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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
The End of Final Causes in Biology

The End of Final Causes in Biology

Mix, Lucas John

Hardcover

PhilosophySports GeneralEvolution

ISBN10: 3031140168
ISBN13: 9783031140167
Publisher: Palgrave MacMillan
Published: Nov 1 2022
Pages: 149
Weight: 0.76
Height: 0.44 Width: 5.83 Depth: 8.27
Language: English

This book provides a straightforward introduction to teleology in biology, the work it did and the work it can do. Informed by history and philosophy, it focuses on scientific concerns. Seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth century biologists proposed a menagerie of biological actors to explain power without appealing to Aristotelian vegetable souls and final causes. Three constraints on teleology narrowed the field, selecting among the various actors as they mutated and recombined. Methodological naturalism, local adaptation, and blind chance each represent a significant philosophical advance in biology. Kant, Darwin, and the Modern Synthesis provided a new teleology, grounded in natural selection, an etiological recursion of form and function, and the details of carbon chemistry on Earth. They naturalized teleology, but they also finalized nature, shifting conceptions about the world and science. Understanding these links - historical, philosophical, and theoretical - sets thestage for new work moving forward.

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