Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences xxx (2015) 1e7

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Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and

Biomedical Sciences
journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/shpsc

Evolutionary biology and the question of teleology

Michael Ruse
Program in the History and Philosophy of Science, Florida State University, FL, 32306, USA

a r t i c l e i n f o a b s t r a c t

Article history: Teleologydwhat Aristotle called “final cause”dis trying to understand things in terms of the future, as
Available online xxx when we ask about the plates on the back of the dinosaur, stegosaurus, and suggest that they might
sometime be used to control the internal temperature of the brute. Recently the philosopher Thomas
Keywords: Nagel has argued for a wholesale embrace of teleological thinking in the sciences, particularly the life
Thomas Nagel sciences. I argue that Nagel’s thinking is shoddy and ill-informed, but that in some sense biologists do
Teleology
(with reason) seem drawn to teleological understanding, and so the correct response is not outright
Final cause
rejection of the very idea but a more informed and sympathetic approach to those aspects of nature that
Charles Darwin
Natural selection
seem to call for final cause thinking.
Arms race Ó 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

When citing this paper, please use the full journal title Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences

1. Thomas Nagel’s bad book
Recently the well-known American philosopher Thomas Nagel
published a book, Mind and Cosmos, in which he argued that the
thus-far insoluble problems of the biological sciences (especially in
the field of evolution) suggest that researchers need to return to
teleological explanations.
If contemporary research in molecular biology leaves open the
possibility of legitimate doubts about a fully mechanistic ac-
count of the origin and evolution of life, dependent only on the
laws of chemistry and physics, this can combine with the failure
of psychophysical reductionism to suggest that principles of a
different kind are also at work in the history of nature, principles
of the growth of order that are in their logical form teleological
rather than mechanistic. (Nagel, 2012, 7)
To say that the book was not well received is a bit like saying that
Hitler had a thing about Jews. Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker
wrote on Twitter of “the shoddy reasoning of a once-great thinker.”
Daniel Dennett bluntly said that Nagel’s work “isn’t worth any-
thingdit’s cute and it’s clever and it’s not worth a damn.” And the
Guardian newspaper carried a headline that Nagel’s book was the
E-mail address: mruse@fsu.edu.
most despised science book of 2012 (Chorost, 2013). Perhaps
expectedly, the Creationists loved it!
Mind and Cosmos is not a great book (Ruse, 2010). Nagel’s
knowledge of biology is breathtaking in its nigh-willful superfici-
ality. One suspects that only someone who knew his conclusion
before he started his research could argue in so shallow and
misleading a fashion. Nagel is no Creationist. One accepts his claim
to be an atheist. He does however have a record of praising Crea-
tionist booksdmore specifically, he praises books by the so-called
Intelligent Design Theorists, what I call “Creationism Lite”dand
one senses a shared contempt for and fear of arguments about
evolutionary origins. (See Behe, 1996.) Perhaps if we were to
identify one single factor for this hostilitydand this is made very
clear by Nageldit is that evolutionary thinking belittles the worth
of humankind. We are reduced to mere matter in motion and that
which makes us somehow special is downgraded and denied. I will
not here go into more details; what I would like to do here is turn
the tables somewhat and pick up and take seriously Nagel’s claim
that we need to take up teleological modes of understanding. Given
that I am one who has written critically of Nagel’s book, it may
seem odddhypocritical perhapsdthat I would do so. But I am
motivated by the ferocity of the reactions to Mind and Cosmos. Bad
books appear on a regular basis. Generally such books get little
press and they make no waves and are soon forgotten. Why then
did Nagel’s book so upset people?

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Please cite this article in press as: Ruse, M., Evolutionary biology and the question of teleology, Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological
and Biomedical Sciences (2015), http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.shpsc.2015.12.001
2 M. Ruse / Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences xxx (2015) 1e7
In part obviously the reaction was because of the Creationism
factor. Any book praised by Creationists is going to be disliked and the
fact that already Nagel had earlier spoken warmly of Creationist
works did not help. I suspect however that there was something
about teleology in itself that rattled people. This mode of thought is in
some sense considered not just wrong but unclean, and when Nagel
started pushing it, emotions were generated and poured forth.
Embracing and advocating teleology is a bit like smoking in some-
one’s living room. People used to do it but they don’t anymore and
very much disapprove of those that still do. It is just something that is
alien to decent people, or perhaps as with smoking not done now but
with a hint of past pleasures and urges that must now be repressed.
Nothing like a reformed Magdalene for sanctimonious disapproval.
This is the hunch I want to pursue and unpack. Teleology unnerves
people because although it is wrong it is still tempting.
2. What is teleology?
What does one mean by “teleology,” or more specifically what is
a “teleological explanation”? It is a form of explanation that makes
reference to causes that can be understood only in terms of the
future (Ruse, 2003). To make sense of this definition, contrast
teleological explanation with more usual forms of explanation that
make reference to “proximate” or “efficient” causes. These latter
explanations are in terms of causes that are understood in terms of
past or present. So for instance if I say (to take a biological example)
the reason why a child has Down’s syndrome is because he has an
extra chromosome, I am explaining the physical and psychological
nature of the child in terms of some cause that already exists. In a
teleological explanation I am explaining in terms of causes that do
not yet exist. If I say (to take another biological example) the plates
on the back of stegosaurus exist in order to (for the purpose of, have
the function of) regulating the heat of the animal, I am talking of
what I expect to happen. The stegosaurus has its plates now. Later
in the day, the sun heats the brute and then the plates start to
radiate heat or to catch the cooling breezes in the air.
Note therefore that there is not really a straight analogy be-
tween proximate causes and teleological causes. In the former case,
you know that the cause exists or existed. In the latter case, the
cause may never exist! It could be that the stegosaurus falls of a cliff
and never uses its plates for their intended purpose. How then can
there be reference to the future if the future never occurs? There are
two proffered explanations. One is that teleological explanation
occurs in the context of intelligent design. The purpose of the air-
bags in the automobile is to explode on major contact. It may be
that the airbags never are used for this purpose, but the point is that
someone at some point thought about what might happen and
designed and built them accordingly. The future reference comes
because someone thought about it. (This has its roots in the
thinking of Plato.) The other explanation is that there is some kind
of special force that is future directed. The force may not be a
thinking force, but it seeks out phenomena or events in the future.
The idea here is rather like the goal-directed system you get in
rockets. As the target moves, the rocket adjusts its direction
accordingly with the aim of hitting the target. The analogy is not
quite exact, because in the case of rockets someonedsome bright
engineer from MITddesigned the seeking system. But you get the
idea. (This has its roots in the thinking of Aristotle.)
3. Charles Darwin and natural selection
I will take seriously Nagel’s claim that he is not a believer, so I
accept that he does not see the teleology of biology as literally
designed. I presume therefore that he subscribes to some kind of
view that has special forcesd“vital forces”dfocused on the future.
Please cite this article in press as: Ruse, M., Evolutionary biology and the question of teleology, Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological
and Biomedical Sciences (2015), http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.shpsc.2015.12.001
This is a view made popular at the end of the nineteenth century by a
group known naturally as “vitalists,” led by the German embryologist
Hans Driesch who spoke of “entelechies” and the French philosopher
Henri Bergson who spoke of “élans vitaux.” (See Bergson, 1907 and
Driesch, 1908.) I will not stop here to criticize this view because this
was done so often in the last century, but I will agree with the critics
that the main problem with vital forces is that they seem not to add to
the explanatory mix. Once you have finished talking about DNA and
that sort of thing, it really doesn’t seem that adding vital forces adds
at all to one’s understanding. However, I will agree with Nagel that
there does seem to be something teleological about organism talk-
dwe do have forward referencedand that this needs explaining. The
eye does serve the future purpose of seeing. What I would say is that
as always in science we have a metaphor at work here, the metaphor
of design. We look at the eye as if designed, even though it may not
be, and the reason why we do this is because it does seem as if
designed and using the metaphor has incredible heuristic value. In
the stegosaurus case, thinking of the plates as if designed for cooling
led to all sorts of interesting hypotheses about blood flow, that were
later confirmed.
Where I part company with Nagel is in thinking that, in the case
the design of organisms, we have a more than adequate natural-
isticdmechanisticdaccount. This is Charles Darwin’s theory of
evolution through natural selection. In his Origin of Species, Darwin
argued that population pressures lead to a struggle for existence
and (more importantly) reproduction. The successful in the strug-
gle will tend to be different from the unsuccessful and it will be the
differences that count. Given enough time there will thus be a
natural form of selection.
Let it be borne in mind how infinitely complex and close-fitting
are the mutual relations of all organic beings to each other and
to their physical conditions of life. Can it, then, be thought
improbable, seeing that variations useful to man have un-
doubtedly occurred, that other variations useful in some way to
each being in the great and complex battle of life, should
sometimes occur in the course of thousands of generations? If
such do occur, can we doubt (remembering that many more
individuals are born than can possibly survive) that individuals
having any advantage, however slight, over others, would have
the best chance of surviving and of procreating their kind? On
the other hand, we may feel sure that any variation in the least
degree injurious would be rigidly destroyed. This preservation
of favourable variations and the rejection of injurious variations,
I call Natural Selection. (Darwin, 1859, 80e81)
Note that Darwin’s mechanism not only leads to change but to
change of a particular kind. Organisms will develop end-directed
features like hands and eyes, what biologists call “adaptations.”
There will be an appearance of design, without need of vital forces
or direct interventions by a designer. Blind mechanical law can do
everything. It is not so much that final-cause type understanding is
now gonedDarwin himself happily talked about final causes and
he certainly thought that this involved explaining in terms of the
futuredbut that teleology is now subsumed under mechanism
(Ruse, 2009).
4. The challenge of history
For the Greeks, this would have been the end of the story. They,
at least the philosophers, had no real thoughts of development
through time. Their world was eternal and essentially unchanging.
Historical development comes later and is due in no small part to
the biblical narrative, with the movement from Eden to Calvary and
later. It was after the Scientific Revolution, during the
 M. Ruse / Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences xxx (2015) 1e7
Enlightenment starting at the beginning of the eighteenth century,
that people started really to think seriously about development
over time. With this came another dimension to the story of tele-
ology. Now the end points, future references, were not to individ-
ualsdthe parts of organisms for instancedbut to the end or
culmination of time. The question now was about the direction of
history and how we can and should interpret the present in terms
of what is to come rather than simply in terms of what has passed.
Essentially this is the story of progress (Ruse, 1996). It is true of
course that one might see history as culminating in humans driving
themselves off the edge of a cliff, and in this age of nuclear weap-
onry and global warming who can gainsay such thinking? But
traditionally those thinking about historical development have
tended to be optimists, to have endorsed thoughts of progress. In
the world of culture, of society, this is the idea that socially and
intellectually we humans are improving and will continue to do so.
There is an upward pattern to history and we should see stages not
only as reflecting what has happened in the past but what was
bound to happen in the future. There is change and there is di-
rection and to understand it we need to see where it is headed. In
other words we need teleological understanding. And, increasingly
through the eighteenth century, people argued that the same is
true in the world of organisms. They too show progress, from the
simple to the complex, from that lacking in worth to that with
fullest worth, from, as it was called, the monad to the man. Some
thought that the progress was more conceptual than actual, in the
sense of talking of linked development from one to the next that is
to say of physical evolution. Others, with greater or lesser enthu-
siasm accepted the reality of the connections. Either way, as with
adaptations, here also teleological understanding is demanded, as
we see the futuredin the sense that humans once did not exist and
then later they diddas important to understanding as is the past.
Cultural progress and biological progress were never two sepa-
rate ideas. The latter was always an epiphenomenon of the former
and often used in a somewhat circular fashion to support the former.
Denis Diderot, the French encyclopedist, was a pioneer. “Just as in
the animal and vegetable kingdoms, an individual begins, so to
speak, grows, subsists, decays and passes away, could it not be the
same with the whole species?” (Diderot, 1943, 48, quoting On the
Interpretation of Nature, 1754) He made no bones about seeing a link
between his social views and his scientific speculations. “The Tahi-
tian is at a primary stage in the development of the world, the Eu-
ropean is at its old age. The interval separating us is greater than that
between the new-born child and the decrepit old man” (Diderot,
1943, 152, quoting Supplement to Bougainville’s Voyage, 1772).
Later in the century Charles Darwin’s grandfather, the physician
Erasmus Darwin, fell into the same pattern.
Imperious man, who rules the bestial crowd,
Of language, reason, and reflection proud,
With brow erect who scorns this earthy sod,
And styles himself the image of his God;
Arose from rudiments of form and sense,
An embryon point, or microscopic ens!
(Darwin, 1803, 1, 11, 295e314)
Explicitly, Erasmus Darwin tied in this vision of the organic world
with his hopes and beliefs about the social world: the idea of
organic progressive evolution “is analogous to the improving
excellence observable in every part of the creation; . such as the
progressive increase of the wisdom and happiness of its in-
habitants” (Darwin, 1794e96, 509).
Please cite this article in press as: Ruse, M., Evolutionary biology and the question of teleology, Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological
and Biomedical Sciences (2015), http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.shpsc.2015.12.001
3
Surely this all came to an end with Charles Darwin? Evolution
was now far more than something merely riding on the back of the
idea of cultural progress. Interestingly, however, its connection
with cultural progress was not severed. Evolutionists continued to
be thoroughly soaked in thoughts about cultural progress and they
continued to see this reflected in the history of organic life. This was
true of Darwin: “The inhabitants of each successive period in the
world’s history have beaten their predecessors in the race for life,
and are, in so far, higher in the scale of nature; and this may account
for that vague yet ill-defined sentiment, felt by many palæontolo-
gists, that organization on the whole has progressed.” (Darwin,
1859, 345) And this kind of thinking continued right down into
the twentieth century. There have been those, like the late Stephen
Jay Gould, who attacked the whole notion of biological progress. He
wrote of biological progress as “a noxious, culturally embedded,
untestable, nonoperational, intractable idea that must be replaced
if we wish to understand the patterns of history” (Gould, 1988, 319).
He argued that there is nothing inevitable about the emergence of
humans. Making joking reference to the asteroid that hit the Earth
65 million years ago and wiped out the dinosaurs, making possible
the age of mammals, he wrote: “Since dinosaurs were not moving
toward markedly larger brains, and since such a prospect may lie
outside the capabilities of reptilian design., we must assume that
consciousness would not have evolved on our planet if a cosmic
catastrophe had not claimed the dinosaurs as victims. In an entirely
literal sense, we owe our existence, as large and reasoning mam-
mals, to our lucky stars” (Gould, 1989, 318).
Actually, as we shall see, Gould’s full position on the subject
was much more complex than a simple denial of progress. But
Gould apart, the fact is that many, perhaps most, continued to
believe in such progress. Today’s most distinguished living
evolutionist, Edward O. Wilson of Harvard University, is open in
his fervent belief in biological progress. “The overall average
across the history of life has moved from the simple and few to
the more complex and numerous. During the past billion years,
animals as a whole evolved upward in body size, feeding and
defensive techniques, brain and behavioral complexity, social
organization, and precision of environmental controldin each
case farther from the nonliving state than their simpler ante-
cedents did” (Wilson, 1992, 187). Adding: “Progress, then, is a
property of the evolution of life as a whole by almost any
conceivable intuitive standard, including the acquisition of goals
and intentions in the behavior of animals.” (See also Wilson,
1975.) Others agree. In his great popular overview of modern
evolutionary thinking, The Blind Watchmaker (1986), Richard
Dawkins refers to Harry Jerison’s (1973) notion of an Encephal-
ization Quotient, this being a kind of universal animal IQ, that
works from brain size and subtracts the gray matter simply
needed to get the body functioningdwhales necessarily have
bigger brains than shrews, because they have bigger bodies.
What counts is what is left when you take off the body-
functioning portion. Thus measured, humans come way out on
top, leading Dawkins (1986, 189) to reflect: “The fact that humans
have an EQ of 7 and hippos an EQ of 0.3 may not literally mean
that humans are 23 times as clever as hippos!” But, he concludes,
it does tell us “something.”
5. Problems with progress
Why would anyone worry about biological progress? Couldn’t
you say that although it has the odor of teleologydthe course of
evolution is directed to the end point of humankinddthe system is
just as mechanistic as adaptation, something else with the odor of
teleology but entirely mechanistic? In fact, the same process is at
work in both cases, natural selection in the short term for
4 M. Ruse / Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences xxx (2015) 1e7
adaptation and natural selection in the long term for progress. As it
happens, it is pretty clear that Gould’s objections to biological
progress were more social than scientific. He believed in social
progress but thought biological progress a barrier to its fulfillment.
Too easily biological progress is used to justify racismdblacks,
Asians, Jews down the scale and white Anglo-Saxons at the top-
dand he fought against his all of his life. But this kind of thinking
aside, the fact is that many find beliefs in biological progress
something of an embarrassment. At the specific level, because
whatever Darwin himself may have thought, it seems that his
theory quite undermines thoughts of biological progress. On the
one hand, natural selection is relativistic. It is not a tautology but it
does say that what is of adaptive advantage in one situation is not
necessarily of adaptive advantage in other situations. A dark-
skinned mouse is camouflaged on clay soil whereas a light-
skinned mouse is camouflaged on sandy soil. On the other hand,
the variationsdthe raw building blocks of evolutiondare random
in the sense of not occurring according to need. There is no direc-
tion in their nature. This fact too seems to tell against inevitable
upwards climb. At the general level, seeing the history of life on
Earth as moving up towards the best of all possible organisms,
Homo sapiens, is to put value judgments right up front of one’s
science. And this is considered incompatible with good science.
Since the Scientific Revolution, nature has been seen simply as
matter in motion, without point, without purpose. Hence profes-
sional science itself must be value free. It cannot promote things
one wants. Only things as they are. In the words of Karl Popper
(1972), science is “knowledge without a knower,” meaning that
human interests are excluded. Thus although there may be belief in
biological progress, the tendency is to downplay it or exclude it
from explicit discussion.
6. Naturalizing progress
Or to argue that it is no longer a value laden notion! As in the
case of final causes with respect to individual features (adapta-
tions), the hope is that the teleology of history can be put on a
happy mechanical foundation. How can this be done? God cannot
enter into the picture. Neither can vital forces. Natural selection
itself, or some equally naturalistic alternative, must do the
explaining. Part of the trick will be giving a definition or charac-
terization of what is being produced, something that humans have
more than any other organisms. One can hardly simply say “hu-
man-like features” because that just gets you into a circle. They
must be features that we in some sense judge desirable, although
the judgment itself cannot be part of the science. Generally the
move is towards some kind of complexity. Darwin led the way here.
In the third edition of the Origin (1861) he admitted that “natu-
ralists have not defined to each other’s satisfaction what is meant
by an advance in organisation.” However, he was prepared to make
a suggestion of his own.
Amongst the vertebrata the degree of intellect and an approach in
structure to man clearly come into play. It might be thought that
the amount of change which the various parts and organs un-
dergo in their development from the embryo to maturity would
suffice as a standard of comparison; but there are cases, as with
certain parasitic crustaceans, in which several parts of the struc-
ture become less perfect, so that the mature animal cannot be
called higher than its larva. Von Baer’s standard seems the most
widely applicable and the best, namely, the amount of differen-
tiation of the different parts (in the adult state, as I should be
inclined to add) and their specialisation for different functions; or,
as Milne Edwards would express it, the completeness of the di-
vision of physiological labour. (Darwin, 1861, 133)
Please cite this article in press as: Ruse, M., Evolutionary biology and the question of teleology, Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological
and Biomedical Sciences (2015), http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.shpsc.2015.12.001
7. Arms races
How are you going to get this complexity by natural means?
Again Darwin comes to our aid. Basically you argue that selection
leads to competition and the more subtle or sophisticated or
complex will win out in the end. Intelligence is at the top of
complexity and so humans come out top.
If we look at the differentiation and specialisation of the several
organs of each being when adult (and this will include the
advancement of the brain for intellectual purposes) as the best
standard of highness of organisation, natural selection clearly
leads towards highness; for all physiologists admit that the
specialisation of organs, inasmuch as they perform in this state
their functions better, is an advantage to each being; and hence
the accumulation of variations tending towards specialisation is
within the scope of natural selection. (Darwin, 1861, 134)
In the twentieth century, this kind of thinking was refined and the
discussion was cast in terms of “arms races.” Lines of organisms
compete and improvement occursdthe prey gets faster and so does
the predator. The person who really developed this notion was
Julian Huxley. Likening biological evolution to the competition
between nations in preparation for war, and making reference
(writing in 1912) to the naval build-up between Germany and
Britain, Huxley wrote: “The leaden plum-puddings were not un-
fairly matched against the wooden walls of Nelson’s day.” He then
added that today “though our guns can hurl a third of a ton of
sharp-nosed steel with dynamite entrails for a dozen miles, yet
they are confronted with twelve-inch armor of backed and hard-
ened steel, water-tight compartments, and targets moving thirty
miles an hour. Each advance in attack has brought forth, as if by
magic, a corresponding advance in defence.” Explicitly, Huxley
likened this to the organic world, for “if one species happens to vary
in the direction of greater independence, the inter-related equi-
librium is upset, and cannot be restored until a number of
competing species have either given way to the increased pressure
and become extinct, or else have answered pressure with pressure,
and kept the first species in its place by themselves too discovering
means of adding to their independence” (Huxley, 1912, 115e16).
And so finally: “it comes to pass that the continuous change which
is passing that through the organic world appears as a succession of
phases of equilibrium, each one on a higher average plane of in-
dependence than the one before, and each inevitably calling up and
giving place to one still higher.”
Richard Dawkins picks right up on this sort of thinking. In a
paper co-authored with fellow biologist John Krebs he writes that
even “if modern predators are no better at catching prey than
Eocene predators were at catching Eocene prey, it does at first sight
seem to be an expectation of the arms race idea that modern
predators might massacre Eocene prey. And Eocene predators
chasing modern prey might be in the same position as a Spitfire
chasing a jet” (Dawkins & Krebs, 1979, 490). In other words, in
Dawkins’s happy Darwinian world, it all comes out right in the end.
As in the military world, weaponry has become increasingly elec-
tronic, and those organisms with the biggest on-board computers
win out.
8. Niches
A second Darwinian approach can be found in one of the
many essays that Stephen Jay Gould penned for Natural History.
This may seem strange, because we have seen how he argued
against biological progress. However, as I have pointed out, it is
clear that this opposition was more political than
 M. Ruse / Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences xxx (2015) 1e7
epistemological, and if you look at Gould’s overall corpus, you
find that throughout he had yearnings for some kind of
improving development with humans winning out in the end.
Think about ecological nichesdlike the shelter provided by trees
or the safety of burrows underground. One might say that,
thanks to natural selection, organisms are constantly looking and
prodding to find new niches and, when they do, they enter and
exploit them. The first animals to get up to and survive on dry
land found a whole new area in which they and their de-
scendents could live and thrive. Culture can be described as one
such niche, the niches that humans have found and entered. If
not us, was it not predictable that someone on Earth would find
and enter the niche? Why should this not happen repeatedly, if
not here on Earth (because you might say that we have now
blocked the entrance) then elsewhere in the universe? Note that
selection here is doing the work, but it is not doing it by one
organism beating out another and thus proving its superiority.
The superiority if such there be comes from the niche itself and
rather confers this on its inhabitants. So there are no longer the
obvious opportunities for racism and sexism.
In an essay on the search for extraterrestrial life, Gould wrote: “I
can present a good argument from “evolutionary theory” against
the repetition of anything like a human body elsewhere; I cannot
extend it to the general proposition that intelligence in some form
might pervade the universe” (Gould, 1985, 411). He then went on to
quote the leading twentieth-century evolutionist Theodosius
Dobzhansky, writing in a textbook with other major evolutionists:
“Granting that the possibility of obtaining a man-like creature is
vanishingly small even given an astronomical number of
attempts. there is still some small possibility that another intel-
ligent species has arisen, one that is capable of achieving a tech-
nological civilization” (412). About this passage, Gould commented:
“I am not convinced that the possibility is so small.” He then gave an
argument that evolutionary convergence (where two different lines
evolve essentially similar adaptations to survive and reproduce)
suggests that even though major intelligence has arisen but once on
this earth, it is quite possible that elsewhere in the universe it has
arisen quite independently.
Conscious intelligence has evolved only once on earth, and
presents no real prospect for reemergence should we choose to
use our gift for destruction. But does intelligence lie within the
class of phenomena too complex and historically conditioned
for repetition? I do not think that its uniqueness on earth
specifies such a conclusion. Perhaps, in another form on another
world, intelligence would be as easy to evolve as flight on ours.
(412)
This argument has been picked up (apparently independently)
and promoted by the paleontologist Simon Conway Morris, who
(as a Christian) is very keen to argue for the inevitability of the
appearance of humans. He argues that only certain areas of what
we might call “morphological space” are welcoming to life forms
(the center of the sun would not be, for instance) and that this
constrains the course of evolution. Again and again, as Gould
argued, organisms take the same route into a pre-existing niche.
The saber-toothed, tiger-like organisms are a nice example, where
the North American placental mammals (real cats) were matched
right down the line by South American marsupials (thyla-
cosmilids). There existed a niche for organisms that were preda-
tors, with cat-like abilities and shearing/stabbing-like weapons.
Darwinian selection found more than one way to enter itdfrom
the placental side and from the marsupial side. It was not a
question of beating out others but of finding pathways that others
had not found.
Please cite this article in press as: Ruse, M., Evolutionary biology and the question of teleology, Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological
and Biomedical Sciences (2015), http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.shpsc.2015.12.001
5
Conway Morris argues that, given the ubiquity of convergence,
we must allow that the historical course of nature is not random
but strongly selection-constrained along certain pathways and to
certain destinations. Most particularly, some kind of intelligent
being was bound to emerge. After all, our own very existence shows
that a kind of cultural adaptive niche existsda niche that prizes
intelligence and social abilities.
If brains can get big independently and provide a neural
machine capable of handling a highly complex environment,
then perhaps there are other parallels, other convergences
that drive some groups towards complexity. Could the story of
sensory perception be one clue that, given time, evolution will
inevitably lead not only to the emergence of such properties
as intelligence, but also to other complexities, such as, say,
agriculture and culture, that we tend to regard as the
prerogative of the human? We may be unique, but paradox-
ically those properties that define our uniqueness can still be
inherent in the evolutionary process. In other words, if we
humans had not evolved then something more-or-less iden-
tical would have emerged sooner or later. (Conway Morris,
2003, 196)
9. Complexity just happens
A third suggestion finds hints in Darwin but it is not very
Darwinian, inasmuch as it does not rely on natural selection. It
basically says that there is a natural tendency to complexity and
over time you will get what you want. In one of his early notebooks
Darwin wrote:
The enormous number of animals in the world depends of their
varied structure & complexity. d hence as the forms became
complicated, they opened fresh means of adding to their
complexity. d but yet there is no necessary tendency in the
simple animals to become complicated although all perhaps will
have done so from the new relations caused by the advancing
complexity of others. d It may be said, why should there not be
at any time as many species tending to dis-development (some
probably always have done so, as the simplest fish), my answer
is because, if we begin with the simplest forms & suppose them
to have changed, their very changes tend to give rise to others.
(Barrett et al. 1987; Notebook, E, 95e6)
Of course, for Darwin, selection was always hovering, so he would
have seen this process connected to change towards adaptive
advantage. A purer version, if we might so describe it, can be found
in the thought of Herbert Spencer. To characterize the phenomenon
of complexity, something he admitted he got from the Natur-
philosoph Friedrich Schelling via the writings of the poet Samuel
Coleridge, Spencer introduced two terms which have had a very
long shelf life. Simple organisms (or states of affairs generally) are
“homogeneous. Complex organisms (or states) are “heteroge-
neous.” The course of progress therefore is from the homogeneous
to the heterogeneous. As he developed his thinking around the
time that Darwin published the Origin, Spencer fell more and more
under the spell of physics. This led to his full-blown theory of
“dynamic equilibrium.” He argued that organisms, or a state, exist
in a balancedworking normally, with everything in equilibria.
Then somethingdquite possibly something from outsidedacts to
upset the balance and things get into play. They are striving always
to regain equilibrium, just as a ball bearing at the bottom of a bowl,
if disturbed, will naturally tend back down to the center and to
regained equilibrium. Eventually this balance will be achieved, but
6 M. Ruse / Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences xxx (2015) 1e7
it will be a new balance, higher than before, and with a greater
heterogeneity than before. Backing all of this, Spencer gave a kind
of metaphysical principledone that may or may not have been
behind the notebook passage of Darwin quoted abovedthat causes
always proliferate in several effects but never conversely. So
complexity emerges naturally. “Every active force produces more
than one change e every cause produces more than one effect”
(Spencer, 1857, 32).
More recently, in his book Full House (1996), Gould argued that
there is certainly no necessary, selection-driven process of pro-
gressive evolution leading to greater complexity. However, he did
at the same time agree that the natural course of events would lead
to ever-more complex organisms. These ideas have been picked up
and developed at some length recently in a new book by two ac-
ademics at Duke University, one a biologist (Daniel McShea) and
the other a philosopher (Robert Brandon). In Biology’s First Law: The
Tendency for Diversity and Complexity to Increase in Evolutionary
Systems, they offer a very Spencerian vision of the evolutionary
process (McShea & Brandon, 2010). They call their law the “zero-
force evolutionary law,” or ZFEL. It is formulated as follows: “In any
evolutionary system in which there is variation and heredity, in the
absence of natural selection, other forces, and constraints acting on
diversity or complexity, diversity and complexity will increase on
average.” What do McShea and Brandon mean by complexity?
Certainly nothing to do with natural selection as such. They say that
complexity is “a function only of the amount of differentiation
among parts within an individual.” Elsewhere they say
““complexity” just means number of parts types or degree of dif-
ferentiation among parts.” They are very careful to specify that this
has nothing to do with adaptation. Indeed they say “in our usage,
even function less, useless, part types contribute to complexity.
Even maladaptive differentiation is pure complexity.” How could
this complexity come about? It all seems to be a matter of
randomness, meaning not that there are no causesdwith orthodox
Darwinians they would agree that the building blocks of evolution
(mutations) have physical causesdbut that there is no direction in
the nature of the building blocks or in what happens to them once
they appear. With Gould, and I think with Spencer, they simply
believe that over time more and more things will happen and
pieces will be produced and thus complexity will emerge. It is the
inevitability of the drunkard falling into the gutter.
10. Close but no cigar
So, pulling back, what do we say about historical direction and
teleology? Interesting and stimulating though the various natu-
ralistic proposals may be, nothing quite works as well and as
definitively as one might like. In a way, the whole talk about
complexity is problematic. And even if one solved the general is-
sues, one might query whether any proposal would unambiguously
classify humans as the top organisms. One of the most interesting
things to emerge from the Human Genome Project was just how
few genes are needed to produce so much. What about con-
sciousness? Is that complex or simple? Note that this is not to say
that humans are not special or that they should not be valued over
all other organisms. I certainly value humans over warthogs. It is
just a matter of finding characteristics of humans that do not end in
circularity and that would be produced by evolutionary processes.
Analogously, all of the mechanisms for producing human-like
beings are suggestive but hardly definitive. Most Darwinians
accept arms races although there are critics. The fossil record does
not suggest that predator-prey encounters always improve speed.
But even if you accept their importance, whether they will neces-
sarily produce intelligence is another matter. So it is hard to claim
that in some sense being humanlike is absolutely good. Even brains
Please cite this article in press as: Ruse, M., Evolutionary biology and the question of teleology, Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological
and Biomedical Sciences (2015), http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.shpsc.2015.12.001
have their costs, namely the need of large quantities of high-grade
fuel (the bodies of other animals) and there are times when this
might not pay. In the immortal words of the late John J Sepkoski: “I
see intelligence as just one of a variety of adaptations among tet-
rapods for survival. Running fast in a herd while being as dumb as
shit, I think, is a very good adaptation for survival” (Ruse, 1996,
486).
The niche suggestion is clever and may have some real worth.
However, as critics of Darwinism like geneticist Richard Lewontin
(1983) point out non-stop, niches do not exist in splendid isola-
tion waiting to be found. They are as much made as discovered. The
niche for insects at the tops of Brazilian junglesdapparently a very
rich home for much lifedobviously would not exist were there no
trees. The point is not whether humans have evolved, because
obviously we have. The question is whether we would necessarily
evolve given the evolutionary processdeither here or somewhere
else in the universe. Who is to say that there are not many other
possible niches that would produce something quite different from
consciousness but as effective? Don’t ask me what they are, because
the whole point is that I don’t know! I am just asking why they are
ruled out.
Finally the natural tendency to complexity. This may well be
true and it may be important. Darwin is surely right about the way
in which it leads to a diversity of organisms. But again I am not quite
sure why humansdor human-like beingsdshould emerge.
Perhaps they will. Perhaps they won’t. The point is that without
some stronger reason, like those supplied by the Greeks, you might
be waiting a long time for nothing. And the Greek solutions are not
acceptable in modern science.
11. Envoi
All of this may leave the reader somewhat dissatisfied. There has
to be some reason why humans, the best of all organisms, emerged.
And yet, given mechanism, there is no satisfactory answer or pros-
pect of such an answer. Which brings us back to Thomas Nagel. I
suggest that for all of the inadequacies of his own positiondit was
reprehensible to argue in the shoddy fashion to be found in Mind and
Cosmosdhe has put his finger on a sore point. Evolutionists want
teleology but they cannot have it. And perhaps that goes some way
towards explaining the vehemence of their reactions to his book.
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Please cite this article in press as: Ruse, M., Evolutionary biology and the question of teleology, Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological
and Biomedical Sciences (2015), http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.shpsc.2015.12.001