Science and Teleology: Conclusions

This is the conclusion of the Science and Teleology essay. In the previous installments I introduced the concepts of teleology (pertaining to purpose) and etiology (which pertains to cause). I explained that some critics of science have claimed that science can only offer etiological explanations and that it must necessarily be silent when it comes to teleological explanations &mdash a critique often (sloppily) phased as science being able to deal with how questions but not why questions.

Over the course of the essay I gave a fuller account of what teleology is and what sort of explanations are teleological. I then gave myself the challenge of offering a scientific account of a phenomenon using etiological reasoning to achieve it. The phenomenon that I chose was that of play. I further restricted myself by stating that I would do so without using an evolutionary account.

Using a variety of biological and, in particular, developmental and genetic arguments I was able to eventually produce a functional teleological account: some animals play because their brains have become too complex for their genes to impart the necessary instincts to allow them to be born with the prerequisites for survival. Play allows a channel by which they can learn the necessary skills to survive. I also noted that, once play does arise in a lineage, additional cognitive opportunities open up.

So, what conclusions can we draw?

The first and most obvious is that it is possible to do so. A few qualifications are in order. It is not obviously possible to provide teleological explanation for any given phenomena and, in all probability, the majority of natural phenomena will not be amenable to teleological accounts.

While we were able to provide a teleological account of play, it took considerable effort. We had to painstakingly work our way down from taxonomy through developmental economics and then to genetics and back up through development. Moreover, the account that I provided was simplified. Science is a painstaking task.

That noted, what we accomplished is rather marvelous. Using etiology to achieve a teleology is very much akin to transforming lead into gold. It's almost a philosophical miracle that it is possible to do anything like that.

This not only says something valuable about science, but also about the philosophy of teleology. One of the big problems with teleology is that most of the things which can be assigned definite teleologies are trivial. The questions that teleologists are really interested in &mdash the meaning of life sorts of questions &mdash are only amenable to speculation. Teleology, as a whole, lacks a methodology with which it can decide whether a certain answer is a good or bad answer (or whether or not there is, in fact, any answer), which is why teleology is often left to the theologians. Debating religious points can, at least, allow for one to arrive at an answer that conforms to dogma. Of course, this is only true if you agree with the dogma and its interpretations.

Paradoxically, another advantage of deriving a scientific teleology is a lack of certainty. This may seem like a disadvantage, but science isn't about finding ultimate truths; science is a process of refining our knowledge so that it approaches an ideal of truth. This may seem like a weak epistemology but it's actually strength is deceptively powerful. In a dogmatic discipline, false convictions can be help as absolute truths without any means of moving away from them. In science, all knowledge is considered contingent and subject to improvement. As such, a poor scientific answer to a question can be either discarded or refined. As time passes, this leads to an increasing sense of confidence in our conclusions as our refinements become progressively more "pure".

Having said this, I should point out that the conclusion that I've presented for the teleology of play is contingent. Indeed, there are a number of potential problems. One of the biggest is the issues of junk DNA. As I noted, there is a limited amount of genetic material and only so much of it can be used to program instincts into an organisms; however, geneticists have found that long stretches of DNA don't actually code for any proteins. The actual purpose (if any) is unknown. It is possible that junk DNA doesn't have any function &mdash it's just an accumulation of errors over time. Others suggest that it is functional, albeit in a subtle one. Some have, for instance, suggested that it acts as a kind of buffer between active segments.

If junk DNA is really functionless, we may well ask why it couldn't be utilized for building more instincts. On the other hand, that question applies to the other elements of an animal's phenotype, too. If the "junk" segments could be used for instincts, they could also be used to refine an animals class, armor, digestive tract, etc. As such, junk DNA is a general problem and not a specific problem.

It is plausible that the teleological hypothesis for play is flawed in other ways. Fortunately, like any good hypothesis, it makes testable predictions. We would predict, for example, that play only arises in those creatures that have certain well-specified developmental luxuries. Cowboy songs to the contrary, we would not expect to see genuine play in the deer and the antelope, for instance.¹ If we were to find examples of play that weren't accounted for by the hypothesis, we would need to reexamine the data. Perhaps we would conclude that there are multiple paths to play, or we might conclude that the hypothesis is defective and needs to be fixed or discarded (depending on the nature of the defect).

Because teleology is often associated with theology and metaphysics, many scientists find themselves uncomfortable speaking in teleological terms. Some prefer to refer to scientific teleology as teleonomy, much in the way that we distinguish astrology from astronomy. I believe that this is misguided. Astrology and astronomy are fundamentally different. The only superficial resemblance is that they both involve observations of the planets and stars, but their goals are radically distinct. Teleology and "teleonomy" have the same purpose: the assignment of purpose. There is a radical difference in methodology, however. A metaphysicist is not (and should not) interested in using scientific methodology to illuminate metaphysical concerns. We should be very hesitant, for instance, to try to using scientific means to ascribe a teleology to the abstract principle of "justice".

If we need a distinction of terminology, I would suggest using terms like "metaphysical teleology", "scientific teleology", and "theological teleology" with the understanding that each employs distinct methodologies to arrive and their conclusions.

As I have shown, the critics are wrong. Science can address the question of purpose for at least some problems. I doubt that this will really satisfy many of those critics, however, since the sorts of questions that they tend to be interested in are not scientific questions. More often then not, the sort of purpose they are trying to divine is, frankly, the will of God. They want to know the reason that humanity is here. For that sort of question, the only sort of teleological answer that will suffice is a theological one. Many of the other Big Questions are similarly outside of the scope of science, including considerations of ethics and morality. Science can do a good job of describing moral systems and can even explain how such systems might arise (which can potentially offer a functional teleology), but science can not offer as an answer to the question of how we ought to behave towards one another.

Such criticisms, however, are tantamount to saying that science isn't either religion or metaphysics. One might just as plausibly criticize the field of ethics since ethicists can't seem to come up with any good medical vaccines, or criticizing theology on the basis that theologians make lousy bridge builders! Such criticism aren't wrong, they are irrelevant. Ultimately, they are simply tautologies: a thing is not that which it is not. When faced with such a criticism, the only correct answer is the shrug one's shoulders and say, "Yes, but so what?"

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¹ We might expect to find certain ritualized territorial and mating behaviors, however, to look similar to play. Inner-species conflicts are potentially dangerous. It is in an animal's interests, when dealing with rivals, to engage in non-lethal contests with opponents in order to gauge their strengths and to retreat if they are at a disadvantage, just as two tough-guys might opt to arm-wrestle one another rather than going directly to throwing punches.

The ritualization of mating behavior is its own complex subject which is outside the scope of this essay, although I would certainly encourage an examination of the literature.

Science and Teleology, part V

Before I begin, I want to thank those who've had the patience to follow along. I am aware that this essay seems to have been going all over the place without appearing to approach anything like a conclusion. I am happy to say that we're almost there.

In the previous installment, I talked about learning as well as introducing the idea of certain biological constraints, both in terms of protein and neural space, which I called "budgets". I also argued that nature "prefers" to give creatures as much instinctual knowledge as possible and noted that learning, although common, tends to simply be filler for instinctual knowledge. This left of with the question of why some animals are born with large gaps in their knowledge of the world, which left us with the question of why this was the case. I ended with a question that suggested that the reason some animals more lack instinctual knowledge is because they aren't able to.

In order to understand this it is necessary to take one more (apparent) detour. In order to understand why some animals seem incapable of retaining more instinctual knowledge, we need to understand something about genetics.

Many people have the idea that our genes are like blueprints. It is supposed that if you could carefully examine a given person's genes, for instance, that you would, in principle, be able to precisely reconstruct her. This is a view that is reinforced by media articles that report the discovery of a gene for this or that (e.g., a "fat" gene) as well as popular fiction which has clones popping out of vats who not only look like the original but, in many cases, even has the memories of the individual! Even discounting pop media and pop fiction, one only has to look at a pair of identical twins in order to suppose that genes do, in fact, encode the exact biological details of one's body.

Looks can be deceiving, however. Identical twins do have a lot of similarities (the precise degree of similarity being the subject of some controversy) but a close examination will reveal differences. Twins do not, for instance, have matching fingerprints, retinal patterns or birthmarks. Likewise, if one could microscopically examine a pair of twin's circulatory system, lungs, etc, one would be able to catalog innumerable deviations from one another.

Rather than thinking of genes as blueprints a better analogy is to think of them as recipes.

Let us take a recipe for something like a cake. If you examine the recipe, you can probably get a good idea of what's going to be produced if you combine all of the ingredients and follow the instructions. You'll know that you'll have something sweet, fluffy and bread-like with a layer of even sweeter confection. If it's a fairly complicated cake you might have layers of food with different textures and tastes. However, if you were to extract a cubic centimeter of an actual cake and if you tried to map it back to a precise line of instruction, in most cases you'll find yourself frustrated.

When scientists say that a given gene is for a given trait, what they really mean is that the lack of the gene inhibits the trait from developing. It's like trying to reverse engineer a meal by selectively removing lines from a recipe book and seeing what the final product looks and tastes like.

If you've done any cooking, you know that the ingredients and the instructions are only part of the processes. There are any number of external factors that influence how a given dish will develop. Two different burners will likely produce different temperatures even when put on the same setting. Likewise, a frying pan with a copper bottom will distribute heat differently than a cast iron one. Whether I'm cooking at altitude or at sea-level will influence the final product.

The advantage of using recipes rather than blueprints is that recipes can withstand a fair amount of variation in these conditions. In fact, recipes are robust enough that they can often survive the omission of certain ingredients or the substitution or addition of other ingredients. True, the final product will taste different but, in many cases, it will be edible and, perhaps, even more enjoyable than the initial recipe. In fact, I suspect that one of the reasons that people have an intuitively difficult time accepting the idea that mutation is a factor in the Theory of Natural Selection is that they think of mutations as being changes to a blueprint. If I substitute one gear for another in a precision Swiss watch, it is unlikely that the watch will continue to function and almost wholly implausible that it will function better. On the other hand, if I substitute Swiss cheese for cheddar in my Denver omelet the end result will almost certainly be palatable and may well taste better.

Even when we cook a given recipe using the same equipment and conditions, we often find that cooking the same meal twice does not produce exactly the same result. Infinitesimal variations in cooking time, ingredient quality and quantities can make "identical" meals taste slightly different. In like manner, even if you do everything precisely the same, down to the millimeter, the microsecond, and the millionth of a degree centigrade, meals would still come out subtly different because the process of combining them is statistical. I can say, in very exact terms, stir the pot of sauce fifteen times counter-clockwise and such-and-such a speed with such-and-such a radius, but that will not produce an identical distribution of ingredients.

Genetics is a very, very indirect process. Enzymes (which are a kind of protein) interact with DNA to produce proteins (some of which are enzymes) which are used to build cells which (in certain cases) interact to form tissues which are "folded" into organs which a grouped into systems which, ultimately, comprise a body. It is not a bad analogy to think of DNA as being you body's "recipe", the proteins in your body as your "ingredients", your mother's wombs as being the oven that baked you, and your body as the meal that was produced (except that you continue to "cook" over the entire span of your life, a bit like an omelet still cooks for a few minutes after it has been removed from the stove).

Actually, DNA is more like a book of recipes than a single recipe. There are recipes for building lungs, for building skin and (foreshadowing alert!) building brains. Just as with real cookbooks, some recipes are more precise than others.

Consider a sandwich. Although I've made a point of distinguishing recipes from blueprints, making a sandwich is a lot more like following a blueprint than, say, blending a margarita. You could actually make a blueprint of a sandwich, rather than a recipe, and not lose anything essential (so long as certain components such as the mayonnaise or peanut butter had been prepared in advance). Some parts of our bodies are like that from a genetic standpoint.

When a body part needs to have a precise structure, our genes must contain enough information to specify its structure to the necessary degree of precision. That comes at a cost and that cost is informational. Genes are information. The more information you need to describe a given structure in a body, the longer the section of DNA you need to use to describe it. This is a finite resource.

You might wonder why an organism can't simply make longer DNA. The amount of DNA that an organism can have is limited by the size of its cells. Cellular sized among animals whose cells have a nucleus is limited by physical constraints. Each of your cells is essentially an non-independent organism. It eats, it metabolizes, and it excretes. It needs to do all of these operations through membranes (an inner and an outer set). Membranes constitute areas while the bulk of a cell's machinery occupies a volume. As you know, areas increase as a square while volumes increase as a cube. This if I have a cell with an area of 2 and a volume of two and I want to double its size, I now have a cell with an area of 4 and a volume of 8. This means that I have twice the area for doing such critical tasks as absorbing nutrients but that I am now supporting four times the volume of cellular machinery that needs to be fed. It is for this reason that all animals, from whales down to fleas, have approximately the same sized cells.

Much of the complexity of the body can be reduced to simple repetitive algorithms. Lungs, for instance, have millions of branching tubes. One might naïvely suppose that this means that millions of genetic instructions are required to "construct" lungs; however, the structure of lungs can be viewed as a simple set of instructions that says, "build a tube, then split the end of it in half and build two smaller tube; repeat until done."

There are different sort of cooks in the world. Some cooks slavishly follow a recipe exactly while others consider a recipe to be a general theme which is supposed to be improvised upon. The "recipes" in the DNA cookbook tell you (meaning the cellular machinery of your body) what sort of cook you need to be. Perhaps a bit confusingly, a single recipe can require different types of cooks for different parts of the recipe. Some elements of the circulatory system, such as the jugular vein, are not open to a great deal of improvisation while others, such as the capillaries, require extensive improvising.

Again, the determining factor is how much variation can be tolerated in a given part of the system. If you don't have an aorta, you're probably dead. As such, your genes need to provide enough information to ensure that there is going to be an aorta in your body. On the other hand, the precise layout of the capillaries in your big toe can withstand a lot of variation, so long as it gets enough blood, so your genes can get away with a fairly compressed set of "branch as appropriate" instructions.

Now let us consider the brain. As I've stated previously, many organisms don't have brains or have such miniscule brains that they might as well not have them (insects, for example, can live for extended periods after being decapitated, dying ultimately of starvation rather than for lack of their brains). In some respects brains really are like computers: if you don't have one and have gotten along fine, you probably don't need one, but once you get one and start to really use it, you quickly find that it becomes a necessity that you can't do with out.

Like computers, the more brainpower you have, the more advantage you get out of it. This is especially true if you find yourself in any sort of "arms race" with brainy competitor animals (including, potentially, members of your own species). However, like computers, the more powerful your brain, the more expensive it costs. In some cases, the expense is worth spending a sizable fraction of your protein budget on brain mass. However, also like a computer, a brain is as only good as its software and firmware. It doesn't do any good to have a beefy brain that doesn't have the necessary programming to cope with the problems of survival — you might as well be a tree!

As previously noted, from a survival perspective, instincts are good. The problem with learning is that if you have to learn something that is critical for your survival, you run the risk of either getting killed before you learn it or, just as bad, learning the wrong thing and getting killed by false knowledge. In this view, you want to have to learn as absolutely little as possible. It is better to be born wise than to have to attain enlightenment at a later date.

The problem with instincts is that the only way to pass instinctual information is through the genes. That means that every bit of knowledge you need to have must be encoded in your genes. That translates into physical space on the genes. The more complex your knowledge is, the more space is required. It is necessary to understand that when we are talking about instinctual knowledge, we are actually talking about physical structures in the brain. An instinct to be wary of predators is actually a three-dimensional labyrinth of neurons connected in a lattice that is structured to evoke a particular response (perhaps a release of adrenaline which, in turn, activates other neural clusters) when presented with certain stimuli. This means that in order to have that structure, the genes that control its development have to contain enough information to reliably "tell" the body how to create it. Some of that can be compressed into abstract recipe-like instructions that allow for compression but a fair amount will require more blueprint-like specifications.

Brains get complicated very fast. The human brain (which is a rather extraordinary example) has something like 10 billion neurons and, more importantly, 100 billion connections between those neurons. The human genome, by contrast, has about 100 thousand distinct genes.

An animal's genes can only specify so much information to allocate to a given brain. Once your brain grows past a certain size and complexity, your genes have no choice but to allow the body to improvise the actual structure. What this means is that your genes can't "anticipate" what brain you're actually going to end up with. They can pre-program in a certain amount of information but are helpless to program the rest.

In my last essay, a person with the handle of "Murky Thoughts" challenged my assertion that few animals need to learn how to walk. He noted that colts, by way of example, do walk on their first day but that they don't walk well. He also suggested that relatively few vertebrates are born knowing how to see (this is actually mainly true of avians and mammals, but regardless) and that they need to learn how do so. He's right; however, this is mainly due to the complexity of an animals overall nervous system rather than the complexity of its brain. The animals in question have sufficiently complex nervous systems that their genes can't "know" how, precisely, the nerves (from say their retinas) will connect to their brains. This inability to anticipate that requires a certain amount of learning, much as a rat needs to learn the maze of tunnels that it's born into. However, colts are born with the knowledge of how to walk once they figure out how their legs are connected to their brains. That information is inherited.

Human babies, by contrast, don't have the knowledge of how to walk buried in their neurology, waiting in anticipation of the time when their brains figure out which nerves connect to which muscles (and, or course, in anticipation of having muscles that are strong enough to do the job). Even after they work out their neural schemas, they still have to go through the tedium of actually learning how to walk. A fascinating contrast to this is the fact that infants are born knowing how to swim. If you drop a newborn into a tank of water (and under no circumstances am I suggestion that you do so!) she will not only know how to swim but will also know how to avoid breathing in water when she's submerged. Most curiously, they lose this ability within three days. In order to swim after that point, the child has to learn how.

In most animals, the genetic limitations of instinct translate into physical limits to the complexity of their brains. Even if they have the protein to spare towards the construction of bigger brains, doing so would be a waste of resources since they wouldn't have the necessary programming to take advantage of them and they lack the luxury of time and effort that would be required to develop programming for them after the fact. It takes a rather special set of circumstances to justify the complexity of a brain that doesn't come preinstalled with the majority of the software necessary to survive.

A handful of animals do have that luxury. This is the central feature that unifies lion cubs, elephant calves and human babies. Each of these creatures is born into a protective environment that allows them to have brains that are more complex than their genes. Not only do they have the safety of being protected at birth but they have the luxury to take their time in growing up.

So let us suppose we have that luxury. We have a turbo-charged brain which (by necessity) has blocks of computational space that aren't programmed from birth. How do our genes tell us to take advantage of it? After all, a surplus a free space doesn't do us any good if it just gets filled up with junk and noise. Even though our genes can't directly program it, it needs to be able to tell us how we ought to utilize it. This is accomplished through the insertion of meta-instincts.

Instead being born with the gift of knowledge, we are bequeathed with the knowledge of how to get knowledge. A kitten doesn't know how to catch mice, but it does have an instinctual desire to play with small, moving objects. Because the kitten can rely on its mother to feed it in the meanwhile, it can spend time developing those skills in a non-survival context. By the time the kitten reaches maturity, when it is critical for it to be able to feed itself, it has (we hope) learned everything that it needs to know to do so.

This is play. This is also the essential function of play.

There is, of course, more to the story. Let us consider the difference between calculators and computers. A calculator is a tool for performing mathematical manipulations. So, in essence, is a computer. The primary difference is that all of the functions of a calculator are preprogrammed. If your goal is simply to have a tool to perform those calculations, you really don't need anything more sophisticated and, indeed, for quite a long time people got along perfectly well with calculators. A computer, by contrast, isn't limited by its built in operations. You can build on those basic operations in a very flexible and open manner. The need for that flexibility is debatable but once you start to use it, it quickly becomes apparent that there are quite a few advantages to having that flexibility.

Although nature doesn't "like" having to rely on learning, once the requirement of flexible learning arises (and the necessary circumstances to support it) a vast amount of potential is unlocked. Being able to learn doesn't simply mean that you are forced to learn how to catch your dinner; it means that you have the potential of figuring out a better way to catch your dinner.

Of course that comes with its own set of risks. One of the ways to minimize that risk is to have a non-genetic channel for transmitting information. If you have the ability to compare notes with others (including peers as well as parents) you can minimize the risk of working from bad information. This is the root of culture, the rudiments of which we can see in such animals as chimps and (perhaps) dolphins.

Again, play is a useful meta-instinct; however, the instruction transforms from "figure out how to do X" to "figure out how those around you do X". An even more sophisticated version is when X is actually left as a free variable. Instead of a desire to interact with a specific purpose, our instinct becomes an abstract desire to simply interact with our peers and our parents with a generalized desire to learn from them without any particular goal.

It is instructive to watch human children at play. Some games seem very strongly connected to necessary skills. All children, everywhere, have games that involve the tossing and catching of objects. What is more interesting is that, past a certain age, children start to become obsessed with rules. In a certain sense, the rules become the game with a great deal of effort being spent on deciding what is "fair" and what is "cheating". My own feeling is that when you see children arguing about rules you are witnessing the development of our moral sense. I believe that it is on the playground, more than from our parents or from such institutions as church and school, that we learn (or fail to learn) how to be moral creatures.

At this point, we have our teleology. All that is left is for me to wrap this up into a conclusion. Since I've already been tardy twice in writing this, and since I expect the conclusion to be relatively short, I won't make you suffer another two week delay. The next installment will be next week.

Science and Teleology part IV

This is the forth installment of an essay where I have been discussing the relationship between science and teleology. In the previous installment, I continued to explore why animals play. It was determined that play is a type of learning behavior but that this wasn't quite the teleological answer that we were looking for. I ended the installment by asking what the advantage of learning is. I also stated, somewhat cryptically, that this was the wrong question but for the right reason.

The question I asked is misleading. It is misleading because conflates learning and play. Although we have determined that some animals play to learn, it does not follow that all animals play to learn. In fact, the ability to learn, unlike the behavior of play, is fairly common. Mice, famously, can learn to navigate mazes. Pigeons can learn to play tic-tac-toe (or knots and crosses if you prefer) and can do a decent job of it. Even nematodes (simple worm-like creatures) can be trained to take a right hand path at an intersection so as to avoid a shock.

It is, however, the right question in the sense that we need to consider what advantage learning confers; however, we also need to understand what differentiates the sort of learning that happens during play and to determine what advantages are conferred there.

The advantages of learning may seem self-evident but we should bear in mind that the vast majority of organisms do not and cannot learn for the simple reason that most living beings on the planet don't have brains. This has not inhibited the success of bacteria, plants, fungi, various protozoa, various algae and slime molds, nor a number of animals such as sponges and star fish. In like manner, many animals that do have brains have such simple brains that they can not learn new behavior including arthropods (insects, spiders, crustaceans, etc), and the majority of mollusks (with octopi and squids being the notable exceptions).

We might suppose that the ability to learn is a good survival strategy when it comes to dealing with complex environments and this supposition would, in fact, be true; however it isn't the only strategy nor is it always the best one. Small creatures tend to adapt to shifting environments by simply breeding fast and copiously. Many larger organisms, such as trees, cope by assuming forms that are extremely durable. We should also be aware that not all environments are equally unstable. Many environments are very stable of long term periods which allows for survival strategies that "assume" that any given life will experience a given set of circumstances.

When it comes to thinking about animals it's often helpful to think in terms of something called a protein budget. A protein budget is simply the amount of raw material that you have to work with when creating a given organism. The "you" in question is nature and we can think of this in terms of natural selection or, if we are so incline, in terms of a god (it really doesn't matter in this case). Your one and only goal is to make creatures that can survive long enough to reproduce.

The main thing you need to understand is that you have a finite amount of material to work with. That's your protein budget. You can spend it on things like claws, or wings, or brains, or sophisticated eyes, and so forth and so on. Like any budget, you can only buy so much before you run out of funds, which means that you have to spend your allocation wisely.

Brains can be expensive and they aren't always the best deal. If your animal can manage to do without them, you should probably spend your funds on other things. Even if you opt to buy a brain, you can't always afford to get the best model. If your animal's brain is taking up so much of your budget that your animals can't successfully defend itself, you've made an unwise purchase. In the natural world, animals that have "budgeted" badly go extinct.

The reason that we find brains in the natural world is that they do come with quite a few advantages. While it is possible, in many circumstances, to get along without brains, having a brain does improve your interactions with the world. High-end brain models not only improve your interaction but allow you to modify your interactions over your lifetime so as to continually improve your survivability — if you can afford it.

Not all animals have an equal protein budget. Insects get a very small budget and have to be especially conservative in their spending. Larger animals, such as reptiles, have more latitude. They can afford to spend a big chunk of their budget of some relatively sophisticated brains. But even in big animals, there's always the question of trade-off. Do I benefit from having a bigger brain or by spending it on something more practical. Dinosaurs, famously, had a literally huge success by spending the bulk of their budget on bulk. Being bigger was more useful to them then being smarter (and make no mistake, dinosauria was an immensely successful order of animal).

So let us say that we have decided to budget for a brain and that we've opted for a learning model. We still have a critical question to ask: what sort of things do we want to learn. Here is where we really need to start thinking about the disadvantages of learning. Yes, disadvantages.

Creatures are born into a hostile world. There are an immense number of ways to die. You can fall off a cliff, you can be crush under a bolder, you can be eaten by a predator, you can be killed by a sexual rival (or a mate: just ask a praying mantis), you can succumb to disease, you can eat a poisonous plant, and so forth and so on. Although the ability to learn from mistakes can be useful (mustn't eat those particular berries again; they got me sick!) having to learn everything is a disadvantage.

Imagine being an antelope and having to learn that lions are predators. Your first lesson would probably kill you. If you are an antelope, it's a lot better if you know, from the start, that lions are dangerous. In other words, you're better served, in this case, by having an instinctual aversion to lions.

An instinct is nothing more than a pre-programmed set of behaviors that are hard-coded into the structure of the brain. They are, essentially, "memories" that you are born with.

We humans tend to disdain instincts. We consider them something primitive that has been superseded by our capacity to reason. We have every right to be proud of our rational abilities but our tendency to see them as being an natural advantage is a bit anthropocentric.

Again, we need to think in terms of budgets. This time, instead of a protein budget, we need to think about a neural budget. Any given brain will only have so much space. Any amount that we budget for learning is going to subtract away from the space that we can allocate from instinct (and vice versa).

If I am an animal that is being born into harsh circumstances it is typically to my advantage to come into the world with as many instincts as possible. Instincts tend to be necessities while learning tends to be a luxury. It is often a good idea to budget some space for the capacity to learn, of course. If I am a mouse, there's no way that instinct is going to prepare me for the particular configuration of tunnels that I'm going to have to traverse. Being able to learn tunnel layouts (or mazes) is a very useful trick, so I'll need to budget some brain space for that. As a rule, though, it's a very good idea to be born with as much survival gear as possible, which means a bias towards instinct over learning.

When most animals learn, what they learn are things that supplement their instincts. Few animals need to learn the basic elements of survival, such as how to walk. The only animals that can afford that are those who are shielded from those basic necessities.

Does this ring a bell?

In the previous installment we noticed that animals that engage in play tend to have long development times. I called this "developmental luxury". Those animals that are shielded from most of the dangers of their environment can afford the luxury of dispensing with some of their instincts. They can afford to take the time to learn how to do the things that other animals are born knowing how to do.

This still doesn't explain why they would "want" to. We are still left wondering what the advantage of learning how to do things that we could, in principle, be born knowing. Why not keep those as instincts?

We're still asking the wrong question. The right question is why can't we keep those as instincts. This question will be the subject of the next installment.

Science and Teleology, part III

In the prior installments of this essay I introduced the concepts of teleology and etiology and their relationship with science. In the last essay, I advanced the proposition that science can approach some teleological questions and proposed that the phenomenon of play was one such area. I finished by conducting a partial survey of life forms, eliminating the vast majority of organisms from consideration. At the end of the installment, I had limited the scope of inquiry to mammals and offered the reader the challenge to see if they could determine the unifying factor that links those mammals which do play.

I suggested that you might want to start with a random sample of mammals. So you might have come up with a list something like aardvarks, bats, cats, elephant, horse, mice, mole, sloths, etc. You might then have divided them into animals that are known to engage in play (cats, elephants, horses), animals that don't (aardvarks, bats, moles, sloths), and animals that you might not have been sure about (say, mice).

On any comprehensive list there are going to be questionable cases. We must first decide whether or not we can, in fact, categorize such outliers. In my list, I put mice in the questionable column. The reason that I did so is that mice in captivity often do seem to engage in play like activity. I know one girl who had a group of mice that would all get on their spinning wheel, run it up to a high speed, and then grab on to the wheel's frame which caused them to get spun around on the inside of the wheel (which, if nothing else, proves that mice don't suffer from motion sickness). That certainly seemed like play; however, a wheel in a cage is not a natural environment. It is well established that many creatures will exhibit anomalous behavior when put into unnatural circumstances. Do mice in the wild exhibit playful behavior? I haven't been able to find evidence that they do. So, which column should mice fall into?

There are any number of inaccurate stereotypes concerning the workings of science and not all of them come from the detractors of science. Many people who are "pro-science" have a notion that scientists will scrupulously include all experimental data in their considerations. In principle, it is true that data shouldn't be discarded on the basis that it contradicts a given hypothesis, but this isn't quite the same as saying that all data is automatically going to be included. This isn't always so.

Let us suppose that I'm conducting experiments on the effects of various salts on the boiling point of water. I set up a traditional experiment where I have a control (several beakers of distilled water) and an experimental set. I conduct a series of measurements for salt X and find that in nineteen trials the boiling point clusters closely around 102.7 degrees centigrade. In the twentieth run, however, my thermometer reports a boiling point of 131 degrees!

If we were to follow the stereotype, I would dutifully record the data point on my carts and adjust my curve to fit it in. In practice, though, I know damned well that 131C is not a real boiling point. Perhaps my instruments have a defect, or maybe there was a patch of superheated steam that threw of the thermometer. Whatever the case, I know to a high degree of certainty that the measurement is meaningless. I can do one of two things at this point. I can either exclude it from my data entirely or include it in the data and discount it from the conclusions.

Modern practice favors the latter. Modern science is a very competitive venture and anything that could even potentially look like data manipulation can be used to destroy one's career; however, whether or not I plot the data in my submission, it would be equally irresponsible for me to allow it to impact my results and doing so would also get me into hot water (if you'll pardon the pun). Given this, I'll note the outlier but I will specifically say that it is an outlier and that it isn't included in the calculations for the actual data curve. It should be noted that many respected experimentalists from the earlier days, when science was more of a gentleman's hobby, didn't bother to do that much. Bad data was tossed out on its ear without any hesitation.

So, having dispensed with the outliers, for the time being, let us look at the data and offer some tentative hypotheses.

You may have noticed that there seem to be a lot of carnivorous animals on the list: wolves, lions, hyenas, and so forth. Could it be that being hunted is the factor that we are looking for? But what about elephants and horses, who are both herbivores, as well as primates, which span the gamut from strict vegetarians (gorillas) to predatory omnivores (such as chimps and, yes, humans).

Clearly there is more to the matter than diet, however, before we more along too hastily, we should note there are, in fact, a lot of carnivorous predators and periodically predatory omnivores. Should we, perhaps, consider the herbivores on the list to be outliers? In this case, I think not. There are enough herbivorous creatures that we can't simply dismiss them from consideration without running the risk of skewing our answer. What we need to do is to think about what commonalities there exist between the predators and the non-predators on our list. We should, however, consider the predatory bias to be a clue.

My goal, here, is to give you an idea of how scientific inquiry works. The fundamental point that I want to convey is that science is systematic. Too many people have an image of science where a scientist takes a look at some new phenomenon, ponders it briefly and then, from the vastness of his intellect, produces just the right insight to explain it. As much as so-called eureka moments are celebrated, real science is a grueling and often tedious exercise where observation after observation is tested against one tentative hypothesis after another. Even the grant theorists such as Einstein had to consider mountains of prior observation and theory before producing their own. The public, too often, sees science as a sequence of facts that are provided on demand. They don't see the working process that is responsible for the production of those conclusions.

For the purposes of this essay, I'm providing an abbreviated account of the considerations that we should be examining. If this were a real scientific investigation, we should be considering dozens, if not hundreds, of alternatives and we should be using more than a random sampling of mammals as our dataset. Fortunately for us, I'm following a trail that has already been laid out by the real workers. Because they have put themselves to the effort of being systematic, I can afford a certain degree of laziness.

I would like you to take a final moment to consider the data, however, before moving on. Consider what we have and ask yourself what commonality binds play.

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As it happens, there are actually two factors that are almost universally present in animals that play. The first factor is that animals that play are not born with a full set of mature behaviors. The second factor is that the behaviors that they engage in while playing resemble behaviors that adult animals employ in non-play activities.

Let us consider a wildebeest calf, a lion cub, an elephant calf, and a human baby. The first does not engage in play while the latter three do.

When a wildebeest is born, the very first thing that it needs to do is to stand up. The reasons for this are very good: a calf that cannot stand on its own four legs is in serious danger of being eaten by passing carnivores. One of the most horrific videos that I've ever seen was a mother wildebeest with a half born calf being torn to shreds by hyenas. Clearly, time is of the essence.

A lion cub, by contrast, has a strung resemblance to a domestic kitten. It is born blind and feeble. Likewise, so is a human baby. An elephant calf is somewhere in the middle. Elephants are very protective of their young, and they have the bulk to back up their protectiveness, so an elephant calf isn't at high risk of being eaten by the local fauna. On the other hand, elephants require a large foraging area and have to move fairly large distances to eat. Elephants, unlike lions, can't create a crèche for their offspring, and they can't carry them from place to place, as humans can do, so a baby elephant needs to get her feet under herself fairly soon.

This represents something that we might call developmental luxury. A wildebeest does not have the luxury of being born unable to walk, nor does an elephant, but a human and a lion don't have to be born with those capabilities. We have, so to speak, the luxury to take our time to develop those capabilities. This is a very big clue, by the by.

Let us return to our wildebeest. Our wildebeest is not only born knowing how to walk. She also knows how to forage, how to spot predators, and how to stay with her herd. She also has a set of behaviors that cause her to remain close to her mother and which prompts her to nurse on a periodic basis (as do lions, humans and elephants). As she matures, she will lose these while gaining certain sexual behaviors (again, as will lions, humans and elephants). This, for the most part, represents the whole of her knowledge set. Wildebeests don't need to know a lot in order to be successful. A wildebeests life may be occasionally stressful (you try being on someone's lunch menu) but it is not a complicated life.

Our lion cub, on the other hand, is going to need to know how to hunt, which means not only knowing how to chase down animals but also how to select favorable targets and how to coordinate their kills with the other members of their pack. There is also a range of non-hunting behaviors that lions need to develop which also relate to their pack structure. A lion needs to be able to discern its place in the pack hierarchy and to know how to behave with respect to other members in the pack.

Elephants, obviously, do not hunt and there's not much that they need to know about foraging (plants are docile prey). This is not to say that an elephants mental space is small. We humans have an expression, "as plain as the nose on your face", which means that something is obvious and simple. If elephants had language, that expression would be an oxymoron. Baby elephants are not born with well coordinated trunks (just as human babies don't have well coordinated limbs and fingers). They can get away with this because they are highly social creatures and their mothers can help them along until they get their trunks under their full control. Elephants also have a fairly complex social structure which they need to integrate with.

Humans, of course, are the most complex case. A human child is born without control of her body, knowledge of her society, any skills, or even language. By the time she becomes an adult, she must acquire all of these things.

Let us call this feature developmental complexity. Although our three examples have the luxury to be born with less than a full compliment of behaviors, they also have the obligation of developing a behavioral set that is substantially more complex than their wildebeest peer.

Before we continue, I want to head off a potential red herring. Elephants, humans, and lions are social creatures. You may be tempted to suppose that this is the critical ingredient; however, many playful creatures are solitary. Most species of cat, for instance (including domestic cats and tigers) are non-social. Socialization isn't irrelevant but, like carnivorousness, it isn't the whole shebang.

Returning to the topic, you may have noticed that there is a word that I haven't been using. That word is "learning". I've been avoiding it because it is the final clue. Animals that play are animals that are born knowing less than they know about the world (developmental luxury) and which have a lot that they will ultimately need to know about the world (developmental complexity).

Play behavior is synonymous with learning behavior. Juvenal animals play in order to learn how to be adult animals.

At this point you might suppose that we have our teleological answer. We are not quite there, yet, unfortunately. We have one more question that we need to address: why do some animals need to learn anything in the first place? In other words, what's the advantage of learning?

I will leave this for you to ponder this until the next installment. I will give you a clue though: I'm deliberately asking the wrong question, but for the right reason.

On Science and Teleology, part II

In the previous installment of this essay I discussed the distinction between teleology and etiology, with teleology being the search for purposeful explanations and etiology being the search for causal explanations. I noted that one of criticisms of science is that it can not be used to find teleological explanations of phenomena and that it is limited to the realm of the etiological. I explored the question and offered some examples of questions that science, indeed, would not been well-suited to find teleological answers. I closed, however, by claiming that there were some questions that science could provide such an example for and that I had such an example… which I deferred from providing.

The example I had in mind is the phenomenon of play.

I could, at this point, try to give a technical definition of the word. Since this is Unstructured Musings, however, rather taking the risk of being sidetracking by a tricky definition, I'm going to take a shortcut and say that it's what you intuitively suppose that I'm talking about. Think of children playing with a ball or foals roughnecking with one another and you should know what sort of behavior I am referencing. If you suppose that this is cheating, all I can do if reference you to the behavior literature on the subject. I think that you'll find that the vast majority of papers will assume a common understanding between the authors and their readership.

Why do some creatures play?

The first think that we should ask ourselves is whether or not this is a well-formed teleological question. As I noted in the previous installment, not all "why" questions are really teleological questions. When we ask "why is the sky blue" we might well be asking whether there is a purpose to the blueness of the sky but we might also be asking for a causal explanation: what processes lead to the perception of blueness in the sky. Let us then reformulate the question so that we can be assured that we are not asking, for instance, for the casual chain of events that cause animals to play (e.g., the stimulation of certain neural clusters caused by the presence of certain environmental factors, etc): what is the purpose of play?

We are interested in knowing the meaning of play, so to speak, and why it is that certain beings engage in it (and, conversely) why others do not. We are not interested in the causality of play. Never the less, we will find our answer by way of etiological questions, although we will do so indirectly. The question, itself, is well-formed, however since our goal is, indeed, to seek a purposeful explanation.

One answer that immediately offers itself is the simple reply that the purpose of play is "fun". Animals and people play because it is fun to do so. This is a poor answer for two primary reasons.

The first reason is that the answer is non-informative. Of course we engage in play because it's fun. It's very nearly a tautology since "fun" is one of the aspects that define whether or not a particular behavior is play. The answer immediately leads us to wonder why play is fun. The sort of answer we are looking for &mdash an answer that illuminates the question in such a way as to grant us a fundamental insight into the purpose of play &mdash will have to be found at a deeper level.

The second reason that fun doesn't suffice as a teleological answer is that it is, in fact, an etiological answer. To say that we play because it is fun to play is to propose a causal chain. Adding some links to the chain will help to make this linkage explicit:

• Engaging in the type of behavior known as play causes certain neurochemical interactions
• These neurochemical interactions lead to the formation of the euphoric mental state known as "fun"
• This euphoric state stimulates an organism's pleasure centers
• This results in a feedback loop where an organism's desire to experience pleasure leads to it performing actions (play) which result in a euphoric brain-state (fun)

While this is almost certainly true, it doesn't do anything to give us insight into the actual purpose of play beyond a causal loop. We ought to bear in mind, of course, that there is no guarantee that there is a teleological answer to any given question. This causal loop could, in principle, be all the explanation that we could ever, even in principle, hope to find. The universe is not obligated to be purposeful.

Never the less, I believe that a purposeful (i.e., teleological) answer can be find and that it can be found by utilizing science to do so. More specifically, I believe that the best answer can be found in the realm of biology.

Those who may be familiar with either biology or teleology might suppose that I am going to utilize the theory of evolution. This is a reasonable guess given that evolutionary biology is, in fact, the one branch of science that produces the most, as well as the best, teleological explanations; however, I want to show how other branches of science can do so as well. The solution that I am seeking will be found in the sciences of genetics and embryology (with a bit of taxonomy) and should, in principle, be able to even convince a diehard creationist.

Before I proceed, I think that it's worthwhile to expand upon that a bit. A creationist will, of course, be inclined to offer the position that all questions should ultimately be answered in terms of God's will. I am reminded of a song I once heard that talks about the flowers and the hills, and so forth. Each stanza of the song ended with the words "because the Lord God made it so!"

We might suppose that if one thought that the answer to all questions was ultimately to be found in the will of God then science would, by definition, be excluded from providing any teleological answers; however, even if we do accept such a proposition it is still possible to ask (and answer) teleological questions that don't require us to resort to God by way of answer. Let me offer an example.

Suppose that I built a car and you wanted to know why the car included a break pedal. I could say that the break pedal is in the car because I so willed it. This would be a perfectly factual answer (and a teleological one at that!) but I suspect that you would find it uninformative. You aren't really interested in knowing who put the pedal there and you already know that whoever did put it there did so as an act of creative will. What you really want to know is the reason the car includes a break pedal. Simply saying that it is an expression of my will is uninformative. The answer you want is more likely to be something like this: the break pedal is there because it is a part of a system which allows the operator of the car to retard the car's momentum, thus allowing the driver to more easily drive the car without causing it to crash.

This second explanation is an example of a "functional teleology". Note that even though we sincerely believe that the car has a creator, we can find a satisfactory explanation that doesn't requires us to make reference to the creator. In doing so, we are neither denying nor affirming the existence of the creator (nor offering any comment upon additional teleological layers to the question).

Many theists have adopted the supposition that science doesn't seek divine answers to be a tacit endorsement of atheism. As we can see in this example, this is a poor assumption. Science seeks functional answers. Just as the question of a car's break pedal demonstrates that functional answers can be informative and even preferred, science strives for functional explanations precisely because such explanations are informative and useful. The fact that science doesn't try to seek explanations in the realm of the metaphysical or the theological does not mean that science is taking a stance on either subject &mdash quite the contrary.

As for the question at hand, if it is your preference to view play as, ultimately, being an expression of the will of God, so be it. I will only attempt to approach the question from the perspective of a functional teleology while leaving the matter of God's will (and existence) for some other time.

Let us begin our investigation into the question of play with a survey. We do so because it is evidence that many organisms do not engage in play. Fanciful tales to the contrary, plants do not play, nor do protozoans, fungi, amoebas, and so forth. Play is strictly limited to the kingdom of animals.

We can exclude from consideration those animals that lack brains such as starfish and sponges, or which only have the most rudimentary of brains such as insects and mites. Rather than proceeding in a haphazard way, let us do a more methodical survey using cladistics.

Cladistics is the science of partitioning the natural world into hierarchical groups (that is, into a taxonomy). At this point, some may believe that I'm about to break my promise of offering a teleology that would even satisfy a creationist. While modern cladistics does rely heavily upon evolutionary theory, even creationist theories utilize taxonomic relationships (all cats are felines, all felines are mammals, are mammals are vertebrates, etc). Indeed, the father of biological taxonomy (which later became cladistics), was a creationist (by necessity, being a predecessor of Darwin's). Since I'm only using cladistic partitions to help us narrow our search, I have not broken my word.

Being vertebrates we have a natural tendency to divide the animal world into vertebrates and invertebrates; however, this is largely the result of a parochial perspective. The vast majority of animals are invertebrates. Vertebrates aren't even a phylum (the largest taxonomic division among groups of animals) but rather a subphylum of chordates. For us to see animals as being divided by vertebration would be like the citizens of the island of Tonga dividing the people of the world into Tongans and non-Tongans.¹ While this is a factual division, I suspect most people would be amused to suppose that being a non-Tongan said anything significant about them. Be that as it may, let's indulge our parochialism and first consider invertebrates if only to dispense with a large chunk of candidates.

The phenomenon of play does not appear to be a part of invertebrate (that is, 16/17^ths of the world's phyla) behavior. Of all the invertebrate species, the only potential case might be octopuses (and yes, folks, that is a proper pluralization of the word octopus). Although octopuses are very remarkable creatures that exhibit some truly extraordinary behaviors &mdash including the ability to open sealed jars and to escape from fish tanks &mdash the only examples I've found for play among them is strictly anecdotal. To the best of my research, I haven't found any credible observations of octopus play and am inclined to view the anecdotal accounts with deep suspicion.

Let us narrow the focus to our own little corner of the biological world and consider play about those creatures that have a spinal column.

Do fish play? It seems not. How about amphibians? No. Perhaps reptiles? No. Birds? Apparently not, although they do engage in complex behaviors that sometimes seem to have a near resemblance.

Mammals do play. More precisely, some mammals play. Many mammals do not.

At this point, rather than trying to survey the various orders of mammals (which would be a huge task), I'm going to reformulate the question by asking what types of mammals play. For this purpose, I'm going to take a random sample of creatures that do and do not play and ponder the question of what, if anything, distinguishes them.²

Before doing so, however, I am going to give you the opportunity to do the same. See if you can identify any patterns that distinguish between mammals that play and mammals that do not. Meanwhile, I will pick up the thread during the next installment, two weeks hence.

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¹ Some might protest that vertebrates are special given that all large animals are vertebrates. Discounting such extinct examples such as a six foot long sea scorpion, it is true that having vertebrae is a definite advantage when it comes to size. However, this is nothing more than picking a particular feature and extolling it arbitrarily. Besides, the very largest organisms aren't animals at all, they're plants &mdash which certainly don't have vertebrae.

² Hint: I'm not necessarily looking at the species level.

On Science and Teleology, part I

Let us begin without preamble: science has its critics. One of the most common criticisms of science is that science can only answer "how" questions as opposed to "why" questions. There are a number of problems with this criticism that I will address in this essay.

On the face of it, this would appear to be an absurd claim. If you want to know why a bridge collapsed, science can give you the tools to determine that (say) one of the critical supporting struts suffered failure due to metal fatigue. If you want to know why the sky is blue, science provides the methodology to understand that this is a result of the particular way that light is scattered by our atmosphere. Science can also tell you not only why the sky is blue in the daytime but why it's red at dusk and dawn.

I am sorry to say that this is a naïve rebuttal of the criticism. On the other hand, such a rebuttal is, itself, a response to a slip-shod formulation of the criticism. "How" and "why" are simple and intuitive terms but they lack precision. To understand the criticism and, therefore, to rebut it we must first eschew imprecise language in favor of technical precision.

When people say that science can't address why questions, the actual claim is that science isn't teleological but rather etiological.

Teleology is the branch of philosophy that pertains to the issue of purpose. To explain something in teleological terms means to account for something in terms of its purpose and meaning. To provide a simple example, the teleological nature of a chef's knife is that it is a tool designed to cut or chop food. Note that even though such a knife can be used for other functions, such as a lever or a crude can opener, those functions are not part of its intended purpose.

By contrast, etiology is the study of causation. It describes entities and events in terms of the sequence of events that led to their instantiation. Whereas the teleology of a knife is bound to its intended purpose, the etiology of the knife is found in its construction. In like manner, although explaining the color of the sky in terms of light diffraction answers the question of why the sky is blue, the explanation is etiological in that the explanation is bound in a causal framework. It is not teleological because it doesn't offer a purpose for the color of the sky.

Before we go any further, it should be noted that teleology is a word whose meaning can be a bit tricky. The knife example provided a fairly generic example of a teleological case; however, many philosophers would consider big-T Teleology to be the study of ultimate purpose. Some philosophers would go so far as to define Teleology has a branch of Theology with the goal of Teleology being to explain the universe in terms of God.

That's well and good. Science, however, is defined as the study of the natural world. Science doesn't have anything to do with such metaphysical entities as gods (unless those gods have some posited interaction with the natural world that science can investigate). On this level, saying that science isn't teleological is a tautology, meaning that it's a truth only because the terms of the claim are such that it's defined to be true. In other words, it's a bit like saying that gentiles aren't Jewish: true by definition and, therefore, trivial.

Moving only slightly beyond Theological Teleology, we have flavors of teleology that try to describe the universe and its entities in terms of ultimate meanings while stopping short of explicitly positing gods (usually by leaving the question open). Almost everyone has asked themselves, at some point or another, what the meaning of life is. That's a perfectly teleological question but it also comes with its own hidden implication: that there is such a teleological meaning to be found. One of the big, open questions in teleology is whether there is, in fact, anything to be found at that teleological level. It is plausible to suppose that the universe is only the result of etiological causations and that it did not come into existence with an over-arching purpose. In like manner, the only meaning bound to our lives may be those meanings that we, ourselves, generate from within. In other words, saying that science isn't teleological may be as relevant as saying that elephants aren't angels.

Leaving aside theology and metaphysics, is the claim that science can't address any teleological questions true? Is science, in fact, only good at doing etiological work?

In a word: no.

It is true that scientists tend to prefer addressing questions that fit into either an etiological framework (how does this happen) or an ontological framework (what is this that is happening). The simple reason for this is that those kinds of questions are easier to address.

Let us consider lightning. We start with observation. There are big flashes of light that appear to travel from the sky to the ground. One of the very first questions a scientist studying lightning would ask would be what is it (i.e., what is its ontology). That's what Benjamin Franklin was doing when he sought to demonstrate that lightning was a form of electricity. Having worked out its ontology, a scientist would then want to understand how lightning works (i.e., what is its etiology). This is a more complicated question but one that can usually be broken down into smaller components. Since we've already established that lightning is electrical in nature, we can start by investigating how electricity works in the laboratory and in other controlled settings. We can also create models of how lightning should work in the real world and compare those models compare to real-world observations. Ultimately, we can come up with a well-developed theory of lightning that does a thorough job of explaining the etiological aspects of the phenomenon.

Now suppose that we were a scientist who was interested in the teleology of lightning. Even supposing that we assumed that it had a teleology, for the sake of argument, how could we possibly do anything to approach that teleology in a reliable manner? To be sure, we could conjecture. We could speculate, for instance, that God created lightning (or, more precisely, the conditions that allow for the existence of lightning) in order to turn the soil. In this case, we could use science to investigate whether or not lightning does, in fact, turn the soil. Suppose that we found that lightning does turn the soil, however. All we've done is demonstrate that the conjecture isn't contradicted by observation, but we haven't actually supported the proposition that God's will is involved. Let us consider an alternative speculation: lightning exists because Thor needs it as a weapon against the enemies of Asgard. Here we have a claim that we can't even begin to approach using the methodologies of science.

Does this not suggest, then, that science is, in fact, unable to approach even the most basic of teleological questions? Not quite.

But how can this be? If the tools of science are only appropriate for discovering ontological and etiological facts, how can science approach even the most rudimentary of teleological questions?

I have the perfect example, which I'll share with you in the next and final installment of this essay, two weeks hence.