Preface ix 1 Meaning and the Means to an Understanding of Ends 2 Why Is an Eye? 21 3 Adaptationism and Engineering 39 4 On Five "-Isms" 67 5 Function, Selection, and Explanation 87 6 Deflating Function 119 7 Artifacts and Organisms 139 References 167 Index 177.

In recent years there has been a renewed interest in the design argument, which states that the seemingly purposeful features of the natural world point to the existence of a supernatural designer. The purpose of this article is to give a brief survey of the fine-tuning of the fundamental constants in physics and cosmology, and complexity in biology, and their potential implications for the design argument. Contingency in the history of the earth and the evolution of life on (...) earth is also discussed, and some of the problems associated with inferring design from scientific investigations of nature are evaluated. It is concluded that an unambiguous detection of design in nature is not possible, but that this does not eliminate the demand for an ultimate explanation of the existence of the universe and the life it harbours. (shrink)

‘Biochromatology’ can be defined as the study of the relationships between colours, and between colours and design in nature. Certain laws concerning biochromatics can be formulated in the terminology of the Colour Circle. One of them is that planes in warm colours and planes in cold colours never adjoin. Another law is that design is never polychromatic. It seems that the observed biochromatical facts can be explained with the help of the principle “optimal manifestation of colour”, which (...) in turn is based on the formative principles of matter itself. (shrink)

How a designer gets from thought to thing is, at least in broad strokes, straightforward: (1) A designer conceives a purpose. (2) To accomplish that purpose, the designer forms a plan. (3) To execute the plan, the designer specifies building materials and assembly instructions. (4) Finally, the designer or some surrogate applies the assembly instructions to the building materials.

The European Legacy, Volume 17, Issue 4, Page 554-557, July 2012.

Some contemporary theories about the origin and the nature of language resort to concepts with no bearing on Darwinian evolutionary hypothesis or evo-devo perspective which are both based on the reconstruction of species morphological structure transformation. These theories, which evoke qualitative leap, cultural evolution, structure/function coevolution as esplicative principles for human evolution, in our opinion, result compatible in some points with the most recent Intelligent Design accounts. Attempting to substantiate itself as a scientific theory, the contemporary ID is (...) ready to give up creationist explanation just to impeding Darwin’s fundamental idea according to which it’s possible to explain evolution only through a gradual material modification of structures. For comprehending a complex phenomenon as human language – according to ID – it’s necessary appealing to a second substance, whatever it is. This idea seems to be at the bottom of all those theories which have rejected monistic structural explanation for embracing functional, psychological or cultural accounts. We consider these kinds of explanation real unresolved residuals of ID, residuals nested in the heart of the most accredited scientific theories. (shrink)

Explores the question of whether or not concepts and principles involving supernatural intelligent design can occupy any legitimate place within science.

The last three decades have witnessed a heated debate of the merits of intelligent design (ID) as a way to understand a number of observable natural phenomena. The present dispute has its roots in a much older discussion: that of natural theology, which has always had as its goal the discernment of design(s) attributable to God in the natural world. Despite its ongoing relevance, natural theology does not have a coherent scholarly history. Turning Points in Natural Theology from (...) Bacon to Darwin deftly fills that gap, analysing the argument of design during the period from Francis Bacon (1561-1626) to Charles Darwin (1809-82), with a specific focus on those moments at which the rhetorical terms changed significantly. (shrink)

Much has been written through the years of the clash between Darwinism and natural theology, and the basic tenants of this debate are well understood (Gillispie 1959; Bowler 1977; Ruse 2003; McGrath 2011). However, the literature is still growing, and one may wonder if anything new may yet be added. Of these new literary sources, one of the richest is the online Darwin Correspondence Project, which makes it possible to search and read the full texts of all correspondence either sent (...) or received by Darwin, up to the year 1868. (This project is ongoing and letters are still being recovered and added.) The purpose of this article is to outline the role of the intelligent design argument, as espoused by its principal .. (shrink)

Equivalent overdetermined and underdetermined bivalent Belnap–Dunn type semantics for the logics determined by all natural implicative expansions of Kleene’s strong 3-valued matrix with only one designated value are provided.

I see in the nature of our minds and the character of our problem-solving methodologies a search for simplifying tools that will let us model a complex world and get away with it far more often than we might suppose. As it turns out, this broad a reach to mind and world is possible because both turn on common properties of evolved complex adaptive systems. These are in effect “design principles” for the architecture of nature—all of it, (...) from biological systems to ourselves and the technologies that we engineer.I explore how generative systems may, under some circumstances lead to adaptive radiations, and how the growth of complexity is entailed by their compositional embedding of prior systems, their stabilizing their features as architecture thru a process that I call generative entrenchment. I also explore how modularity has two forms: top-down modularity or “quasi-independence” in which evolving systems require the possibility of changing parts of the system without scrambling the organization of the rest, and bottom-up modularity in which a stable alphabet of standardized parts can be combined in various ways to generate an adaptive radiation of diverse systems to accomplish different things. (shrink)

This paper addresses recent literature on rigid designation and natural kind terms that draws on the inferentialist approaches of Sellars and Brandom, among others. Much of the orthodox literature on rigidity may be seen as appealing, more or less explicitly, to a semantic form of “the given” in Sellars’s terms. However, the important insights of that literature may be reconstructed and articulated in terms more congenial to the Pittsburgh school of normative functionalism.

The topic of temporal meaning in texts has received considerable attention in recent years from scholars in linguistics, logical semantics, cognitive science, and artificial intelligence. Representing Time in Natural Language offers a systematic and detailed account of how we use temporal information contained in a text or in discourse to reason about the flow of time, inferring the order in which events happened when this is not explicitly stated. A new representational system is designed to formalize an appropriately context-dependent notion (...) of situated inference. The Dynamic Aspect Tree, representing temporal dependencies, constitutes a novel and important dynamic temporal logic, one that makes it easy to see "what follows when" from the information given in an ordinary English text. (shrink)

Book Information Nature's Purposes: Analyses of Function and Design in Biology. Edited by Allen Colin, Bekoff Mark and Lauder George. MIT Press. Cambridge. 1998. Pp. vi + 597. Paperback, US$31.50.

This study aims to create an integrated geographical information system database of natural resources represented by mining activities in the Red Sea area in Sudan. GIS is a vital tool to help the decision-makers in managing and classifying these resources in terms of quantity and quality within the concept of sustainable development. The paper extracts some models of investment map indicators. In addition to that, it conducts a study and research aimed at developing a mineral resources management and discovering and (...) identifying the new areas of mineral wealth in GIS database. The motivation of this study stems from the fact that countries with these types of wealth can greatly grow their gross domestic product through the optimum management and governance. Most of the least development countries can focus on the search for alternative natural resources to support their economy. Red Sea region is one of the great regions full of natural and mineral resources, beside its strategic location on the way of most of the global trade transaction path. This paper designs and implements GIS multiple database layers. The multiple layers were modelled to overcome the technical difficulties that result from processing of large quantities of tempospatial information. The database was built by using an Oracle database system due to its capability of multilayer design. (shrink)

This volume provides a guide to the discussion among biologists and philosophersabout the role of concepts such as function and design in an evolutionary understanding oflife.

New and radically reformative thinking about the enactive and embodied basis of cognition holds out the promise of moving forward age-old debates about whether we learn and how we learn. The radical enactive, embodied view of cognition (REC) poses a direct, and unmitigated, challenge to the trademark assumptions of traditional cognitivist theories of mind—those that characterize cognition as always and everywhere grounded in the manipulation of contentful representations of some kind. REC has had some success in understanding how sports skills (...) and expertise are acquired. But, REC approaches appear to encounter a natural obstacle when it comes to understanding skill acquisition in knowledge-rich, conceptually based domains like the hard sciences and mathematics. This paper offers a proof of concept that REC’s reach can be usefully extended into the domain of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) learning, especially when it comes to understanding the deep roots of such learning. In making this case, this paper has five main parts. The section “Ancient Intellectualism and the REC Challenge” briefly introduces REC and situates it with respect to rival views about the cognitive basis of learning. The “Learning REConceived: from Sports to STEM?” section outlines the substantive contribution REC makes to understanding skill acquisition in the domain of sports and identifies reasons for doubting that it will be possible to apply the same approach to knowledge-rich STEM domains. The “Mathematics as Embodied Practice” section gives the general layout for how to understand mathematics as an embodied practice. The section “The Importance of Attentional Anchors” introduces the concept “attentional anchor” and establishes why attentional anchors are important to educational design in STEM domains like mathematics. Finally, drawing on some exciting new empirical studies, the section “Seeing Attentional Anchors” demonstrates how REC can contribute to understanding the roots of STEM learning and inform its learning design, focusing on the case of mathematics. (shrink)

The dominant paradigm of experiments in the social and behavioral sciences views an experiment as a test of a theory, where the theory is assumed to generalize beyond the experiment's specific conditions. According to this view, which Alan Newell once characterized as “playing twenty questions with nature,” theory is advanced one experiment at a time, and the integration of disparate findings is assumed to happen via the scientific publishing process. In this article, we argue that the process of integration (...) is at best inefficient, and at worst it does not, in fact, occur. We further show that the challenge of integration cannot be adequately addressed by recently proposed reforms that focus on the reliability and replicability of individual findings, nor simply by conducting more or larger experiments. Rather, the problem arises from the imprecise nature of social and behavioral theories and, consequently, a lack of commensurability across experiments conducted under different conditions. Therefore, researchers must fundamentally rethink how they design experiments and how the experiments relate to theory. We specifically describe an alternative framework, integrative experiment design, which intrinsically promotes commensurability and continuous integration of knowledge. In this paradigm, researchers explicitly map the design space of possible experiments associated with a given research question, embracing many potentially relevant theories rather than focusing on just one. Researchers then iteratively generate theories and test them with experiments explicitly sampled from the design space, allowing results to be integrated across experiments. Given recent methodological and technological developments, we conclude that this approach is feasible and would generate more-reliable, more-cumulative empirical and theoretical knowledge than the current paradigm – and with far greater efficiency. (shrink)

»Consciousness and Its Place in Nature« (Chalmers 2003) is the title of an article written by David Chalmers, which deals with the so called hard problems of consciousness, that means, with those problems that do not concern how functions are performed (Chalmers 1997:4), but deal with the emergence of consciousness in the sense of subjective experience. On the one hand, it is important to treat architecture from the very beginning not only as somehow stylish and useful heaps of stones (...) that are additionally embedded in political and philosophical contexts (whatever that means). On the other hand, architecture belongs to nature just as much as trees, apes, and what apes produce. So architecture is situated between what can be grasped from a ›materialistic‹ point of view, on the one hand, and what depends on subjectivity, on the other hand. As far as a general theory of architecture is able to examine what is essential to architecture, one should keep in mind that we would probably not accept a set of characteristics as sufficient for a building being a piece of architecture as we have learned from Wittgenstein and others concerning categories in general (Kleiber 1993). Finding necessary conditions is not as simple as one may expect either. There is a closely related phenomenon however: Are not some individual buildings more representative of architecture as such than others? Gropius once designed a pigsty for the manufacturer Rosenthal. We are inclined to acknowledge it as a part of his architectural work due to the fact that the famous architect Gropius designed it and gave it a typical International Style appearance. Its being purely a pigsty, not a castle or a dwelling, however may be a reason to deny it this status as architecture (Isaacs 1984:1105). (shrink)

People meeting a robot for the first time do not know what it is capable of and therefore how to interact with it—what actions to produce, and how to produce them. Despite social robotics’ long-standing interest in the effects of robots’ appearance and conduct on users, and efforts to identify factors likely to improve human–robot interaction, little attention has been paid to how participants evaluate their robotic partner in the unfolding of actual interactions. This paper draws from qualitative analyses of (...) video-recorded interactions between a robot and groups of participants, in the framework of ethnomethodology and conversation analysis. We analyse the particular ways in which participants shape their embodied actions, how they can reproduce a prior action that failed to obtain a response from the robot; and how they explore the robot’s embodied nature. We find a set of recurrent methods or practices, showing that robot-recipient design displays not only participants’ initial assumptions about the robot’s competences, but also more importantly perhaps their continuous assessment of the robot’s behaviour, and their attempts to adapt to it. Participants locally produce and constantly revise their understanding of the robot as a more or less competent co-participant, drawing from its past, current, and projected conduct and responsiveness. We discuss the implications of these findings for research in robotics and human–robot interactions, and the value of the approach to shed new light on old questions by paying attention to the quality of gesture and the sequential organisation of interaction. (shrink)

Technology design has social as well as technical determinants. These social factors, such as the political context and social philosophy, vary historically and cross-nationally. The work upon which this paper is based addresses the nature of process technology design in the United States and focuses on the underlying assumptions that guide technology design, based on both historical analysis and survey and case studies of current design practices. Central to this work is an analysis of how (...) the US approaches compare to some of the other industrial nations and the assumptions and implications of different social design concepts such as human-centered design, skill-based design, and human factors. (shrink)

In the face of renewed and growing awareness of the importance of natural teleology (goal-directedness) in the scientific and philosophical reflection on the reality, a question should be asked about the ways in which the notion of finality may inspire theology. I show that—when clearly distinguished from Paley’s argument from design and its contemporary version developed by the proponents of Intelligent Design—the classical notion of teleology becomes a promising and fruitful inspiration for both natural theology and theology of (...) nature. At the same time, the analysis of highly influential projects of science-oriented panentheism and process theism shows that they do not seem to pay enough attention to teleology. Hence, further research is needed that will (1) reinvigorate the classical theological reflection on teleology, (2) contextualize it in reference to contemporary science, and (3) engage it into a conversation with other schools of theology participating in the ongoing dialogue between science, philosophy, and theology. (shrink)

Three examples of theoretical analysis of evolutionary processes are presented. It is shown that the mechanisms involved have little to do with cognitive processes except for superficial and formal analogies. That is the case not only for classical models of adaptive evolution , but also for more recent ones making use of neural network computation and self-organization theories.Recent works on functional self-organization exhibiting some features of intentionality are discussed in this context. It is argued that Dennett's intentional stance cannot be (...) used as a theoretical framework common to human prepositional attitudes, animal behaviour and adaptive evolution. Indeed, a physical theory of intentionality could account, at least in principle, for the production of intentional self-organizing systems. However, except for a renewed theological “argument from design”, there is no justification to attribute intentionality to evolutionary processes and “Mother Nature”, for the reason that they have produced organisms endowed with intentional psycholinguistic capabilities. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Introduction: The Design Argument The Design Argument in Antiquity Christian Authors Hume's Onslaught William Paley's Natural Theology The Bridgewater Treatises Intelligent Design: A Political Movement Eyes to See No “There” There Blood and Tears Gambling to Non‐existence Natural Selection Natural Selection and Design Postscript: Counterpoint Notes References.

This chapter contains sections titled: Introduction: The Design Argument The Design Argument in Antiquity Christian Authors Hume's Onslaught William Paley's Natural Theology The Bridgewater Treatises Intelligent Design: A Political Movement Eyes to See No “There” There Blood and Tears Gambling to Non‐existence Natural Selection Natural Selection and Design Postscript: Counterpoint Notes References.

Images are objects of work in the laboratory. On its face, this work is achieved through talk Yet the talk attached to these images makes reference to other images, which are drawn from varcous environments. In this article, four such environments are identified: the domain of laboratory practice; the context of invisible physical reactions; the future image as it will appear in publication; and the domain of case precedents and reference scenarios from the field. The work of image analysis brings (...) the outside of the image into it and takes the inside out. Thus it can be seen that images are not just taken, they are designed and made. (shrink)

It is well-established that the experience of nature produces an array of positive benefits to mental well-being. Much less is known about the specific attributes of green space which produce these effects. In the absence of translational research that links theory with application, it is challenging to design urban green space for its greatest restorative potential. This translational research provides a method for identifying which specific physical attributes of an environmental setting are most likely to influence preference and (...) restoration responses. Attribute identification was based on a triangulation process invoking environmental psychology and aesthetics theories, principles of design founded in mathematics and aesthetics, and empirical research on the role of specific physical attributes of the environment in preference or restoration responses. From this integration emerged a list of physical attributes defining aspects of spatial structure and environmental content found to be most relevant to the perceptions involved with preference and restoration. The physical attribute list offers a starting point for deciphering which scene stimuli dominate or collaborate in preference and restoration responses. To support this, functional definitions and metrics—efficient methods for attribute quantification are presented. Use of these research products and the process for defining place-based metrics can provide (a) greater control in the selection and interpretation of the scenes/images used in tests of preference and restoration and (b) an expanded evidence base for well-being designers of the built environment. (shrink)

Urban dwellers are more likely to develop mental disorders such as mood and anxiety disorder as well as schizophrenia compared to rural dwellers. Moreover, it has been demonstrated that even short-term exposure to nature can improve mood and decrease stress, but the underlying neural mechanisms are currently under investigation. In the present intervention study we examined the effects of a one-hour walk in an urban vs. natural environment on activity in the amygdala, a brain region previously associated with stress (...) processing. Before and after the walk 63 participants underwent an fMRI paradigm inducing social stress. Since there is a pronounced gap in the literature regarding interindividual differences in stress-related neural effects of urban and natural environments, we set out to explore sex differences. We observed that amygdala activity decreased after the walk in nature, but only in women, suggesting that women may profit more from salutogenic effects of nature. Moreover, performance on the arithmetic tasks improved in women after the walk in nature, whereas men performed better after the walk in the urban environment. To our knowledge, this is the first study to report differencial tendencies in men and women concerning the stress-related neural activity as an effect of acute exposure to urban vs. natural environments. Furthermore, our findings highlight the importance of sex differences when exploring effects of the environment on brain function and stress. Evidence for beneficial effects of nature on stress-related brain regions may inform urban design policies to focus on providing more accessible green areas in cities and this study suggests that sex differences in experiencing the environment should be taken into consideration. (shrink)

In this paper, I will argue against Ginsborg's (2014) rejection of divine design in Kant's account of organisms that Kant develops a variety of physico-theological arguments throughout his career whereby he changes the premises of the physico-theological argument in accordance with his changing concepts of the order of nature. In the first part of the paper, I will reconstruct Kant’s ealier attempts to develop a valid physico-theological argument. While Kant recognizes marks of divine design in the unity (...) of the major mechanical orders of the macrocosmos in his early "Theory of the Heavens", in the "Ground of Proof" essay, Kant claims that marks of divine design appear in the unity of the highly complex minor mechanisms in the microcosmos also, in what he later calls ‘organized’ beings. But although the inclusion of organic orders as marks of divine design improves the strength of the physico-theological argument, Kant, as Hume before him, at the same time realizes its syllogistic defectiveness. Its main logical failure consists in the derivation of a non-empirical conclusion, the idea of God, from empirical premises, the observable beauty and order of nature. Consequently, Kant follows a destructive path in the first "Critique", now claiming that the physico-theological argument relies on the ontological argument, whereby the latter is false, and finally avoids the physico-theological argument in the second "Critique". But in the third "Critique", Kant reintroduces a new variant of the physico-theological argument beside the ethicotheological argument. Why so? I will argue in the second part of the paper, that Kant’s new attitude towards the physico-theological argument in the third "Critique" relies, again, on a new insight into the order of nature: Kant’s detection of teleological laws of nature and of the necessary unity of a natural purpose. Both allow Kant to no longer ground the physico-theological argument on a posteriori, empirical premises related to the mechanical macrocosmic or microcosmic orders of nature alone, but on a priori premises instead related to the teleological order of nature and the necessary unity of a natural purpose. The concept of the necessary unity of a natural purpose, though a posteriori and empirical, implies the non-empirical, a priori necessary unity of all properties that can be subordinate to the idea of a natural purpose. Moving the premise of the physico-theological argument from the empirical a posteriori into the non-empirical a priori realm enables Kant to close the logical gap in the earlier versions of his physico-theological argument and to validly derive a conclusion from the a priori moment in the notion of the designed to the a priori notion of its designer. But this argument is not without flaws either. (shrink)

The empiricism of eighteenth-century experimental science meant that the development of scientific instruments influenced the formulation of new concepts; a two-way process for new theory also affected instrument design. This relationship between concept and instrumentation will be examined by tracing the development of electrical instruments and theory during this period. The different functions fulfilled by these devices will also be discussed. Empiricism was especially important in such a new field of research as electricity, for it gave rise to phenomena (...) that could not have been predicted by theory alone. However, the interpretation of these phenomena, and what the natural philosopher thought he observed, were often unconsciously determined by current ideas and attitudes; the interaction between instrumentally induced phenomena and observation was more complex than was realized at the time. The shortcomings of this empirical approach will be discussed. In the case of electricity this became increasingly apparent during the latter part of the century. The many discoveries had to be placed in a unifying framework before new advances could be made. Instruments, however, continued to play an important role in scientific progress, for they made visible what was hidden in nature. (shrink)

This book offers a cutting-edge perspective of design for space to increase astronauts’ wellbeing and performance creating a more sustainable and inclusive environment, but without to forget beauty. The relevant aspect is that these design principles are now also supported and promoted by the European Community with the New European Bauhaus project. It is legitimate to affirm that Space Design is a precursor and inspiring these principles. Space exploration has shown us how results of space research inspire (...) management policies addressing important earth issues such as the responsible use of resources as well as ethical behavior leading to sustainable and inclusive choices. The International Space Station (ISS) is the most successful virtuous example of circular economy and sustainability by almost totally recycling the waste produced. Recently the European Space Agency (ESA) launched the first call for “parastronauts” opening the fly possibilities to people with physical disabilities and thus affirming the principle of inclusion in space. Thanks to design—a bridge between science, technology, and beauty—space opens up to new creative experiments, placing the human being at the center of the interplanetary exploration programs to ensure extra-terrestrial habitats safer, more comfortable, and efficient, where crew will feel “like at home”. (shrink)

Recent work in the cognitive sciences has argued that beliefs sometimes acquire signaling functions in virtue of their ability to reveal information that manipulates “mindreaders.” This paper sketches some of the evolutionary and design considerations that could take agents from solipsistic goal pursuit to beliefs that serve as social signals. Such beliefs will be governed by norms besides just the traditional norms of epistemology. As agents become better at detecting the agency of others, either through evolutionary history or individual (...) learning, the candidate pool for signaling expands. This logic holds for natural and artificial agents that find themselves in recurring social situations that reward the sharing of one’s thoughts. (shrink)

Empty judgements appear to be about something, and inaccurate judgements to report something. Naturalism tries to explain these appearances without positing non-real objects or states of affairs. Biological naturalism explains that the false and the empty are tokens which fail to perform the function proper to their biological type. But if truth is a biological 'supposed to', we should expect designs that achieve it only often enough. The sensory stimuli which trigger the frog's gulp-launching signal may be a poor guide (...) to the signal's content. Teleosemantics should be anti-verificationist. (shrink)

It may be of interest to see what can be done by giving a robot no innate knowledge about its environment or its sensors or effectors and only a totally general learning mechanism, such as reinforcement learning, or some information-reduction algorithm, to see what it can learn in various environments. However, it is clear that that is not how biological evolution designs animals, as McCarthy states.

Eden In Iraq is an environmental design and water remediation project in the marshes of southern Iraq using design and wastewater as bio-art, to create a restorative garden for education, cultural memory, and contemplation. Earmarked for a 20,000 m2 site at Al Manar in the marshes between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, near a probable site of the historic Garden of Eden, Eden in Iraq is a project that brings, art, design, and technology together with culture and (...) history. Drawing on Islamic and Mesopotamian traditions originating in this historically and symbolically charged region, the Eden in Iraq Waste Water Garden is designed to be a syncretic container for ecological and cultural restoration and heritage after the time of war. This paper looks at this project from three inter-related activities, namely, treatment of wastewater suitable for growing a large scale garden, design of the garden starting from the Islamic garden design principles and thirdly, reviving the cultural heritage of the pre-Islamic, Mesopotamian art in contemporary forms.Graphic abstract. (shrink)