December 27, 2006
We live in a Darwinian world. So we can kiss Aristotle and Hegel's philosophy of nature goodbye is the standard argument. They are irrelevant. What if we read a Darwinian world from a dialectical perspective? That would focus on the conceptual framework of evolutionary theory that is deployed to make sense of, and explain evolution.
Conventional Darwinism consists of three fundamental ideas: that natural selection works almost entirely at the level of organisms (rather than at multiple levels extending from genes to species), that selection is the exclusive shaper of evolutionary change, and that the extrapolation of minute, incremental changes can explain the entire history of life.
For many evolutionary biologists the ever-extending grand evolutionary synthesis promulgated in the 1930s and 1940s offers adequate explanations. Modern darwinians are largely reductionist in approach--whilst paying some lip-service to the possibility of constraints, the reality of mass extinctions and the like--they view evolution in general as microevolution plus lots of time and some contingency.
Is this synthesis adequate to its task? Do the metaphysical concepts need re-working? Are their conceptual gaps?
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