The Progress of General Evolution

By ‘general evolution’ I’m referring to the evolutionary principle that operates in almost everything from life to cultures to systems to ideas even to individuals. This ubiquitous principle provided by Darwin is truly one of the great discoveries and in its universality lies its power. Beyond biology and over different time scales it brings in notions like growth and change and also increasing complexity and sophistication over time when you consider the successes but it also means competition and survival and decides the fates of the weaker and stronger. Finally, it brings in the notion of selection where a feature is ‘selected’ because of a significant variation that suits the surrounding environment - adaptation. The environment itself changes over time too so those who can adapt well will fare better and in this way when it comes to life as a whole a species will evolve and life itself will diversify down evolutionary pathways over time.



Firstly, we’ll look at other aspects of biological evolution which provided the paradigm and which tell us a good deal. This is what Darwin found through his research and then published in his famous book ‘On The Origin Of The Species.’ Biological evolution is essentially random and gradual although this claim itself is contested in the field. Some think it’s not random and occurs in ‘quantum leaps’. Whatever the case, life becomes more complex and stronger over a long time because small improvements accumulate and build a better organism. It should be said that the ‘weak’ doesn’t necessarily mean those individual members are necessarily weak and therefore don’t survive. It could be that they just don’t possess the variation or mutation which confers the survival advantage in their particular environment. Were ancient giraffes that possessed shorter necks inherently weak? Not really, their environment just favoured those who could reach the high branches and possibly more nutritious food. It shows that those with longer necks tended to survive and produce offspring like themselves. Shorter necked giraffes couldn’t compete and died out. Long necks thus went from being possessed by a small group in the population to being a species trait over time. Short necked giraffes in this hypothetical example became extinct. The long neck was ‘selected’ by nature.



Certainly, in terms of fitness, other qualities such as great speed, agility and strength, etc are more clear-cut as ‘fit’ in the animal world and possessing one or a combination puts you high in nature’s pecking order. It is interesting in this sense that, physically, man is not that fit and one to one wouldn’t compare well with most animals for example. Strip a New York stock broker, give him nothing and tell him survive a month in the Serengeti and he would most probably die. But there is a reason we are the dominant species. The fact of human intelligence and ingenuity possessed solely by us in a unique way among all species’ traits is probably something that comes close to a pure positive and excels every other trait considerably. It is the key evolutionary advantage and outweighs all other species’ traits combined and it has enabled man to become master of the planet.



Outside of purely biological evolution there are other forms that also evolve in the general sense including cultures and civilisations from primitive tribes and groups to the Egyptian and Greek civilisations, for example but you also have systems and ideas. By systems and ideas I mean the large areas of human concern and preoccupation like science and mathematics, political systems, technologies, art forms and spirituality. All these contain the evolutionary principle too and change over time in some particular way. Some progress fast and some slower and each differently, and for others progress isn’t really the issue at all.



We’ll now briefly consider some of them in terms of how they change and the issue of progress which are not actually the same. Technology has always been there but has advanced considerably since the industrial revolution and progressed exponentially in the 20th century particularly in the last fifty years. You can view it in terms of machines and devices but you see this evolution very starkly in something like IT. Whether it’s hardware and processors or the web and operating systems anything in this area represents two forms of evolution. The outer form is wide scale proliferation among larger percentages of the population but at the heart is pure evolution – the rapid increase in power and complexity in design at the heart of every new generation of machine. And it happens every twelve months or so not every ten thousand or hundred thousand years. Its speed is therefore its unique characteristic.



Religion on the other hand is usually bound by tradition and dogma or just core beliefs about life and the world. These have been passed down and progress principally by spreading the message to more people but also in terms of interpreting the message for contemporary society. It can also in a more limited way adapt to changing times but the reason it progresses is that some find meaning in the message which is based on those same traditions and doctrines, etc expressed simply as basic beliefs about life and the human condition. Philosophy is not really bound this way but values instead logic and consistency about what we can know instead of what we believe – blindly they would say - on grounds of faith and revealed truth. It seeks answers to questions like ‘What is truth?’ and ‘What is the best way to live?’ which also arise in religion but are tackled differently in philosophy. Philosophy and the different schools within it seek answers that are rational and consistent with what we already know to be true or think is true. However, it often cannot give a single answer or a simple one it seems but progresses by deeper inquiry often in the light of other knowledge. Progress is made in the work of brilliant individuals like some other disciplines but particularly in this field. They throw new light and insight onto the central questions or ask better ones. They think and theorise and come up with new systems and schools of thought but unlike science are unable to perform experiments as such to confirm them; it is an abstract discipline not an empirical, physical study where ideas can be verified but it can be informed by science and art and often is and it’s a two way street. It can give science for example a philosophical basis like positivism which says the only good hypotheses are those which are falsifiable (therefore testable) and further that we can only have models of reality that accord with observations and which make predictions that can be verified by experiment or observation – we cannot know ultimately what reality is only have better and better models of it. Some would contest this conclusion.



Art doesn’t ‘progress’ over time as such, at least not like technology or science; it’s more accurate to say that it changes and takes different forms and styles and subtle sub-forms instead but the quality of great art is high and constant throughout time. A piece produced in China two thousand years ago could be as valuable maybe more so as something done two years ago and hanging in the Tate Modern today. Politics is also a bit different because a system that died and failed can be resurrected at a later date unlike an extinct species in biological evolution. For example fascist-type movements will almost always arise any place where the people have little and are angry and hungry for change that will improve their lot and restore national pride which may have been taken away. Science does progress in an evolutionary way because of its own exacting and dispassionate method. Theories that don’t agree with experiment and observation however beautiful are discarded, those that do agree have survived - for now and may contribute to a larger model. As a whole the scientific project expands and improves our knowledge with applications to industry and society and it does so in a sure, steady way. It is still open to abuse however, as history shows because knowledge is power and for some science can also sometimes be cold, clinical and amoral.



Is evolution itself changing and what is its future? It seems it is changing and primarily because of us. Life on the planet evolved in broadly the same way for hundreds of millions of years. Then humans came along and evolved faster and also created other forms which themselves evolved. In the case of technology we are now at the point of artificial intelligence possibly, and machines that could think at a basic level could be very useful. Some experts think the future may mean that man and technology may combine or ‘fuse’ but not really in some sort of sci-fi way. This idea is called transhumanity and would mean that future people, maybe within a century, would be stronger in mind and body because of assistance from technology. Neural implants and other devices, more powerful drugs, genetic manipulation and healthier lifestyles would mean that people could stave off aging, sickness and disease, have more acute senses and possess more powerful brains. Ultimately, some think humanity will have to leave the planet to survive and it may take humans like those just described to live and travel in space. Colonisation might begin with the moon and mars but we may eventually have to leave the solar system. That is very long way off though and even reaching a local star stretches current theory. There are also unknowns and unanswered questions in this scenario and we don’t really know how things will go. What about the possible advent of cloned humans or electronically-based life? These are also controversial issues but there are more immediate concerns for the majority of us.

What about the essential question of human evolution as we know it now i.e. can we ultimately create a happy, peaceful world in our life time or that of our children? Are things getting generally better or generally worse? Whatever about possible futures in coming centuries we do know about the present and can extrapolate forward a few decades. The answers to these questions are not straightforward but they can tell us about the real power of evolution. Is it truly great or actually limited? One observation about most evolutions is that with each new stage there are new problems. So it can be like a zero sum gain - we evolve for example or more precisely with us we change over the millennia, centuries and now decades and think we are better off but new problems that arise mean the overall state hasn’t improved much, it’s just changed to something else, e.g. modernism to post-modernism.

Perhaps there is some progress amongst more rapid change but human history displays the above pattern. We may assume there is a general improvement over time but we should realise the current state of the world after many millennia is that, although many in the developed world have high living standards, useful technology and comfortable lives in the main compared with the past, it is also true that we can now destroy the planet many times over and by contrast are unable to feed it. We have evolved to a state where more than a third of the world lives in poverty and where, on the other hand, many in the developed world suffer from mental illness and a general unhappiness related to stress, job dissatisfaction, poor health, relationship problems and crime, etc.



One expert (Martin Rees, Astronomer Royal, Great Britain) who looked into the larger question of human survival gave the world a 50% chance of surviving beyond the 21st century. This is not that unrealistic when you consider the multiple simultaneous threats – natural and man-made - we now face and that we often hear about like war, famine, other natural disasters, global terrorism, food supply, energy provision, overpopulation and our rapidly deteriorating environment. Many of these are linked of course so they reinforce each other which only makes it worse. So it’s not a given really that we have indeed truly ‘progressed’ or, put another way, many of these serious problems were not problems for our ancestors, even recent ones. Some humans could be evolving at a high level but many are just surviving and the global situation is volatile and uncertain.



Evolution though, it must be said, is a powerful force, just not perfect and why should it be? It preserves the species or system, or happens to, by keeping it changing and adapting to the surrounding environment but considering the big picture, real underlying progress is often much slower. When it comes to us, people sometimes optimistically point to the glories of the current age like the car, computer, TV and moon landings and forget the serious issues mentioned above that have existed alongside them and that continue to go unresolved. I suppose though it’s good to be positive overall. You could point out that in the human case if we really wanted to create a better world we could do it together - a greater democratisation of power globally would be a good start for one thing. The elite are making bad decisions (good for them though) that are based on power, greed, etc that the ordinary people disagree with and who sometimes suffer the consequences of those decisions. On the whole though there would be difficult obstacles in our path certainly but no impossible barriers, I think – only we ourselves stand in the way, it seems.