Subject: 
        Re: [evol-psych] ought and is in relation to function
   Date: 
        Wed, 20 Feb 2002 10:25:18 EST
   From: 
        "Paul Gross" 
     To: 
        [email protected], [email protected]
    CC: 
        [email protected]




In a message dated 02/20/02 4:13:44 AM Eastern Standard Time, [email protected] writes: 


   . Does nature exhibit design? -- We routinely talk as if many of the things found in nature were
   designed or had a specific purpose. But the great breakthrough of evolutionary theory was to make it
   possible to avoid all talk of design, purposes, ends, goals, etc. All references to design (purpose, etc.)
   in evolutionary theory are merely apparent -- and all can be replaced with a purely causal story of how
   things came to be as they are. A wholly design-free account is bound to be longer and more detailed,
   because references to "purpose" or design in evolutionary explanations are in fact a superficial,
   shorthand way of capturing the relevant details of the purely causal story.



Thanks to "jeremiad" for the post of which the above is a snip. I take the liberty of stating, or re-stating,
what seems to me implicit in the message as a whole: 

There is no process of reason by which people can be (genuinely) convinced that there is no ultimate
purpose, at least none that we know about, in the way things are. Some people come to that conclusion in
the course of their lives by processes that include science and reason, but are not solely that. Others
never come to it, because, perhaps, it is too deeply ingrained in epigenetic processes of "mind"
development that are nevertheless ultimately genetic and structural. For those whose deepest convictions
*require* there to be a telic explanation of the world, "ought" is implicit in everything, and it is *always* a
moral ought, however trivial or apparently ad hoc, since in a world built and governed by purpose, no action
is unrelated thereto. No sparrow falls... 

PRG