>purpose is very much constrained to concious design.
Not true. Natural selection can produce the same results as artificial selection. They are both effectively the same process where in one scenario the guiding hand is human and the other scenario nature is the guiding hand.
If both nature and artificial selection evolved a mechanism that is very specifically and efficiently able to do one thing and one thing only does it mean that the thing evolved has no purpose? No it doesn't.
Either way we're getting into a linguistic and philosophical argument on the meaning of the word "purpose." These are traps. Ultimately we begin arguing about the definition of an ambiguous word thinking that the argument is profound. It's like all those arguments about "What is life." Pointless, "life" is the word that is loaded and ambiguous; any debate of that nature is simply an argument about the intricacies of a vocabulary word.
Not true. Natural selection can produce the same results as artificial selection. They are both effectively the same process where in one scenario the guiding hand is human and the other scenario nature is the guiding hand.
If both nature and artificial selection evolved a mechanism that is very specifically and efficiently able to do one thing and one thing only does it mean that the thing evolved has no purpose? No it doesn't.
Either way we're getting into a linguistic and philosophical argument on the meaning of the word "purpose." These are traps. Ultimately we begin arguing about the definition of an ambiguous word thinking that the argument is profound. It's like all those arguments about "What is life." Pointless, "life" is the word that is loaded and ambiguous; any debate of that nature is simply an argument about the intricacies of a vocabulary word.