And yet evolution has led to the emergence of human intelligence, and intelligence has produced scientific biology, and that must surely be a self-validating concept for scientific biologists. Some evolution would seem to have led to progress, even if all evolutionary change is not necessarily progressive. All science fiction writers and many astronomers assume that if some distant planet has had the right physical conditions for long enough, not only will life evolve, but some of that life will be intelligent. If it is, progress in a profound sense seems to be inbuilt into the very nature of life. This problem is not discussed.
Biology touches on profound philosophical questions on a number of fronts.
One is the awesome power genetic engineering gives us over our physical inheritance, and hence over our whole bodies, and what we are ourselves. By fiddling with our genes, we can select for brains, or beauty, or against homosexuality, and we can produce an infinite series of identical clones from one human being. As more than one author perceives, this raises the question of what is a human being. If a man or woman is nothing more than a highly complicated set of electrical and chemical processes, as Richard Dawkins and Stephen Gould would both seem to imply, then there is no problem. But not everyone seems happy with this.