Darwinism

The present philosophical and anthropological endeavor aims to radically reinterpretation the constitution of humanity and the human being, portraying it as a trajectory of fierce virulence—a turbulent, staged ontification unfolding at the highly tense, profoundly confrontational confluence of raw biological immanence and the trans-biological leap of the mind and spirit. Transcending reductive, elementally scientistic paradigms, this work introduces a confrontational theoretical model: an ontological-agonistic perspective. Through this analytical lens, the dramatic rupture of man from nature and the subsequent genesis of (...) culture and civilization are no longer conceptualized as passive, harmonious biological adaptations to environmental pressures. Instead, they are recognized as the direct product of catastrophic ontological tears and phylogenetic fractures, triggered by a constitutive anatomical vulnerability and incessantly governed by the titanic collision between the dismergent force (the centrifugal vector rooted in natural amorphisation and dissolution) and the promergent force (the centripetal vector driving the integration, architecture, and ascension of the ordering values of the spirit). The study initially examines the primary anthropogenetic premises, subsequently engaging with classical theories precisely to establish and justify a staged ontological-agonistic framework. This model is comprised of stringent ontic sequences compelled by the harsh logic of confrontation, survival, and defiant self-transcendence. It maps the violent metamorphosis of the human experience across five distinct phases: beginning with the primary contact and collision between burgeoning cognition and the raw resistance of nature; advancing through the confrontational accumulation of technical resources and tools; moving into the normative-coercive structuring of early communities through ritual discipline; progressing to the formal-institutional establishment of state-level civilization; and culminating in the supreme phase of ontification proper or existential statuation. In this final stage, the symbolic universe constructed by man through suffering, sacrifice, and ascetic discipline becomes consubstantial with his very being, demonstrating absolute ontological autonomy and the sovereign capacity to subjugate and dictate over the biological substrate. The conclusions synthesize this trajectory of heroic, agonistic, and defiant self-grounding of the human condition, while opening a legitimate interrogative window toward the future macro-structural dynamics of global society—now marked by unprecedented configurations of tension and systemic control—viewed through the same conceptual prism of a fertile, generative ontology of agonism. Keywords: Homo sapiens, anthropogenesis, humanogenesis, ontification proper, existential statuation, dismergence, promergence, agonistic ontology, constitutive vulnerability, symbolic autonomy, staged model, cultural emergence, human being, humanity, society. (shrink)

This article aims to compare notions of progress and evolution in the social theories of Freud and Spencer. It argues 1) that the two authors had similarly complex theories that contained mixed elements of positivism and teleology; 2) In its positivist elements, both authors made use of unified natural laws and, in its teleological aspect, they made use of notions of final cause in that progress and the evolution of civilization was understood as a linear path of progressive development with (...) an aim, 3) that that aim was both ethno- as well as - in Freud?s case in particular? self-centric and, finally, 4) that such understanding of natural law led to ethical commitments to the individual. (shrink)

From his earliest student days through the writing of his last book, Charles Darwin drew diagrams. In developing his evolutionary ideas, his preferred form of diagram was the tree. An examination of several of Darwin’s trees—from sketches in a private notebook from the late 1830s through the diagram published in the Origin—opens a window onto the role of diagramming in Darwin’s scientific practice. In his diagrams, Darwin simultaneously represented both observable patterns in nature and conjectural narratives of evolutionary history. He (...) then brought these natural patterns and narratives into dialogue, allowing him to explore whether the narratives could explain the patterns. But Darwin’s diagrams did not reveal their meaning directly to passive readers; they required readers to engage dynamically with them in order to understand the connections they disclosed between patterns and narratives. Moreover, the narratives Darwin depicted in his diagrams did not represent past sequences of events that he claimed had actually occurred; the narratives were conjectural, schematic, and probabilistic. Instead of depicting actual histories in all their particularity, Darwin depicted narratives in his diagrams in order to make general claims about how nature works. The conjunction of these features of Darwin’s diagrams is central to how they do their epistemic work. (shrink)

L’opposition contemporaine entre physicalisme réductionniste et physicalisme non réductionniste est régulièrement tenue pour l’un des clivages majeurs de la philosophie de l’esprit. Le présent article défend l’idée que ce clivage repose sur une méprise fondamentale dans la manière même de poser le problème. Le désaccord ne porte pas en premier lieu sur l’articulation du mental et du physique ; il s’inscrit dans une problématique déjà admise de part et d’autre, selon laquelle l’enjeu décisif serait de savoir ce qui peut être (...) ramené à la matière et selon quelles modalités. Or c’est précisément ce présupposé qui doit être mis en cause. Tant que la question de la signification, des formes signifiantes, de la normativité du vrai et du faux et du statut des règles n’est pas traitée pour elle-même, le débat physicaliste demeure prisonnier d’un monisme méthodologiquement efficace mais philosophiquement insuffisant. La thèse défendue ici est double. D’une part, le passage du matérialisme méthodologique au matérialisme ontologique procède d’un glissement illégitime : ce qui vaut comme principe d’unification dans les sciences de la nature ne suffit pas à fonder la proposition selon laquelle tout ce qui existe est de part en part matériel. D’autre part, les formes signifiantes ne peuvent être identifiées à leurs supports physiques sans que soient effacées les distinctions mêmes qui rendent possible un discours vrai sur la matière. Le débat entre réduction et émergence apparaît ainsi comme une querelle interne au matérialisme, et non comme la formulation adéquate du problème. Pour des développements plus détaillés, se référer à la Philosophie de la Signification, Geoffroy de Clisson (en libre accès sur PhilPapers). -/- Mots-clés : physicalisme ; matérialisme ; néodarwinisme ; principe de raison suffisante ; cybernétique ; Libet ; signification ; normativité ; émergence ; intentionnalité. (shrink)

The contemporary opposition between reductive physicalism and non-reductive physicalism is often treated as one of the major fault lines in the philosophy of mind. This article argues that the opposition rests on a fundamental misunderstanding in the very way the problem is posed. The disagreement does not primarily concern how the mental and the physical are to be articulated; it is inscribed within a shared framework in which the decisive question is taken to be what can be brought back to (...) matter, and by what routes. It is precisely this presupposition that must be called into question. So long as the problem of meaning— of signifying forms, of the normativity of truth and falsity, and of the status of rules— is not addressed, the physicalist debate remains captive to a monism that is methodologically effective yet philosophically insufficient. The thesis defended here is twofold. First, the passage from methodological materialism to ontological materialism involves an illegitimate slide: what functions as a principle of unification in the natural sciences does not by itself warrant the claim that everything that exists is thoroughly material. Second, signifying forms cannot be identified with their physical vehicles without erasing the very distinctions that make a true discourse about matter possible. The dispute between reduction and emergence thus appears as an internal quarrel within materialism, rather than as an adequate formulation of the problem. For more detailed developments, see Philosophy of Meaning, Geoffroy de Clisson (open access on PhilPapers). -/- Keywords: physicalism; materialism; neo-Darwinism; principle of sufficient reason; cybernetics; Libet; meaning; normativity; emergence; intentionality. (shrink)

The contemporary debate between reductionist physicalism and non-reductionist physicalism rests on a presupposition that remains insufficiently examined: the idea that the decisive question is first and foremost whether mind, consciousness, language, or morality are reducible to matter. This way of formulating the problem already belongs within a monist schema, insofar as it takes for granted an identity in principle between being and the material register. The present study argues that such a framework misses the primary problem, which is not that (...) of the reduction of the mental to the physical, but that of the irreducibility of rule, meaning, and normative form to their material support. The dualism defended here refers neither to a naive spiritualism nor to a theological separation between soul and body. It designates the constitutive duality between matter and idea, between causal support and meaningful form, between the enactment of a rule and its formulation. The article opens with a programmatic critique of the physicalist confusion between information and its material support, then examines the machine as the site of the concrete enactment of rule. It then shows that totalizing statements of a monist type fail to produce meaningful content, before broadening the analysis to the dual structure of language, mathematics, and every living organism. On this basis, freedom is rethought not as a miraculous suspension of determinism, but as an understanding of causal constraints on the moral agent. Such a perspective leads to a reinscription of the question of truth, knowledge, and morality within a philosophy of meaning in which the relation between idea and world is never reduced to the identity of matter with itself. These themes receive fuller treatment in Philosophy of Meaning, by the same author (available on PhilPapers). (shrink)

Evolutionary theory has been shaped by multiple paradigms—Darwinism, Lamarckism, Organicism, Emergentism, the Extended Synthesis, and contemporary proposals by Sheldrake, Noble, Kauffman, among others. While each has contributed valuable insights, they remain constrained by contradictions, ideological assumptions, or explanatory gaps. This article revisits the Evolutio Unfolding Theory (EUT), first formulated in 2020, and further developed through empirical evidence published in evolutionary developmental biology. After reviewing the fundamental principles of EUT and the empirical findings that support it, we undertake a systematic comparison (...) with the main historical and contemporary evolutionary paradigms. We show where EUT converges with these traditions, where it diverges, and how it overcomes their unresolved limitations. By conceiving evolution as the purposive unfolding of virtual preformations through teleological formal agents within morphogenetic fields, EUT provides a coherent framework that integrates modularity, hierarchy, self-organization, epigenesis, and other phenomena underexplained by conventional theories. The originality of this work lies not in re-stating the theory or presenting new data, but in demonstrating its explanatory superiority when tested against the spectrum of evolutionary thought. In this way, the article positions EUT as a robust, argued, and verifiable alternative capable of transcending entrenched dichotomies—chance versus necessity, mechanism versus vitalism, design versus selection. More than a critique, it represents a constructive and integrative step toward a paradigmatic shift in how we understand life's evolutionary unfolding. (shrink)

This paper presents a detailed structural and conceptual comparison between the Evolutio Unfolding Theory (EUT), published by Agustín Ostachuk in 2020, and the "Platonic Space" framework, introduced by Michael Levin in a 2025 preprint. While the latter is presented as a novel contribution, this analysis demonstrates a profound and systematic overlap with the core architecture of the former. By examining foundational principles – the ontology of form, the source of biological order, the nature of novelty, the role of teleology, the (...) guidance of development, and the dynamics of evolution – we show that Levin's framework reproduces the explanatory structure of the EUT, with primary changes limited to terminology. The analysis goes beyond the identification of isolated similarities to document the wholesale appropriation of a complete theoretical architecture. A new section on terminological translation reveals how Levin's renaming of key concepts serves as a camouflage strategy. This paper serves as a definitive record of conceptual lineage and priority, arguing that the "Platonic Space" framework is not an independent discovery but a renamed restatement of the Evolutio Unfolding Theory. (shrink)

This chapter examines the works of Walter Lippmann (1889–1974) and Friedrich A. Hayek (1899–1992) to understand how they interpreted the decline of the liberal order and formulated its renewal. Situating their contributions within the crises that twentieth-century liberalism, it explores how both thinkers conceived neoliberalism as a remedy to civilizational decline. Through a comparative reading of their major works, the chapter shows how each author mobilized evolutionary concepts to articulate a project of "reconstruction" or "restatement" of liberalism. The result is (...) a biopolitical rationality that seeks to establish neoliberalism as the driving force behind the supposed evolutionary "progress" of civilization. Distinguishing this framework from classical social Darwinism, the chapter introduces the notion of neo-social Darwinism to describe how neoliberal rationality reconfigures evolutionary theory into a moral and political doctrine that equates the advancement of human civilization with the ascendancy of neoliberalism itself. In this framework, Lippmann’s "adaptation" and Hayek’s "survival of the successful" become biopolitical imperatives for the humankind. (shrink)

La philosophie de la signification s'articule autour de quatre grands axes : la connaissance, l'esthétique, l'éthique et l'identité. En se confrontant à la question de l'émergence de la conscience, elle examine les limites logiques du matéria-lisme et du réductionnisme et propose une critique du monisme physicaliste, au profit d'un dualisme repensé, fondé sur la discontinuité entre matière et signification, disconti-nuité qui seule permet l'émergence du discours objectif. -/- Au fondement de cette approche se trouve l'idée d'une ouverture originaire de l'être (...) au monde - une exposition silencieuse à ce qui lui est extérieur, antérieure au langage, à la logique et à toute forme de représentation. Trois dimen-sions centrales de l'expérience peuvent ainsi être interrogées à partir de cette structure première : l'esthétique, à travers la musique, comme voie d'accès immédiate à l'articulation entre le sensible et le signifiant ; l'éthique, en tant que questionnement fondamental du rapport à l'altérité qui précède la problématique normative de la morale ; et l'identité, pensée comme une dialectique dynamique entre ouverture et rassemblement de l'être. Ces registres ne relèvent pas de champs séparés, mais déclinent, chacun selon ses modalités, la structure d'un dualisme radical - condition de toute production formelle, de toute pensée et de toute possibilité de comprendre le monde. -/- En filigrane, se dessine une tentative de réconcilier science et humanisme à travers une philosophie de la forme, de la liberté et de l'esprit. -/- Geoffroy de Clisson est titulaire d’un Doctorat en Philosophie (La Sorbonne, Paris IV) . (shrink)

In this paper I show that James Africanus Beale Horton launched an internal critique of race science as it developed in the hands of Robert Knox, Carl Vogt, and James Hunt. The latter three held an inductivist Baconian conception of science. Horton shows that their practices as scientists and natural philosophers contradict their own conception of what one must do in order to do good science. Horton’s critique of race science has important implications for philosophical anthropology as it took shape (...) over the course of the nineteenth century and for our understanding of the history of African philosophy in its global context. (shrink)

In his influential 1949 essay, The Intellectuals and Socialism, F.A. Hayek prophesied that the “revival of liberalism” must coincide with the resurgence of “the courage to be Utopian.” Today, at a time when liberalism is under attack from multiple fronts, we need courage more than ever. Indeed, the rediscovery of the Utopian potential of liberalism coincides with going back to its roots. My paper shows that liberalism, especially in its so-called “epistemic” or "evolutionary" branch whose notable theorists include Adam Smith, (...) J.S. Mill, Herbert Spencer, and F.A. Hayek, provides a framework for “real Utopian” theory and practice. However, I argue that evolutionary liberalism should be enriched with the insights of contemporary evolutionary theory and complexity theory to properly account for the downsides of social evolution and to overcome the understandable charge of social Darwinism. Only then can it robustly realise its emancipatory aspirations and real Utopian promise. (shrink)

This article explores the interplay between history and nature in the philosophy of Hegel and its reception in British Idealism. Starting with Hegel’s concept of reason as the logical structure of the world, the discussion highlights the tension between the rational and contingent dimensions of reality. Hegel identifies an inherent ‘impotence’ in nature, consisting in its inability to fully realize the concept, which leaves an element of contingency that resists complete rational integration. This issue became a focal point for British (...) Idealists such as Andrew Seth Pringle-Pattison and David George Ritchie, who grappled with reconciling Hegelian rationalism with Darwinian evolutionary theory. Seth critiques Hegel’s failure to rationalize contingency, perceiving it as a breakdown of his system, while Ritchie integrates Darwin’s natural selection into Hegelian thought to address these limitations. By adapting Darwinian mechanisms to explain natural and historical processes, Ritchie redefines the status of reason, risking a shift towards determinism. The article concludes by reflecting on the tension between reason and contingency as a central problem in understanding the relationship between freedom, history, and nature. (shrink)

This article addresses the problem of conceptual priority and lineage in contemporary theoretical biology through a comparative analysis of two frameworks that propose non-Darwinian accounts of biological form and evolution. It first summarizes the core principles of Evolutio Unfolding Theory (EUT), originally formulated in 2020, which conceives evolution as a process of unfolding of latent formal potentials, guided by formal causes, morphogenetic fields, and teleological–purposeful formal agents. The article then examines a later framework introduced in 2025 under the name “Platonic (...) Space,” which describes biological development and evolution as trajectories within a structured space of possible forms. By systematically comparing their central conceptual functions—ontological status of form, source of biological order, role of teleology, nature of novelty, and evolutionary dynamics—the article demonstrates a strong structural equivalence between the two approaches. Given documented prior awareness of EUT by the later authors, the analysis argues that the issue at stake is not independent convergence but conceptual lineage and attribution. The article concludes that clarifying lineage is an ethical responsibility essential to the integrity, accountability, and historical continuity of scientific thought. (shrink)

Les découvertes de la biologie contemporaine donnent un contenu empirique à l'idée bergsonienne selon laquelle les animaux insèrent de l'indétermination dans le monde. Bergson apparaît dès lors comme le complément philosophique nécessaire aux avancées de l'éthologie et de la biologie de l'évolution.

Quantum Mechanics is arguably the most controversial theory ever constructed: its overwhelming empirical success contrasts with the perplexity about its basic meaning. Darwin's evolutionary theory, on the other side, is hailed as the only conceptual framework that allows us to make sense of biological phenomena, at the same time its theoretical efficiency has been overly debated. Although both quantum physics and evolutionary theory constitute a scientific bedrock in contemporary thinking, a deeper analysis of their relationship is still missing. In the (...) following paper I will address the connection between Darwinism and a specific interpretation of quantum mechanics proposed by Carlo Rovelli, namely, Relational Quantum Mechanics. I will aim to show that Darwinism (understood in a broad sense) has constituted a central source of inspiration for Rovelli's own proposal, in three different ways: first, Darwinism provides a model of a philosophically satisfactory scientific theory; second, it introduces a way of thinking at odds with traditional substantialism; and third, it stresses the central and unifying role of information. (shrink)

Reviving Confucianism with evolutionary and medical conceptual tools in the British Straits Settlements before the Pacific War, the Straits Chinese philosopher, physician, reformer, and revolutionary Lim Boon Keng (1869–1957) pathologized Eurocentrism as a disease under his innovative but also troubling system of medical Confucianism. According to Lim, Eurocentrism was caused by certain (Christian) metaphysical pathogens – speciesism and dualism in human nature – and its pathogenesis involves insensitivity and maladaptation to one’s environment at individual, national, and even ‘racial’ levels. For (...) Lim, the signs and symptoms of individuals, nations, or ‘races’ suffering from Eurocentrism manifest as immoralities and injustices (commonly understood by contemporaneous theorists of evolution as atavism) – such as unjust wars – and degeneration in traits, physical or otherwise – such as indolence. In his attempt to overcome Eurocentrism in fin-de-siècle philosophical theories and practices, Lim’s medical Confucianism presents to us one of the earliest, systematic examples of a comprehensive Anglo-Chinese hybrid philosophy, attempting to tread a thin line between Eurocentrism and Sinocentrism by creating a new centre at imperial peripheries. However, Lim’s problematic, inherited conceptions of race and eugenics also present a cautionary tale of a doctor relying too much on his master’s tools in diagnostics and treatment. (shrink)

Charbonneau (2014) and Papale (2021) challenge the necessity of reproduction for evolution by natural selection (ENS) by contending that what really matter for ENS are memory and (re)generation at the population level, rather than lineage-forming reproduction at the local level. In this article, we critically evaluate their reproduction-independent accounts of ENS and defend the importance of lineage-forming reproduction in paradigmatic ENS on both empirical and theoretical grounds. We argue that none of the empirical cases they cite can be used as (...) evidence to demonstrate the existence of paradigmatic ENS without lineage-forming reproduction, and adopting their reproduction-independent views would lead to an account of ENS that is both too liberal and too strict. (shrink)

This paper offers a descriptive account of the transition in evolutionary ethics with reference to some major works from ethics, sociobiology, moral psychology, and primatology. The causes and nature of the transition are discussed by making a distinction between traditional and recent trends in evolutionary ethics enabling us to understand the significance of contemporary evolutionary ethics. The study is gradually directed toward a crucial question of ethics that is the place of reason in morality and what evolutionary ethics implies for (...) Kantian ethics in the question of reason. Many advocates of evolutionary ethics and evolutionary moral psychology claim that reason plays no role or plays a very insignificant role in morality. Such assertion often leads to a rejection of Kantian ethics in particular and cognitivism in general. In this backdrop, the scope of reconciling evolutionary ethics with Kantian ethics as proposed by Frederick Rauscher is analyzed. This paper is thus an attempt to expose the significance of evolutionary ethics with reference to the relation of reason and morality. (shrink)

The etiological account of teleological function is beset by several difficulties, which I propose to solve by grafting onto the etiological theory a subordinated goal-contribution clause. This approach enables us to ascribe neither too many teleofunctions nor too few; to give a unitary, one-clause analysis that works just as well for teleological functions derived from Darwinian evolution, as for those derived from human intention; and finally, to save the etiological theory from falsification, by explaining how, in spite of appearances, the (...) theory can allow for evolutionary function loss. (shrink)

According to the standard formulation, natural selection requires variation, differential fitness, and heritability. I argue that this formulation is inadequate because it fails to distinguish natural selection from artificial selection, intelligent design, forward-looking orthogenetic selection, and adaptation via the selection of nonrandom variation. I suggest adding a _no teleology_ condition. The no teleology condition says that the evolutionary process is not guided toward an endpoint represented in the mind of an agent, variation is produced randomly with respect to adaptation, and (...) selection pressures are not forward looking. (shrink)

One of the most significant advances to Peirce’s original idea of abduction is the one developed by Hintikka. Unlike the Peircean definition that is constructed from a syllogistic structure with low logical power, Hintikka releases abduction from the constraints of deduction by placing the concept in a more flexible interrogative framework where the reseacher advances to the final discovery through a strategic pathway. Paavola implemented this idea by using the discovery of the theory of evolution as historical example. In this (...) work I posit that the example used by Paavola is incorrect because of a misinterpretation of Darwin’s discoveries. A more detailed inspection of Darwin’s Notebooks, however, reveals that Darwin’s reasoning in the search for the Principle of Divergence, the last hypothesis before the publication of the Origin of Species, is consistent with Hintikka proposition, albeit in a different historical segment than the used by Paavola. (shrink)

John Dewey is a pragmatic and evolutionary philosopher who, with his instrumentalist philosophy, seeks to apply philosophy as well as to update philosophy based on new findings in the field of experimental science. He believed that with the introduction of the Darwinian origin scheme, a great event had taken place in the world of natural sciences and a revolution had taken place in the thinking and way of thinking of the time. Dewey enters his new philosophy by using the problem (...) of changing the types and concepts that are inferred from it. According to Dewey, epistemology and conventional ethics have come to an end, and we need to bring about a fundamental transformation and revision. Keywords such as the essence of objects, the fundamental principles, the invisible objects that regulate or control our lives and our world, are challenged by Darwin's theory. Dewey's philosophy of inquiry criticizes absolute principles. Dewey's philosophy of ethics and epistemology is realized in nature, along with natural selection and with the mechanism of the principles of adaptation of living beings. Individual and society, opinion and action, world and hereafter, right and wrong, are two parts that Dewey tries to unite. He considers man and society as a single, continuous, organ-like or organic matter. Dewey's evolutionary ethics and epistemology can be useful as a new tool for the philosophical society of Iran, with the consideration that its practical results in our society should be constantly evaluated. (shrink)

Debates on Nietzsche’s naturalism usually posit nature and culture as competing principles to understand the contingent genesis of humanity. In contrast to this polarizing tendency, I argue that Nietzsche focuses on the cultural characteristics of humanity because of his naturalistic framework. Moreover, I submit that Nietzsche’s conceptualization of the entanglement of nature and culture contains important insights for critically understanding the challenges of the Anthropocene today.

Cognitive scientist Donald Hoffman and others have recently advanced an evolutionary debunking argument aimed at our perceptual beliefs in ordinary objects, based on the Interface Theory of Perception. In contrast with most recent criticisms of Interface Theory, which have targeted its characterizations of perception and veridicality, I raise a broad dialectical problem for Hoffman’s debunking argument. I show that the argument is self-defeating, and that responding to this problem by appealing to Universal Darwinism leads to a fatal dilemma for the (...) view. (shrink)

This is the outline : I - Quelques étapes aux avancées significatives II - La pensée chrétienne et le hasard d’ignorance III - De quelques difficultés de raisonner sur le probable IV - Téléologie et évolutionnisme V - Où est l’« étage » qui permette de parler d’indépendance ? VI. Qu’y a-t-il à la base de nos concepts d’ordre ? VII - Quelle place pour le hasard ? VIII. Le hasard appréhendé de dos ?

The ninth and tenth chapters of the Origin mark a profound, if perhaps difficult to detect, shift in the book’s argumentative structure. In the previous few chapters and in the ninth, Darwin has been exploring a variety of objections to natural selection, some more obvious (where are all the fossils of transitional forms?) and some showing careful attention to challenging consequences of evolution (could selection really produce instincts?). Starting in the tenth, however, Darwin turns to showing us what kinds of (...) new and unexpected results evolutionary theory might be able to offer us, again in domains both predictable (extinction) and unexpected (biogeography, embryology). It is notable that it is the fossil record that serves as this pivot point, being both a source of potentially powerful objections to evolutionary theory and home to some of its most compelling new explanations. In this chapter, I present both sets of arguments and consider what role Darwin gave to fossil evidence, in the process attempting to discover why it might have played this unique role in two different parts of Darwin’s “long argument” for evolution by natural selection. Geology’s special place, I argue, derives at least in part from its particular importance in Darwin’s social and intellectual context. (shrink)

It is not always considered that the discussion about the objective or subjective nature of beauty occurred partly in natural history, within the framework of the Darwinian revolution. The approaches of many pre-Darwinian naturalists assumed the existence of absolute standards of beauty. This idea was a presupposition in some versions of the great chain of being and in the idea that beauty was an objective characteristic of creation that could explain the possession of many traits of organisms. In this paper (...) I will show how Darwin explicitly confronted both views throughout his work. (shrink)

This chapter explores Darwin’s conception of transitional forms and challenges his view on the problem of intermediate species. Starting with a brief historical introduction to the epistemological status of fossils before Darwin’s time, I proceed to the analysis of Darwin’s theory of evolution and identify three fundamental hypotheses that substantially influence his investigation of the fossil record. Although Darwin’s theory implies the necessary existence of transitional forms, he believes that the paleontological record remains incomplete due to lacking discovery of intermediate (...) forms. I find several reasons for such a radical conclusion. I deconstruct his specific yet ambiguous conception of intermediate forms and show that, in addition to the fundamental assumptions of his theory, this conception is at the root of the emergence of the intermediate species problem. Further, I explicate how this problem arises at two distinct but connected levels of Darwin’s theory. Whilst at the first level it appears in the form of a vague interpretation of the intermediate form concept, at the second level this problem takes a form of a stringent requirement for classification of an organism as an intermediate form: the discovery of a complete chain of transitional forms that connects such an organism to at least one known species. Archaeopteryx lithographica could not satisfy such a requirement; actually, no organic form can. The problem of the intermediate species thus remains one of ‘the gravest difficulties’ for Darwin’s theory of evolution. (shrink)

Originating in the work of Ernst Haeckel and Wilhelm Preyer, and advanced by a Prussian embryologist, Wilhelm Roux, the idea of struggle for existence between body parts helped to establish a framework, in which population cell dynamics rather than a predefined harmony guides adaptive changes in an organism. Intended to provide a causal-mechanical view of functional adjustments in body parts, this framework was also embraced later by early pioneers of immunology to address the question of vaccine effectiveness and pathogen resistance. (...) As an extension of these early efforts, Elie Metchnikoff established an evolutionary vision of immunity, development, pathology, and senescence, in which phagocyte-driven selection and struggle promote adaptive changes in an organism. Despite its promising start, the idea of somatic evolution lost its appeal at the turn of the twentieth century giving way to a vision, in which an organism operates as a genetically uniform, harmonious entity. (shrink)

If Charles Darwin’s work opened up the possibility of a true natural history, the signicance of time in evolutionary processes was left unresolved. This ambiguity has led to various interpretations of what evolutionary history is, some seeing it as the pure unfolding of processes, others as a ow marked by contingency and unpredictability. These interpretations re ect underlying differences in the perception of causality: mechanical and uniform on the one hand, transformative and multifaceted on the other. This tension affects not (...) only our understanding of the Darwinian text, but also our contemporary conception of evolutionary theory. Although many challenges in evolutionary biology are linked to time (the historicity of evolution, path-dependent processes, biological rhythms, the contingency of certain evolutionary events etc.), the importance attributed to time in biology remains unspeci ed. The aim of this chapter is to study the contradictions regarding the conception of history and causality in Darwin’s writings and to analyse how they have permeated the different interpretations of evolutionary theory from the turn of the twentieth century to the present day. This analysis of the tensions within the different interpretations of Darwinism in history will lead me to address both the conception of biological time(s) and the approach to causality in contemporary evolutionary biology. I will conclude this chapter by proposing some clarications about the signicance of time in contemporary evolutionary biology. (shrink)

All of us, including scientists, make judgments about what is true or false, probable or improbable. And in the process, we frequently appeal to concepts such as evidential support or explanation. Bayesian philosophers of science have given illuminating formal accounts of these concepts. This paper aims to follow in their footsteps, providing a novel formal account of various additional concepts: the likelihood-prior trade-off, successful accommodation of evidence, ad hocness, and, finally, consilience—sometimes also called “unification”. Using these accounts, I also provide (...) a new Bayesian analysis of how someone such as Charles Darwin hypothetically could have reasoned in favor of evolution over special creationism. Lastly, I explore how these accounts relate to other topics and accounts in philosophy, and I chart out some areas for further research. (shrink)

Between the 1930s and the mid 1970s, it was commonly believed that in 1880 Karl Marx had proposed to dedicate to Charles Darwin a volume or translation of Capital but that Darwin had refused. The detail was often interpreted by scholars as having larger significance for the question of the relationship between Darwinian evolutionary biology and Marxist political economy. In 1973–4, two scholars working independently—Lewis Feuer, professor of sociology at Toronto, and Margaret Fay, a graduate student at Berkeley—determined simultaneously that (...) the traditional story of the proposed dedication was untrue, being based on a long-standing misinterpretation of the relevant correspondence. Between the two, and among several other scholars who became their respective allies, there developed a contest of authority and priority over the discovery. From 1975 to 1982, the controversy generated a considerable volume of spilled ink in both scholarly and popular publications. Drawing on previously unexamined archival resources, this article revisits the ‘case’ of the so-called ‘Darwin–Marx correspondence’ as an instance of the phenomenon of ‘multiple discovery’. A familiar occurrence in the natural sciences, multiple discovery is rarer in the humanities and social sciences. The present case of a priority dispute in the history of ideas followed patterns familiar from such disputes in the natural sciences, while also diverging from them in ways that shed light on the significance of disciplinary norms and research infrastructures. (shrink)

Algunos aspectos de La expresión de las emociones de Charles Darwin pueden resultar intrigantes, pues, en la explicación de cómo tales expresiones se originan, Darwin casi nunca apela a la selección natural. En cambio, apela principalmente a la idea de que movimientos voluntarios se asocian a emociones, volviéndose por hábito innatos e involuntarios al heredarse a la descendencia. Si bien Darwin da varias razones para defender esta explicación, en este trabajo trataré de mostrar que, si se entiende el libro sobre (...) las expresiones en relación con los objetivos explícitos e implícitos de El origen del hombre, el asunto se entiende mejor. En particular, resulta interesante la tesis que Desmond y Moore plantean respecto a la importancia de los ideales antiesclavistas de Darwin a la hora del tratamiento de las razas. Defenderé en este trabajo que el enfoque de Desmond y Moore puede extenderse al libro acerca de las expresiones. Específicamente, estableceré vínculos entre la explicación del origen de las razas y la explicación del origen del rubor. Palabras clave: Charles Darwin, La expresión de las emociones, El origen del hombre, Rubor, Antiesclavismo. (shrink)

Universal Basic Income (UBI) has been proposed as a potential way in which welfare states could be made more responsive to the ever-shifting evolutionary challenges of institutional adaptation in a dynamic environment. It has been proposed as a tool of “real freedom” (Van Parijs) and as a tool of making the welfare state more efficient. (Friedman) From the point of view of complexity theory and evolutionary economics, I argue that only a welfare state model that is “polycentrically” (Polanyi, Hayek) organized (...) as an evolving network of distributed decision-making can respond to the challenges of complexity in an adaptively efficient manner. UBI has the theoretical possibility to facilitate flexible, bottom-up innovation, since a) it embodies the “rule of law” principles of generality, nondiscrimination, simplicity, and transparency, and b) it grants people widespread freedom to experiment, innovate, and deviate from established practices and norms; but whether it can be made to work as intended depends on a number of variables in its design. I situate my research in the contemporary UBI debate around automation and technological development, which I interpret creatively through the lens of contemporary evolutionary political economy. I advance a syncretic model of institutional design based upon the shared insights of the Santa Fe, Neo-Hayekian, and Neo-Schumpeterian schools of evolutionary economics that, following Adam Thierer and Michael Munger, I call the framework of Permissionless Innovation (PI). Under the PI framework, which is a development of the tradition of evolutionary liberalism (Hume, Smith, Mandeville, Mill, Hayek, Polanyi, Schumpeter, Hodgson), individuals are granted the default right to innovate without having to ask for permission, and the right to basic income, which they can use to support their right to innovate, mutate, and experiment. This framework is a liberal framework to the extent it relies on widespread human freedom as a means of fostering innovation and social learning. And it is an evolutionary framework to the extent that it seeks to facilitate evolutionary socioeconomic processes for the sake of social progress and welfare advancement. I proceed to show, through an analysis of how innovation operates in both the economy and the cultural domain, that UBI can be used as an important cornerstone of an evolutionary liberal model of “ecostructural” governance that treats the socioeconomic order as an ecological garden of spontaneous growths, adaptations, and innovations. I call this the Permissionless Innovation Universal Basic Income (PIUBI) framework. In it, the right to innovate, deviate, and mutate is upheld as the “gold standard” of institutional design whereby individuals are granted widespread freedoms combined with the provision of UBI and other innovation-fostering (carefully bound) services and regulations. In the coming decades, UBI may even enable poor people to take better advantage of Human Enhancement Technologies (HETs) and other experimental innovations. Such a framework is compatible with a fast pace of evolutionary development, but the regulatory model accompanying such a framework must be capable of responding to evolutionary lock-ins, maladaptive innovations, self-destructive behaviour on the part of UBI recipients, and the management of catastrophic and existential risks. In the end, I will have shown that the PIUBI framework can be justified as a plausible default institutional mechanism for responding to radical uncertainty, but it needs to be experimentally adapted to changing circumstances with the help of various situation-specific, polycentric, multi-level, approaches. (shrink)

There have been constant and multiple endeavours to argue for Darwin's both epistemic and practical debt to Romanticism. Almost all of these arguments emphasise Darwin's theoretical and aesthetic associations with Alexander von Humboldt, who, from a prevailing Darwin-centred perspective, is in turn usually oversimplified as an undisputed incarnation of Romanticism. The antagonistic view, however, develops nothing other than another stereotype of Humboldt as an anti-idealistic, pro-French, and even highly Anglophone empiricist naturalist, and accordingly rejects the claim of a romantic Darwin (...) in terms of his Humboldtian inheritance. In this paper, I will first portray a balanced figure of Humboldt in terms of both his critical incorporation of romantic philosophy and the idiosyncratic history of his science. Then, I will thematically compare Darwin with Humboldt and other romantics so as to elucidate Darwin's peculiar appropriation of romantic tenets. Three interrelated romantic themes are examined, along with a discrimination of different senses in which the term romanticism is used: a) the literature-science relation, b) the pursuit of the unity in and through multiplicity, and c) the epistemic role of imagination. On the basis of this triadic dissection, both Humboldt's and Darwin's adherence to and departure from romanticism are reevaluated. (shrink)

One claim found in the received historiography of the biometrical school (comprised primarily of Francis Galton, Karl Pearson, and W. F. R. Weldon) is that one of the biometricians' great flaws was their inability to look past their population-focused, statistical, gradualist understanding of evolutionary change – which led, in part, to their ignoring developments in cellular biology around 1900. I will argue, on the contrary, that the work of the biometricians was, from its earliest days, fundamentally concerned with connections between (...) statistical patterns of inheritance and the underlying cellular features that gave rise to them. Such work remained current with contemporary knowledge of chromosomes, cytology, and development; in this article, I explore the first case. The biometricians were thus well positioned to understand the relationship between the patterns of Mendelian inheritance and the statistical distributions with which they primarily occupied themselves. Ignorance of this connection, then, is not the reason why they rejected Mendelism. Further, both Galton and Weldon – though each in their own unique way – decided to turn to biological detail as a way to better justify the generality of their statistical approaches to heredity. Perhaps paradoxically, then, for these biometricians, detail offered an approach to theoretical generality. (shrink)

Charles Darwin (1809–1882) Charles Darwin is primarily known as the architect of the theory of evolution by natural selection. With the publication of On the Origin of Species in 1859, he advanced a view of the development of life on earth that profoundly shaped nearly all biological and much philosophical thought which followed. A number….

Abstract One of the most important things that the Darwinian revolution affected is the previous teleological thinking. In particular, the attribution of functions to various entities of the natural world with explanatory pretensions. In this change, his theory of natural selection played an important role. We all agree on that, but the diversity and heterogeneity of the answers that try to explain what Darwin did exactly with functional biology are overwhelming. In this paper I will try to show how Darwin (...) modified previous functional biology. Pre-Darwinian naturalists did not hesitate to attribute functions in which, for example, the traits of one species were in the service of other species. I will try to show that this has consequences on the discussion regarding the nature of functional language, since the main approaches, the systemic and the etiological, do not adequately account for these changes and therefore do not account for the way functional biology regulates the kind of legitimate functions. I will outline a possible new solution to this problem: appropriate functional attributions in Darwinian functional biology could be regulated by a theory or a set of laws that provide the criteria for determining its fundamental concepts. -/- Resumen: Una de las cosas más importantes a las que la revolución darwiniana afectó es el pensamiento teleológico previo. En particular, la atribución de funciones a diversas entidades del mundo natural con pretensiones explicativas. En este cambio, su teoría de la selección natural desempeñó un papel importante. Todos estamos de acuerdo en ello, pero la diversidad y heterogeneidad de las respuestas que tratan de explicar lo que Darwin hizo exactamente con la biología funcional son abrumadoras. En este artículo intentaré mostrar cómo Darwin modificó la biología funcional anterior. Los naturalistas predarwinianos no dudaban en atribuir funciones en las que, por ejemplo, los rasgos de una especie estaban al servicio de otras especies. Intentaré mostrar que esto tiene consecuencias en la discusión sobre la naturaleza del lenguaje funcional, pues los principales enfoques, el sistémico y el etiológico, no dan cuenta adecuadamente de estos cambios y, por tanto, no dan cuenta de la forma en que la biología funcional regula el tipo de funciones legítimas. Esbozaré una posible nueva solución a este problema: las atribuciones funcionales apropiadas en la biología funcional darwiniana podrían estar reguladas por una teoría o un conjunto de leyes que proporcionen los criterios para determinar sus conceptos fundamentales. -/- . (shrink)

Numerous authors have examined the influence of other thinkers on Darwin’s formulation of some of the key concepts of the theory of evolution. Amongst those, Alexander von Humboldt often stands out – a scholar who, following his intention to explain the interconnection of various parts of the natural system, seems to tackle the question of evolution but does not offer an explicit answer. In this article, I examine Humboldt’s thoughts on evolution and the origin of species and evaluate his contribution (...) to Darwin’s theory of evolution. First, I analyse and explicate the fundamental assumptions and goals of Humboldt theory, and compare them to Darwin. Moving forward, I highlight the similarity of their methods, and argue that Humboldt and Darwin conduct similar investigation of fossil record and geographical distribution of species. Finally, I show that Humboldt acknowledges essential elements of Darwin’s theory of evolution: evidence given by fossil records, struggle for survival and relation between natural environment and living organisms. Humboldt, however, concludes we cannot know the evolution of species. I explain this stance, and contend that theories of Humboldt and Darwin turn out to be more similar than they seem, yet their different conclusions regarding the evolution of species stem from different initial assumptions underlying their respective frameworks. (shrink)

This goal of this thesis in the philosophy of nature is to move us closer towards a true biological science of consciousness in which the evolutionary origin, function, and phylogenetic diversity of consciousness are moved from the field’s periphery of investigations to its very centre. Rather than applying theories of consciousness built top-down on the human case to other animals, I argue that we require an evolutionary bottomup approach that begins with the very origins of subjective experience in order to (...) make sense of the place of mind in nature. To achieve this goal, I introduce and defend the pathological complexity thesis as both a framework for the scientific investigation of consciousness and as a lifemind continuity thesis about the origins and function of consciousness. (shrink)

Our goal is to illustrate that Darwinian and autopoietic views of the organism are not as squarely opposed to each other as is often assumed. Indeed, we will argue that there is much common ground between them and that they can usefully supplement each other.

The extent to which normal (nonmalignant) cells of the body can evolve through mutation and selection during the lifetime of the organism has been a major unresolved issue in evolutionary and developmental studies. On the one hand, stable multicellular individuality seems to depend on genetic homogeneity and suppression of evolutionary conflicts at the cellular level. On the other hand, the example of clonal selection of lymphocytes indicates that certain forms of somatic mutation and selection are concordant with the organism-level fitness. (...) Recent DNA sequencing and tissue physiology studies suggest that in addition to adaptive immune cells also neurons, epithelial cells, epidermal cells, hematopoietic stem cells and functional cells in solid bodily organs are subject to evolutionary forces during the lifetime of an organism. Here we refer to these recent studies and suggest that the expanding list of somatically evolving cells modifies idealized views of biological individuals as radically different from collectives. (shrink)

In his earliest philosophical work, Moritz Schlick developed a proposal for rendering aesthetics into a field of empirical science. His 1908 book Lebensweisheit developed an evolutionary account of the emergence of both scientific knowledge and aesthetic feelings from play. This constitutes the framework of Schlick’s evolutionary psychological methodology for examining the origins of the aesthetic feeling of the beautiful he proposed in 1909. He defends his methodology by objecting to both experimental psychological and Darwinian reductionist accounts of aesthetics. Having countered (...) these approaches, Schlick applies Külpe’s psychological distinction between stimulus-feelings and idea-feelings to collapse the traditional philosophical opposition between the agreeable and the beautiful. Both types of feeling, Schlick argues, result from humans’ adaptation to their environment. Because of this adaptation, feelings that were once only stimuli for action can come to be enjoyed for their own sake. This thesis underlies Schlick’s 1908 argument that art, qua mimesis, is necessarily inferior to aesthetic feelings directed towards the environment. Part of Schlick’s justification for this view is that humans are, through a long evolutionary process, better adapted to their environment than to artworks. Schlick nevertheless concedes that mimetic art can involve ways of abstracting from the objects it copies to produce idealised regularities that are not found in the original. Schlick thus concludes that art teaches its audience how to perceive the world in this abstract and idealised manner. This type of environmental aesthetics constitutes a means for reaching Schlick’s utopian ecological vision of a future in which culture will become harmonised with nature. (shrink)