Who Were the Sea Peoples?

Contra Noah Millman, who recently claimed , "we can’t rely naively on an Aristotelean teleology which we now know has no empirical basis" (God knows what he meant here!), teleology pervades modern biology, and there is absolutely no sign it can be gotten rid of. Take this report of recent sloth research in the NY Times : I find at least the following uses of teleology in explaining what the sloths are up to, with the key teleological words highlighted: "[the three-toed sloth] has carved out a remarkably ingenious mode of life in the treetops" (Something is ingenious in that it achieves an end very economically.) " Why then does the sloth take such a risk every week?" (For what end ?) "They started by trying to understand what would compel the sloth to brave the dangers of a weekly visit to ground zero." (To what end would it do so?) "Rather, they assumed, it was to favor a critical component of the sloth’s ecosystem, the pyra...

In my yard in Pennsylvania, there is a sudden explosion of spiders that are bright orange, bright yellow, and black. I have never seen such creatures in my yard before this year. Why are they suddenly here? There are several possible answers, but among those I thought of was "Global warming: perhaps my yard was out of their range until just recently, but they have been moving north or up in elevation." And then I wondered just how spiders would know that they could move north? Were they getting weather reports? Little arachno-capitalist real estate agents were pitching them space between my fence railings? And then I realized the answer lies in marginalism: in whatever range the spiders can occupy, there must be some spiders who are just on the edge of making it: they are on marginal land, where they just scrape by. When they have their 247,000 babies or whatever enormous amount they have, those babies disperse and some of them wind up settling down between fence post...

"Like most summer activities, the frogs' vocal signaling requires an impressive expenditure of energy, and therefore presumably has an advantage." -- Bernd Heinrich, Summer World , p. 40 So, here is a prominent biologist stating a general rule for evaluating traits: if the trait is expensive in terms of energy required, by default we should assume it provides something important to the species in question. And, of course, the more widespread the trait is, the more we should suspect it is adaptive. So, someone who believes evolutionary biology is the cat's meow, and finds a widespread human practice, so widespread that we have never encountered a single culture where it is absent, and one into which a huge amount of energy is poured, would have to say it is most likely adaptive, right? Wrong! Not if the practice is religion! Then this universal, high-energy consuming activity turns out to be a social pathology ! Everyone does it not because it has helped us to s...

"And, by the age of Mill and Marx indeed, even in Ricardo's time and Malthus's later editions -- the level of the subsistence wage rate was freed from physiological dimensions and became a dummy variable shot through with conventional standards of life hankered after by (some) workers. At this stage a meaningful false theory had been replaced by a meaningless nontheory that could never be vindicated or rejected by any pattern of historical facts." -- Paul Samuelson, "Modes of Thought in Economics and Biology," American Economics Review