isaiah Berlin
Richard J. Bernstein
Bernard Berofsky
Robert Bishop
Max Black
Susanne Bobzien
Emil du Bois-Reymond
Hilary Bok
Laurence BonJour
George Boole
Émile Boutroux
Daniel Boyd
F.H.Bradley
C.D.Broad
Michael Burke
Lawrence Cahoone
C.A.Campbell
Joseph Keim Campbell
Rudolf Carnap
Carneades
Nancy Cartwright
Gregg Caruso
Ernst Cassirer
David Chalmers
Roderick Chisholm
Chrysippus
Cicero
Randolph Clarke
Samuel Clarke
Anthony Collins
Antonella Corradini
Diodorus Cronus
Jonathan Dancy
Donald Davidson
Mario De Caro
Democritus
Daniel Dennett
Jacques Derrida
René Descartes
Richard Double
Fred Dretske
John Dupré
John Earman
Laura Waddell Ekstrom
Epictetus
Epicurus
Austin Farrer
Herbert Feigl
Arthur Fine
John Martin Fischer
Frederic Fitch
Owen Flanagan
Luciano Floridi
Philippa Foot
Alfred Fouilleé
Harry Frankfurt
Richard L. Franklin
Bas van Fraassen
Michael Frede
Gottlob Frege
Peter Geach
Edmund Gettier
Carl Ginet
Alvin Goldman
Gorgias
Nicholas St. John Green
H.Paul Grice
Ian Hacking
Ishtiyaque Haji
Stuart Hampshire
W.F.R.Hardie
Sam Harris
William Hasker
R.M.Hare
Georg W.F. Hegel
Martin Heidegger
Heraclitus
R.E.Hobart
Thomas Hobbes
David Hodgson
Shadsworth Hodgson
Baron d'Holbach
Ted Honderich
Pamela Huby
David Hume
Ferenc Huoranszki
Frank Jackson
William James
Lord Kames
Robert Kane
Immanuel Kant
Tomis Kapitan
Walter Kaufmann
Jaegwon Kim
William King
Hilary Kornblith
Christine Korsgaard
Saul Kripke
Thomas Kuhn
Andrea Lavazza
Christoph Lehner
Keith Lehrer
Gottfried Leibniz
Jules Lequyer
Leucippus
Michael Levin
Joseph Levine
George Henry Lewes
C.I.Lewis
David Lewis
Peter Lipton
C. Lloyd Morgan
John Locke
Michael Lockwood
Arthur O. Lovejoy
E. Jonathan Lowe
John R. Lucas
Lucretius
Alasdair MacIntyre
Ruth Barcan Marcus
Tim Maudlin
James Martineau
Nicholas Maxwell
Storrs McCall
Hugh McCann
Colin McGinn
Michael McKenna
Brian McLaughlin
John McTaggart
Paul E. Meehl
Uwe Meixner
Alfred Mele
Trenton Merricks
John Stuart Mill
Dickinson Miller
G.E.Moore
Thomas Nagel
Otto Neurath
Friedrich Nietzsche
John Norton
P.H.Nowell-Smith
Robert Nozick
William of Ockham
Timothy O'Connor
Parmenides
David F. Pears
Charles Sanders Peirce
Derk Pereboom
Steven Pinker
Plato
Karl Popper
Porphyry
Huw Price
H.A.Prichard
Protagoras
Hilary Putnam
Willard van Orman Quine
Frank Ramsey
Ayn Rand
Michael Rea
Thomas Reid
Charles Renouvier
Nicholas Rescher
C.W.Rietdijk
Richard Rorty
Josiah Royce
Bertrand Russell
Paul Russell
Gilbert Ryle
Jean-Paul Sartre
Kenneth Sayre
T.M.Scanlon
Moritz Schlick
Arthur Schopenhauer
John Searle
Wilfrid Sellars
Alan Sidelle
Ted Sider
Henry Sidgwick
Walter Sinnott-Armstrong
J.J.C.Smart
Saul Smilansky
Michael Smith
Baruch Spinoza
L. Susan Stebbing
Isabelle Stengers
George F. Stout
Galen Strawson
Peter Strawson
Eleonore Stump
Francisco Suárez
Richard Taylor
Kevin Timpe
Mark Twain
Peter Unger
Peter van Inwagen
Manuel Vargas
John Venn
Kadri Vihvelin
Voltaire
G.H. von Wright
David Foster Wallace
R. Jay Wallace
W.G.Ward
Ted Warfield
Roy Weatherford
C.F. von Weizsäcker
William Whewell
Alfred North Whitehead
David Widerker
David Wiggins
Bernard Williams
Timothy Williamson
Ludwig Wittgenstein
Susan Wolf

Scientists

David Albert
Michael Arbib
Walter Baade
Bernard Baars
Jeffrey Bada
Leslie Ballentine
Marcello Barbieri
Gregory Bateson
Horace Barlow
John S. Bell
Mara Beller
Charles Bennett
Ludwig von Bertalanffy
Susan Blackmore
Margaret Boden
David Bohm
Niels Bohr
Ludwig Boltzmann
Emile Borel
Max Born
Satyendra Nath Bose
Walther Bothe
Jean Bricmont
Hans Briegel
Leon Brillouin
Stephen Brush
Henry Thomas Buckle
S. H. Burbury
Melvin Calvin
Donald Campbell
Sadi Carnot
Anthony Cashmore
Eric Chaisson
Gregory Chaitin
Jean-Pierre Changeux
Rudolf Clausius
Arthur Holly Compton
John Conway
Jerry Coyne
John Cramer
Francis Crick
E. P. Culverwell
Antonio Damasio
Olivier Darrigol
Charles Darwin
Richard Dawkins
Terrence Deacon
Lüder Deecke
Richard Dedekind
Louis de Broglie
Stanislas Dehaene
Max Delbrück
Abraham de Moivre
Bernard d'Espagnat
Paul Dirac
Hans Driesch
John Eccles
Arthur Stanley Eddington
Gerald Edelman
Paul Ehrenfest
Manfred Eigen
Albert Einstein
George F. R. Ellis
Hugh Everett, III
Franz Exner
Richard Feynman
R. A. Fisher
David Foster
Joseph Fourier
Philipp Frank
Steven Frautschi
Edward Fredkin
Benjamin Gal-Or
Howard Gardner
Lila Gatlin
Michael Gazzaniga
Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen
GianCarlo Ghirardi
J. Willard Gibbs
James J. Gibson
Nicolas Gisin
Paul Glimcher
Thomas Gold
A. O. Gomes
Brian Goodwin
Joshua Greene
Dirk ter Haar
Jacques Hadamard
Mark Hadley
Patrick Haggard
J. B. S. Haldane
Stuart Hameroff
Augustin Hamon
Sam Harris
Ralph Hartley
Hyman Hartman
Jeff Hawkins
John-Dylan Haynes
Donald Hebb
Martin Heisenberg
Werner Heisenberg
John Herschel
Basil Hiley
Art Hobson
Jesper Hoffmeyer
Don Howard
John H. Jackson
William Stanley Jevons
Roman Jakobson
E. T. Jaynes
Pascual Jordan
Eric Kandel
Ruth E. Kastner
Stuart Kauffman
Martin J. Klein
William R. Klemm
Christof Koch
Simon Kochen
Hans Kornhuber
Stephen Kosslyn
Daniel Koshland
Ladislav Kovàč
Leopold Kronecker
Rolf Landauer
Alfred Landé
Pierre-Simon Laplace
Karl Lashley
David Layzer
Joseph LeDoux
Gerald Lettvin
Gilbert Lewis
Benjamin Libet
David Lindley
Seth Lloyd
Hendrik Lorentz
Werner Loewenstein
Josef Loschmidt
Ernst Mach
Donald MacKay
Henry Margenau
Owen Maroney
David Marr
Humberto Maturana
James Clerk Maxwell
Ernst Mayr
John McCarthy
Warren McCulloch
N. David Mermin
George Miller
Stanley Miller
Ulrich Mohrhoff
Jacques Monod
Vernon Mountcastle
Emmy Noether
Donald Norman
Alexander Oparin
Abraham Pais
Howard Pattee
Wolfgang Pauli
Massimo Pauri
Wilder Penfield
Roger Penrose
Steven Pinker
Colin Pittendrigh
Walter Pitts
Max Planck
Susan Pockett
Henri Poincaré
Daniel Pollen
Ilya Prigogine
Hans Primas
Zenon Pylyshyn
Henry Quastler
Adolphe Quételet
Pasco Rakic
Nicolas Rashevsky
Lord Rayleigh
Frederick Reif
Jürgen Renn
Giacomo Rizzolati
Emil Roduner
Juan Roederer
Jerome Rothstein
David Ruelle
David Rumelhart
Tilman Sauer
Ferdinand de Saussure
Jürgen Schmidhuber
Erwin Schrödinger
Aaron Schurger
Sebastian Seung
Thomas Sebeok
Franco Selleri
Claude Shannon
Charles Sherrington
David Shiang
Abner Shimony
Herbert Simon
Dean Keith Simonton
Edmund Sinnott
B. F. Skinner
Lee Smolin
Ray Solomonoff
Roger Sperry
John Stachel
Henry Stapp
Tom Stonier
Antoine Suarez
Leo Szilard
Max Tegmark
Teilhard de Chardin
Libb Thims
William Thomson (Kelvin)
Richard Tolman
Giulio Tononi
Peter Tse
Alan Turing
Francisco Varela
Vlatko Vedral
Mikhail Volkenstein
Heinz von Foerster
Richard von Mises
John von Neumann
Jakob von Uexküll
C. S. Unnikrishnan
C. H. Waddington
John B. Watson
Daniel Wegner
Steven Weinberg
Paul A. Weiss
Herman Weyl
John Wheeler
Wilhelm Wien
Norbert Wiener
Eugene Wigner
E. O. Wilson
Günther Witzany
Stephen Wolfram
H. Dieter Zeh
Semir Zeki
Ernst Zermelo
Wojciech Zurek
Konrad Zuse
Fritz Zwicky

Presentations

Biosemiotics
Free Will
Mental Causation
James Symposium
 
Ernst Mayr

Ernst Mayr's great work in biology in the 1940's was to understand that a species was not just a group of similar individuals, but a group that interbreeds. The information content of their DNA differs enough from other species to prevent interbreeding.

In his later years Mayr invested much of his intellectual energy trying to modify the philosophy of science to make a proper place for biology. He thought that logical positivists and empiricists sought mechanical and deterministic laws appropriate to material objects but not to life.

Ludwig Bertalanffy also stressed the historical character of life
He insisted on the importance of information, in the form of the history of living things, as critical to distinguish biology from physics and chemistry. This is basic to information philosophy.

Mayr says in his 1988 Toward A New Philosophy Of Biology,

One of my special concerns has been the neglect of biology in works claiming to be philosophies of science. From the 1920s to the 1960s the logical positivists and physicalists who dominated the philosophy of science had little interest in and even less understanding of biology, because it simply did not fit their methodology. Their endeavors to solve all scientific problems by pure logic and refined measurements were unproductive, if not totally irrelevant, when applied to biological phenomena.

The assumption that it should be possible to "reduce" the theories and concepts of all other sciences, including biology, to those of the physical sciences has clearly dominated not only philosophy but science itself, from the days of Galileo and Descartes. But the further the study of biological systems advanced during the past 200 years, the more evident it became how different living systems are from inanimate systems, no matter how complex the inanimate system or how simple the organism. Attempts to "reduce" biological systems to the level of simple physico-chemical processes have failed because during the reduction the systems lost their specifically biological properties. Living systems...have numerous properties that are simply not found in the inanimate world.
(Toward A New Philosophy Of Biology, p.1)

In most traditional philosophy, the total amount of information in the conceptually closed universe is static, a physical constant of nature. The laws of nature allow no exceptions, they are perfectly causal. Chance and change - in a deep philosophical sense - are thought to be illusions.

Information philosophy, by contrast, is a story about invention, about novelty, about biological emergence and new beginnings unseen and unseeable beforehand, a past that is fixed but an ambiguous future that can be shaped by teleological changes in the present that are made possible by Darwinian evolution.

Ernst Mayr has been more outspoken on this view than any other biologist. He wrote in his 2001 What Evolution Is, that the "Great Chain of Being" or scala naturae rising from inanimate matter through plants and animals up to the primates and man was an unchanging perfect structure that reflected the mind of the creator.

Evolution is the evidence for the conclusion that the world is not constant but is forever changing. In the modern view, Mayr says,

the world is of long duration and is forever changing; it is evolving. Even though this may seem strange to us moderns, the concept of evolution was at first alien to Western thought. The power of the Christian fundamentalist dogma was so strong that it required a long series of developments in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries before the idea of evolution became fully acceptable. As far as science is concerned, the acceptance of evolution meant that the world could no longer be considered merely as the seat of activity of physical laws but had to incorporate history and, more importantly, the observed changes in the living world in the course of time. Gradually the term "evolution" came to represent these changes.
(What Evolution Is, p.3)
The simple mechanical and deterministic philosophy - for every effect a cause - of Newton and Laplace could never really establish "man as machine." This gave rise to theories of a "vital" force or principle behind life.

Information philosophy, by contrast, is built on probabilistic laws of nature. But the challenge for information philosophy is to explain the emergence of order and life from chaos. It must account for the phenomenal success of adequately deterministic laws when the material substrate of the universe is irreducibly chaotic and random.

Mayr makes it very clear that there are no exceptions to the laws of physics required for evolution. The essential difference is how living things acquire and manage information.

It must therefore be emphasized that the modern biologist rejects in any form whatsoever the notion that a "vital force" exists in living organisms which does not obey the laws of physics and chemistry. All processes in organisms, from the interaction of molecules to the complex functions of the brain and other whole organs, strictly obey these physical laws. Where organisms differ from inanimate matter is in the organization of their systems and especially in the possession of coded information.
(Toward A New Philosophy Of Biology, p.2)
Mayr says that living organisms can not be understood as a causal chain of single causes and effects. Biological phenomena have multiple causes. Actually, so do most physical events.
The development of completely new disciplines — evolutionary biology and genetics — was necessary before the centuries-old battle between mechanists and their opponents could be resolved. To the distress of both camps, the conclusion reached was that both were, to some extent, correct. The finding that all processes in living organisms strictly obey the laws of physics and chemistry — that there is no residue of "vital forces" outside the realm of the physical sciences — meant that the mechanists were right. But the finding that the coded information system of living organisms has no equivalent in inanimate nature meant that the antimechanists were also right. This genotype-phenotype duality of the living organism is the reason why it is not sufficient in biology to search for a single cause in the study of a phenomenon, as is often sufficient in the physical sciences.
(Toward A New Philosophy Of Biology, p.2)
With the emergence of life in the universe, purposeful behavior appeared. The vitalists and creationists assumed that a primordial teleology in the cosmos had created life. Evolution removed the need for a cosmic, pre-existing teleology. Jacques Monod called purposeful behavior in life "teleonomic" to distinguish it from creationist ideas of a "cosmic teleology."
The clear recognition of two types of causation in organisms has helped to solve an important problem in biology, the problem of teleology. What is teleology, and to what extent is it a valid concept? These have been burning questions since the time of Aristotle. Kant based his explanation of biological phenomena, particularly of the perfection of adaptations, on teleology — the notion that organisms were designed for some purpose. Teleology was the principal argument used by some of Darwin's major opponents. And the numerous autogenetic theories of evolution, such as orthogenesis, nomogenesis, aristogenesis, and the omega principle (Teilhard de Chardin), were all based on a teleological world view. Indeed, as Jacques Monod (1971) rightly stressed, almost all of the most important ideologies of the past and the present are built on a belief in teleology.

It is my belief that the pervasive confusion in this subject has been due to a failure to discriminate among very different processes and phenomena, all labeled "teleological." [T]he word teleological has been indiscriminately applied to four entirely different phenomena or processes. By partitioning so-called teleological phenomena into these four categories, and by introducing an appropriate terminology for each, it is possible to study each of them separately and show that three of them can be explained scientifically. On the other hand, no evidence whatsoever has been found for the existence of the fourth one, cosmic teleology.

The most important conclusion of the recent research on teleology is that it is illegitimate to extrapolate from the existence of teleonomic processes (that is, those directed or controlled by the organism's own DNA) and teleomatic processes (those resulting from physical laws) to an existence of cosmic teleology. There is neither a program nor a law that can explain and predict biological evolution in any teleological manner. Nor is there, since 1859, any need for a teleological explanation: The Darwinian mechanism of natural selection with its chance aspects and constraints is fully sufficient.

Mayr's teleomatic processes are our ergodic processes in physical nature. Both involve the creation of information. The striking thing about teleonomy is that the management of information is done by processes that are remarkably similar to computer programs, but where the "goal" or direction is created by the computer programmer..

When B. F. Skinner's "black-box" model of the mind gave way to cognitive science in the 1960's, the idea that a mind consists of many distinct functions suggested that a computer with its many subroutine programs could be an effective mind model. Many computer scientists became cognitive scientists.

But computers are strictly deterministic logical state machines. So many cognitive scientists continued to lean toward "man as machine" and "mind as (mechanical) computer." Few saw any value to be gained from random "chance."

Mayr wrote,

The study of genetics has shown that seemingly goal-directed processes in a living organism (teleonomic processes) have a strictly material basis, being controlled by a coded genetic program. Curiously, the coded program is a concept philosophers with a background in logic, physics, or mathematics seem to have great difficulty in understanding and accepting. Since the term program was taken over from the field of informatics, it is sometimes rejected as an anthropomorphism. Yet, the use of the term in biology is fully justified. Even though the mechanism by which the DNA stores and codifies information is of course different from that of a computer, the basic principle is remarkably similar, as demonstrated by the researches of molecular biology.

Returning for a moment to the rift between the physicalists and biologists, we must note that advances during the last 150 years not just in biology but in the physical sciences as well have greatly helped to narrow the gap that existed between the two camps. Many of the concepts of classical mechanics and the traditional philosophy of science that were questioned by biologists, such as strict determinism (vs. high frequency of probability), the predictiveness of all processes, or the universality of laws, have now also been either given up entirely by modern physics or at least restricted in applicability.

Classical physics was strictly deterministic. Laplace's boast that he would be able to predict the future course of events on earth ad infinitum if he had a complete catalogue of the existing situation was symptomatic of this attitude. Not surprisingly, natural selection with its emphasis on the chance nature of variation was not palatable to the physicists. This is why John Herschel referred to it as the "law of the higgledy-piggledy." Modern physics has theoretically abandoned such determinism, and yet physicists still are far more deterministic in their thinking than biologists.
(Toward A New Philosophy Of Biology, p.4)

And we could add that philosophers of mind and human agency are distinctly more deterministic and compatibilist than the physicists.

Teleonomy and Teleology

Mayr wrote in 1974 about the importance of using teleological language in biology, despite the criticisms of most scientists, including biologists themselves.

Teleological language is frequently used in biology in order to make statements about the functions of organs, about physiological processes, and about the behavior and actions of species and individuals. Such language is characterized by the use of the words 'function', 'purpose', and 'goal', as well as by statements that something exists or is done 'in order to'.
The use of "function", "purpose", and "goal" in biology, and the idea that biological systems communicate in a coded language with "meanings," is at the heart of the controversy in the field of biosemiotics
Typical statements of this sort are 'It is one of the functions of the kidneys to eliminate the end products of protein metabolism', or 'Birds migrate to warm climates in order to escape the low temperatures and food shortages of winter'. In spite of the long-standing misgivings of physical scientists, philosophers, and logicians, many biologists have continued to insist not only that such teleological statements are objective and free of metaphysical content, but also that they express something important which is lost when teleological language is eliminated from such statements. Recent reviews of the problem in the philosophical literature (Nagel, 1961; Beckner, 1969; Hull, 1973; to cite only a few of a large selection of such publications), concede the legitimacy of some teleological statements but still display considerable divergence of opinion as to the actual meaning of the word 'teleological' and the relations between teleology and causality.
Mayr analyzed the use of the new term "teleonomic" (introduced by Colin Pittendrigh in his 1958 article Adaptation, Natural Selection, and Behavior), Mayr's own 1961 definition of "teleonomic," and Jacques Monod's use of the term teleonomy in his great 1971 work, Chance and Necessity (without mentioning Pittendrigh or Mayr).

Pittendrigh invented the term to distinguish the appearance of purpose in biological evolution, specifically Darwinian natural selection, from the ancient idea of "teleology," Aristotle's "telos" or "final cause," a cosmic purpose pre-existing the origin of life.

Today the concept of adaptation is beginning to enjoy an improved respectability for several reasons: it is seen as less than perfect; natural selection is better understood; and the engineer-physicist in building end-seeking automata has sanctified the use of teleological jargon. It seems unfortunate that the term 'teleology' should be resurrected and, as I think, abused in this way. The biologists' long-standing confusion would be more fully removed if all end-directed systems were described by some other term, like 'teleonomic', in order to emphasize that the recognition and description of end-directedness does not carry a commitment to Aristotelian teleology as an efficient [sic] casual principle.

Mayr provided the Pittendrigh reference in a 1974 article in Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science. But Mayr thought the uses of "teleonomy" and "teleology" needed clearer definitions.

The teleological dilemma, then consists in the fact that numerous and seemingly weighty objections against the use of teleological language have been raised by various critics, and yet biologists have insisted that they would lose a great deal, methodologically and heuristically, if they were prevent from using such language. It is my endeavor to resolve this dilemma by a new analysis, and particularly by a new classification of the various phenomena that have been traditionally designated as 'teleological'.

Mayr criticized the use of teleonomy by Pittendrigh and Monod. Pittendrigh for contrasting it with Aristotle's telos, when Aristotle's biological examples were cases of Ptttendrigh's teleonomy, amd Monod for equating teleonomy to adaptation. Mayr had introduced the term teleonomic in 1961, likening it to computer programming.

Mayr criticized the use of teleonomy by Pittendrigh and Monod, Pittendrigh for contrasting it with Aristotle's telos, when Aristotle's biological examples were cases of Ptttendrigh's teleonomy, amd Monod for equating teleonomy to adaptation. Mayr had introduced the term teleonomic in 1961, likening it to computer programming. He argued that as early as 1943 Norbert Wiener and his colleagues had shown how communications and control systems utilizing negative feedback can fully explain goal-directed behavior.

We owe a great debt of gratitude to Rosenblueth et al. (1943) for their endeavor to find a new solution for the explanation of teleological phenomena in organisms. They correctly identified two aspects of such phenomena, (1) that they are seemingly purposeful being directed toward a goal, and (2) that they consist of active behavior. The background of these authors was in the newly developing field of cybernetics and it is only natural that they should have stressed the fact that goal directed behavior is characterized by mechanisms which correct errors committed during the goal-seeking. They considered the negative feedback loops of such behavior as its most characteristic aspect and stated "teleological behavior thus becomes synonymous with behavior controlled by negative feedback." This statement emphasizes important aspects of teleological behavior, yet it misses the crucial point: The truly characteristic aspect of goal-seeking behavior is not that mechanisms exist which improve the precision with which a goal is reached, but rather that mechanisms exist which initiate, i.e. 'cause' this goal-seeking behavior. It is not the thermostat that determines the temperature of a house, but the person who sets the thermostat. It is not the torpedo which determines toward what ship it will be shot and at what time, but the naval officer who releases the torpedo. Negative feedbacks only improve the precision of goal-seeking, but do not determine it. Feedback devices are only executive mechanisms that operate during the translation of a program.

But in 1974 he sharpened his definition

Mayr wrote to Pittendrigh to explore his intentions in creating the term "teleonomy."

Pittendrigh replied,

You ask about the word 'teleonomy'. You are correct that I did introduce the term into biology and, moreover, I invented it. In the course of thinking about that paper which I wrote for the Simpson and Roe book (in which the term is introduced) I was haunted by that famous old quip of Haldane's to the effect that 'Teleology is like a mistress to a biologist: he cannot live without her but he's unwilling to be seen with her in public'. The more I thought about that, it occurred to me that the whole thing was nonsense - that what it was the biologist couldn't live with was not the illegitimacy of the relationship, but the relationship itself. Teleology in the Aristotelian form has, of course, the end as immediate, 'efficient' cause. And that is precisely what the biologist (with the whole history of science since 1500 behind him) cannot accept: it is unacceptable in a world that is always mechanistic (and of course in this I include probabilistic as well as strictly deterministic). What it was the biologist could not escape was the plain fact – or rather the fundamental fact – which he must (as scientist) explain: that the objects of biological analysis are organizations (he calls them organisms) and, as such, are end-directed. Organization is more that mere order; order lacks end-directedness; organization is end-directed. [I recall a wonderful conversation with John von Neumann in which we explored the difference between 'mere order' and 'organization' and his insistence (I already believed it) that the concept of organization (as contextually defined in its everyday use) always involved 'purpose' or end-directedness.

I wanted a word that would allow me (all of us biologists) to describe, stress or simply to allude to – without offense – this end-directedness of a perfectly respectable mechanistic system. Teleology would not do, carrying with it that implication that the end is causally effective in the current operation of the machine. Teleonomic, it is hoped, escapes that plain falsity which is anyhow unnecessary. Haldane was, in this sense wrong (surely a rare event): we can live without teleology.

The crux of the problem lies of course in unconfounding the mechanism of evolutionary change and the physiological mechanism of the organism abstracted from the evolutionary time scale. The most general of all biological 'ends', or 'purposes' is of course perpetuation by reproduction. That end [and all its subsidiary 'ends' of feeding, defense and survival generally] is in some sense effective in causing natural selection; in causing evolutionary change; but not in causing itself. In brief, we have failed in the past to unconfound causation in the historical origins of a system and causation in the contemporary working of the system…

You ask in your letter whether or not one of the 'information' people didn't introduce it. They did not, unless you wish to call me an information bloke. It is, however, true that my own thinking about the whole thing was very significantly affected by a paper which was published by Wiener and Bigelow with the intriguing title 'Purposeful machines'. This pointed out that in the then newly-emerging computer period it was possible to design and build machines that had ends or purposes without implying that the purposes were the cause of the immediate operation of the machine.

A Two-Step Process
In his 1988 Toward a New Philosophy of Biology, Mayr wrote...
Evolutionary change in every generation is a two-step process: the production of genetically unique new individuals and the selection of the progenitors of the next generation. The important role of chance at the first step, the production of variability, is universally acknowledged, but the second step, natural selection, is on the whole viewed rather deterministically: Selection is a non-chance process.

In his 1997 article for the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, "The Object of Selection," he wrote

One additional basic aspect of selection must be mentioned here because it is important for the adoption of an unequivocal terminology. Darwinian selection, as it is now fully understood by the evolutionists, is a two-step process. The first step is the production of a vast amount of variation that will serve as the material needed for the second step, the actual process of selection or elimination.

Would Ernst Mayr have liked the recent two-stage free will models of neurobiologist Martin Heisenberg and his many predecessors back to William James?

References
The Objects of Selection

The Idea of Teleology

Teleological and Teleonomic

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