It's funny, nobody ever tells me I somehow don't understand evolution unless I'm talking about Teleology. Frankly, this gives me the impression I understand Evolution perfectly fine for a layman, but nobody seems to really understand Teleology.
I'm glad you've decided you're smarter than everyone else in the world.
For a philosopher, you sure do employ a lot of really misleading comparisons. It's nothing alike.The concept creates nothing but misunderstandings to you, and people who didn't spend a long time studying what ancient Greek words meant in context and how the words changed later. This is like saying that because "Evolution" creates so much misunderstandings among Conservative Christians who believe it means we came from Monkeys, it must be useless and shouldn't be invoked in discussions on life.
If Teleology is a concept specialised to students of the history of philosophy, and not useful to actual life scientists driving their own discipline, then it shouldn't be referenced when talking about that discipline.
Conservative Christians are not typically biologists, and their opinions aren't really relevant to the discipline itself. They have their "intelligent design" for example, which like "teleology" informed a lot of early natural scientists. Informed mistakenly. We scoff at the first (rightly), and I don't see the necessity for the second.
Nope. Useful metaphors for grade students. Not useful beyond that. But you knew I was going to say that.In reality though, it's really not that difficult or unusual. The language used to explain Evolution invokes Teleology all the time. "Survival of the fittest" and "Giraffes evolved long necks to reach the trees."
These aren't "useful metaphors" or whatever thing you'll probably say. They are in fact accurate descriptions of what happened, albeit, imprecise and not the full account.
Here's a phrase for you to ponder: "blue light makes plants grow better"
You're not allowed to grammatically change the subject of the sentence to be plants. It has to be light (same way you disallow me to reject "giraffes" as a subject and talk about molecule replication).
Clearly the Telos of EM waves between 450 and 490nm is to "make plants grow better".
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Think of evolution as a description of the following game:
You have a bunch of coloured stones. You also have a magic lamp that eliminates a set fraction of stones of a certain colour when shined on them.
Nontheless three conditions always hold true:
1. in a given time period all stones get doubled in number;
2. and also a small percentage of stones randomly changes colour to one of the colours in the possible set.
3. over time, the magic stone-destroying lamp may change its mode to destroy stones of a different colour.
That's the simplest model, and explains pretty much everything.
If you want more accurate, we could simulate genetic linkage, sexual selection, founder effect, punctuated equilirium and so on. But the above should suffice.
What's the Telos of the game?