Evolutionary Foundations for Philosophy

For the past year and a half I have been digging into the meaning of four little words. What I found awaiting me was astonishing ... and almost unbearably exciting. These four words, descriptors of the process of evolution and the emergent qualities it engenders, have revolutionary implications for both science and philosophy. These implications are consistent with well- established scientific theory because they undergird, rather than displace, our productive scientific traditions. In this essay I will explain something of the genesis of this project, its philosophical and scientific bases, and some of the promises it holds:

• Fusing the competing views of the evolutionary process -- gradualism, punctuated equilibrium, "selfish" genes, cooperation.
• Uniting all the sciences -- physical, biological and social a common conceptual foundation.
• Taking materialist philosophy the next quantum step toward a fully consistent view of the universe and its processes -- and life and its purpose.
• Suggesting new, non-traditional, functional definitions of the various branches of philosophy.
• Accounting for the evolution of competing belief systems, and explaining how certain psychological barriers have prevented this synthesis from coming to light sooner.
• Providing sound evolutionary roots for cross-cultural acceptance of shared ethical principles and goals for humanity. I fully realize that these claims must sound grandiose, but I trust that the promise they hold will at least inspire a fair hearing.

Our collective sciences have produced a convincing picture of an evolutionary universe. Hydrogen condensed from the quantum soup produced by the Big Bang, was forged into the other elements in the fusion furnaces of several generations of stars, which elements have in turn been integrated into myriads of molecules of ever-increasing complexity. Certain large organic molecules emerged which made copies of themselves from simpler molecules nearby; occasional accidental variants of those molecules retained the ability, and the marvelous explosion of biological diversity began.

Philosophy must take into account the discoveries of science. This is the enlightened attitude of the prevailing philosophical tradition today (humanism, realism, naturalism, materialism and their variants; for brevity's sake, I'll sacrifice precision and refer henceforth to this family of philosophies as "materialism," which I take to be the most accurate of the lot). Materialist philosophers have managed to accept the fact of evolution of physical traits, and are struggling under the compelling arguments that social traits (Ruse, 1985), and even individual human behavior and mental function (Rosenfeld, 1988; Miller, 1983) are the products of evolutionary process.

Apparently random quantum events, such as the creation of pairs of virtual particles (Hawking, 1988), and seemingly random fluctuations in large-scale phenomena, such as weather or population dynamics, represent the few remaining challenges to a model of the universe which is a completely deterministic evolutionary progression of events following the Big Bang. But the continuous appearance of virtual particles throughout the universe leads to absurd infinities of mass (Hawking, p. 157); and the emerging science of chaos (Gleick, 1987) demonstrates that very complex deterministic systems produce the same apparently chaotic behavior that we would expect to result from random influences -- and therefore randomness is no longer required to explain them.

In short, the evolutionary process has served as such an excellent explanation for all aspects of existence that I believe it deserves to be the focal point of today's world view. I would consider the premature introduction of any other explanation (before evolutionary possibilities are thoroughly explored) to be a violation of Ockham's razor.

My concern in this project is not so much to argue this sweeping claim for universal applicability of evolutionary theory as to urge that its implications be more thoroughly appreciated in philosophy and science. A growing feeling that something fundamental was missing from evolutionary theory led me to publish an essay entitled "Survival of the Whichest? Toward an Evolutionary Philosophy for the 21st Century," (Van Cleave, 1988a) in which I set forth my complaints about the state of philosophy and some observations on the nature of life and the evolutionary process:

• Anthropocentrism, the bane of scientists throughout history, still impedes our understanding of ourselves and our universe. As a footnote to Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (which showed how such revolutions required a radical change in world-view -- a paradigm shift -- of thinkers of the day), I argued that the real upheaval of scientific advancement results because people have to rebuild their self- images, invariably losing a large measure of self-importance.
• Epistemology, metaphysics, aesthetics, and particularly ethics need reworking based on our knowledge of developmental psychology and evolutionary processes.
• Where does natural selection lead us? "I've identified three fundamental evolutionary attractions -- attributes which are evident, either singly or in combinations, in every successful evolutionary adaptation I've encountered. They are excellence, variety and security. Every human trait, every social urge, every animal instinct is directed toward one or more of the three. Some examples:

"Freedom is variety of opportunity. Truth is an excellent match between reality and opinion. Kinship extends security within its ranks. Specialization is always in pursuit of excellence. Diversified investments -- variety again. Free markets -- variety and excellence. Education pursues variety and/or excellence. Peace is the secure opposite of strife. Justice aims to provide security of liberty and property to the widest variety of people under its care."

"More examples, this time from a negative perspective: Inbreeding violates variety. Murder, theft, assault and the like are threats to security. Laziness thwarts excellence. Greed, in pursuit of variety or excellence, may victimize others (violate security) and involve waste (anything but an excellent use of resources).

"On a larger scale: Socialism aims for economic security for all persons, but fails to motivate excellence or achieve variety. Capitalism institutionalizes variety, motivates excellence, but often neglects security. Dogma, be it pollitical or religious, promises security, claims excellence, but exorcises variety. Imperialism pursues variety and security for one group at the expense of another."

Then on to the crux of the problem: "Our appetites, once valuable forces for survival, are now indulged for their own sake, out of all proportion to need. Runaway consumption and self-absorbed thrill-seeking are the symptoms of a species out of its natural element.

"We must consciously adopt, as mankind's common goal, the same pursuit of excellence and variety from a basis of security by which Nature has guided us all along. Civilized man has removed himself from Nature's harsh but effective stewardship. We are now responsible for our own evolution."

In the year since "Whichest" was published I have scoured the available literature on evolution, both from the philosophical and scientific perspectives. That time has been insufficient for any degree of thoroughness, but sufficient to satisfy me that I was pursuing something of great importance. Philosophical positions on evolution I encountered ranged from the hopelessly teleological (e.g., Pierre Teilhard de Chardin) through the more moderately teleological (Henri Bergson, Herbert Spencer, A.N. Whitehead) to the more realistic (T.H. Huxley and most of today's materialists). The literature teemed with references to security, variety, excellence and derivative terms, but in ways that were descriptive of specific situations, showed an intuitive appreciation of their value in those situations (often mistakenly teleological), but never identified them as the only basic values underpinning evolution, and certainly never attempted to examine their fundamental meanings in the way I had.

Also, whenever I encountered a misconception, the reasons for its existence were apparent to me. In considering this, I became convinced that a philosophy should be able to account for the existence of competing philosophies; after all, they are a subset of human behavior, which any successful philosophy must convincingly explain. I began to realize that I was developing an evolutionary philosophy which showed every indication of being able to do just that.

To abbreviate the repetitive "security, variety and excellence" litany, I've chosen to call these evolutionary attractors, collectively (and provisionally), triadaptors. Similarly, triadaptive modifications are those which enhance an organism in all three respects over the long term. A quick abstract analysis of the triadaptors will show that, while they aren't absolutely fundamental concepts, they are functionally fundamental where life is concerned:

The universe is process -- change as a function of time. Change occurs in states, forms and interactions of matter and energy. Yet there is also continuity -- not an opposite of change, but relatively slow change -- in systems that persist in essentially stable form for an appreciable time. All objects of our experience are such systems. Life, too, is such a system, but is unique in that its form can replicate itself, creating a multiplicity of systems bearing the same continuity of form. For life, security is the "goal" of continued continuity, and is therefore primary. Changes between generations occur, and they are changes in either quality (excellence) or quantity (variety): Changes in the essential attributes of the form are qualitative, and may improve the durability of the system (excellence) or enhance its ability to generate viable replicas (variety). Changes in the type or number of essential attributes of the form are quantitative, and if they replicate well into a new generation, add to the variety of living forms; they may also have more excellent durability. Both excellence and variety, then, promote security. We'll see some ethical (and other) applications of this in a moment.

My readings in science, spanning philosophy of biology, chaos, cosmology, psychology and other related fields in addition to evolution theory, while treating the triadaptors in the he same descriptive, non-abstract way as did philosophers, was supportive of my thesis at every turn; and, more importantly, it led me to a new revelation:

Natural selection, treated as the basis of evolution, is conceptually a "second tier." Underlying it is the more abstract concept of qualitative "fit" between an organism and its environment -- that on which natural selection acts. The perception of a one-way receptiveness of an environment toward a species is faulty; the species acts on the environment, too -- affecting other populations in the ecosystem by taking and providing food (and in some more subtle, indirect ways). Species select their environments, too, by migration. The affinity, or lack thereof, between a species and its environment is bidirectional and mutual.

The same relationship had been apparent in my earlier reading of laissez faire economics (Friedman, 1980): the supply/demand equation (an analogy often remarked upon by evolutionists). Extending the principle, more examples flooded forth -- symbiosis; endorphin action; planetary orbits and Lagrange points; viruses and antibodies; complex ecosystems; magnetism; crystal structure; molecular bonds; critical mass; market niche; states of matter; stages of psychological development; inflation rates and gold prices; catalysts; talents and career choices; superconductivity ... the list was endless.

I borrowed the term valence from elementary chemistry as the one which best conveyed the mutual affinity or repulsion, the potential energy in dynamic balance, that this general concept embodied. All the basic forces -- electromagnetism, gravity and the strong and weak nuclear forces -- possess this mutuality whereby all elements of a system actively contribute to the net force of the system, and none can be considered to be the passive object of forces exerted by the rest. Newton's third law applies not just to physics, but to all the sciences; one need only point out that the key is interaction rather than action and reaction (which imply sequentiality rather than simultaneity).

Save for the universe considered as a whole, there are no completely isolated valences. The objects we deal with are systems whose binding forces are so strong as to render the forces of external interactions practically insignificant by comparison. Because of this they have an apparent boundedness. The internal valence associated with the system is essentially the net binding force, and can be called strong or weak according to the relative amount of force required to perturb the system. The external valence of a system is the interactive potential it has vis-a-vis any other system, which can also be relatively strong or weak. This latter sense is the most useful in discussing evolution, allowing one to examine either the "opportunity" offered by some aspect of the environment or the "potential" a particular trait had for future success. Scientists were no strangers to valence; they just hadn't "named" it, thereby giving it independent abstract existence.

Different levels of integration in living organisms have long been acknowledged, from the Aristoteleans to present-day materialists (Sellars et al., pp. 245, 547). Alex B. Novikoff expressed it well (Sellars et al., p. 226): "Each level of organization possesses unique properties of structure and behavior which, though dependent on the properties of the constituent elements, appear only when these elements are combined in the new system.... The laws describing the unique properties of each level are qualitatively distinct, and their discovery requires methods of research and analysis appropriate to the particular level." Thus, the individual properties of sodium and chlorine are altered in combination to produce the very different set of properties -- a new valence -- associated with table salt. I'm convinced that the new properties could be explained, in principle, by a calculus of the most basic constituent forces; in practice, however, that would be impossible -- and the emerging properties invariably behave with consistency that admits classification as new "laws."

As with the triadaptors, valence as a concept underlying all the sciences was missing from the scientific literature. Like Newton's apple or Archimedes' bath, all had been familiar, useful fixtures in the scientific domain -- underappreciated until someone thought to ask whether they might hold some hidden deeper meaning. In evolution theory, the notion of valence as I construe it was intuitively subsumed by the term "natural selection," and the clear analogy with the behavior of free markets was treated as a fortuitous coincidence rather than as due to a shared fundamental guiding principle. Kurt Lewin saw the versatility of the word "valence," but applied it in the context of intentional interaction between an individual and aspects of its environment (Lewin, 1968, p. 88). Elliott Sober deserves credit for coming the closest by arguing that evolution should be considered as a "theory of forces" (Sober, 1984, ch. 1), though the descriptions of forces are essentially transitive rather than mutual interactions.

Scientists have long applied this concept of valence in an intuitive way. From known information they adduce that a valence may exist, then create an experiment to test for it. If I know that methane is produced by combining a carbon atom with four hydrogen atoms, and that hydrogen ions carry a charge of -1, I can predict that chlorine ions, also -1, will likely combine with carbon to make carbon tetrachloride; I predict a valence for the latter molecule on the basis of my knowledge that a strong valence for the former exists. If I suspect the existence of cosmic strings, I will look for a sequence of identical pairs of astronomical objects, explainable only by the intervention of a long gravitational lens.

Valence easily settled the debate among evolutionary theorists: What is the mechanism of evolution? Pure Darwinian gradualism (Korey, 1984)? The punctuated equilibrium of Stephen J. Gould and Niles Eldredge (Gould, 1980; Eldredge, 1985)? Richard Dawkins' "selfish" genes (1976)? Or perhaps cooperation, as Kropotkin would have had it (Bowler, 1986, p. 211)? The answer was simply that all of these mechanisms operate in evolution. Which applies in a given situation is a function of the valence between a species and its environment. A well-established species in a benign, stable environment will change gradually, for mutations will be diluted by virtue of what I call (with no apologies to Spencer) "survival of the mediocre." Under conditions of catastrophic upheaval, punctuated equilibrium will govern as only those individuals able to survive under radically changed circumstances will contribute to the next generation, and adaptive variations prove significantly more valuable. Selfish genes, if benign (as repetitive strands of DNA appear to be), will persist indefinitely; if maladaptive, such as the PSR gene in the Nasonia vitripennis wasp (Discover, Dec. 188, p. 15), they will perpetuate themselves right out of existence. And cooperation is clearly the basis of all social behavior -- perhaps the most important evolutionary development of all -- which seems to emerge whenever there is a valence for divided labor.

Now let us consider these evolutionary principles as they apply to the various branches of philosophy.