The dominant view today on evolutionary progress is that it has been thoroughly debunked. Even value-neutral progress concepts are seen to lack important theoretical underpinnings: natural selection provides no rationale for progress, and natural selection need not even be invoked to explain large-scale evolutionary trends. In this paper I challenge this view by analysing how natural selection acts in heterogeneous environments. This not only undermines key debunking arguments, but also provides a selectionist rationale for a pattern of “evolutionary unfolding”, where (...) life radiates across an increased range of exploitation of environmental heterogeneity. (shrink)

The question of specific properties of life compared to nonliving things accompanied biology throughout its history. At times this question generated major controversies with largely diverging opinions. Basically, mechanistic thinkers, who tried to understand organismic functions in terms of nonliving machines, were opposed by those who tried to describe specific properties or even special forces being active within living entities. As this question included the human body, these controversies always have been of special relevance to our self-image and also touched (...) practical issues of medicine. During the second half of the twentieth century, it seemed to be resolved that organisms are explainable basically as physicochemical machines. Especially from the perspective of molecular biology, it seemed to be clear that organisms need to be explained solely by the chemical functions of their component parts, although some resistance to this view never ceased. This research program has been working quite successfully, so that science today knows a lot about the physiological and chemical processes within organisms. However, again new doubts arise questioning whether the mere continuation of this analytical approach will finally generate a fundamental understanding of living entities. At the beginning of the twenty-first century the quest for a new synthesis actually comes from analytical empiricists themselves. The hypothesis of the present paper is that empirical research has been developed far enough today, that it reveals by itself the materials and the prerequisites to understand more of the specific properties of life. Without recourse to mysterious forces, it is possible to generate answers to this age-old question, just using recent, empirically generated knowledge. This view does not contradict the results of reductionistic research, but rather grants them meaning within the context of organismic systems and also may increase their practical usefulness. Although several of these properties have been discussed before, different authors usually concentrated on a single one or some of them. The paper describes ten specific properties of living entities as they can be deduced from contemporary science. The aim is to demonstrate that the results of empirical research show both the necessity as well as the possibility of the development of a new conception of life to build a coherent understanding of organismic functions. (shrink)

Many have argued that there is no reason why natural selection should cause directional increases in measures such as body size or complexity across evolutionary history as a whole. In this paper I argue that this conclusion does not hold for selection for adaptations to environmental variability, and that, given the inevitability of environmental variability, trends in adaptations to variability are an expected feature of evolution by natural selection. As a concrete instance of this causal structure, I outline how this (...) may be applied to a trend in phenotypic plasticity. (shrink)

The notion of the ‘division of physiological labour’ is today an outdated relic in the history of science. This contrasts with the fate of another notion, which was so frequently paired with the division of physiological labour, which is the concept of ‘morphological differentiation.’ This is one of the elementary modal concepts of ontogenesis. In this paper, we intend to target the problems and causes that gradually led biologists to combine these two notions during the 19th century, and to progressively (...) dissociate them, retaining only the concept of differentiation by the early 20th century. We shall adhere to the following: 1. The primitive economic concept of the division of labour is not a descriptive notion denoting a type of organisation of labour, but an etiological one: the idea of a causal relationship between this type of organization and the improvement of the whole. 2. This concept rapidly interested naturalists such as Henri Milne-Edwards, who were keen to find a rational ground for hierarchizing living forms based on anatomical complexity. 3. The validation of this notion in the realms of biology was subject to at least two conditions which were far from being fully satisfied. This did not prevent, however, the initial success of the concept of the division of physiological labour during the second half of the 19th century. 4. Finally, the gradual disqualification, within the Darwinian theoretical context, of the conception of an intrinsic hierarchical rank of organisms, led to a lack of interest in the concept of the physiological division of labour, at least in its non-Darwinian and non-ecological variant. (shrink)

This article presents Schelling’s claim that nature has an evolutionary process and Hegel’s response that nature is the development of the concept. It then examines whether evolution is progressive. While many evolutionary biologists explicitly repudiate the suggestion that there is progress in evolution, they often implicitly presuppose this. Moreover, such a notion seems required insofar as the shape of life’s history consists in a directional trend. This article argues that, insofar as a notion of progress is indeed conceptually ineliminatable from (...) evolutionary biology or needed to articulate the shape of life’s history, progress should be viewed as constitutive. The section on “Why Schelling and .. (shrink)

Attempts to explain the origin of macroevolutionary innovations have been only partially successful. Here it is proposed that the patterns of major evolutionary transitions have to be understood first, before it is possible to further analyse the forces behind the process. The hypothesis is that major evolutionary innovations are characterized by an increase in organismal autonomy, in the sense of emancipation from the environment. After a brief overview of the literature on this subject, increasing autonomy is defined as the evolutionary (...) shift in the individual system–environment relationship, such that the direct influences of the environment are gradually reduced and a stabilization of self-referential, intrinsic functions within the system is generated. This is described as relative autonomy because numerous interconnections with the environment and dependencies upon it are retained. Features of increasing autonomy are spatial separations, an increase in homeostatic functions and in body size, internalizations and an increase in physiological and behavioral flexibility. It is described how these features are present in different combinations in the major evolutionary transitions of metazoans and, consequently, how they should be taken into consideration when evolutionary innovations are studied. The hypothesis contributes to a reconsideration of the relationship between organisms and their environment. (shrink)

In On the Origin of Autonomy; A New look at the Major Transitions in Evolution, Bernd Rosslenbroich argues that an increase of the relative autonomy of individual organisms is one of the central large-scale patterns in evolution. I begin by presenting how Rosslenbroich understands the notion of autonomy in biology and how he correlates its increase to different sets of morphological, physiological, and behavioral characteristics of various biological systems. I briefly discuss his view of directionality in evolution with respect to (...) its ontological and epistemological status. Then, I discuss the advantages of his thesis, and especially the emphasis on the organism as the subject rather than the object of evolution. I argue in detail that his account could benefit from a more exact conception of autonomy, and I discuss six problems related to the operationalization of his concept as applied to various theoretical issues. (shrink)