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Excellent discussion on the limitations of Darwinism, relying on an unexamined view of the role of mathematics in the description of life forms. There is no doubt that mathematics can quantify almost every material thing and its motion, but there is a doubt about its relevance to the kind of explanation of 1. life forms per se , 2. the explanation of the intelligence of life forms, and 3. explanations of consciousness that we find in Aristotle and Kant, who both saw the limitations of mathematics in this arena of Philosophy.
Psuche for Kant was categorically understood as a self-causing agent which, in the case of the human form of life, possessed powers of mind that fell into three domains, namely sensibility, understanding and reason. Animals possessed a form of nonlinguistic sensible “intelligence” with limited powers, and humans possessed an integrated battery of powers of sensibility, understanding and reason that enabled the formation of hylomorphic theory, Kantian theory, Wittgensteinian theory, that could never be reduced to any basic code that we find in information theory or genetic theory. This is not to deny that chains of amino acids in the end produce brains, and the organs of living systems, that constitute the different animal species. It is rather to insist that, what in the above discussion, was referred to as top-down accounts, give rise to a completely different kind of discussion, which would acknowledge the limitations of Darwin who certainly provided us with the law of natural selection that helps us explain the existence of the populations of animals we see around us today, and also helps to explain the fossils of extinct species we uncover. We recognise the American concern over the issue of Intelligent design, is still to some extent raging, without making any reference to the ancient Greek relation of what we call intelligence to “areté”(virtue, doing the right thing at the right time in the right way). Bringing areté into the discussion obviously also demands the introduction of other terms such as diké(justice), arché(principle) and epistemé(Knowledge). Aristotles theory rests upon an understanding of these terms, and might be an example of a non-theological top down theory that might have contributed to the discussion above when it ground to a halt upon being confronted with the demand for a more philosophical form of debate. The Philosophers view of Divinity, e.g. Aristotle’s, Kant’s and Wittgenstein’s accounts, make room for both Darwin and God without any need to turn these into dialectical opposites. All three Philosophers also agree in their rejection of both materialistic attempts to account for the issues of life, intelligence, and consciousness, as well as dualistic retreats into analytical psychology, phenomenology or theology. The Philosophers view of the divine does not share the view that everything that was created was, as one of the interviewees put it , “screwed up by man”. This is one theological view, but not one shared by Aristotle or Kant, for whom mans telos (his final cause), sufficed to characterise him as “good” in the formal essence-specifying sense, even if the manifestation of the consequences of his good nature would take a long time to materialise.
In short the ghosts of Aristotle hung in the air of the above discussion waiting for an opportunity to materialise which never came.