The Meaning of Life
Does evolution have anything to
say about it?
Life, the universe and everything…
Purposes
• We can value things in two rather different ways:
– Some things are valued ‘for themselves’- these are
things we seek or do simply because we value them
(typical examples are good food, happiness, activities
that we enjoy like skiing or swimming or reading; for
some these might include religious observances …)
– Some things are valued as means to things that we
value for themselves. (Typical examples here are
money (it’s a pathology to value money for itself),
drudgery (work that must be done but which is not
itself enjoyable), religious observances for some fall
in this category rather than the first…)
Teleology
• For Aristotle there simply were purposes ‘in the world’:
the analogy between organisms and their parts and
human tools and their parts was taken to be sufficient to
justify speaking of the purpose of (say) the heart (today,
A would say that this was to pump blood through the
circulatory system– at the time this wasn’t known).
• These purposes did not require a conscious, deliberate
agent behind them– they were simply part of nature (or
at least, part of how Aristotle understood nature: They
play a role in explanation, answering ‘why’ questions of
the ‘what for’ type: What do these organisms have a
heart for? To pump their blood!).
Evolution and teleology again
• Evolution eliminates this from our understanding of
nature– there is no special role for purposes in a
scientific explanation of what goes on in the world, even
when it comes to living things.
• The natural world, considered solely in itself, doesn’t
have purposes at all.
• This is the ‘mechanistic’ world view that has emerged
from modern science; it’s been an immensely successful
enterprise, developing powerful accounts of how things
work that we’ve been able to use to achieve the
unprecedented wealth, power and security we now
enjoy, at least in the wealthy countries of the world.
Biology
• Modern biology is a part of this project, and is
also immensely powerful (its potential is still
being explored and expanded).
• Evolution is central to modern biology, as we’ve
seen: it holds it all together, it warns us about the
potential changes in disease organisms (multiple
antibiotic resistance in bacteria) and pests
(resistance to pesticides), and even suggests
ways to avoid these outcomes (proper use of
these drugs and chemicals can reduce or even
prevent the spread of resistant strains).
Life and purpose
• But for the science of life itself to give up on the
notion of purpose seems paradoxical at best,
and depressing at worst.
• If the absence of purpose in a scientific
description of life implies that there really just is
no such thing at all, then that’s a downright ugly
result– and it’s one that I could certainly
understand people objecting to!
• But the question is, does the absence of
purpose as a fundamental concept in biology
really imply that there are no purposes?
The Direct Answer
• It can’t have that consequence, because we all
have and pursue goals and purposes (our
understanding of our own actions depends on
this).
• This may not be satisfying- in accepting modern
science, including biology, while maintaining that
we do have goals and values, we may be
embracing some sort of contradiction (humans
are like that…). The implication may still be
there– we may just be (in effect) ignoring it.
On the other hand
• Science itself (as a practice, as an institution, as
an activity) is among the actions we can’t
understand except in terms of purposes– in the
case of science, the overarching purpose of
seeking a powerful explanatory account of the
world we live in, and local purposes like
understanding the structure of atoms, the origins
of camoflage or mimicry in butterflies, etc.
• So if modern science’s description of the world
rules out purposes, it actually undermines our
understanding of what we’re doing as scientists–
a very peculiar result.
So far
• The emphasis so far has been on just how much
we would be giving up if we gave up on
purposes altogether.
• If purposes aren’t ‘built in’ to organisms (and
nature) in general, as Aristotle thought), could
they arise in the course of evolution?
• Some have proposed ‘emergence’ as an answer
to this.
• On one account, an emergent property of a
system is a property that its parts don’t have, but
which the system as a whole does have.
Four approaches to teleology
• Elimination: The scientific world view includes
everything, but does not include goals at all– the world is
just a mechanism and we’re part of it.
• Reduction: At some point in the evolution of life,
organisms really come to have goals as part of their
nature.
• Dualism: Ditto– but something special and non-natural
must be added to make this happen.
• Compatibilism: Interpreting what some organisms do in
terms of goals is a way of understanding things that we
use for different purposes than mere descriptions. We
learn to apply it to ourselves and others in a wellmotivated way, but it is a further sort of description– it’s
aims are distinct from those of description.
On elimination
• On one level this attitude is just
incomprehensible: How can I understand
myself if not as an agent who seeks
certain goals? What is left of the self here,
in fact? On this view, I’m just the sum of
my parts, a collection of interacting cells–
and those cells are dying, and being
replaced all the time. There’s no
continuing individual thing that is me, the
agent, in the scientific world view.
Hard determinism (incompatibilism)
• Think now about something that I do– whether good or bad.
• How did it happen that I did this thing?
• The answer for the elimination view is clear: my body’s parts and
their arrangement, together with the circumstances, caused the
body to make certain motions.
• If that’s all there is to anything I or anyone else does, the whole
business of praising people for good things they do and blaming
them for bad things they do makes no sense– it’s all just a matter of
the workings of nature.
• Some people have defended this view (d’Holbach): Ethical talk and
teleological talk are just noise that we make.
• This noise may affect our behaviour in some ways (and so a
tendency to make certain kinds of noise could even be selected for).
• But there is nothing those noises are about; they don’t describe
anything in the world…
It’s never anyone’s fault
• From a descriptive point of view, neurons work in certain
definite ways.
• Given me as I am, placed in a particular situation, either
there is something I will definitely do or there are a range
of things that I might do (perhaps with different
probabilities).
• In the first case it is a mere matter of natural laws that I
will do what I will do.
• In the second case the laws don’t determine what I will
do, but they do fix the probabilities: whatever happens is
no more under ‘my’ control than in the first case.
• Either way, whatever I do, it’s not my fault– any exactly
similar thing will have the same probabilities of doing
what I do.
Possible Lessons
• Some endorse this purely scientific picture, and
declare right/wrong an ‘illusion’ (and the
concomitant praise and blame for actions
unjustified). (This is a form of eliminativism…)
• Some say that our responsibility for our actions
is so fundamental and so obvious that we know
there is something missing from this scientific
picture of things– that some further ingredient
plays a crucial role in generating choices, and
it’s this ingredient’s role that makes us truly
responsible for what we do. (This is a form of
dualism…)
Two other possible lessons
• Some say that there is a natural account of how some
actions arise that makes those actions ‘free’ even though
it’s also true that they are either determined by
circumstances and natural laws or their probabilities are
so determined. (This is a reductionist move…)
• Finally, some say that interpreting an event as an action
that someone is responsible for is not describing what
happened and how it came to happen. This normative
use of language serves a very different purpose from
descriptive language: it helps us to deal effectively with
our fellow human beings as members of social groups
rather than describing & explaining the workings of the
world. (This is what I’ve called a compatibilist view…)
Eliminativism
• We’ve discussed this view– it’s also the position that
Ruse and Wilson have adopted (with their ‘illusion’
hypothesis).
• On this view even language itself is just a system of
noises (and inscriptions) with certain effects.
• This is indeed part of what a language is– but for Ruse
and Wilson it’s all that language is, since meanings and
intentions are just as problematic as right and wrong (in
fact, this is pretty obvious, since meanings determine
what constitutes correct or incorrect usage and true or
false sentences– forms of rightness that turn on the
norms associated with language.
Aside on games: PD
• PD:
B
cooperate
cooperate
3/3
defect
1/4
defect
2/2
A
4/1
Note: The payoffs give A’s reward first, B’s
second. The cooperative dividend here is 2 (net
difference between DD and CC); it’s
automatically divided equally in this game…)
Games: Chicken
Chicken:
B
cooperate
cooperate
3/3
defect
2/4
defect
1/1
A
4/2
Note: The payoffs give A’s reward first, B’s
second. The cooperative dividend here is 4 (net
difference between DD and CC); again, it’s
automatically divided equally in this game…)
Can we get some kind of
evaluation out of these games?
• Some reductionists think that these kinds of
games provide reasons for a purely selfinterested individual to bind herself to
cooperate– which requires that she actually
change her psychology in a way that makes her
respect such commitments rather than cheat on
them.
• This is motivated by the availability of
cooperative dividends (and the possibility of
working out a way to share them).
An important lesson
• The ultimatum game…here’s a game
where knowing how to cooperate and
what’s expected (a social issue!) is
essential to playing successfully.