Progress as a universal epiphenomenon – Part 2: Biology

One of the most basic premises of evolutionary biology is that evolution by natural selection is not in any way a goal-directed process. Species result from a set of survivors, and what emerges as a natural consequence are characteristics which best suit the environment.

However, ethologist Richard Dawkins, in his book The Ancestor’s Tale, describes several cases where he sees value-laden progress in evolution. The primary example is in predator/prey relationships, which form a sort of feedback loop in the evolutionary process. Prey must get better at escaping, and predators must get better at hunting. Those who don’t parish as they find themselves outcompeted by their more adept counterparts.

Another such feedback loop is sexual selection. When a trait becomes in any linked to the reproduction process, it explodes on an evolutionary timescale. This is one hypothesis as to why human intelligence exploded: intelligence became sexually desirable. The best singers, the best dancers, the best speakers, and the best hunters became the most desirable members of society.

There are other ways in which evolution is progressive which don’t rely on feedback loops. Richard Dawkins describes them as “watershed events.” The foremost of these is sexual reproduction itself, which really gave birth to the true concept of species as we know it, namely as a group where the indivduals naturally mate with each other. Sexual reproduction created the gene pool, which if plotted over time gives way to the branching structure of speciation which eventually lead to humanity, among countless other endpoints. Where asexual production was more akin to a diffuse cloud, sexual reproduction forms a splitering river, to borrow a symbol from Dawkins. There are several theories as to why sexual reproduction emerged, one of which is as a defense against parasites. While the reasons why sexually reproducing organisms were the fittest for their environment may not be known, but the end result of this adaptation certainlly is.

Similar watershed events occur earlier on the evolutinary timescale. One of these was the advent of the eukaryotic cell which underlies all animal, plant, fungus, and protist life on this planet. Other such splits include the advent of the Moneran cell, the likely split where Archaea diverged from viruses, and the most important watershed event of all: the divergence of the common ancestor from all life on earth, the progenote, from the primitive life systems which came before it.

It’s amazing, in 20/20 hindsight, to plot the progression of biological evolution and see the sorts of problems were naturally solved by each of these watershed events. As evolution by natural selection favors those individuals most adept at living enough to reproduce, and successfully doing so, there are two routes to optimize for: fast reproducers who don’t live long, or slower reproducers with substantially longer lifespans. The progenote and its descendants most similar to itself favor the former path in a graduating scale in which eukaryotes have continued to employ a progressive path in which species have become increasingly optimized at living longer as opposed to producing large numbers of offspring.

Another split occurs at sexual reproduction. The gene pool affords the ability for descendants of a common ancestor who are similar enough to share adaptations they’ve discovered, at the cost of remaing substantially more stable in their configuration. This limits the rate at which they can adapt, but also means that they can leverage adaptations that may have been lost to all but a few members of the group when they are needed again.

The brawn vs. brain dichotomy can be seen in the reptile/mammal split. Dinosaurs were genetically geared to start small but keep growing, with growth being the primary cause to which their energies were directed. Mammals, on the other hand, found ways to allow their descendants to develop for longer periods of time, culminating in placental mammals whose offspring developed internally. This provided a way for offspring to grow amazingly elaborate structures as they fueled themselves with energy from their parents. In mammals, it was the brain, and not size, that energy would be directed at.

These watershed events allowed the evolutionary system to explore increasingly elaborate and complex designs, culminating in man. The human brain remains biology’s greatest mystery, rivaled only perhaps by the origin of all life on earth. However, while there are several theories about how life originated, there are no comprehensive theories of the human brain’s operation as a whole. While most biologists will see man as merely one of innumerable strategies life attempted over the course of history, we represent a creature which went through a series of progressive tunings and happened to be the products of a fortuitous evolutionary feedback loop which lead to the human brain. Of all the brain architectures nature explored, ours does its job, namely that of thinking, the best.

In humans, nature found a platform where evolution would be driven by information, not by genetics. Many consider the evolution of information inside of the human system to be evolving in a way similar to natural selection, a hypothesis which underlies the protoscience of memetics, and many consider a natural selection-like model to be one of the main processes underlying consciousness, including philosopher Daniel Dennett and computer scientist Donald Knuth. In this way human societal and cultural evolution can be seen as extensions of biological evolution, employing similar methods but with a substantially more refined approach. Humans create the sorts of feedback loops which I described above naturally through their collective action, and it’s out of these feedback loops that immense progress has been made.

Life explored innumerable approaches in evolutionary history. Many of these were aimless fluxuation around the basic design of the common ancestor. But naturally, progressive approaches emerged. Thus progress is an epiphenomenon of biological evolution; invariably, given enough time, a progressive element will emerge, lest all life be destroyed.