Biological and Cultural Proper Functions in Comparative Perspective 43
personal, portable clock we now know as a watch could be realistically designed, let
alone made.
The point is this: Positing an intelligent agent with an understanding of the structural
design and proper function of a watch and its parts barely begins to explain the watch
found on the deserted beach, because the existence of such an agent itself requires an
explanation. An agent capable of designing or making a watch is not even remotely con-
ceivable without the long history of incrementally built-up technologies sketched here,
since no human agent, however intelligent, could possibly have invented such a thing
utterly from scratch. In other words, a watch may imply a watchmaker, but a watchmaker
in turn implies a cultural history during which the requisite technological resources and
techniques are incrementally built up through the work of many intelligent agents who did
not have in mind the structural design or proper functions of watches or their parts. Thus
the existence of watches is not explained by appeal to a watchmaker but rather by appeal
to the history of technologies and techniques on which watchmakers are utterly dependent
and without which their production of watches is inconceivable. So artifacts are the result
of long-term incremental processes that are insensitive to their ultimate proper functions,
just as in the case of biological traits. The only difference between biology and culture is
that the increments are implemented by intelligent agents in the latter case. But there is
nothing to be made of this for the purposes of a counterargument, because those intelligent
agents—early metallurgists, for instance—are sensitive only to the features of the incre-
ment they are implementing and not to the whole process that will result in a more complex
material culture at some far future point. So an analogue of Cummins’s argument goes
through for the building of items of material culture just as it did for the spread of such
items.
Let us summarize our results. Standard theories of biological proper function appeal to
natural selection to pick out proper functional performances. But this appeal to natural
selection has encountered a number of serious problems, all of which have analogues in
cultural selection. In particular, neither natural selection nor cultural selection actually
does pick out the proper functional performances. The most reasonable response is to
abandon selection as criterial for proper function in favor of a weaker standard. Buller’s
weak etiological theory of biological proper function, which appeals to fi tness instead of
natural selection, is thus a logical alternative. Can it be adapted to proper function in
material culture?
3.3 Fitness
Buller formulates the weak etiological theory thus:
A current token of a trait T in an organism O has the [proper] function of producing an
effect of type E just in case past tokens of T contributed to the fi tness of O’s ancestors by