Writing in the journal Outreach and Education in Evolution, David Zeigler asserts the following:

My “purpose” (we can create our own temporally and spatially limited purposes) in writing this piece is to point out one of the most important and real issues in the teaching of Darwinian evolution that so often goes unaddressed, or more amazingly—unrecognized, and this issue is really fairly obvious. Darwinian evolution by natural selection results in adaptations which increase the ability of the individuals to survive and reproduce successfully in their respective environments, or as biologists would say—adaptations increase the fitness of individuals. This is the only evolutionary goal or purpose for which science has found objective evidence.

In our science, there is no mention of, or mechanism for achieving, any long-term metaphysical or teological goals of form, complexity, or intelligence—as Gould has argued so eloquently. Most of the other known mechanisms of evolutionary change such as genetic drift, neutral mutation, gene duplications, transposons, horizontal gene transfer by plasmids, and others have no direction or goal at all and are in fact random (which natural selection is not) and therefore could not possibly give a particular direction to evolution. Numerous science writers have made the obvious point that had that asteroid not struck some 65,000,000 years ago and pushed the dinosaurs to extinction, we humans would undoubtedly not be here, for the evolution of mammals would have been constrained and altered drastically from what has come to pass (i.e., we humans were not destined to evolve).

I cite this because it is a nice, succinct description of the standard, non-teleological perspective shared by many. Yet how have teleologists reacted to this perspective?

Throughout my life, I have seen three basic reactions among teleologists. First, there is the Religious Response, where someone accepts Zeigler’s description at face value and simply adds that God somehow sustains the process. Second, there is the Vitalist Response, which questions Zeigler’s description by arguing that evolutionary mechanisms are not truly random. Third, there is the Creationist Response, which questions Zeigler’s description by denying these mechanisms are capable of bringing about large-scale evolutionary change.

Yet The Design Matrix outlines a fourth response – one that would agree with Ziegler’s description of evolution, but argue that our understanding of evolution is still rather primitive. I suspect there is a deeper logic and rationality to evolution than random changes captured and propagated by selection and it is just such logic and rationality that may impart the purposes that Zeigler cannot see. Just as biochemists had to learn the cell is far more sophisticated than they ever imagined, so too might evolutionary biologists one day appreciate that evolution is far more sophisticated than Gould or Dawkins ever imagined. So let us nibble on Zeigler’s description in the next posting.