James Barham, IMO any good study is question driven, so I’ll offer some of mine up and then I hope you will volunteer a few. I’ll number the paragraphs to facilitate the references. I will also bold referenced phrases this time. Let me know if you can see the bolding. I think Yahoo is too primitive for that, but I’m giving it a try.

·        What do you think Ross means by “spread-out causation”? (para 3)

·        Do you have a good handle on the distinction between resultant and emergent? (para 4)

·        By “obediential capacity” Ross simply refers to potency (or “dispositions” as modern philosophers call it). Do you agree?

·        What do you think Ross means by “secondary causes” in this sentence: “Evolution is a goal-directed spread-out way of coming to be from secondary causes” (para 6)

My conjecture about Ross’ meaning of “spread out” is that he is thinking of what biologists call “hierarchical selection”, a system embraced by scholars like Plotkin (whom Jeffrey Schloss talks about) and repudiated by folks like Richard Dawkins who believed that only our genes endure enough for selection to have time to work its magic. Biologists argue about the “units of selection” and one of the big debates of recent decades was between guys like Dawkins who argued in the Selfish Gene that genes are the units of select and higher-level forms are just “vehicles” (presumably his brainchild, the cultural “meme” would also be a vehicle) VS. guys like Stephen J. Gould, a paleontologist who argued that larger units (like social groups or, as Darwin himself had it, organisms) can be units of selection. Plotkin comes back at the gene crowd and says, “Sure. Only genes last long enough to account for variation in the basic nucleotide sequence. However, ****learning**** systems like the immune system or, obviously, the brain, are higher-level systems to assume the role of **control** that characterizes a unit of selection. These systems allow the organism to respond adaptively to much more rapidly changing environments, and to do so without requiring genetic change. The latter moves at glacial speed.

What do you think he means?

(1)  Could humans have evolved, yet be capable of life forever with God? ¹ Evolutionary hypotheses invite us away from the baleful ambiguities of dualism, from talk of our bodies and souls as if they were two things, with the soul the true self, the body a disposable shell. They challenge us, suggesting ways as well, to reconceive our nature more coherently in view of our conjectured origins and our revealed destiny.² They are, as Teilhard de Chardin thought, a "light" to the theologian.'

1.1. A QUESTION OF HUMAN NATURE, NOT CAUSATION

(2)         The problem concerns the nature of man, particularly as understood by the Catholic Church and other important Christian churches: that humans are by nature both material beings, not ghosts in machines, and, though embodied, apt for unending life with God; that for any of this no change in what we are is required or is even possible. (I do not explore dualist readings of that conception in this essay.)

(3)         The problem is only apparently about how humans are produced originally, whether by evolution or direct creation; it is substantively about how to describe our nature consistently and intelligibly. 1 am looking for an account of human nature that literally fits the Christian conception I mentioned, as to the undeniable materiality, mortality, and unity of the person. Imagining evolution as systems of spread-out causation, where complexity builds rapidly by simple rules that "follow" an overall bias, say, natural selection, "frees the mind". It reminds one that an adequate account of human nature must place humans squarely at home in the physical universe, perhaps even among the objectives to which all nature is directed.

(4)  I have narrowed the issue a little, emphasizing that intelligent beings, and probably living beings in general, are not merely resultant but emergent from micromatter and have active powers not possessed by their microparts. These parts, in any mere aggregation or physicochemical interaction alone, are incapable of such active powers, but in "obediential" capacity (see I, 6 below) are a perfect medium for them. So most of this essay is about some conditions for emergent being, which could, of course, appear in nature by evolution.

(5)  "Scientific" materialists think humans are not suitable for eternal life. They think humans, like plants, are composed of structures that pass away with their realizations. Biblical fundamentalists think humans are not suitable for evolution from prehumans but are fit to be made only directly by God. Maybe, indeed, enspiriting is specially related to God (so I believe). Still, humans and all material living things belong to one natural system along with inanimate things. Humans are, nevertheless, apt for life with God. ⁴

(6)  Evolution is a goal-directed spread-out way of coming to be from secondary causes. It is like a natural system of assembly lines and model-years, with an "inner" account of design changes (perhaps some version of "random variation", "adaptation", and "natural selection"). The processes might even, for all we know, be ordered to a cosmic outcome, as embryonic development is ordered to the mature organism.

(7)  Living things generally seem to belong to a “spread-out" system of design changes. In saying that, I make no attempt to deny that details of evolutionary theory, especially those relating microgenetic changes to gross organ changes, are sketchy and in some respects anomalous. ⁵ Still, it would be an unusual living organism that could not belong to any evolutionary system. That is because material living things replicate their designs (with variations) in their offspring, ensuring design preservation when generation is successful, along with inevitable design changes due to the functioning and malfunctioning of the reproduction process. So we look to the nature of humans. Are humans apt to have evolved from prehuman life forms? Is there something about humans that makes it impossible that they are the output of the causal systems characteristic of living things generally? ⁶

Comments? I’ll try to follow up with a comment tomorrow. Too tired at the moment.  :-/