Teleology nature

Light is the primary carrier of photosynthetic energy and also the initial producer of natural food colorants. To speak about the color of an object is to speak simultaneously about the illuminating light source, light transmitting medium, object properties, eye sensitivity, and conventions about color scales. Teleologically viewed, food color has two ambivalent main functions ... 

However relieved, and however exhausted, you are unlikely to be easily able to fall asleep without some resurgence of anxiety or altered perceptions. This is because falling asleep under any circumstance is characterized by the sudden eruption of dreamlike conscious experience. These sleep onset microdreams are often associated with classic jerks of the trunk and extremities akin to those in startle reactions. Reasoning teleologically, it would seem that nature had evolved a built-in burglar alarm system to provide us with a security check at sleep onset, just the time that we are about to become most vulnerable to predation ... 

The Stoics rejected the idealism of Plato and the teleological point of view of Aristotle, adopting a materialistic philosophy. Matter and nature they considered as eternal and even the soul was material. They however contributed nothing to constructive theories of matter or nature. 

The use above of the somewhat controversial terms of teleology goes back to Mayr s essay collection [10], where, slightly simplified, teleomatic processes are governed by natural laws and teleonomic ones are goal-directed due to the influence of an evolved program. 

I am not altogether sure how this approach is related to my own. First of all, the terms in which the two account are cast are difficult to compare. The teleological account is illustrated nearly exclusively by biological examples having to do with rather simple-minded animals. This is quite natural, for we do not understand much of the human mind in terms of biological functions. Conversely, my account is... 

Nevertheless, the commitments behind the two accounts are different. The advocates of the teleological view are devout naturalists. Their rhetoric seems to suggest that they endorse the sort of naturalism which is at odds internal realism. They are also committed to metaphysical realism. In fact, the principal advocate of this approach, Ruth Millikan has actually argued against Putnam s internal realism ( Metaphysical Antirealism ). I understand the motivation behind this commitment, even though I do not think it is justified. The theory presupposes that... 

The point is not that Marx erred on this or that specific point it would have been surprising if he had not. Rather I want to emphasize the a priori nature of his reasoning - the speculative, teleological strand in his thought. The summit in this respect is reached in the assertion that these classical revolutions "reflected the needs of the world at that time rather than the needs of those parts of the world where they occurred, that is England and France". True, the statement leads up to a denunciation of the provincial character of the Prussian March revolution, and may to some extent be seen as a rhetorical device. Yet it fits in very well with Marx s general tendency to explain the classical revolutions in terms of final causes - by looking at their achievements rather than at the social forces that set them in motion. 

This refers to their discovery of the nature of surplus-value, a discovery that led Marx to find in their doctrine the "contradictions of capitalist production as it works its way out of feudal society". This is a teleological interpretation of the physiocrat doctrine, in terms of the further clarifications it would undergo. This aspect of Marx s analysis is even more prominent when he goes on to point out that the policy consequence of the doctrine - to put all taxes on agricultural production and exempt industry which, being sterile, has no taxable surplus - actually favours the industrial capitalists rather than the landowners ... 

Boyle adopted the general philosophical approach to the study of nature espoused by Francis Bacon. People who followed Bacon s ideas about the study of nature tended to regard experiments as the most reliable route to knowledge and tried to be as objective about nature as possible. They also moved away from asking teleological question such as what the end purpose of matter might be. Instead, they tried to confine their questions to how nature functioned. 

Waxman There is currently a lot of research on how myelinated fibres build nodes. But there is a converse issue of how the previously excitable internodes are deconstructed. The yet-to-be myelinated axon has enough channels to conduct relatively securely prior to myelination and then it decreases its channel density when it is myelinated. Joel Black and I showed 15 years ago that the suppression of Na channel expression in the internode depends critically on the formation of compact myelin (Black et al 1986). It doesn t occur until there is compact myelin, which makes teleological sense, otherwise we would end up with lethality. However, we don t yet know the molecular nature of that signal. It is highly focal. We also know that where there are ectopic oligodendrocyte processes touching the myelinated axon at the node, under the footprint of that process Na+ channels disappear (Black et al 1985). 

In his report on Henderson s early work, younger colleague John Edsall noted that these basic facts pointed clearly to a teleological order in the universe. But Edsall immediately went on to indicate that Henderson explicitly disavowed any attempt to associate this order with notions of design or purpose in nature, and considered his views fully compatible with a mechanistic outlook on the problems of biology (Edsall, 1973, p. 350). 

---