The renowned biologist and thinker Richard Dawkins presents his most expansive work yet: a comprehensive look at evolution, ranging from the latest developments in the field to his own provocative views. Loosely based on the form of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, Dawkins's Tale takes us modern humans back through four billion years of life on our planet. As the pilgrimage progresses, we join with other organisms at the forty "rendezvous points" where we find a common ancestor. The band of pilgrims swells (...) into a vast crowd as we join first with other primates, then with other mammals, and so on back to the first primordial organism. Dawkins's brilliant, inventive approach allows us to view the connections between ourselves and all other life in a bracingly novel way. It also lets him shed bright new light on the most compelling aspects of evolutionary history and theory: sexual selection, speciation, convergent evolution, extinction, genetics, plate tectonics, geographical dispersal, and more. The Ancestor's Tale is at once a far-reaching survey of the latest, best thinking on biology and a fascinating history of life on Earth. Here Dawkins shows us how remarkable we are, how astonishing our history, and how intimate our relationship with the rest of the living world. (shrink)

Science, and with it our understanding of evolutionary processes, is itself undergoing evolution. The evolutionary framework still most frequently used by the general public to describe and guide processes of societal development is erroneously grounded in Darwinian perspectives or, at the very least, draws facile analogies from biological evolution. The present inquiry incorporates fresh insights on the general systemic nature of developmental dynamics from the most recent advances in the transdisciplinary realm of the sciences of complexity (e.g., general evolution theory, (...) cybernetics, information and communication theory, chaos theory, dynamical systems theory, and nonequilibrium thermodynamics). The description of the evolutionary trajectory of complex dynamical systems as irreversible, periodically chaotic, and strongly nonlinear agrees with certain features of the historical processes of societal development. But there are additional features of the evolutionary dynamic of natural systems that are seldom portrayed as part of human developmental deportment. These features include elements such as the convergence of existing systems at progressively higher levels of organization, the increasingly efficient utilization of environmental energy, and the complexification of system structures in states that are progressively further removed from chemical and thermodynamic equilibria. The sciences of complexity offer insight into the laws and dynamics that govern the evolution of complex systems across a variety of disciplinary areas of investigation. Through a study of the isomorphisms across disciplinary constructs in the theoretical analyses of the principles governing the evolution of human societies, it is possible to enrich the account of developmental dynamics at the socio-civilizational level. Such an account would further our understanding of the phenomenon of societal development and provide the means for the purposeful guidance of this phenomenon in accordance with general evolutionary principles. This article sets forth the type of considerations, and outlines a general research agenda, for inquiry toward an operational model of the evolutionary development of social systems. (shrink)

A short review of complexity research from the perspective of history and philosophy of biology is presented. Complexity and its emergence has scientific and metaphysical meanings. From its beginning, biology was a science of complex systems, but with the advent of electronic computing and the possibility of simulating mathematical models of complicated systems, new intuitions of complexity emerged, together with attempts to devise quantitative measures of complexity. But can we quantify the complex?

In this article I analyze a regular pattern in the developmental and evolutionary processes, formed by a gradual shortening of developmental stages. This shortening is the expected result of a selection process, in the biological as well as in the cultural evolutionary process. Biology and culture are in this way unified by a common mechanism. A mathematical analysis further indicates a vital condition for a continued progress of human culture, especially for a continued progressive scientific evolution, implying continued shortening of (...) mental developmental stages by means of enhanced education. (shrink)

In the present paper I develop a model of the evolutionary process associated to the widespread although controversial notion of a prevailing trend of increasing complexity over time. The model builds on a coupling of evolution to individual developmental programs and introduces an integrated view of evolution implying that human culture and science form a continuous extension of organic evolution. It is formed as a mathematical model that has made possible a quantitative estimation in relative terms of the growth of (...) complexity. This estimation is accomplished by means of computer simulations the result of which indicates a strong acceleration of complexity all the way from the appearance of multicellular organisms up to modern man. (shrink)

How is cultural progress possible? Historically, no other animal has progressed as humans have. Conventional wisdom suggests that by having language, people accumulate knowledge, which produces progress. Such Formal stage 10 wisdom begs fundamental questions. Thus, we assert the cultural necessity of levels of support, or scaffolding, for people to develop higher stages of hierarchical complexity. The resulting, wider accessibility to higher-stage action and knowledge, which requires higher stages of development to understand, enables social and scientific progress. With memes and (...) downward assimilation, larger proportions of society gain access to advanced thinking with support, in turn enabling cultural progress. (shrink)

The essays in this volume represent an approach to human knowledge that has had a profound influence on many recent thinkers. Popper breaks with a traditional commonsense theory of knowledge that can be traced back to Aristotle. A realist and fallibilist, he argues closely and in simple language that scientific knowledge, once stated in human language, is no longer part of ourselves but a separate entity that grows through critical selection.