Late 19th-century imperialism used Darwin’s theory of evolution as an ideological foundation to justify the domination of powerful nations over weaker ones, and the debate between Dawkins and Gould over the direction of evolution and the concept of progress explores the nature and social implications of evolution.
Darwin’s theory of evolution inevitably appears in the ideological foundations of late 19th-century imperialism. Darwin’s concept of “survival of the fittest” justified the domination of the weak by the strong, or the strong by the weak. In particular, the fittest were perceived as ‘better’ or ‘more advanced’, giving rise to concepts such as the Nazi concept of ‘ethnic cleansing’. Is this a misuse of the concept of evolution or does evolution really mean progress?
To discuss whether evolution means progress, we first need to look at the concept of progress. The dictionary definition of progress is simply ‘becoming better than before’, but this is where the definition of ‘better’ becomes very ambiguous. There are many possible candidates for what constitutes a state of nature, but in order to establish a single standard, human values would have to be involved. When values are involved, it’s already outside the realm of science.
However, if we use progress more broadly, we can have a meaningful discussion. This is when we redefine progress as a ‘direction’. If life is evolving, and it’s happening in a consistent direction, we can define it as progress. The theme of directionality in the evolution of life pits the Dawkins and Gould teams in the book against each other.
Dawkins’s team argues that all life evolves in a direction of increasing complexity, and Gould’s team presents the drinker model. The drunkard model is a drunken, staggering walk with a wall on the left and a ditch on the right, so the real drunkard can only fall into the right ditch if he moves left or right. This is not wrong, of course. But the process of evolution involves not just where the drunk is moving, but also what the wall is doing. If the drunk’s movement is a mutation, then the wall is natural selection. So in a complete model of evolution, it doesn’t matter where the drinker was originally moving (the direction of the mutation) because it includes the wall (selection).
Gould’s team also argues that the story of the least common denominator shows that there is no direction of evolution, in the sense that at the least common denominator, bacteria are still the dominant life form, while more complex life forms are less numerous and have a harder time surviving in extreme environments. However, this argument is based on the wrong sample. When discussing whether evolution is directional, we should limit ourselves to before and after evolution, i.e., it should be conditional. We should look at whether the organisms that evolved had direction before and after. In this case, the lowest common denominator of current life is irrelevant: the evolution that “actually happened” has a consistent direction of increasing complexity.
In response, Gould’s team again uses the example of “degeneration”: there is also degeneration in the form of decreasing complexity. This is clearly a very meaningful counterexample to the directionality. However, it is insufficient to refute that evolution is directional for two reasons. First, as Dawkins’s team notes, reversible evolution is sometimes found in microevolution, but never in macroevolution. This means that, in the end, evolution has a direction in the big picture. Second, a statistical approach is essential when discussing life. Given the complexity of life and the physical limitations of natural selection in the evolutionary process, there is not a single proposition that is 100% correct. Everything is probabilistic. Isn’t modern medicine a statistical approach after all? Take diffusion for example. Individual molecules can certainly move against the direction of diffusion. But that doesn’t make it a false proposition that the molecules are ‘spreading in a broad direction,’ because in the end, at the macroscopic level, they are all spreading, and eventually they are uniformly spread throughout the whole. In the same way, the fact that a single entity has reverse evolution (or degeneration) cannot be used as a basis to negate the proposition.
As we’ve seen, it’s true that evolution has a general direction of increasing complexity. Of course, when we say true, we mean true as a statistical proposition. Since the complexity of life is such that there is no other way to characterize it other than statistically, it is safe to say that there is a direction in this debate.
Thus, the debate about evolution and progress leads to philosophical questions that go beyond mere scientific facts. Humans use scientific facts not only to understand themselves as part of nature, but also to form social and ethical values based on that understanding. It is therefore important to be vigilant about how the interpretation of evolutionary theory extends to social and political ideologies, while not distorting its original scientific meaning. This will preserve the purity of scientific inquiry and fulfill social responsibility at the same time.
