125 | David Haig on the Evolution of Meaning from Darwin to Derrida
Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas
Sean Carroll | Wondery
4.8 • 4.4K Ratings
🗓️ 30 November 2020
⏱️ 75 minutes
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Summary
Aristotle conceived of the world in terms of teleological “final causes”; Darwin, or so the story goes, erased purpose and meaning from the world, replacing them with a bloodless scientific algorithm. But should we abandon all talk of meanings and purposes, or instead conceptualize them as emergent rather than fundamental? Philosophers (and former Mindscape guests) Alex Rosenberg and Daniel Dennett recently had an exchange on just this subject, and today we’re going to hear from a working scientist. David Haig is a geneticist and evolutionary biologist who argues that it’s perfectly sensible to perceive meaning as arising through the course of evolution, even if evolution itself is purposeless.
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David Haig received his Ph.D. in biology from Macquarie University. He is currently the George Putnam Professor of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology at Harvard University. His research focuses on evolutionary aspects of cooperation, competition, and kinship, including the kinship theory of genomic imprinting. His new book is From Darwin to Derrida: Selfish Genes, Social Selves, and the Meanings of Life.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello everyone and welcome to the Mindscape Podcast. I'm your host, Sean Carroll. |
| 0:03.7 | And today we're going to dive once again into the meaning of life. In fact, the meaning of many |
| 0:08.7 | things. What is meaning? What are purposes that we have out there in the world? But we're going |
| 0:14.4 | to do this in a much more grounded scientific way than we usually do or than people usually do |
| 0:19.6 | in talking about these things, which is appropriate for the modern world. You know, back in the day, |
| 0:24.5 | before the scientific revolution, before Darwin and his friends, you could imagine that |
| 0:29.3 | purposes and meanings were simply part of the fundamental furniture of reality. If you were |
| 0:34.9 | Aristotle or one of his successors, you imagine that a final purpose, a final cause, was one of the |
| 0:41.5 | things you needed to explain how things worked. The final cause was the thing to which you aimed, |
| 0:46.8 | right? Your ultimate future goal. It was a teleological way of thinking about the world. |
| 0:52.0 | But then along comes physics, of course, but mostly along comes Darwin. And Darwin is able to |
| 0:57.1 | explain all of the species, all the biology we have around us in ways that don't refer to future |
| 1:03.6 | goals at all, right? This is one of the secrets of evolution that even though individual species |
| 1:09.6 | can be very, very well adapted to their environments, it doesn't come from recognition. It doesn't |
| 1:15.1 | come from planning for the future. Individual parts of our genomes shake about randomly or |
| 1:21.5 | recombined through sexual reproduction and so forth. And they just figure out through trial and error, |
| 1:26.7 | which ones work for the situations they're in right now. There's no forward-lookingness at all. |
| 1:32.6 | So here's the puzzle then. If that's true, if Darwin is right and there is no forward-lookingness |
| 1:37.3 | in the process of biology, why is it that so many things in the world and the natural world seem |
| 1:43.1 | to have purposes, seem to be existing for reasons, right? This is what drives people to intelligent |
| 1:49.9 | design and things like that. Why is the neck of the giraffe so long? Well, it seems to have the |
| 1:55.6 | purpose of reaching the leaves up there in the tree, right? And on a piecemeal basis, you can |
... |
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