Dear Bob,
I agree that we have to distinguish a proximate goal–what the system is trying to attain–from an ultimate goal–what the designer of the system was trying to attain by designing it. The proximate goal of a thermostat is to keep a constant temperature; its ultimate goal is to keep people comfortable. The proximate goal of sexual desire is sexual pleasure; the ultimate goal is replicating genes. Note that an ultimate goal at one level is a proximate goal at another level: The thermostat doesn’t want to keep people comfortable, but the thermostat designer does; people may not want to make babies when they make love, but their genes, as shaped by natural selection, do. (Note to the Gotcha! Gang–I’m omitting the tedious shudder-quotes from teleological terms such as try, goal, design, and want; neither Bob nor I believe that thermostats and genes literally have thoughts and feelings.)
But the buck has to stop somewhere. Warm rooms are a goal of thermostats, thermostats a goal of people, people a goal of their genes. Darwin, and then Dawkins, made it scientifically respectable to talk about genes as having goals, because natural selection makes them act as if they do. But natural selection itself, being a product not of a teleological process but of the physics and mathematics of replicating systems, has no right to have a goal in the way that genes or people or thermostats do. Hence the titles of Dawkins’s books: The Selfish Gene (genes have goals) versus The Blind Watchmaker (natural selection doesn’t).
Now you’re suggesting that natural selection may indeed have goals. And we have to wonder how it got them. The only processes we know of that can imbue things with goals are human intentionality and natural selection. Since natural selection was not naturally selected (or if it were, we’d ask the same question of the meta-selection process), does that lead us to a humanlike cosmic designer? Not Paley’s god who designed eyes and wings directly, of course, but a god who wound up the universe (including natural selection) and let it crank away until biospheres and intelligent organisms and the Internet popped out? Or would you challenge the suggestion that goal-directed systems have to arise either from conscious intentionality or from selection?
A related question. Whether or not you see the goal-directedness of evolution as sign of a deity,
in today’s intellectual climate other people will surely draw that conclusion. We have already seen dubious interpretations of cosmology and physics in which the Big Bang vindicates Genesis and the fundamental physical constants were tweaked to make the universe hospitable to humans. Are you comfortable with the possibility that the arguments in Nonzero will be extrapolated into arguments for the existence of an intelligent designer?
On the Flintstones. I like your argument that human evolution and history were propelled by an ability to negotiate contracts and share know-how cheaply, because it explains a conspicuous feature of the human phenotype: language. For 10 years (beginning in a paper with Paul Bloom), I have argued that language is an adaptation that multiplies the benefits of sociality and technological intelligence by making it easier to cooperate and to pool and transmit discoveries. This seems obvious but is surprisingly contentious–many theorists (such as your target Stephen Jay Gould) argue that language has no evolutionary function or that it has some exotic function like substituting for grooming. Your mountain of evidence for the importance of easy information transmission in human evolution makes it abundantly clear that language is no byproduct or accident or luxury for our species.
Too bad we’re at the end. Nonzero is brimming with original ideas and will keep people talking and writing and posting for years to come.
Best wishes,
Steve
