Two

Precisely this fogged window, which prevails in the cold, wet night, blinks out onto an uninhabited land of Other People?s houses and in sight of all that forgotten real estate, along with all the amiable conversations on phones across America and evenings shared in movie houses, around the corner from a recent homicide, down the block from wild lots and weeds, great unknowns, colossal, all evolving along with Darwin and his species. One?s life, assumed to be finite, ticking away. Night covers things up but you can still hear the rain.https://digitalcommons.butler.edu/onearth/1028/thumbnail.jp

Operationalizing Goal Directedness: An Empirical Route to Advancing a Philosophical Discussion

Goal directedness is one of the most commonly observed behavior patterns in biology, exemplified by systems ranging in complexity from cellular migration to human motivations. Philosophers have long tried to understand goal directedness in terms of necessary and sufficient conditions, but no consensus has been reached. Here we take an entirely novel approach to goal directedness, postponing the search for necessary and sufficient conditions, and instead trying to advance understanding by an empirical route. In particular, we introduce quantitative measures of goal directedness, applicable to systems that are generally agreed to be goal directed. The measures allow one to assess two signature properties of goal-directed systems, persistence and plasticity. Persistence is the tendency for an entity that is on a trajectory toward a goal to return to that trajectory following perturbations. Plasticity we understand as the tendency for an entity to find a trajectory toward a goal from a variety of different starting distances. We demonstrate the metrics by applying them to goal-directed behavior in two biological systems, bacteria moving up a chemoattractant gradient and a human following a heat gradient. Our approach reveals goal directedness to be an empirically tractable notion, one that makes possible a variety of comparative studies in biology, including comparing degree of goal directedness in different species, or in one species under different conditions, as well as studying evolutionary trends. More generally, the metrics make it possible to investigate the correlates and causes of goal-directed behavior. Finally, our approach challenges the conventional view of goal directedness as a discrete and unitary property, by showing that it can be treated as continuous, as a matter of degree, and that it can be broken down into at least two, and possibly more, partly independent components

Origin and Evolution of Large Brains in Toothed Whales

Toothed whales (order Cetacea: suborder Odontoceti) are highly encephalized, possessing brains that are significantly larger than expected for their body sizes. In particular, the odontocete superfamily Delphinoidea (dolphins, porpoises, belugas, and narwhals) comprises numerous species with encephalization levels second only to modern humans and greater than all other mammals. Odontocetes have also demonstrated behavioral faculties previously only ascribed to humans and, to some extent, other great apes. How did the large brains of odontocetes evolve? To begin to investigate this question, we quantified and averaged estimates of brain and body size for 36 fossil cetacean species using computed tomography and analyzed these data along with those for modern odontocetes. We provide the first description and statistical tests of the pattern of change in brain size relative to body size in cetaceans over 47 million years. We show that brain size increased significantly in two critical phases in the evolution of odontocetes. The first increase occurred with the origin of odontocetes from the ancestral group Archaeoceti near the Eocene-Oligocene boundary and was accompanied by a decrease in body size. The second occurred in the origin of Delphinoidea only by 15 million years ago

Resolving teleology's false dilemma

This paper argues that the account of teleology previously proposed by the authors is consistent with the physical determinism that is implicit across many of the sciences. We suggest that much of the current aversion to teleological thinking found in the sciences is rooted in debates that can be traced back to ancient natural science, which pitted mechanistic and deterministic theories against teleological ones. These debates saw a deterministic world as one where freedom and agency is impossible. And, because teleological entities seem to be free to either reach their ends or not, it was assumed that they could not be deterministic. Mayr’s modern account of teleonomy adheres to this basic assumption. Yet, the seeming tension between teleology and determinism is illusory because freedom and agency do not, in fact, conflict with a deterministic world. To show this, we present a taxonomy of different types of freedom that we see as inherent in teleological systems. Then we show that our taxonomy of freedom, which is crucial to understanding teleology, shares many of the features of a philosophical position regarding free will that is known in the contemporary literature as ‘compatibilism’. This position maintains that an agent is free when the sources of its actions are internal, when the agent itself is the deterministic cause of those actions. Our view shows that freedom is not only indispensable to teleology, but also that, contrary to common intuitions, there is no conflict between teleology and causal determinism

Goal directedness and the field concept

A long-standing problem in understanding goal-directed systems has been the insufficiency of mechanistic explanations to make sense of them. This paper offers a solution to this problem. It begins by observing the limitations of mechanistic decompositions when it comes to understanding physical fields. We argue that introducing the field concept, as it has been developed in field theory, alongside mechanisms is able to provide an account of goal directedness in the sciences

Goal directedness and the field concept

A long-standing problem in understanding goal-directed systems has been the insufficiency of mechanistic explanations to make sense of them. This paper offers a solution to this problem. It begins by observing the limitations of mechanistic decompositions when it comes to understanding physical fields. We argue that introducing the field concept, as it has been developed in field theory, alongside mechanisms is able to provide an account of goal directedness in the sciences