KANT'S CRITIQUE OF TELEOLOGY IN BIOLOGICAL EXPLANATION

30 Kant's Reading of Biology
not been able to mate and produce fertile progeny with members of
other varieties. Such varieties must, according to Buffon, have had a
common origin, even though they possess different hereditary
traits. The original species must have split up into lineages or races
which transmit hereditarily their distinguishing characteristic
traits. In such races new characters have arisen which apparently
can be transmitted in generation. Furthermore, some of these
hereditary traits seemed clearly to be purposive adaptations to the
environment. Thus the question arose: How can new purposive
properties be added to an organizational form in such a way as to be
passed on in generation?
The empirical phenomenon that occasioned and was used to
illustrate this general question of biological theory can be sketched
rather briefly: Black Africans and white Europeans can mate and
produce fertile progeny who bear traits from both sides and pass
these traits on; both races thus belong to the same biological species.
Although white Europeans (the Portuguese) who have been living in
Africa for 200 years are burned brown by the sun, their children are
at birth just as white as those born in Europe; the darker color of the
skin is not inherited. The black Africans brought to Europe have not
grown pale in the European climate; they transmit their dark skin
unchanged. Since both races have a common descent (and since the
common ancestor is supposed to have been somewhat similar to the
present Europeans, 24 the Africans must at some time have become
black. Kant also assumes that dark skin is a useful adaptation to the
climate of the tropics. The question is thus: How could the Africans
adapt themselves to the tropics? Why don't the Europeans today do
the same? And why don't the Africans become white (again) in
Europe? Or more generally: How can the environment occasion
heritable adaptations, and why can't they be reversed?
Since he doubts that the laws of mechanics can explain the
first origin of organic structures, Kant assumes a — somewhat
indeterminate — original organization. If one assumes that the
environment can change the hereditary organization by acting
mechanically upon it, then there is no reason why it should not in
24 Kant may well be the only European thinker of his time who seriously considered
that the white European might not necessarily be the prototype of the species
and that whites and blacks might be descended from a common ancestor that no
longer exists. Nonetheless, he believed as an "empirical" hypothesis that the
original stock was "white and brown haired." (W 6,28; Ak 2,441)