The bacterial flagellum is a striking example of integrated biological teleology. The appearance of contrivance in such systems shouldn’t be seen as in explanatory competition with evolutionary biology.
Evolutionary mechanisms explain how structures like the rotor–stator complexes, hook, and filament can arise through cumulative selection and the reuse of functional subcomponents. However, this doesn’t eliminate the deeper question of why the natural world possesses the...
...law-governed regularities, physicochemical affordances, and convergent propensities that make such evolvable systems possible in the first place. The flagellar motor’s capacity to harness ion gradients to generate torque through conformational changes exemplifies...
...biological teleology as understood within evolutionary theory itself, where functions are real and indispensable to explanation. If the wider teleology of the cosmos that underwrites chemical bonding, protein folding, and energy transduction is plausibly interpreted within...
...a theistic framework, then the products of that teleology, including complex molecular machines, can reasonably be taken to provide some probabilistic support for a purposive account of reality. On this account, evolutionary explanation and design discourse operate at...
...different explanatory levels, and the success of natural selection doesn’t render purposive interpretation superfluous but reframes it as grounded in the deeper conditions that make an evolutionary biosphere intelligible at all.
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