I got a question from an astute reader:

I picked this passage out of a book as an example to help raise a philosophical question about biology and purpose and intent:

There are many connected species that deal with dead animals in a river system. There are species in the water and species on the land. A kangaroo carcass on the river bank is cleaned up by land/air species like crows, flies and ants, while parts of the kangaroo that fall into the river are cleaned up by water species like eels and yabbies to prevent pollution.

-Sand Talk: How Indigenous Thinking Can Save the World by Tyson Yunkaporta

The phrase “to prevent pollution” at the end is doing a lot of heavy lifting here.

Nowhere on any level that we know of is anyone or anything “intending” to prevent pollution here, by having eels and yabbies do this. The eels and yabbies certainly aren’t thinking “Aha, must prevent river pollution!”

So either
– Nothing and nobody is actually intending anything; the outcome (preventing pollution) just emerges … or perhaps is reinforced by the ecosystem continuing to thrive
or
– Something somewhere actually is intending this, but you and I have no access to it at our level of awareness or consciousness.

Does some entity have to have an “intent” in order for a living system to function like this?

I replied…

Let’s start with the word pollution. In everyday human language it means landfills, plastic, exhaust, and poisons in the water. It usually refers to modern human engineered substances that are very unlike what nature generates on its own. It does not typically refer to things like urine or animal carcasses, based on how I hear the word used most of the time.