Evolution — Definition and Implications (Part 2)
By Dr Alan Tuffery - Edited by Dr Gurjot Brar & Prof. Henry O'Connell
Dr Tuffery is a retired lecturer in Physiology with about 40 years experience teaching and examining in Health Sciences and Science. This includes many different types of writing, from short-answer examination questions and essays to literature reviews, final-year dissertations and PhD theses.
Dr Tuffery was a College Tutor for over 30 years and Senior Tutor (1989-95) and was deeply involved in Student Services in Ireland and in the development of Disability Services in College.
Dr Tuffery has an abiding interest in words and language; he selected and collated an anthology of the Irish Times columns of the lexicographer, Diarmaid & Muirthe.
We are exceptionally delighted to have Dr Alan Tuffery write two articles on Evolution - Definition and Implications which will be published in two parts. Part one discussed the definition with part two exploring the implications of evolution.
You can find a link to part one below:
PART II - Implications of Evolution by Natural Selection
Part I set out the main elements of the concept of Evolution by Natural Selection and its supporting arguments. Part II summarises some of the main implications of what Daniel Dennett called ‘Darwin’s dangerous idea’ for our understanding of ourselves and our world. I’ll begin by describing its application in a variety of fields of human learning, then outline its impact on religion. After that we’ll look at ‘man’s place in nature’ and the special features of humans which result in our responsibility for the future evolution of ourselves and other living things on our planet.
Applications of Evolution to Different Fields of Learning
One of the tests of an idea is how widely it serves as an ‘organising principle’, helping to examine and explain a wide range of phenomena. The evolutionary principles of variation and differential survival are considered to be essential in many disciplines outside biology from astronomy and cosmology to philology (Indeed, philologists, who study the origins of words and languages, were ‘early adopters’ in the 19th century and some even use genetic models to build family trees of languages).
The social sciences (including psychology) have been resistant to biological ideas, including evolution. However, psychiatry has a movement towards evolutionary thinking which suggests that adaptations, such as high levels of alertness which were adaptive far back in human evolution are no longer adaptive in modern human society and lead to pathologies such as over-anxiety. The argument is that human societies have changed so much in just a few thousand years — a mere blink in evolutionary terms — there has not been enough time for evolution to select the necessary adaptations.
In the sense that all fields of learning — indeed all human activities — are products of living things, namely humans, it is not surprising that the concept of evolution is useful. It is all Biology after all (see Cultural Evolution below).
Religions
The earliest proponents of evolution recognised that there would be conflict with religion for two main reasons. First, because of the demonstration of the extinction and change of species, contrary to the belief in a single creation of fixed species. Second, evolution by natural selection is sufficient to explain both the ever more refined adaptation of organisms to their environment and also the intricacy of structure (Dennett’s ‘engine for complexity’). Hence it removes both the need for a creator god and the argument from design which asserts that intricate structures must have had a designer. Some religious groups will accept most evolutionary ideas but insist that humans are special in that they have separately and divinely created souls. We will see that humans are special, but we can account for this in purely evolutionary terms.
‘Man’s Place in Nature’. (The title of an 1863 book by TH Huxley, a fierce 19th-century proponent of evolution). The principle of descent with modification leads to the idea that all living things (including humans) are related. We are not separate from nature; we are part of nature, another type of animal, descended from other animals. (The Last Universal Common Ancestor (LUCA) of all living things was about 3.9 billion years ago; the last common ancestor of the human species was about 250,000 years ago).
The Uniqueness of Humans — Cultural Evolution
Although we are undeniably part of the living world, an animal among other animals, we are however, special — indeed unique — in that we have the most complex brains, advanced language and writing. These qualities move us out of the two slow earlier phases of evolution recognised by JS Huxley 60 years ago. The first, Inorganic phase took billions of years for the formation of stars and the larger atoms, such as iron, carbon etc. The second, Organic phase took hundreds of millions of years during which the more complex molecules were formed until eventually some could reproduce themselves. Essentially this is the forming of the first living things which slowly gained in complexity (under the influence of natural selection) until humans appear.
In a few thousand years humans have evolved within Huxley’s Psychosocial phase of evolution in which change is extremely rapid: humans can rapidly transmit ideas of all kinds: technology, social structures — in short, all the products of human societies (I prefer the term cultural evolution for this process and I suspect that Huxley only called it ’psychosocial’ because he was addressing psychologists at the time).
Cultural evolution means that humans can understand their place in the world, determine desirable goals and set a course towards those goals. For Huxley the next great evolutionary advance will be humanity’s agreement about its ‘destiny’, based on rational scientific thought and evolutionary principles. Our understanding of cultural evolution has profound consequences for our view of ourselves because we can see that we are responsible for ourselves and our actions including their effects on other living things and on our environment. This in turn has implications for our view of the value of the individual and hence for the way we organise our societies. It is these aspects I want to explore in the remainder of this article.
‘Every one of us is precious in the cosmic perspective. If a human disagrees with you, let him live. In a hundred billion galaxies, you will not find another.’ Carl Sagan, astronomer and writer (1981). Cosmos McDonald & Co, GB
The Value of the Individual
This is the great existential question for humans. An individual’s life of a few decades is as nothing on a cosmic time-scale of billions of years. In the face of this fact it is easy to feel daunted and despairing. Throughout human history religions have addressed this question by promises of a blissful after-life or the suggestion that we are serving some supernatural being’s purpose — often unknowable and beyond question. Such views are unsupported by any useful evidence — they are matters of faith.
However, the evolutionary view described above — what we may call evolutionary humanism — gives a much more optimistic perspective. On this view every individual has value precisely because we are the ‘agents of evolution’. Each individual human has the potential to contribute to the betterment of our species, all living things and our environment. The evolutionary view is supported by all the weight of modern biology, the fact of evolution and our knowledge about ourselves.
‘The well-developed well-patterned individual human being is, in a strictly scientific sense, the highest phenomenon of which we have any knowledge; and the variety in individual personalities is the world’s highest richness’
[88-9] Quotations Julian Huxley on Value of the individual
In evolutionary humanism every individual is valued for two main reasons. First, in any evolutionary view diversity is prized for itself. As we saw in Part I, diversity, or variation is the ‘stuff of evolution’; without it evolution ceases. A population with a narrow range of possibilities and no variation is likely to become stranded by changes in the environment, unable to adapt — an evolutionary ‘dead-end’.
Second, we cannot know what problems lie ahead of us and what skills and aptitudes will be required to survive. Happily, humans are wonderfully diverse and every individual should be encouraged to seek personal fulfilment to the highest possible degree. This is not a recipe for hedonistic self-indulgence, but rather a strategy for fostering the widest range of skills and aptitudes as a kind of evolutionary insurance policy.
The duty to ‘do something to develop his own personality, to discover his own talents and possibilities, to interact personally and fruitfully with other individuals, to discover something of his own significance.’ In so doing the individual ‘is realising an important quantum of evolutionary possibility; … contributing personal quality to the fulfilment of human ‘‘destiny’’.’
[89] Quotations Julian Huxley on Value of the individual
Implications for Societies
It is now clearly understood that variation in traits come from three sources:
genetic predisposition
chance variations during development
and the effects of the environment
The significance of genetic predisposition varies greatly. In some conditions it approaches 100% (sickle-cell trait, blood groups), but in many conditions many hundreds or even thousands of genes are involved in a particular trait (intelligence, height). In the latter case each gene has a only a minute effect on the trait. Chance variations during development arise because genetic instructions are fairly general. For example, in brain development a particular bundle of nerve fibres is instructed to connect to a particular group of nerve cells; but which individual fibre goes to which individual cell is not specified. The precise connections at that level are a matter of chance.
These developmental effects are beyond our control, as is the genetic predisposition (at the moment). But the environment can be manipulated to produce optimum development of individuals. By environment is meant all experiences throughout life. This includes nutrition, exposure to infection and many other factors. For humans, perhaps the most important is education (in its broadest sense). This is where we gain much of our knowledge of the wider world and learn how to think. It is in education that there is the most potential for enhancing our super-powers of abstract thought, communication and planning our goals and working out how to get there.
Given this knowledge of our development and an evolutionary overview which values each individual, we can get some clear pointers about how we should organise our societies for the best results on an evolutionary scale. In a society organised on the principles of evolutionary humanism, all individuals will have support and opportunities according to their needs so that they can maximise their potential. This means reducing poverty, providing efficient healthcare and the opportunities for education according to ability and attitude. As JS Huxley pointed out, our environment should include beauty and wonder. (George Orwell’s novel, 1984, shows how to do precisely the opposite.)
“As JS Huxley pointed out, our environment should include beauty and wonder.”
Societies are extremely complex but evolutionary humanism provides a set of general guidelines to help work out the details at a local level. For our present purposes, it is sufficient to say that this is extremely important work and it will draw on many strands of human thought.
The Planet’s Future is up to Us
(A found poem from Julian Huxley, The Humanist Frame.)
If this seems bleak,
consider the qualities we can bring:
the possibilities
of wonder and delight
of knowledge and reverence
creative belief
and moral purpose
of passionate effort
embracing love
imagination
and co-operative goodwill.
Afterword
In attempting this summary of evolution and its implications, I am aware that almost every paragraph could be a topic for further detailed discussion of this fascinating and complex subject. Let the last words be those attributed by Francis Crick to Leslie Orgel: ‘Evolution is cleverer than you are.’
Acknowledgements
I am grateful to my ‘critical friends’ David McConnell and Tom Miniter for commenting on early drafts.
Note on Sources
Bashford, A (2022). An Intimate History of Evolution: The Story of the Huxley Family. An excellent account of JS and TH Huxley and their intellectual and personal milieux.
Dawkins, R (2009). The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution.
Dennett, DC (1995). Darwin’s Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meanings of Life.
Huxley, JS (1961). The Humanist Frame (See the essay of the same title. (1964). Essays of Humanist
Much of JS Huxley’s work is now out of print although some of it can be read online, and scanned copies are available.
Huxley, TH (1863) Man’s Place in Nature and Other Essays. (Often reprinted but now out of print; available in scanned versions.)
Mayr, E (1991). One Long Argument: Charles Darwin and the Genesis of Modern Evolutionary Thought
If you enjoyed this article and would like to discover more about Evolutionary Psychiatry please consider:
subscribing to our Substack to receive regular content updates
visiting the webpage of the Evolution and Psychiatry Special Interest Group within the College of Psychiatrists of Ireland
visiting the webpage of the Evolutionary Psychiatry Special Interest Group within the Royal College of Psychiatrists
exploring a Youtube playlist on curated presentations by the Evolution and Psychiatry Special Interest Group within the College of Psychiatrists of Ireland
exploring the Youtube page of the Evolutionary Psychiatry Special Interest Group within the Royal College of Psychiatrists
exploring the Evolving Psychiatry podcast