EVENTS

STOQ 2009 – THE STOQ INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON
«BIOLOGICAL EVOLUTION. Facts and Theories»

Abstracts of the Lectures:

David J. Depew, University of Iowa, USA

Accident, Adaptation, and Teleology in Aristotle and Darwinism 

It is sometimes said that Darwin reintroduced an Empedoclean account of organic origins into biology. It is true that Empedocles posited accidentally compounded and conjoined body parts that coalesce into organisms. Some of these conjunctions perpetuate themselves, he asserted, because they are stable in their environments. Those failing to meet this test, he continued, "perish and continue to perish" by a selection process. I argue, however, that the analogy between Darwinian natural selection and Empedocles’s appeal to "incidental (kata symbebekos, per accidens)" final causality, as his critic Aristotle calls it, is mistaken. My argument also shows that in spite of considerable differences on the issue of whether descent from a common ancestor is possible—for Aristotle it is not--there is a strong analogy between Aristotle, our first great biological theorist, and Darwin on the subject of adaptation. This affinity explains why Asa Gray, Darwin’s American correspondent and early interpreter, was right to say that Darwin was a teleologist and why Darwin was right to agree with him.