Reply to comment

"Purpose" is a very sticky term in biology, in my experience (said experience being some background in the history of evolutionary biology). It's a very understandable holdover from Aristotelian teleology, and seemingly "common-sense," but what evolution, culture, and society have deemed "common-sense" is not necessarily valid. A quick perusal of quantum mechanics or relativity will shatter any fundamental confidence in common-sense notions right quick, to say nothing of the still-"common-sense" notion that the sun goes around the earth. It sure looks that way!

Without getting too heavily philosophical, it's simply impossible to delineate any sense of purpose -- in the human-intentional sense -- in evolution. It's far more algorithmical: a mathematical series defined by 2x + 1 that starts at, say, 3, may be said to be "destined" to generate 7; it may even be said that its "purpose" is to generate 7, but 7 is simply the logical outcome, given the parameters.

Furthermore, evolution is a combination of the algorithmic and contingent. Which distances it even further from "purpose" and "destiny". You can predict what 2x + 1 will generate (I know my math notation is wrong here; just roll with the idea behind what I'm saying!); you cannot predict evolution. You can, somewhat, at small time-scales and with extremely limited parameters, of course, but that predictability falls precipitously as parameters broaden and time-scales lengthen.

Conway Morris and a host of other evolutionists aside, modern evolutionary theory simply doesn't provide any "purpose" whatsoever. Even a softer version of "purpose" -- "progress" -- is a very sticky debate, mostly semantic. "Trends" are real, of course, but just as the trend of 2x + 1 doesn't reveal any purpose whatsoever, neither does any evolutionary trend.

To complicate things further, though, at some point, intentional beings (or beings that would like to think themselves intentional) noted their language-faculty, and billions of these beings have been tweaking it in large and small ways, collectively and individually, for thousands of years. Whether all of this intentionality adds up to "purpose" or not seems rather unlikely to me, unless you radically limit the parameters and players to, say, a bunch of linguists trying to invent an international language (Esperanto).

Our language reflects our belief in our own intentionality (a topic I won't even broach here). Unfortunately, we have to use such intention-drenched language to describe intention-free biological traits like language (or feathers), striving to use language to clearly communicate the non-common-sense notion that language is not "for" communication.