Cel i wyjaśnianie celowościowe ewolucji

Abstract

The essential context of this article is the claim that only a man may ascribe goals to things or persons. N. Beckner thinks that goals “belong to” persons since intentions are ascribed to them; but not all the goals are intentions, for example a goal of rat's life is getting some food, although it is not directed by an intention. A. C. Purton stresses the useful goal (a given thing achieves a certain goal if it is used to realization of this goal) and the goal of the intention. Representants of the synthetic theory of evolution speak differently on the problem of the directiveness of the evolutionary process. F. J. Ayala thinks that the process of evolution is not purposeful in the sense of being directed to “production” of DNA with a specific genetic cod. I mean the goal understood in the sense of the necessity of existence of the directed activity of the DNA improving the reproductive fitness of a population. R. A. Fisher identifies the goal of evolution with the initial state of the evolutionary processes. On the other hand E. Mayr considers the natural selection not to be goal-directed. As a consequence we can understand the purposefulness of evolution in the sense of the realization by an organism the population or the species of what has been encoded in their closer or furtherpast. Although this realization can be observed only post factum for example when the adaptation appears, we can say that the state of adaptation of a population to the conditions of an environment has been achieved. The goal directed explanation (teleonomic) by itself is such a type of explanation in which a state of system (here: an observed fragment of evolution) in the time t2 is explained by referring to the past state of this system in the time t1. So it is not here the case that the given state of a system is explained through a goal which this system is going to achieve. The explanation of the purposefulness of evolution is the procedure accordingly to which one attempts to explain the realization of the program of evolution. I realize that the presented generalizations require logical and methodological analyzies for example by referring them to the explanatory model of C. G. Hempla and P. Oppenheim's invented with the thought of the phisical science. It would be worth to undertake an attempt to construct the model to explain evolution in general including the character of the mechanisms and the evolutionary factors. The lack of such general model hinders the analysis of a goal and purposeful explanation of evolution.