Hi Interbane, I don't think anyone ascribes purpose to drops of water. You seem to extrapolate from patterns that may resemble a vague and meaningless purpose in water drops,to saying that we have a bias towards seeing purpose everywhere.Interbane wrote:The lynchpin is human tendency to see purpose where there is none. The article I linked demonstrates this. Don't you feel yourself "observing" purpose in the moving water while watching the video? I certainly do. We're trained to see purpose, because to err on the side of not seeing purpose is to miss the plotting foe or stalking predator. We've evolved the tendency to err on the side of false positives with regards to determining purpose.
What you see in evolution are indicators that this "purpose-bias" exists there as well. This isn't to say that organisms with a complex enough nervous system don't have purpose. The word would be meaningless without an instance of it. But to see purpose elsewhere is false attribution.
Dawkins and Dennett work very hard to convince us that purpose in nature is an illusion not because of our bias towards seeing purpose but because it is so evident in the biological world.
The cheetah stalking a gazelle does so with purpose and, the lionesses stalking theirs do so with coordinated execution of purpose.
Talbott in his essay shows, how biologists in their descriptions of biologically complex organisms use language of purpose continually in doing this.
Whether or not regulatory genes have intrinsic purpose in regulating, they work towards a goal in a coordinated and purposeful way.
I wouldn't say that they do possess intrinsic conscious purpose as a cheetah would have,but it strongly suggests purpose and intent underlying it.
The alternative is blind chance,trial and error and natural selection hitting on and creating working mechanisms.Yet even random events are not independent of the organisms responses.
Talbott critiques the notion of mutations as random and the tautological nature of the definition of "fitness" in evolutionary terms.
You can say that the complex interactions of biological structures in human bodies themselves, and with their environment are intrinsically purposeless, but they work towards that human seeing,hearing smelling, tasting,feeling, thinking and purposing.
This is why the language of purpose is pervasive in biology.
But this is an illusion insist the naturalists.It's all just mechanisms evolved over time from matter which had no plan or purpose in the first place. Undoubtedly there are mechanistic aspects to biological interactions but even that seems to fall short of doing justice to the immense complexity and subtlety of these things.