Nathan Cofnas is 40 years old. He is a post-doctoral fellow in Belgium researching 'the future of liberalism'. In other words, even if he isn't brain-dead, he is in a zombie profession where the only thing worse than being a post-doc would be being a fucking Professor. Nevertheless, thanks to the Jason Arday affair, it now looks as though he can establish himself in the front rank of well remunerated public intellectuals.
Does he deserve his good luck?
Briefly- yes. He took risks and completed worthless theses at different intstitutions on different continents. Still, it was sheer luck that the Arday case ended in the manner that it did because, it turned out, the diversity hire was genuinely nuerodivergent ( i.e. he genuinely believed invisible racists were trying to kill him) and that his own family didn't bother to take steps to get him sectioned & thus kept safe from self-harm.
Nathan wasn't mathsy and thus could make no contribution to evolutionary biology or philosophy. He got his start critiquing a low IQ Catholic anti-Semite but there really wasn't a lot of mileage in it because George Soros ws determined to provie evidence that 'rootless' Jews wanted to destroy Christendom by importing hordes of crazy Jihadis.
What about attacking affirmative action & 'wokeness' back home in the US? The problem here is that you need heavy econometric chops to muscle in on that territory. Moreover, if even African American Sociolgists, publishing alethic research, can get cancelled, what hope had Nathan?
Interestingly, after a first degree from Columbia, Nathan went to Hong Kong for his masters and then Cambridge and Oxford for his M.Phil & PhD respectively. The problem he faced was that 'Philosophy of Biology' is either super-mathsy or else it is finger painting with your own faeces.
As a case in point, consider a recent paper by Cofnas taking issue with the stardard defintion of natural selection as featuring
(1) “phenotypic variation,”
(2) “differential fitness,”
(3) 'heritable fitness'
I argue that the standard formulation is inadequate because it fails to distinguish natural selection from artificial selection by humans,
humans are part of nature
intelligent design by God,
God is immanent in Nature
forward-looking orthogenetic selection,
bound to happen if a species evolved by sexual selection gains consciousness.
and adaptation via the selection of nonrandom variation.
There is no way to tell random from pseudorandom (Razbarov Rudich)
In the case of artificial selection and intelligent design, natural or supernatural agents intervene in the mutation and/or selection process to drive evolution in a predetermined direction.
There may be such a direction- e.g. 'the law of increasing functional information'- which, however, maps poorly to what we cognize as biological life or, indeed, an 'extended phenotype'.
“Orthogenesis” refers to the idea that evolution follows a predetermined path. (“Ortho” comes from the Greek word for “straight.”)
It may be that 'at the end of mathematical time' (i.e. after all possible mathematics is completed) all lawless choice sequences are known to be lawful or, as the mystics say, all Freedom is discovered to be Bondage or the other way around.
In the case of orthogenetic selection, a natural teleological force influences survival and reproduction in order to guide evolution toward a predetermined endpoint.
If there is verification that such is the case, then we know the choice sequence of the Universe is lawful though we may still not comprehend what exactly that law is.
I will also call this “natural teleological selection.”
A Brouwerian free creating subject could have a teleolgy. Indeed, the Intuitionist may say that his adventious discoveries were all pre-planned in a manner occult even to himself. Like Novalis's magician, he is unaware of how he performs his own tricks.
Adaptation via the selection of nonrandom variation involves heritable variation arising because it will be favored by selection. All four of these evolutionary processes involve heritable variation in fitness, but, I claim, they should not be classified as natural selection.
They aren't. We speak of 'artificial insemination' as opposed to such as would occur in the wild. Moreover, devout people speak of God as having created their imperishable soul. They may also mention supernatural beings- e.g. Angels- who worked miracles for a particular purpose.
Natural selection can be distinguished from artificial selection, intelligent design, orthogenetic selection, and adaptation via the selection of nonrandom variation by adding a no teleology condition. No teleology The evolutionary process is not teleological.
What of the fitness landscape? If it is teleological- for e.g. aimed at increased functional information- then evolution is teleological or, in the case of our species, about to become so.
When God guides evolution in order to achieve his purpose, this is paradigmatically teleological.
Not unless it is his purpose that we grasp this or, equally, that is his purpose is that we don't grasp this or if God's purposes could not seem purposive to us.
But it is not clear what it means for there to be a telos in the absence of an agent who intends and strives.
Nor is it clear what purpose means or means means. They are Tarskian primitives.
There may not be a simple, unifying concept of teleology that covers both goal-directed behavior by agents and (hypothetical) forward-looking natural forces that may or may not be metaphysically reducible to efficient causes.
Or there may be nothing but that concept.
If agential interference in the evolutionary process, orthogenetic selection, and adaptation via the selection of nonrandom variation should not be classified as “natural selection,”
nothing follows. One 'should' is compatible with an equal and opposite 'should'. Imperative statements may look logical but they aren't really. This is Jorgensen's dilemma.
the no teleology condition will have to invoke different concepts of “teleology”—different ways of aiming at a telos.
This is a meta-telos- having a purpose with respect to purpose. But that is still just a purpose. Does it arise out of natural selection (because we all do)? If so is it a 'spandrel' or is it functional? Can there be 'naturality' in this matter?
No. The thing is mere displacement activity- like the rest of philosophy. It passes the time as time passes us by.
I will classify these under two headings: “agential teleology” and “natural teleology.”
Such classifications always turn out to be a distinctions without a difference. What matters is whether there scientists can identify 'natural transformations'. Currently this seems promising. It looks as though phenotypic mutational robustness bounds in genetics naturally align with fractal curves and pure number-theoretic functions, pointing to deep, unforced mathematical regularities in evolution. This is useful but only provisionally so. At some point some arbitrary element intrudes. Still, one could say 'synthetic' information causes a particular type of error accumulation & model collapse but the way it is repaired is by increasing verification. This is where the arbitrary element returns. My point is that naturality is mathematical not philosophical. The verification protocol can always be modelled as agential. But it is the fitness landscape which is in the driver's seat.
I address these two types of teleology, in turn, in the following two sections.
Agential teleology A process exhibits agential teleology if it is guided toward an end that is represented in the mind of an agent.
Did any mind guide any historical process in the Twentieth century towards an end it intended? One might say 'all the minds of the belligenerents who went to war in 1914 had the purpose of going to war'. But that is circular. It isn't informative. One might as easily say 'everybody's purpose is to die which is why everybody does manage to end up dead within a century or so.'
The evolutionary process exhibits agential teleology when an agent—such as a breeder, a genetic engineer, or a divine intelligent designer—introduces mutations nonrandomly with respect to, or selects heritable variants with reference to, a mentally represented endpoint.
No. The evolutionary process is only at work where some such people are weeded out while others gains more resources. If there is no competition or predators there is no selection pressure.
There is no great harm in writing shite of the sort I have just quoted. Equally, it would be easy enough for anyone with half a brain to gas on about the future of liberalism precisely because it began by apotheosizing 'naturality' against arbitrariness. Could there be a categorical Utopia of the Condorcet type? Malthus's theory of population ws the counter claim. Even if a utopia was established, immigration or (in the absence of 'vice' (i.e. wanking, contraception, homosexuality etc.)) runaway population growth would turn everything to shit again. This was connected (as Keynes would note) with 'underconsumption' crises. Darwin, of course, applied Malthus's paradigm to Biology & thus got to natural selection. This meant either Eugencis/Planned Economies as needful for 'Social' Liberalism or else (after mathematical Mendelism triumphed over vestigal Lamarckism) a Hayekian scepticism re. information aggregation which was reinforced by purely mathematical problems of concurrency, complexity, computability & categoricity.
For the Left, Maynard Smith (a former card-carrying Commie) and Hamilton, Price, etc., presented a scandal. Uncoreelated asymmetries (especially if they generate Aumann public signals) dictate eusocial 'bourgeois strategies'. Moreover 'co-evolved strategies can increase evolvability but without categoricity (or unicity).
In this context, there are no 'conceptual' problems. Everything is merely pragmatic and relates to shifting coordination & discoordination games. Thus we can say, for any practical purpose there are Voevodsly style 'univalent foundations' or 'observational equivalence'.
In other words, though guys doing mathsy evolutionary biology may be doing very useful stuff, philosophy can only add noise to signal. Rockefeller Uni realised this when it got rid of its high price Philosophy Dept. in the mid Seventies even though the discipline still had some high IQ dudes back then.
It may be that AI will enable non-mathsy dudes to become more productive, or- more to the point- useful, and, if so, Nathan may redeem himself as he rises within the Academy.
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