Filling Some Epistemological Gaps: New Patterns of Inference in Evolutionary Theory

Abstract

Deeply held scientific beliefs, like metaphysical presumptions, color the world in their own hues, leaving in shadow questions which might be both posable and answerable under a different light. Contemporary evolutionary theory, derived from the intellectual marriage of Darwin and Mendel, is such a world view. Whatever conceptual order this intellectual union has brought, it remains true that heritable mutations and Natural Selection are processes exploring and pruning a complex tree of possibilities. The central epistemological failure of contemporary evolutionary theory, I shall argue, is that it has supplied little insight into the expected character of the possibilities which are explored. Prune though it may, selection itself cannot generate biological order, and variation can only explore. Hidden in the shadows of current theory lies the concept that the ultimate sources of order in the living world must derive from basic properties of structural or dynamical self-organization in complex molecular systems; further that an appropriate understanding of such self-organizing properties would help limit and explain the possibilities explored in evolution.