From an evolutionary point of view the ‘purpose’ of life is to engage in behaviors that provide survival benefits in a particular environment via mutations which leads to higher survival and reproduction rates. However the term ‘purpose’ doesn’t seem to fit this well as to me that means something outside of you created the scenario and your choice plays a role. Life seems more about a self sustaining pattern that wasn’t created with intent and isn’t under the control of the individual organisms (ie they can’t really choose to align themselves with their ‘purpose’, that is pretty much out of their hands. It is just a throw of the dice). To me, purpose designates that something was created with an external goal and the organisms in it are trying to achieve that. none of that is really true with life. Life happened by accident and the organisms are just biological machines. Meaning and purpose usually imply more philosophical motivations for everything.
Is there a synonym for purpose or meaning that fits better to describe the meaning of life? Pattern? Function? Trajectory?
Possibly not. Stephen Jay Gould defended the use of “purposeful” language in describing living things. He said it was okay to speak of eyes as being “made for seeing” and the Cheetah’s speed being “for catching prey.” In the strictest sense, no, they aren’t, but the correlation is so strong and obvious that even to evolutionary scientists, such language is commonplace.
Gould also defended (if memory serves; it’s been a good while since I read his books) such sloppy terms as “reward” and “punish.” Beneficial changes are “rewarded” with survival, while detrimental ones are “punished” by extinction. These terms are wrong for being indicative of moral values, but evolution is perfectly without morality. Extinction does not indicate “badness.” But we, being very deeply invested in our own survival, can only with difficulty move away from that way of thinking.
Like I said though, to me purpose implies something outside of you designed the scenario, and you have a goal to align yourself with that design. That doesn’t describe life. Life happened by accident (seemingly, although I have heard a theory that the genesis life is a natural byproduct of excess energy) and we are just machines going through endless cycles where some are better at survival than others. I don’t think purpose fits, in part because the ‘purpose of life’ has so many religious and philosophical overtones that are not relevant to describing life from a biological perspective.
Our language, and our way of thought, is so very purpose-driven, it would be very difficult to come up with a simple and direct way of describing life’s functions without being imprecise. Again, Gould was fine with saying that life’s “goal” was survival.
It requires a paragraph, pretty much, to explain the way evolution operates without goals, purposes, or meaning. (Even here, I used the word “operates,” and that hints at a goal-oriented process.)
So, definitely, you’re right…but if there’s a simple way to phrase it, I’ve never heard it.
I could say, “Evolution just doesn’t care.” But, again, that’s attributing personal characteristics. It’s built in so deeply to how we think!
I agree completely, but we have to be careful when moving between practical descriptions of organisms, and philosophy.
So of course for the sake of convenience we talk about organisms trying to get their genes to the next generation, about beneficial mutations and the purpose of organs.
But many people matter of factly say the meaning of life is survival, and that’s a philosophical statement based on a human value judgement. Nowhere does evolution say it’s “correct” to be one of the survivors (or indeed say anything).
(Another problem with the simple descriptions of organisms trying to get their genes to the next generation, is that many people seem to believe that organisms know why they do some behaviour X.
I even have a friend who studied Biology at Cambridge that would tell me that of course there is a part of our subconscious that wants to get our genes to the next generation, and that’s why we’re attracted to the opposite sex :smack:)
I agree with this largely. But this purposeful language could get problematic if it’s used to derive moral judgements - to justify some behaviours and condemn others. For example, to say that “the mouth is for eating” is indeed reasonable, but that’s not an argument that shows that that oral sex is “wrong”.
(Just wanted to put this point out there. I am not saying that you or Stephen Jay Gould are making this kind of argument.)
I thought this was true… The sex drive evolved to promote the sex act… Differential rates of survival caused there to be more people with a sex drive than without… Obviously, it isn’t expressed in terms of genes. People don’t leer and say, “I want to perform meiosis with that genome!” They say, “Looka them [secondary sexual characteristics] hubba hubba.” But…yeah, we get the hornies so there will be future generations.
Good point. We can allow some level of sloppy language, but have to call people on it if they use that sloppiness as a debate tool.
(Funny story: I once tricked a friend into defining “sodomy” as any adjacency of mouths, genitals, or anuses other than sexual intercourse between male and female genitals. What he didn’t realize was that he just threw away kissing!)
This part I don’t get, but in a way maybe I do. I agree there is no ‘goal’ of survival, it is just the simple fact that organisms that are good at survival and procreation are the ones that end up being fruitful and longer lasting as a species. That doesn’t mean evolution cares about survival, it is just that those organisms are the ones that survive.
Evolution is a mechanism, it has no goals, desires or disappointments. And, interestingly, organisms that survive for a long time are kind of contra-evolutionary. Evolution is most effectively driven by breeding and culling, where a lot of offspring are hatched and a lot of them become lunch, with only the strongest or wiliest reach maturity and reproduce.
Yeah it’s the latter thing I’m talking about. Of course we desire sex, and sex feels good, because those individuals for which that was true had more offspring. I’m arguing about their being some knowledge or intent within each individual to spread their genes. There isn’t. Only the behaviour is selected for, there doesn’t need to be an underlying motivation.
Exactly. You could just as well argue that the goal is to become extinct, and we represent the unlucky few species with characteristics that make us very bad at that, such as fear of dangerous things, a pain response to physical harm etc etc
This helped to clarify it for me. I kept thinking that the whole concept of “meaning of life” implies that there’s something more than the biological function and there’s no real substitution for the word meaning there that creates a useful phrase that’s equivalent in evolutionary terms.
But if you’re really talking about the functions/purposes of individual features, then that does make more sense.
I have no problem with the idea of saying “the/a purpose of the eye is to see.” It is sort of a short hand for “This organ has been selected for based on certain key features that improve the overall fitness of the organism to reproduce.” The word “purpose” is close enough as a short-hand as long as people agree to keep using that term.
Since virtually every word has more than one meaning, it really isn’t an issue if people are going to discuss and debate with integrity. No one is going to argue that “see” can also mean “to understand” and then argue that eyes don’t actually understand anything. To argue that the word “purpose” automatically implies creation or intelligent direction is just as incorrect. Purpose can mean “fitness for a particular function” just as easily as “intention of an intelligent being.”