A nice summary of the "Four Causes."

At Brutally Honest:

Imagine four sheets of paper. One has been folded into an airplane. One has been shaped into an origami frog. One has been crumpled into a ball, a paper wad. And one sheet is left alone.


All four objects are made of the same stuff but they are different things. Philosophers call that stuff the Material Cause. The last sheet represents that cause; the stuff of each object. It is important how the sheets were made, by whom and why. But for now consider just sheets of paper taking different forms.

Their form makes the objects different. Philosophers call that the Formal Cause. The paper wad represents that cause; a different form than the sheet. I read recently that crumpled paper has deep mystery to science. It cannot be accurately modeled! But for now, it is enough to see that a paper wad is different from a sheet. It has a different form.

An origami frog might be folded by an eight year old, but I couldn't do it. Philosophers call the eight year old the Efficient Cause. Almost anyone can make a paper wad. But it takes skill to make a frog. If you'd never seen a real frog, you might have trouble distinguishing the frog from the wad. But for now, it is important to note that an Efficient Cause must be up to the task. I couldn't do it. I am not an efficient cause of origami though you might be.

The paper airplane was made to fly. Philosophers call that purpose, the Final Cause. If the paper plane doesn't fly or doesn't fly well, we say it isn't well made because it doesn't fulfill its purpose.

My friend says that the universe is merely "atoms and void". We agree on this material cause. We agree on the formal causes, the different forms atoms can take. But I continue to be amazed that anyone, especially Randy, can think that natural laws are an efficient cause for those forms of matter that are alive. Nothing in nature, not even natural selection, has demonstrated the creativity necessary for a DNA molecule, let alone a human brain. Nature by itself is simply not up to the task. Believing life happened naturally seems to take an enormous leap of faith.

But the most troubling aspect of my friend's atheism is the loss of purpose. For Randy, there is no final cause for the universe, no purpose to life except what he gives it. When he is gone, so is the purpose.

Darwin and Aristotle.

Michael Flynn on Darwinism:

Mendel chose pea plants partly because they i) had easily identifiable features, ii) could self-fertilize, and iii) were easy to protect from cross-fertilization. But before he could even start, he needed true-breeding plants; that is, plants that when self-crossed would always produce the same phenotype. This took two years of preliminary work. Mendel then spent years making thousands of crosses, discovering that


traits were inherited whole and

traits that seemed to disappear in one generation could reappear in another generation

He described these observations in a set of mathematical relationships (laws) regarding the inheritance of dominant and recessive traits. (These were similar to Darwin's mathematical laws of natural selection setting out the relationship between fitness and reproductive success... Oh, wait. Never mind.)

People sometimes wonder where Mendel found the time to do all this, considering his monastic responsiblities. I have even seen it alleged that the abbot shut him down, a nice example of "model-based history"*. But the answer is easy. His research was one of his monastic responsibilities. The monastery had been conducting hybridization research even before Mendel arrived. The Augustinians freed up his time for the research, allocated large plots of land for his research, and built a greenhouse where he could establish a control group for his studies. The Order did not sorta kinda "give Mendel a research grant" to pursue his personal hobby as some historically ill-informed have grudgingly allowed: The research was part and parcel of the Order's program. Mendel himself had trained as a physicist, not a biologist, so this would not likely have been his own personal choice. Mendel was simply doing the scientific research that his Order asked him to do.**

Mendel's results were published in the Proceedings of the Natural History Society of Brünn in 1866. No-one noticed. Over the next 35 years, his work was cited... three times! Oh well. In the early 1900s, Mendel's work was rediscovered by Correns, deVries, and others, and developed into an entirely new discipline within biology -- genetics.

*model-based history. This is where one starts with an idee fixe and deduces "what must have happened" in the light of that prior assumption. This dispenses with the laborious requirement for actual empirical evidence.

** Oddly, Mendel's work and the support from his Order are seldom mentioned during debates about church-science relationships. See first note (*).

And:

The term "evolution" is the opposite of "involution." It means "an opening of what was rolled up" and was used by the Romans to describe reading a scroll. By the 1660s, it was used in English to mean what we call "morphogenesis." In 1762, it was used by Bonnet for the homunculus theory of embryological development. It was greatly popularized in the philosophy of Herbert Spencer. It was also used (in France) to mean social progress culminating in that pinnacle of evolution: the French intellectual. Most of all, it was used always with a teleological spin.


These were the meanings current when Darwin did his thing. Darwin, who knew that the English country squire was the pinnacle of evolution, rejected the term "evolution" both because of its association with the French Terror (according to Michael Ruse) and its inherent teleology (according to Etienne Gilson). He did not use it until the sixth (and final) edition of the Origin, much preferring either "natural selection" or [his favorite] "descent with modification."

The public mind, however, prefers short terms to longer phrases, and quickly conflated Darwin's natural selection with Spencer's evolution, to the great distress of both men. Spencer objected that his principle was much broader than a mere scientific law, and published a widely-translated pamphlet making his (ultimately vain) case for priority. Darwin, who seldom bothered responding to any disagreement (and seems to have regarded Spencer in person unfavorably) detested philosophy on principle and resisted using the term "evolution" until he finally threw in the towel in the sixth edition of Origin.

And:

Basically, we have seen several major threads coming together: Mendel's genetics, Darwin's natural selection, Kimura's neo-Lamarckian neutral selection. In an article that I have long lost, these factors were summarized as follows:


The genetic factor: the tendency to variation resulting from constant small random mutations in the genetic code; i. e., a variety of differing individuals within a species capable of transmitting their differences

The epigenetic factor: the tendency of interbreeding population to reproduce itself in a stable manner and increase in numbers; i. e., the maintenance of type

The selective factor: natural selection by the environment which eliminates those variants which are less effective in reproducing their kind; i. e., the agent determining in which direction species-change will take place

The exploitative factor: the flexibility of living things by which they are able to occupy new niches in the changing environment; i. e., a feed-back mechanism which guides the selective process toward a new type which can exploit new environmental possibilities

Which the Aristotelians among you may recognize as

Material cause

Formal cause

Efficient cause

Final cause

Surprise! That old Stagerite sure does get around. But then, as Aristotle told Empedocles, you have to look at things from all four points of view to get a complete sense of what is happening.

Wow! Science - Evolution Division.

According to this article at Io9, brains developed separately in the different branches of the mollusk phylum.

University. Kevin Kocot and his team examined the genetic sequences of the eight main branches of the mollusk phylum. They hoped to determine which branches are most closely related to which others, and in doing so provide a clearer history of the specifics of mollusk evolution. Until now, it was assumed that the two mollusk groups with the most highly organized central nervous systems, the cephalopods (octopus, cuttlefish, squid) and the gastropods (snails and slugs), are the most closely related.

Now it appears that that's actually almost the exact opposite of the truth. According to Kocot's analysis, the gastropods are most closely related to bivalves (clams, mussels, oysters, and scallops), which have far more rudimentary nervous systems and not much of a brain. Even more shockingly, cephalopods - the most intelligent of all the mollusk groups - comes from one of the earliest branches, meaning their evolutionary development predates that of snails, clams, and the rest.

There's no way that cephalopods and gastropods could have evolved together apart from all the other mollusks, which means that their similarly advanced nervous systems must have developed independently. That goes against a lot of longstanding assumptions about the evolution of sophisticated structures, as Kocot's colleague, University of Florida researcher Leonid Moroz, explains:

"Traditionally, most neuroscientists and biologists think complex structures usually evolve only once. We found that the evolution of the complex brain does not happen in a linear progression. Parallel evolution can achieve similar levels of complexity in different groups. I calculated it happened at least four times."

A lot of evolutionary theory has been guided by something akin to Occam's Razor - it's simpler to assume that something as complex as the brain only evolved once in a given group, and that all brainy members of that group come from a single common ancestor. Mollusks appear to be pointing us towards a very different story of evolution, one governed by parallel developments and the repeated emergence of brains in wildly divergent groups. Evolution doesn't have any set goals, but it does appear that it has certain ideas and structures it just keeps coming back to.

That last (emboldened) sentence is strange bit of rejecting final causation while affirming final causation.