The Evolutionary Challenge for Technology

The evolutionary challenge for technology in the third millennium is one of designing the vehicles for sustainable human and societal development in partnership with earth. The challenge calls for the conscious creation of evolutionary systems-not through the "hard technologies" that shape and mold the physical infrastructure of our planet, but through "soft technologies" that augment creative and constructive processes of human interaction. Through them, humanity has the opportunity to create the conditions for the emergence of a true learning society at both regional and global levels. The meaning of key terms such as evolution, technology, and development must be explored if we are to create a shared understanding of the contemporary survival challenges faced by humanity. This paper explores both the promise and the threat faced by a techno-civilization such as is emerging on our planet in the early twenty-first century.     

进化心理学的相关概念、理论与历史

该文概述了达尔文主义、进化生物学与心理学在中国的发展,同时也介绍了与进化心理学相关的概念与基本理论。该文内容包括,Darwin的自然选择理论,Hamilton的种系适宜理论与Trivers的父母投资理论,也包括博弈理论、生活史理论与生态位建构理论     

Rhapsodic Evolution: Essay on Exaptation and Evolutionary Pluralism

Since formulating the theory of punctuated equilibria in 1972, a group of prominent evolutionary biologists, geneticists, and paleontologists have contributed towards a significant reinterpretation of the neo-Darwinian image of evolution that had consolidated during the second half of the twentieth century. We believe a research program, which we might define as "evolutionary pluralism" or "post-Darwinism," has been outlined, one that is centered on the discovery of the complexity and multiplicity of elements that work together to produce changes in our evolutionary systems. We are talking about a three-dimensional multiplicity: a multiplicity of rhythms in evolution (i.e., the theory of punctuated equilibria); a multiplicity of evolutionary units and levels (i.e., the hierarchical theory of evolution); and a multiplicity of factors and causes in evolution (i.e., the concept of exaptation). Although the reductionistic and deterministic view of natural history interprets the intelligence of evolution as a panoptic and executory rationality, evolutionary pluralism, going back to the original flexibility of the Darwinian opus, sees in the intelligence of evolution an ingenious m tis, an imperfect but very creative, craftsmanlike cleverness. The new metaphors of change introduced by evolutionary pluralism and the consequent criticism of the adaptational paradigm offer some very interesting spin-offs for the study of evolutionary systems in widely differing fields, from theoretical economics to the cognitive sciences. I propose a particular hypothesis concerning the possibility and usefulness of expanding the concept of exaptation into a general theory of developmental processes, both in biology as well as in the cognitive sciences.     

Molecular Lamarckism: On the Evolution of Human Intelligence

In modern times, Lamarck's view of evolution, based on inheritance of acquired traits has been superseded by neo-Darwinism, based on random DNA mutations. This article begins with a series of observations suggesting that Lamarckian inheritance is in fact operative throughout Nature. I then launch into a discussion of human intelligence that is the most important feature of human evolution that cannot be easily explained by mutational selection. Thus, we are smarter than demanded by our evolutionary experience as hunter-gatherers. The difficulty lies in the inability of neo-Darwinism to satisfactorily answer the following question: How can a large energy-costly set of genes, each member of which has little apparent benefit when first created individually, all gather into a permanent existence within a short time period in each and every member of a small population (that was dispersed and geographically isolated over a huge planet) who had a low reproductive output, a low rate of beneficial mutations, and a low level of genetic contact? The article concludes with a speculative but far-reaching epigenetic theory of intelligence that does not require DNA mutation as the exclusive source of evolutionary change. Instead, cranial feedback relating brain chemistry, as affected by brain activity including education, with the genome. When it comes to the fast rate of evolution, and the dissemination of the intelligence trait worldwide, cranial feedback could make all the difference.     

Circling the wagons or opening the circle

“To approach eudaimonia or human flourishing,” Darcia Narvaez writes, “one must have a concept of human nature… a normal baseline.” This article asks: what is the human baseline so that we may develop public policy to suit and advance human and planetary flourishing? It proposes that our “baseline” is relational, where each person becomes her singular self through networks of relations with others and planet. Relationality is explored through Trinity, covenant, evolutionary biology, and psychology. The article concludes that public policy must be grounded not in “us-them” thinking but in relationality as this is how we are created.     

The proper role of history in evolutionary explanations

Evolutionary explanations are not only common in the biological sciences, but also widespread outside biology. But an account of how evolutionary explanations perform their explanatory work is still lacking. This paper develops such an account. I argue that available accounts of explanations in evolutionary science miss important parts of the role of history in evolutionary explanations. I argue that the historical part of evolutionary science should be taken as having genuine explanatory force, and that it provides how-possibly explanations sensu Dray. I propose an account of evolutionary explanations as comparative-composite explanations consisting of two distinct kinds of explanations, one processual and one historical, that are connected via the explanandum's evolvability to show how the explanandum is the product of its evolutionary past. The account is both a reconstruction of how evolutionary explanations in biology work and a guideline specifying what kind of explanations evolutionary research programs should develop.     

Caring for Nature: From Fact to Value, from Respect to Reverence

Abstract. Despite the classical prohibition of moving from fact to value, encounter with the biodiversity and plenitude of being in evolutionary natural history moves us to respect life, even to reverence it. Darwinian accounts are value‐laden and necessary for understanding life at the same time that Darwinian theory fails to provide sufficient cause for the historically developing diversity and increasing complexity on Earth. Earth is a providing ground; matter and energy on Earth support life, but distinctive to life is information coded in the genetic molecules that superintends this matter‐energy. Life is generated and regenerated in struggle, persists in its perishing. Such life is also a gift; nature is grace. Biologists and theologians join in celebrating and conserving the genesis on Earth, awed in their encounter with this creativity that characterizes our home planet.     

KARL PETERS: THEOLOGY AS A CONFESSING DISCIPLINE

Abstract. Karl Peters's book Dancing with the Sacred brings together his insights from evolutionary biology and ecology, world religions, and process thought into an integrated autobiographical reflection on his thoughts, teaching, and life. The book simultaneously engages readers in their own reflections about religion and science and reminds them that their reflections are freighted with moral responsibility. For Peters, self‐understanding correlates with understanding the world. The celebration of diversity coincides with the universal concerns that all face living together on this planet. Our future depends on how we live in the present tense.     

The Causal Structure of Evolutionary Theory

One contentious debate in the philosophy of biology is that between the statisticalists and causalists. The former understand core evolutionary concepts like fitness and selection to be mere statistical summaries of underlying causal processes. In this view, evolutionary changes cannot be causally explained by selection or fitness. The causalist side, on the other hand, holds that populations can change in response to selection—one can cite fitness differences or driftability in causal explanations of evolutionary change. But, on the causalist side, it is often not clear how, precisely, one should understand these causes. Thus, much more could be said about what sort of causes fitness and driftability are. In this paper, I borrow Dretske's distinction between structuring and triggering causes and I suggest that fitness and driftability are structuring causes of evolution.     

The Absurd Sensibility of Existential Psychotherapy: Clinical Application of Survivors' Experience of Treblinka and Other Death Camps

A pragmatic existential therapy was developed to help patients stuck in intractable life situations make the psychic turn of death camp survivors who learned to adapt to savage conditions in extremity. Using a model of absurd heroism inimical to therapies seeking to modify intrapsychic dynamics, this hardminded intervention thematizes (a) the clinical activation of biological intelligence; (b) reconciliation with the existential situation; (c) problem-solving; (d) therapeutic shaping of realistic, life-affirming attitudes; and (e) absurd happiness. Phenomenological evidence of the survivors' existential posture is drawn from death camp literature, while a comparative case application features a patient afflicted with neurofibromatosis.     

Biology Precedes, Culture Transcends: An Evolutionist's View of Human Nature

I will, first, outline what we currently know about the last 4 million years of human evolutionary history, from bipedal but small-brained Australopithecus to modern Homo sapiens, our species, through the prolific toolmaker Homo habilis and the continent wanderer Homo erectus. I shall then identify anatomical traits that distinguish us from other animals and point out our two kinds of heredity, the biological and the cultural.
Biological inheritance is based on the transmission of genetic information, in humans very much the same as in other sexually reproducing organisms. But cultural inheritance is distinctively human, based on transmission of information by a teaching and learning process that is in principle independent of biological parentage. Cultural inheritance makes possible the cumulative transmission of experience from generation to generation. Cultural heredity is a swifter and more effective (because it can be designed) mode of adaptation to the environment than the biological mode. The advent of cultural heredity ushered in cultural evolution, which transcends biological evolution.
I will, finally, explore ethical behavior as a model case of a distinctive human trait, and seek to ascertain the causal connections between human ethics and human biology. My conclusions are that (1) moral reasoning—that is, the proclivity to make ethical judgments by evaluating actions as either good or evil—is rooted in our biological nature; it is a necessary outcome of our exalted intelligence, but (2) the moral codes that guide our decisions as to which actions are good and which ones are evil are products of culture, including social and religious traditions. This second conclusion contradicts those evolutionists and sociobiologists who claim that the morally good is simply that which is promoted by the process of biological evolution.     

Tree thinking: a new paradigm for integrating comparative data in psychology

Over the past 15 years, several important theoretical and methodological developments have emerged from evolutionary biology. These developments--collectively dubbed tree thinking--are now well known in evolutionary biology but have yet to be incorporated into mainstream psychology. Tree thinking has revolutionized evolutionary biology and has the potential to do the same for how comparative data are integrated into psychology. Tree thinking holds that explanations (or narratives) for adaptations must be based on an understanding of the adaptations' history (or chronicle) over evolutionary time. This tenet of tree thinking requires researchers to consider hitherto neglected patterns of data. The authors present the ideas and methods behind tree thinking, examining their implications for psychology.     

The function debate: between “cheap tricks” and evolutionary neutrality

We examine the use of the notion of natural selection in the philosophical debate on functions in biology. This debate has been largely shaped by the way in which different accounts assess various selective pressures in justifying claims about biological functions. Cummins (Functions: new essays in the philosophy of psychology and biology. Oxford University Press, Oxford, pp 157–172, 2002), one of the main proponents of the causal role account of biological functions, argues that a correctly understood neo-Darwinian notion of natural selection has nothing to do with functional talk in biology. In this paper, we counter Cummins’ account by showing that progress in the molecular approaches to evolutionary biology—specifically scientific data available in neo-functionalization research—offers valuable support to the etiological selectionist approach to functions in biological and biologically-related sciences. Finally, we use the presented data to build our own account of biological functions, which tries to avoid the wrong turns taken by both major strands in the biological function debate, namely causal role and etiological accounts. According to our account, the function of a certain gene or a protein in the biological system that contains it is a particular causal activity, or a group of causal activities whose manifestation is in a specific way determined by corresponding mechanisms of genetic expression. Also, we argue that in many important cases this particular expression of genetic activity was positively selected at a certain point in evolutionary history. Since we take selection as an important but not the only factor that grounds biological functions, we are committed to a weak etiological account.     

Divine freedom and creaturely suffering in process theology: A critical appraisal

The suffering of creatures experienced throughout evolutionary history provides some conceptual difficulties for theists who maintain that God is an all-good loving creator who chose to employ the processes associated with evolution to bring about life on this planet. Some theists vexed by this and other problems posed by the interface between religion and science have turned to process theology which provides a picture of a God who is dependent upon creation and unable to unilaterally intervene in the affairs of the world and avert suffering. In the present paper I seek to critique process theism, focusing on divine action and the aforementioned problem posed by evolutionary suffering. I show that the promise of a more compelling account of a loving God who suffers with creation advanced by the process theist is illusory. Rather, the process God is less dynamic than promised. And on such an account the freedom of both God and the world are significantly more circumscribed than one may find in other forms of theism.     

Re-Conceiving God and Humanity in Light of Today's Evolutionary-Ecological Consciousness

The anthropocentric orientation of traditional understandings of Christian faith and life, further accentuated by the existentialist terms in which theology was articulated in mid-century by Tillich and others, produced theologies no longer appropriate in today's world of evolutionary and ecological thinking about human existence and its embeddedness in the web of life on planet Earth. This problem can be addressed with the help of several new concepts that enable us to understand both humanity-in-the-world and God in ways in keeping with these present conceptions, thus providing a more intelligible and illuminating way of understanding Christian faith and life today.     

Ruse's Darwin and Design: Does It Go Far Enough?

Michael Ruse's forthcoming book gives an enjoyable history of teleology in biology, philosophy, and theology. It argues that concepts of cause, final cause, purpose, teleology, function, design, adaptation, contrivance, progress, ends, and value have all been telescoped by most writers in those three disciplines but that these concepts (and especially the concept of design) are nonetheless valid, provided only that we recognize their metaphorical nature. I agree with this basic argument, and Ruse's critiques and historical summaries of these concepts are both useful and delightful. However, I also explore one major and three minor reservations. The minor reservations are that Ruse overdoes the allegation of telescoping, does not adequately explore ways to express teleology more accurately, and erroneously denies the existence of biology–based theologians who make the same point he is making. The major reservation is that, despite all the groundwork he lays, Ruse comes to a conclusion other than the one clearly suggested by his first fourteen chapters. If he followed the evolutionary story just a bit further, to include the evolution of the human brain, he would be in a position to articulate a theologically sophisticated understanding of teleology and avoid an ending that is uncharacteristically tame.     

Identification: psychoanalytic and biological perspectives

In recent attempts to bring psychoanalysis into greater contact with other sciences, a number of works have explicated neural science concepts and phenomena--affect, memory, consciousness--for the psychoanalyst. These efforts have helped analysts build a more scientific foundation for their theory and practice. A related task remains--namely, to take psychoanalytic concepts and see how they relate to other sciences. The concept of identification has a long history in psychoanalytic theory. It is seen in parent-child interactions, in teaching and mentoring relationships, and in psychoanalysis and psychotherapy. Neuropsychology and evolutionary biology have explored the phylogenetic precursors of identification, while genetics and infant observation provide insights into individual processes of identification. Finally, neuroscience, particularly recent studies of mirror neurons, offers information about the biological mechanisms of imitation and the relationship of imitation to identification. Findings from these sciences are presented in an effort to further the psychoanalytic understanding of identification, especially its biological underpinnings.     

The epistemology of evolutionary debunking

Fifteen years ago, Sharon Street and Richard Joyce advanced evolutionary debunking arguments against moral realism, which purported to show that the evolutionary history of our moral beliefs makes moral realism untenable. These arguments have since given rise to a flurry of objections; the epistemic principles Street and Joyce relied upon, in particular, have come in for a number of serious challenges. My goal in this paper is to develop a new account of evolutionary debunking which avoids the pitfalls Street and Joyce encountered and responds to the most pressing objections they faced. I begin by presenting a striking thought experiment to serve as an analogy for the evolution of morality; I then show why calibrationist views of higher-order evidence are crucial to the evolutionary debunking project; I outline a new rationale for why finding out that morality was selected to promote cooperation suggests that our moral judgments are unreliable; and I explain why evolutionary debunking arguments do not depend on our having a dedicated faculty for moral cognition. All things considered, I argue, evolutionary debunking arguments against moral realism are on relatively secure footing – provided, at least, that we accept a calibrationist account of higher-order evidence.

     

The Theological Structure of Christian Faith and the Feasibility of a Global Ecological Ethic

Scientific evolutionary/ecological thinking is the basis for today's understanding that we are now in an ecological crisis. Religions, however, often resist reordering their thinking in light of scientific ideas, and this presents difficulties in trying to develop a viable global ecological ethic. In both the West and Asia religiomoral ecological concerns continue to be formulated largely in terms of traditional concepts rather than in more global terms, as scientific thinking about ecological matters might encourage them to do. The majority of this article is devoted to the kind of reformulation of Western Christian conceptions of God, humanity, and the relation between them that is necessary to address this problem. The question is then raised whether similar critical thinking about religiomoral issues raised by today's evolutionary/ecological scientific thinking is going on in Asian religions and whether it would be too presumptuous (in view of our colonial history) for us Westerners to ask for such rethinking. This leads to a final question: Without such transformations in religious traditions East and West, is the development of a truly global ecological ethic really feasible?     

Facing the third millennium: An evolutionary crisis

We are witnessing the birth of the first global civilization on our planet earth due to the accelerative progress of science and technology. This is also accompanied by a crisis in health care, pollution and other environmental disasters, a rising wave of violence and crime, stresses due to globalization, and so on. Recently, we formulated “An Action Plan for Human Survival” (Reference 24).

This article explores in depth the challenges in bringing about a peaceful transition to a global civilization. It explores global civilization, environmental crisis and population. It reveals that the stresses generated by globalization and environmental crisis cannot be resolved by dualistic thought, or concepts, or ideals, or intellectual constructions; as these are sterile in bringing mutation in the human psyche. We see that the emergence of global consciousness is not keeping pace with the globalization, and it is feared that globalization may turn out to be abortive and ultimately self‐destructive.

The crisis is not political, or economic, or social. It is evolutionary in character. We have to explore nature's evolutionary impulse. The challenge is to resolve the “crisis of perception,” or to allow the mutation to happen in the mind‐brain system. The only technology for radical transformation or mutation of human psyche is purification or deconditioning of the human psyche. This leads to new relationship between man and man, and between man and environment. It ends all pain, sorrow and travails and ushers a new era of freedom, peace and bliss. This is the key to human survival, progress and fulfillment.