Because it is a hare, because...?

And God said, “Let the water teem with living creatures, and let birds fly above the earth across the vault of the sky.” So God created the great creatures of the sea and every living thing with which the water teems and that moves about in it, according to their kinds, and every winged bird according to its kind. And God saw that it was good. God blessed them and said, “Be fruitful and increase in number and fill the water in the seas, and let the birds increase on the earth.” And there was evening, and there was morning—the fifth day. 

And God said, “Let the land produce living creatures according to their kinds: the livestock, the creatures that move along the ground, and the wild animals, each according to its kind.” And it was so. God made the wild animals according to their kinds, the livestock according to their kinds, and all the creatures that move along the ground according to their kinds. And God saw that it was good.

Genesis 1:20-25 (my italics)

In my introductory post, I mentioned the persistent Biblical idea in Christian thought that God has defined what constitutes proper, natural behavior for his creatures, animals and men alike. Moreover, as is obvious in the Genesis passage cited above, the creatures are thought of as representing different kinds, each of which belongs to a kind-specific habitat and is expected to behave in a kind-specific way. I will now turn to the concept of kind in animal kingdom and analyze it as used in a Thomistic context. There are several assumptions there that come out as problematic, most importantly the following:

We can objectively define an individual animal as representative of a certain kind.
We can deduce the natural ends of the individual from its representing a given kind of thing.
What is unnatural for the individual we can likewise deduce from its kind.

A useful starting point for the analysis is provided by the Aristotelian-Thomistic philosopher Edward Feser, who touched upon the issue of naturalness in his blog article Whose nature? Which law? It is probably best to quote the text directly, because it does not get much clearer than this:

"[D]ifferent kinds of material things have their own distinctive natures that determine distinctive kinds of flourishing. Darting about is something a squirrel needs to be able to do in order to flourish as the kind of thing it is, but it is not the sort of thing a tree or grass needs to do in order to flourish as the kinds of thing they are." 

"[No one would] raise silly objections to the effect that if a certain squirrel is born without a leg, then it must be natural for that squirrel to lack four legs, or that if a certain sickly tree fails to sink roots into the ground and ends up falling over or drying out, then it must be natural for that tree to fail to sink roots. For though these circumstances are 'natural' in the sense that they sometimes occur in the ordinary course of nature and arise from factors internal to the things in question rather than from human action or some other external factor, they are nevertheless unnatural in the relevant sense. For a squirrel’s being born without a leg or a tree’s having weak roots constitute failures to realize the ends that define the flourishing of these sorts of thing, and thus are failures fully to realize a thing’s nature. That is why we call them defects in a thing."

My purpose in this post is to ask questions about the explanatory power of such a philosophy of nature. Does it help me, or you for that matter, in conceptualizing observable phenomena in nature? In the Aristotelian-Thomistic scheme of Feser it is the "sort of thing" an individual represents that dictates what is good for it. Thus, a properly natural life is presented as a more or less unilateral relationship in which an individual (subject) acts in accordance to its nature in a specific habitat (object). For example, a squirrel lives darting around in a forest. No attention, however, is being paid to the obvious reverse: that the forest also lives in the squirrel.

I say "the obvious reverse", because it is obvious in the era of evolutionary understanding of organic nature. It certainly was not for Aristotle or Thomas Aquinas, and they are not to blame for this. As much as they placed value on observing nature empirically, their observations were lacking for both volume and precision when compared to ours. They saw around themselves a world of living things that could be organized in categories based on observable similarities between individuals. There were certain characteristics by which one could determine "squirrels" as opposed to other things, and the lack of some characteristic in an individual squirrel could be labeled a "defect". They had a synchronic conception of nature, based on what things looked like at a certain moment in history.

(N.B. I am fully aware that Aristotelian Thomism is not the same as Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas put together. I rather use these men as examples of a premodern scientific approach to nature.)

The rise of evolutionary biology from 19th century onwards has led to a new kind of understanding nature. The process can not be separated from the all-encompassing revolution in Western science, the revolution of history. As a result, we now have a diachronic conception of nature. It is based on what things have looked like during a long period of time in which different moments can be compared to each other. We definitely know that phenotypes of organisms gradually change over time, and this change is brought about by genetic mutations, some of which are advantageous for individuals in their respective habitats and therefore persist in populations. There was a time when ancestors of modern squirrels were quite different, both phenotypically and behaviorally, from modern squirrels, and when there were no beings we would label squirrels. What's more, we cannot tell what the future descendants of modern squirrels will look like and how they will cope in their respective habitats.

To an extent, this kind of understanding has undermined the relevance of synchronic analysis. The results of the latter can be questioned by the very method applied by classical and medieval scientists: making observations and comparing them. The basic difference is that modern observations and comparisons are diachronic rather than synchronic. The results they yield have implications for philosophy of nature and for concepts such as "natural", "kind", "flourishing" and "defect".

Consider the mountain hare. The color of its pelage tends to shift between summer and winter, becoming white to camouflage the hare in snowy conditions. Then, the color shifts back to brown again during springtime. One would probably say that this tendency is beneficial for the hare, for it reduces the risk of falling prey to predators. Avoiding predators surely is one of the ends that, in the Aristotelian-Thomistic idiom, define the flourishing of a mountain hare. A hare with an all-year-round brown pelage is more vulnerable; thus, its inability to shift color constitutes a failure to realize the ends that define its flourishing. It is natural and beneficial for that sort of thing to develop a white winter pelage. Luckily for them, most mountain hares have no problem doing this.

And yet I would not be so sure the hares possessing that ability are so lucky any more. In many parts of the mountain hare range, snowy winters are becoming rare and in any case shorter than before. In southern Sweden, coastal Norway and Finland, or the Baltic countries, one cannot really count on getting snow cover for periods longer than a week at a time. Suddenly, a white hare bouncing around sticks out and becomes an easy prey. A quality that once enabled the hare to reach its natural ends has become a burden. The habitat, in my language, no longer lives in the hare. And then it's probably time for the hare to cease to live in the habitat.

In turn, an inability to change color, being brown all year round, becomes a beneficial feature, even though it was supposed to be a defect for this sort of thing. Some mutation might produce, and probably does produce, mountain hares without a white winter pelage.* These are the hares the new habitat lives in, which lets them continue living in that habitat. Seen from an evolutionary perspective, defects in a thing are not necessarily to be defined by referring to the "sort of thing" in question. In the case of the hare, it is more adequate to speak of defects in a certain individual in relation to its surroundings. Conditions change, therefore the prerequisites for flourishing also change. Perhaps the kind, if there is one, changes as well.

But let us examine some possible objections to this. One could, for example, claim that there are some ends the hare must always be able to reach to flourish, such that remain stable no matter how the habitat changes over time. A mutation constituting a hinder to reach those ends would thus be a defect not just on the individual level but on the kind level as well. Lacking a leg would indeed be a good example: an effective camouflage would not make a big difference if the hare could not run in the first place.

However, the ability to flee from predators seems not to be something a hare would need because it is a hare. Rather, it is a useful ability common to many different animals not occupying an apex predator position in the food chain. It is not being a hare that determines the more stable ends of the creature, but rather – again – the position it takes in relation to other things. Which, in turn, is mutable over time. We need not consider the possibility of a Monty-Pythonian killer rabbit evolving in the distant future. Suffice it to keep in mind how the lousy and weak ancient hominids eventually became superb killers with no natural enemies: modern men.

A more radical means to invalidate my evolutionary argument questioning the existence of kind-specific ends could be denying the kinds themselves to be subject to empirical, scientific inquiry. This would mean that the existence of a kind, the mountain hare for instance, is independent of the individuals we can observe and study. Metaphysical facts concerning kinds of things could not be altered by scientific observations, but they would provide a suitable context for interpreting those observations. More importantly, one could claim, there are no natural sciences without an underlying philosophy of nature: thus, it cannot be science that dictates our choice of philosophical approach, whether it be Thomistic or something else.

I proceed not by rejecting this immunity of philosophy. On the contrary, I might accept it, at least for a while. For even if philosophy cannot be corrected by science, any given philosophy could still face major difficulties processing the scientific data we have. I suspect that will be the case with the approach illustrated by quotes from Prof. Feser. If some facts established by scientific research are not intelligible in a certain metaphysical framework, that framework probably has to be modified, even if one fancies to grant philosophy an epistemological position superior to science.

Feser explicitly refers to an individual, actual squirrel as a "kind of thing". A simple question would be: Since when have squirrels been the kind of thing they are? Should some animals be identified as the supposedly first squirrels in history, one might ask why not consider their immediate ancestors squirrels as well. It would be impossible to provide an unquestionable answer, because there is no objective "squirrelness" that scientists could detect. It does not read in the DNA of any creature that it is a squirrel. Thus, one could entertain the thought that such creatures we call squirrels are not necessarily squirrels, i.e. do not represent a specific kind of thing. They might lack a kind-identity altogether or share it with all of their ancestors, down to the first I-don't-know-what. Does that kind of a philosophy add anything to our understanding of what's going on in the natural world – that is, going on independently of our conceptual schemes? Speaking for myself, I think it does not.

While nothing said so far disproves the existence of natural kinds or essences, a significant epistemological problem has been pointed out, and it comes with ethical consequences. For as long as we cannot identify objectively the kind of an individual creature, we are not entitled to make strong claims as to what natural, given ends it should realize. We don't really get to taste the normative, teleological fruits that the Thomistic concept of kind seeks to deliver. Without them, the latter's nutritional value seems rather meager: it's like a hollow apple without peel, yet it "is there".

Professor Sarah Coakley was challenged in a similar manner as she applied, in a decidedly Aristotelian-Thomistic fashion, the concepts of "kind" and "flourishing" in her Gifford Lectures 2012 (see the 1st May lecture). She agreed that the difficulty of splitting actual evolutionary continua according to conventional taxonomy does pose problems for thinking in terms of kinds, but did not abandon the notion straight away. Instead, she suggested that we could allow for evolutionary transitional phases between different kinds. Perhaps, then, a kind would be an essentially social thing, becoming manifest not in a single individual but in a population with a relatively stable ecological niche, and thus relatively stable "goals" or "virtues". Supposing this, however, does not seem to solve the problem of reliable identification. What's more, it opens up the possibility that our own kind will enter a transitional phase, eventually becoming something else.

Even if we are no clearly definable kind, we at least do have some changing ends dictated by the conditions we live in. What makes this interesting is the tendency of our surroundings to become more and more constructed and conditioned by ourselves. This has been an ongoing trend for a very long period of time, probably millions of years. The more we create the challenges we face and must adapt to, the more it is we who also define what constitutes human flourishing. This is a subject I am definitely going to take up in a future post, now having considered animals in general.


The Bible quote is from biblegateway.com

* The Irish mountain hare population actually already exhibits a brown pelage all year round. Currently, biologists discuss its possible status as a different species. But would such a status make it a different kind of thing?