Chapter 16 - Aristotelian Teleology and Philosophy of Biology in the Darwinian Era

Summary

This chapter compares Aristotle’s theory of generation and Darwinian evolution by natural selection. It begins by explicating Aristotle’s distinction between intrinsic (kat’auta) and incidental (kata sumbêbêkos) final causation. Aristotle uses this distinction to differentiate Empedocles’ account of generation as incidentally final from his own intrinsically final view. Like Empedocles, Aristotle accepts spontaneous generation, but only as an exception to formal, sexual reproduction. In consequence, he describes spontaneous generation differently from Empedocles.

The chapter goes on to argue that by these standards Darwinian natural selection is intrinsically final and biologically (but not cosmologically) teleological. Accordingly, it is not nearly as similar to Empedocles’ primitive theory of “natural selection” as is sometimes assumed. That this difference was not apparent to Darwin’s contemporaries, or even to Darwin himself, is attributed to Darwinism’s subtle mixture of chance, determinism, and biological teleology. At first, the effects of medieval creationism on Aristotle’s hylomorphism and deterministic views about science were prominent factors standing in the way of understanding the logic of adaptive natural selection. Mid-twentieth-century Neo-Darwinism made the telic logic of Darwinian adaptation more perspicuous. Recent developments in regulatory genetics promise to give evolutionary meaning to something akin to Aristotle’s epigenetic account of generation.