Purposive Evolution
Title | Purposive Evolution PDF eBook |
Author | Edmund Noble |
Publisher | |
Pages | 600 |
Release | 1926 |
Genre | Evolution |
ISBN |
Evolutionary Emergence of Purposive Goals and Values
Title | Evolutionary Emergence of Purposive Goals and Values PDF eBook |
Author | Donald A. Crosby |
Publisher | State University of New York Press |
Pages | 215 |
Release | 2023-08-01 |
Genre | Philosophy |
ISBN | 1438493983 |
Where do the purposes, values, and existential meanings of the world come from? For many, they are conferred on the world and on humans within the world by a supernatural, transcendent, personal divine creator and sustainer. For others, they result from a God or divine presence residing within nature. For still others, they give evidence of mind and spirit as primordial principles suffusing nature from the outset and in all of its forms. In Evolutionary Emergence of Purposive Goals and Values, Donald A. Crosby takes issue with each of these views. His thesis is that mind, meaning, purpose, and value come into existence with the evolutionary emergence of life, and that evolution itself gives evidence of the creative power of two primordial natural principles: matter-energy and time. There is no overarching purpose, value, or meaning of nature as such, but there is a plethora of such factors evident in the evolved life forms of nature here on earth. This fact is especially evident in the day-to-day experiences, aspirations, and concerns of us evolutionarily-evolved human beings. Purpose, meaning, and value are therefore gifts of evolutionary nature, not of any supernatural or non-natural principle, presence, or power.
Purposive Behaviour and Teleological Explanations
Title | Purposive Behaviour and Teleological Explanations PDF eBook |
Author | Frank Honywill George |
Publisher | CRC Press |
Pages | 336 |
Release | 1985 |
Genre | Computers |
ISBN | 9782881241109 |
The later works, 1925 - 1953. 3. 1927 - 1928 : [essays, reviews, miscellany, and "Impressions of Soviet Russia"]
Title | The later works, 1925 - 1953. 3. 1927 - 1928 : [essays, reviews, miscellany, and "Impressions of Soviet Russia"] PDF eBook |
Author | John Dewey |
Publisher | SIU Press |
Pages | 538 |
Release | 2008 |
Genre | Art |
ISBN | 9780809311323 |
The Evolution and Function of Living Purposive Matter
Title | The Evolution and Function of Living Purposive Matter PDF eBook |
Author | Nottidge Charles Macnamara |
Publisher | |
Pages | 328 |
Release | 1910 |
Genre | Animal behavior |
ISBN |
The Human World in the Physical Universe
Title | The Human World in the Physical Universe PDF eBook |
Author | Nicholas Maxwell |
Publisher | Rowman & Littlefield |
Pages | 338 |
Release | 2001 |
Genre | Philosophy |
ISBN | 9780742512269 |
How is it possible for the world as we experience it to exist embedded in the physical universe? How can there be sensory qualities, consciousness, freedom, science and art, friendship, love, justice--all that which gives meaning and value to life--if the world really is more or less as modern science tells us it is? This is the problem that is tackled by this book. The solution proposed is that physics describes only a selected aspect of all that exists--that aspect which determines the way events unfold. Sensory qualities, inner experiences, consciousness, meaning and value, all these exist but lie beyond the scope of physics, and of that part of science that can be reduced to physics. Furthermore, these human features of the world are to be explained and understood, not scientifically, but "personalistically," a kind of understanding distinct from, and not reducible to, science. This view that the world is riddled with what may be called "double comprehensibility" leads to a proposed solution to the philosophical mind/body problem, and to the problem of free will; it leads to a reinterpretation of Darwin's theory of evolution, and to an account of the evolution of consciousness and free will. After a discussion of the location of consciousness in the brain, the book concludes with a proposal as to how academic inquiry might be changed so that it becomes a kind of inquiry rationally designed to help humanity create a more civilized human world in the physical universe.
Evolution "On Purpose"
Title | Evolution "On Purpose" PDF eBook |
Author | Peter A. Corning |
Publisher | MIT Press |
Pages | 391 |
Release | 2023-08-22 |
Genre | Science |
ISBN | 0262376024 |
A unique exploration of teleonomy—also known as “evolved purposiveness”—as a major influence in evolution by a broad range of specialists in biology and the philosophy of science. The evolved purposiveness of living systems, termed “teleonomy” by chronobiologist Colin Pittendrigh, has been both a major outcome and causal factor in the history of life on Earth. Many theorists have appreciated this over the years, going back to Lamarck and even Darwin in the nineteenth century. In the mid-twentieth century, however, the complex, dynamic process of evolution was simplified into the one-way, bottom-up, single gene-centered paradigm widely known as the modern synthesis. In Evolution “On Purpose,” edited by Peter A. Corning, Stuart A. Kauffman, Denis Noble, James A. Shapiro, Richard I. Vane-Wright, and Addy Pross, some twenty theorists attempt to modify this reductive approach by exploring in depth the different ways in which living systems have themselves shaped the course of evolution. Evolution “On Purpose” puts forward a more inclusive theoretical synthesis that goes far beyond the underlying principles and assumptions of the modern synthesis to accommodate work since the 1950s in molecular genetics, developmental biology, epigenetic inheritance, genomics, multilevel selection, niche construction, physiology, behavior, biosemiotics, chemical reaction theory, and other fields. In the view of the authors, active biological processes are responsible for the direction and the rate of evolution. Essays in this collection grapple with topics from the two-way “read-write” genome to cognition and decision-making in plants to the niche-construction activities of many organisms to the self-making evolution of humankind. As this collection compellingly shows, and as bacterial geneticist James Shapiro emphasizes, “The capacity of living organisms to alter their own heredity is undeniable.”