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PROGRESS AND DIRECTIONALITY IN SCIENCE, THE
HUMANITIES, SOCIETY AND EVOLUTION
Robin Attfield: Cardiff University
Keywords: progress, directionality, science, humanities, society,
history, evolution.
ABSTRACT
This essay discusses progress and directionality, both in nature,
in science and in society, treating as its starting-point the
reflections, parallelisms and comparisons of Ruse’s essay, ‘A
Threefold Parallelism for Our Time? Progressive Development
in Society, Science and the Organic World’, but reaching
substantially different conclusions. The essay thus ranges over
progress and directionality in the world of natural evolution, in
the sciences and the humanities, and in history and society. It
defends non-relative progress in science and the humanities,
criticising here both the approach to these disciplines of the
strongly evolutionary epistemology of Hull and the more
moderate evolutionary epistemology of Ruse. It further defends
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the possibility of progress and directionality in history and
society, and also, following Rolston, in the course of evolution
within the world of nature, where the kind of directionality to be
found has multiple directions rather than being unilinear.
Subsequently it relates conclusions about these fields to
theological reflections (characteristic of Judaism, Christianity
and Islam) about the creation of nature and society by a value-
loving intelligence.
1. INTRODUCTION
In this essay I discuss progress and directionality, both in nature,
in science and in society. Much the same enterprise was
pioneered by Michael Ruse, in his essay ‘A Threefold
Parallelism for Our Time? Progressive Development in Society,
Science and the Organic World’ (1). Such parallelisms and
comparisons will also be considered in this essay, but with
different conclusions. This essay accordingly ranges over
progress and directionality in the world of nature, in the sciences
and the humanities, and in history and society. Subsequently I
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relate conclusions about science, society and nature to
theological reflections concerning a creative and value-loving
intelligence; this section will address the emergence of value
and its gradual but belated appearance both in nature and in
culture.
Before more is said, a few words are in place to clarify the
notions of progress and of directionality. Progress, as Ruse
remarks, involves change (many would say ‘a process of
change’) that has (or, we might add by way of qualification,
usually has) a linear character. (Change that doubles back on
itself or repeats itself, as Ruse at once comments, can hardly
count as progress.) In addition, it involves improvement, on one
criterion or another. If subsequent stages are not under some
description better than the ones that preceded them, then neither
they nor the process that produced them amount to progress. (2)
However, the criteria of progress diverge. While scientific
progress is often regarded (at least by realists) as involving a
greater approximation to the truth, social progress is liable to
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betoken either enhanced welfare, or greater freedom, or moves
towards justice or towards equality. In what follows, appropriate
criteria will be specified as and when they become relevant.
Directionality is both broader and narrower than progress. It too
involves change, and change that is either directed towards an
agreed direction or destination or that moves undirected in one
direction or another. Although not all directionality is
progressive, often it is such, involving improvement, at least
from the perspective of those who welcome the direction or
directions in question. Directionality, however, need not involve
change taking place in a single direction, but can involve change
in multiple directions, sometimes simultaneously. As we shall
see, a possible model of the history of life on earth is one
involving multiple directionality. (Some might say the same, in
an adjusted sense, about human culture.)
2. HISTORY AND LAWS OF PROGRESS
The once prevalent belief in progress towards human happiness
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understood as pervading the entire course of human history has
widely been discarded. From the Enlightenment into the early
twentieth century, this belief was held so strongly that
philosophers such as Condorcet, Saint-Simon, Comte, Hegel,
Marx and Spencer competed to articulate actual laws of
progress, manifested in history and governing its evolution. By
‘progress’ was meant change involving improvement, whether
the improvement was intellectual, social or political, or all of
these together. The story of the different versions of this belief
can readily be found in works such as J.B. Bury’s The Idea of
Progress, John Baillie’s The Belief in Progress, and Robert
Nisbet’s History of the Idea of Progress (3). Given such laws,
the patterns and the unfolding of history would have had a
character of inevitability.
But two World Wars largely shattered this belief, particularly
with regard to social and political progress, but to some extent
with regard to progress in general. Not only was doubt cast on
laws of history, but often also on actual belief in progress, or at
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least on progress having favourable prospects. As the various
metaphysical underpinnings of progress ceased to be credited,
so did people’s remaining reliance on progress itself.
With regard to laws of history, a significant impact on their
tenability was generated by an argument of Karl Popper in The
Open Society and Its Enemies. Popper concluded that there are
no laws of history, because whatever predictions may be made
about people’s behaviour, human beings have the capacity to
falsify them by choosing to respond or act differently, and not as
predicted. By contrast, the belief that history unfolds in
accordance with laws of history deprives us of our responsibility
(4). Since history is in large measure the outcome of people’s
choices, it cannot be regarded as governed by laws that are
supposed to have effect regardless of such choices.
Popper should not be regarded, however, as a critic of all belief
in progress. What he objected to was historicism, or large-scale
attempts to predict the human future, to which he further
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objected that human action is considerably affected by human
knowledge, and that the future of human knowledge is itself
unpredictable (5). Yet he maintained that in some
circumstances, scientific progress is assured and will be made
(6), and also discusses its prospects and possible obstacles (7);
and in other writings he took pains to rehabilitate the reputation
of Xenophanes, the earliest Western defender of belief in
progress on the part of humanity with regard to its
understanding of the physical world (see below) (8).
Furthermore in Conjectures and Refutations he spells out the
distinction between belief in historical laws of progress, which
he rejects, and his own belief that continued growth is
characteristic of and essential to scientific knowledge, despite
the dangers that it may be blocked or retarded (9).
Nevertheless the kind of belief that represents progress as law-
governed and inevitable was now widely discarded, even where
belief in progress itself survived. An example of this trend can
already be found in the view of the early-twentieth-century
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historian Herbert Butterfield, who, in The Whig Interpretation
of History (1931), contended that historians should eschew
interpretations and interpretative frameworks altogether (10),
and therewith any tendency to appeal to would-be historical
laws. Yet at the same time Butterfield retained belief in the
operation of providence within history, producing progressive
outcomes sometimes in conflict with the intentions of the
relevant agents (11). Butterfield’s own consistency in rejecting
interpretation in history and at the same time continuing to
discern the workings of providence can be questioned (12); but
his overall stance manifests the possibility of rejecting laws of
history without completely abandoning belief either in progress
or in directionality at the same time.
Belief in the kind of progress that is guaranteed by historical
laws was more widely discarded still with the widespread
demise of the influence of Marxism in 1989. Paradoxically we
might well, in the light of Popper’s arguments, regard the related
abandonment of belief in the inevitability of progress as
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progress itself, whether progress in history, the philosophy of
history or in metaphysics. But the issue of whether progress
either in science or in humanities such as history is possible is
debated, and will shortly be considered, after consideration has
first been given to the relation of Darwinian evolution to
progress.
3. EVOLUTION AND PROGRESS
The increasing adoption across the early part of the twentieth
century of the Darwinian synthesis (13) eventually fostered a
corresponding belief about the absence of progress in the
evolution of species by natural selection. If what survives is
what is fittest to survive, whether through out-predating or out-
breeding competitors or by occupying a distinctive, survival-
friendly niche, then surviving species need be no more
intelligent than the ones they outlive, and in some cases will be
parasites that survive through dependency and at the same time
through predation on species with greater consciousness and
understanding. The adoption of this synthesis did not lead at
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once to a discarding of belief in progress, for, as Michael Ruse
relates, ‘[t]he great mathematicians who synthesized Darwinian
selection with Mendelian genetics – R.A. Fisher, J.B.S. Haldane
and Sewall Wright – were all ardent progressionists’ who ‘saw
no incompatibility between their evolutionism and
progressionism’ (14). But, as Ruse proceeds to recount, the next
generation of evolutionists, ‘[m]en like Theodosius Dobzhansky
and George Simpson and Ernst Mayr and G. Ledyard Stebbings
… set out deliberately to cleanse their work of progressionist
language and descriptions and mechanisms and conclusions’
(15), seeing this as a requirement of a professional, value-free
approach.
The waning of belief in law-governed progress permeating
human history may have had an impact on attitudes to nature, in
particular producing a reduced willingness to discern progress
across the course of evolution. The problem here was not the
inapplicability of laws of nature, but a lack of confidence in the
passage of time displaying any progressive tendencies at all. If
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there is little or no sign of purposiveness in human history, and
the consciousness of such purposiveness underwent a decline,
then the inclination to detect directionality or progress within
the processes of the natural world could well have been
correspondingly reduced at the same time. As has been
mentioned, Michael Ruse has discussed in one of his essays
some possible parallelisms between the development of society,
the development of science, and the (evolutionary) development
of organisms (16). In this essay I will refer to his treatment of
this triple theme, but will be investigating not so much parallels
as different grounds and different criteria for recognising both
directionality and progress.
In any case it has become a commonplace among philosophers
of science (and philosophers of biology in particular) that there
is no discernible purpose in the world of nature, and no
discernible directionality either. Since evolution proceeds
through natural selection, with its focus on survival, there is no
requirement for the survivors (whether species or individuals) to
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be superior, let alone nobler, than their predecessors, for
survival can be due to factors other than intelligence, versatility,
initiative or character. Natural selection depends mainly on
adaptation, and adaptation takes many forms, far from all of
which are in any way progressive, or so it is widely held.
Some theorists, however, have taken the view that this
conclusion went too far. Holmes Rolston, for example, wanted
to keep room for the ‘step up, lock up’ aspect of evolution,
whereby evolutionary achievements such as sight or creativity,
once achieved, are somehow preserved rather than eliminated,
and sought to supplement Darwinian explanations so as to
accommodate it. However ‘groping, blind and unmerciful’ the
system of nature ‘may otherwise seem’, … ‘out of seeming
disorder, order comes the more. There flows this great river of
life, strange and valuable because it flows … uphill,
negentropically from nonbeing to being, from nonlife to
objective life and on to subjective life’. (17). This stance did not
require an abandonment of Darwinism (certainly not in
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Rolston’s own self-understanding or, we might add, at all), but
suggested that Darwinism, with its characteristic implicit
abandonment of directionality, was not the whole story.
Other philosophers, however, have applied the view that there is
no directionality or progress in nature to the sphere of science
itself, on the ground that science is nothing but an outgrowth of
evolutionary processes. This latter account of science can be
found in Stephen Toulmin’s article ‘The Evolutionary
Development of Science’ and his subsequent book Human
Understanding (18). In the earlier essay Toulmin wrote:
Science develops … as the outcome of a double process: at
each stage, a pool of competing intellectual variants is in
circulation, and in each generation a selection process is going
on, by which certain of these variants are accepted and
incorporated into the science concerned, to be passed on to the
next generation of workers as integral elements of the
tradition. (19)
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Thus selection within science is compared to selection within
nature; and a few pages later Toulmin affirms that he intends
this comparison to be taken seriously, and not just as a figure of
speech (20). While it was not obligatory to accept that what
holds good in the realm of natural selection holds good also in
the realm of the kind of purposive selection that characterises
human undertakings such as natural science, it now became
possible to hold that what survives and succeeds in science is
what captures attention in relevant universities, schools and
journals, and that this need not be the most incisive or the most
penetrating work, as opposed to being the fittest to win
followers and secure influence and thus survive. Nor was
Toulmin a lone voice; for Popper himself endorsed evolutionary
epistemology in his 1972 book Objective Knowledge (21). In the
coming section, this approach to human intellectual
undertakings such as the sciences is taken further. After that, I
will be returning to issues of directionality and progress in
evolution and thus in nature.
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4. THE SCIENCES AND THE HUMANITIES
Cultural developments thus came to be seen as a function of a
kind of natural selection which selects between hypotheses or
even between paradigms. Despite the obvious differences
between science and natural evolution, such as the intentionality
of changes in science and the apparent absence of intentionality
in nature, philosophers of science such as David Hull have
contended that the common element of selection was the crucial
one, and that the process by which science develops consists in
competition between scientific schools or groupings, as well as
competition within such schools, and also in reputational
success for scientists who lobby and network most effectively in
the promotion of their hypotheses and interpretations. According
to Hull, ‘scientists behave in ways calculated to get their views
accepted as their view by other scientists’ (22), and ‘The
factionalism that scientists themselves so often decry facilitates
rather than frustrates progress in science’ (23). Thus it is its
fitness to survive within scientific society that qualifies
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scientific work for scientific acceptance, rather than (say) its
rationality. And implicitly there is little or no reason to regard
the current state of science as better than previous stages, or to
regard science as embodying either directionality or progress.
But this understanding of science has been potentially
problematic for philosophers of science themselves, as they
have had to regard their own work (if the evolutionary story is
accepted) as lacking any kind of superior rationality, and as
successful, if it was successful, on the basis of its persuasiveness
and consequent popularity, rather than of its superior intellectual
content and merits. Successful hypotheses, strictly speaking,
were not bound to explain the phenomena better, or to explain a
wider range of phenomena than rival hypotheses, for they were
successful on the strength of their fitness to survive, which was
not invariably the same thing.
But if theories are sometimes accepted or rejected for good
reasons, through the exercise of rational choice and
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discrimination, then there remains scope for belief in progress
(involving enhanced understanding of reality), at least within the
sciences. Take Darwinism itself; arguably it was accepted
because it explained the phenomena of the species and
speciation better than rival theories, and was in due course
vindicated as the phenomena that it predicted were seen to
occur, and when, in conjunction with Mendelian genetics, it
proved capable of explaining inheritance as well. But to accept
this is to regard Darwinism as an improvement on previous
theories. An important aspect here is the way in which human
beings are capable of discriminating between better and worse
explanations, and forming beliefs for reasons. To the extent that
this process informed the widespread acceptance of Darwinism,
that acceptance has to be regarded as an example of epistemic or
scientific progress.
To return, however, to Hull’s evolutionary account of science, it
is worth noting here his proposed definition of ‘selection’: ‘a
process in which the differential extinction and proliferation of
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interactors cause [his italics] the differential perpetuation of the
replicators that produced them’ (24). This definition is intended
to apply to selection not only in organic evolutionary contexts,
but to conceptual selection in science as well; this is attested by
Hull’s claim of a few pages later: ‘My concepts have the added
virtue that they are sufficiently general to apply to conceptual
evolution as well, in particular to conceptual selection in
science.’ (25) (Thus the scope of this account of selection
includes disciplines such as history and literary criticism as well
as the empirical sciences.) Hull recognises that some selection is
intentional and some is not, but regards this as no problem for
this analysis. But his analysis and his definition of selection at
the same time appear to minimise the significance of the rational
element in scientific reasoning and endeavour, as if selection
within science (and more generally within culture) did not
involve the adoption of one rather than another hypothesis for
reasons, unlike selection in the sense of ‘natural selection’. Hull
later refers passingly to ‘rational selection’, but concludes that
‘the effects of intentionality’ make comparatively little
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difference. (26)
This view of science has been criticised by Michael Ruse. In
particular, Hull’s treatment of science, according to Ruse, ‘fails
to account for’ the ‘sense of progress that we have … about
science’. … ‘It makes good sense to say that Mendel was ahead
of his predecessors, just as Watson and Crick were ahead of
their predecessors. Yet … our biological evolution is not
progressive’ (27). So scientific change and evolutionary change
may be radically different, although Ruse here declares himself
convinced neither by those who assert actual progress in science
nor by those who deny it (28).
Hull may well be right, or largely right, about the characteristic
motivations of scientists, and also about the important social
aspects of scientific development. But it does not follow that
scientists (either in the role of researchers or in that of peer-
reviewers) cannot and do not exercise rational discrimination in
appraising new theories, and do not sometimes produce better
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hypotheses and explanations than their predecessors, and
sometimes ones rightly recognised as such. Ruse explains how
there are several varieties of evolutionary epistemology, and that
not all regard the validity of new theories as relative to their
social and intellectual context (29). Hull’s approach, by contrast,
appears to make apparent progress in science relative to the
local conditions of acceptability, just as he considers apparent
advances in natural evolution to be relative to the spatial and
temporal niches of the participants.
Hull’s account of science as a process is characterised by his
understanding of scientific ideas as memes, units between which
selection can take place comparable to the biological units of
genes, which are central to the process of natural selection. (30)
But this way of treating ideas as if they operated through causal
powers analogous to those of genes confers on their selection
and reception a deterministic character that further elides the
rational role of individual scientists. Thus interpreted, science is
less likely to appear capable of rational advances, given the
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apparent beguilement of scientific researchers by the power of
memes to infiltrate their way into scientific brains. But if
scientific ideas are regarded not as memes but as rational
activity, purposefully and actively shared, sifted, amended and
tested, a different picture emerges which is less hostile to
genuine scientific progress being made, progress not needing to
be regarded as invariably relative to the local situation, and
capable of being regarded as better reflecting the nature of the
phenomena studied. (I have discussed memes in greater detail
elsewhere (31).
For his part, Ruse, despite finding much to endorse in Hull’s
account, emphasises a key disanalogy between conceptual
change in science and evolutionary change in nature. As he puts
it, ‘new elements of science seem in some sense to be directed
or teleological, whereas the whole point about the new elements
of the organic world is that they are not so directed or
teleological’ (32). Thus the very purposiveness and non-
randomness of Eldredge and Gould’s punctuated equilibrium
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theory meant that there was not the same need for natural
selection to work on it as there is when random variants appear
in the realm of natural selection (33). For the actual aim is to
produce a theory closer to the truth.
Here it would be appropriate to comment that Ruse’s disanalogy
turns not only on the intentionality of scientists (a point that
Hull recognises and is untroubled by) but on their ingenuity and
rationality. This is what makes scientific debates different from
evolutionary struggles and competition, as the rational
advantages of new proposals are related to and integrated with
existing and newly discovered data and theories. Yet Ruse
writes as if his disanalogy turned mainly on intentionality, as he
now quotes an extensive passage of Hull on this topic, and (to
his surprise) finds that he agrees with it. What is really more
surprising is this: Hull accepts at one stage in this passage that
‘Conceptual evolution, especially in science, is both locally and
globally progressive’, and attributes this fact to the intentionality
of scientists (34). As we have seen, however, this feature of
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science is due to more than intentionality, and its recognition
appears to involve a major concession from Hull, as a social
relativist, to his more progressivist opponents and critics.
Opponents of progressivism in science might here appeal to the
sceptical arguments of Larry Laudan, who argues impressively
against several kinds and varieties of realism and progressivism
about science. Laudan, however, does not deny the possibility of
scientific progress, but actually supplies criteria for recognising
it. Thus ‘If TN has more confirmed consequences (and greater
conceptual simplicity) than TO, then TN is preferable to TO …’
even if TN cannot explain the explanatory success of TO and does
not incorporate its component theories’ (35). While this is not
the only possible characterisation of progress, it suffices to
demonstrate the possibility of a succession of such advances,
while also showing that not all new theories incorporate
whatever items made their predecessors appear successful.
Progressivists need not claim that every new theory is superior
to previous theories in the same field, but assert that some are,
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and that there can be a sequence of such advances across time.
Nor must progressivists invariably be realists (although they
may be more consistent if such they are (36)); for
instrumentalists (for example) could also credit sequences of
advances, all satisfying Laudan’s characterisation, and thus
adhere to progressivism. Indeed the debates about progressivism
and about realism to some degree concern independent issues.
Parallel debates to those concerning Hull’s relativist view of
science could readily be conducted on whether there is progress
in historiography, or in other humanities disciplines such as
literary criticism or philosophy. Followers of Hull could easily
apply their kind of evolutionary epistemology to these
disciplines, and employ the models of selection, of fitness to
survive, and of a competition between memes to their debates.
Yet a parallel reply could be made, that in these connections too
it makes sense to talk of progress being made, whether in
understanding the past, in interpreting literature, or in appraising
philosophical theories and concepts. Here too the debates cannot
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be understood as a contest between memes to colonise
populations of researchers, as opposed to the active
discrimination of research communities in sifting the wheat
from the chaff of explanatory theories and interpretations. And
here too, it is the rationality of the participants that an
evolutionary epistemologist of Hull’s variety would find it
hardest to accommodate. While evidence of actual progress in
these fields may be rare and elusive, the rational nature of these
undertakings seems in the end to make it possible for such
progress to be made, as is also the case in science. An example
of such progress can be found in the discovery by Milman Parry
and Alfred Lord of the oral transmission of the Homeric poems
over many centuries by a whole succession of minstrels (37).
Thus the possibility of cultural progress based on reasoning
cannot be restricted to the natural sciences. Consider Popper’s
own work (already mentioned above) on the philosopher
Xenophanes, the philosopher who declared that the gods did not
reveal everything to humanity from the start, allowing them
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space to get to understand things better. Popper contrived to
vindicate Xenophanes against calumnies (both ancient and
modern) which represented him as holding the ridiculous view
that the earth is infinite, explaining this misinterpretation as a
mistaken construction of one of the surviving fragments, which
has a clear and sensible but different meaning (38). This
argument of Popper in the realm of the history of philosophy
can reasonably be held to amount to progress itself, the very
possibility that Xenophanes had declared the gods to facilitate
(39). Now Popper also argued that Xenophanes was the earliest
adherent of the method of conjectures and refutations (40),
which he has shown to be a fruitful method in the course of the
later history of science (e.g. in the work of Johannes Kepler)
(41). I have argued in reply that Xenophanes need not be
understood in this way, since he seems to have also supported
rival methods such as induction to an equal degree (42). But this
is consistent with the possibility that Xenophanes’ adherence to
the possibility of progress constituted progress itself, and that
Popper’s vindication of Xenophanes supplies a further example
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of progress, that is, in the history of ideas and in philosophy.
To revert now to the topic of progress in science, although Ruse
is much less unsympathetic to there being progress in science
than Hull, it is open to question whether his own version of
evolutionary epistemology is fully consistent with belief in
actual progress. His own version emphasises what he calls
‘epigenetic rules’ for all intellectual disciplines (43),
fundamental rules such as the law of non-contradiction and ‘2 +
2 = 4’ (which supposedly take the form in human beings of
innate dispositions), and maintains that their necessary truth is
somehow grounded in their survival advantage. If they had
lacked this advantage, it is held, then they would neither have
been necessary truths, nor would have been believed as widely
as they are by human beings. For their credibility is due to
human evolution, rather than to factors that would have to be
recognised by any intelligent species, whatever its own
evolutionary origins.
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But this approach seems to cast into question whether the
discoveries that are based on these rules can be held to represent
progress, in view of the chance nature of their status and
(supposed) origins. For the key criterion of acceptability within
the various disciplines that embody or depend on these rules
(logic and mathematics included) appears to be not truth but
fitness for survival; hence such discoveries could make their
holders fitter to survive without any advance towards the truth.
(This is a version of a criticism that Ruse himself directs from
time to time at Hull, but nevertheless it appears applicable to
evolutionary epistemology not only of Hull’s kind but of other
kinds as well.) While there may be innate dispositions in human
beings, the status of the fundamental principles of logic and
mathematics can hardly turn on this kind of innateness. More
generally, this kind of evolutionary epistemology appears (for
the same reasons) barely compatible with belief in objective
scientific progress, and may help account for Ruse’s reluctance
to endorse absolute scientific progress as opposed to scientific
progress of a context-relative kind.
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If, however, we are prepared to credit the possibility (and
sometimes the reality) of scientific advances (as Ruse seems
inclined to do with regard to the work of Darwin and of
Mendel), then the possibility of progress in the humanities,
including the history of philosophy and even philosophy itself
receives enhanced support. Why should not practitioners of
humanities disciplines make advances in understanding culture,
the arts, the past, or significant concepts, possibly through using
improved techniques (as well as improved technology), or
through taking into account the need for consistency between
the answers to an increased range of questions? Even if there are
gaps in the progress of a discipline for whole generations
together, the possibility of such progress cannot be ruled out
(44).
Needless to say, if progress is possible in philosophy and in the
history of philosophy, it is also possible within the study of
history and, by the same token, in social studies and in political
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science too. Both the humanities and the social sciences, like the
natural sciences, embody the capacity for artificial selection,
indeed for purposive selection, as opposed to natural selection
(to which in Darwin’s understanding they supplied the contrast
that he needed to allow talk of ‘natural selection’ to make
sense). In other words, human culture continues to have room
for progress. And some progress involves directionality, or
movement towards recognisable or agreed destinations. In the
case of the humanities, the social sciences and the natural
sciences, the agreed goal is improved understanding of the
phenomena studied.
Nor, perhaps, can the possibility of social progress be excluded,
although the criteria would be different ones. Ruse considers
that few signs of progress are apparent in current society, but
grants that there may have been ‘times and places when
(absolute) societal progress seemed obvious’ (45). The criteria
of this past progress are not specified, but if what he has in mind
includes the nineteenth-century abolition of slavery in Europe
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and America, then the criteria would relate to increased justice
and liberty. Biologists diverge in their attitudes to social
progress, with George Williams a pessimist (46) and E.O.
Wilson an optimist (47); in each case a parallel view is adopted,
whether pessimistic or optimistic, of progress in organic nature
and in society as well. Wilson in particular believes that ‘the
same sociobiological forces govern the forward movement of
society as have governed the upward rise of organisms’ (48).
Ruse considers that evolutionists with views such as these see
progress in their science and proceed to read progress into both
society and into organic nature. (49) Yet, through recognising
past episodes of progress in society, he admits himself that such
progress can and does happen. As for progress in organic nature,
that is the topic of the coming section.
5. BACK TO EVOLUTION
So progress and, to some extent, directionality are genuine
possibilities within culture, and in particular in the humanities
and the sciences, and are acknowledged to characterise some
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tracts of history, even by sceptics. Let us now return to
evolution, to consider whether the realm of natural selection is
entirely different (as Ruse believes (50)), or whether, as some
biologists believe, comparable.
Evidence for the possibility of progress and directionality in
evolution could possibly be found in the evolutionary
emergence of increasingly sophisticated organisms with
increasingly sophisticated capacities. I have in mind not only
human beings and their capacities for understanding and insight,
but also organisms such as whales and dolphins, with their
capacities for communication and collaboration. If there is
intrinsic value in the development of the generic capacities of
organisms, it may be possible to recognise greater and richer
forms of intrinsic value in the emergence of capacities such as
these, and in the development of such capacities within the lives
of individuals of the species concerned.
I am not suggesting that such developments are evidence for
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some form of unilinear directionality, with non-human
organisms somewhere along a continuum and the capacities of
human beings at its apex. Charles Darwin was firmly opposed to
such a view, and for this reason avoided where possible even
using the term ‘evolution’, to avoid being misunderstood as
supportive of unilinear progressive development (51). Indeed
natural selection can be seen as favouring adaptation to
particular circumstances and ecological niches, as opposed to
generic improvement. Nevertheless Darwin appears to have
believed in progressive tendencies within evolutionary
processes: thus in the third edition of the Origin he wrote as
follows:
If we look at the differentiation and specialisation of the
several organs of each being when adult (and this will include
the brain for intellectual purposes) as the best standard of
highness of organisation, natural selection clearly leads
towards highness; for all physiologists admit that the
specialisation of organs, inasmuch as they perform in this
34
state their functions better, is an advantage to each being; and
hence the accumulation of variations tending towards
specialisation is within the scope of natural selection (52).
Such an accumulation of adaptive variations, including the
development of brains, comprised genuine progress, in Darwin’s
view.
Thus what we find is increasing sophistication, albeit in multiple
directions. Simpler eyes evolve into more complex ones,
supportive of more sophisticated kinds of evolutionary fitness.
Correspondingly, the environment of the oceans supports forms
of emergent sophistication such as those of whales and of
dolphins, which are much better suited to survival, let alone
flourishing in the oceans, than human beings are, or at least
were prior to their invention of ships. The environments of
rivers, forests and mountains promote yet other diverse forms of
sophistication. The sophistication of some human capacities
seems well-adapted to savannahs, but it is only technology that
35
has made other environments humanly habitable.
An appropriate way of regarding this pattern of diverse
specialisation and sophistication is not a ladder or escalator, but
the Darwinian model, cited with approval by Mary Midgley, of
evolution seen as a bush with radiating branches (53). The
branches radiate in different directions, some of which develop
their own forms of culture, taught by one generation to another,
such as the use of tools among monkeys, and collaborative
hunting by whales. But cultural achievements arguably have an
intrinsic value of their own, in addition to their value in terms of
the survival of communities and of species. Organisms with
culture make worlds of their own, and it is difficult not to
recognise some form of directionality in their doing so, or at
least in the achievements involved, such as successful
communication, even when the kind of directionality appears
entirely different from that of the directionality that we may be
prepared to recognise within human culture, for example in the
sciences and the humanities.
36
Admittedly the kinds of directionality here do not involve
progress towards goals agreed antecedently. On the other hand
we can recognise directionality towards implicit goals such as
survival, enhanced ways of coping with a given environment,
and adaptability to a wider range of environments. Development
towards these implicit goals is readily recognisable among
species and organisms. So talk about progressive development
in nature is not entirely inappropriate.
This interpretation is in line with that of Rolston, cited above.
Rolston also discusses speciation as embodying a kind of
progress in fecundity, with life on earth developing across three
and a half billion years from a world of zero species to one
containing as many as between five and ten millions (54). The
phenomenon of speciation and its history makes Darwin’s
model of a radiating bush (with its hint of multiple
directionality) all the more appropriate. Those who uphold
directionality in nature certainly need to be cautious of
37
inadvertently promoting Social Darwinism, eugenics or racist
ideologies. But upholding belief in multiple directionality,
represented by the biodiversity of between five and ten million
species, is hardly open to problems of any of these kinds.
The current interpretation can also be regarded as in line with
the findings of the biologist Simon Conway Morris, who has
written of life’s convergence, in the course of evolution, on a
relatively small number of recurrent successful patterns,
chlorophyll, sentience and intelligence included, which Morris
argues would evolve again if the tape of evolutionary history
were to be re-run (55). Morris’s conclusions are controversial,
but his evidence of ‘the ubiquity of convergence’ is impressive,
suggesting life’s uncanny ability to find and develop a small
range of solutions to the problems of often unpromising and
hostile environments (56). Indeed his own view is that these and
other facts of evolution are congruent with the world being ‘a
Creation’ (57).
38
Nevertheless, the kind of directionality intended here is barely
comparable with the kinds discussed above in the sciences and
the humanities, and thus hardly in line with the comparisons
between nature and the sciences in point of progress drawn by
E.O. Wilson and others. Yet both in nature and in culture these
different kinds of directionality are readily interpreted as
embodying and as generating states of affairs of positive value.
Some reflections on this state of affairs are offered in the section
that follows.
6. THEOLOGICAL INTERPRETATIONS
How we are to interpret these diverse kinds of directionality
depends on intuitions, sometimes informed by separate
experiences or patterns of reasoning. Readers interested in the
interface of science, society and religion may be prepared to
consider the relation of these diverse kinds of directionality to
the theistic hypothesis of there being a creator who creates in a
manner supportive of intrinsic value, and possibly welcomes
and facilitates value of this kind, that is value that there is reason
39
for any agent to welcome, cherish, desire or promote.
Certainly the facts of evolution do not require us to adopt this
hypothesis, let alone those of human history. Nor do the kinds of
directionality that we find in the sciences and the humanities.
The facts of evolution, for example, are consistent with non-
theistic interpretations such as unqualified materialism, even
though it does not explain these facts, as opposed to telling us
not to seek an explanation beyond nature.
However, there is quite a good fit between the kinds of possible
directionality that we have come across and this hypothesis. For
a creator desirous of a world of intrinsic value could well be
responsible for both the worlds of nature and of culture, of
evolution and of history. At least some of the phenomena are
what might be expected if this hypothesis were true, such as the
emergence of creativity both in animal and in human cultures.
But there are problems. One of these is the extent of pain,
40
suffering and premature death, states which are not states of
value but of disvalue. Holmes Rolston has well discussed
‘Disvalues in Nature’ from a theistic perspective (58), but there
is no space to delve into this matter here. Nor can I discuss here
the parallel problem of disvalues in culture and in human
history.
Another problem is the belated appearance of many forms of
intrinsic value. Some might expect that a creator desirous of
intrinsic value would bring it onto the stage sooner, if not from
the outset. I will conclude with some remarks about this
apparent problem, and then with discussion of a proposal about
how progress in evolution might possibly be explained.
The problem of belatedness is a corollary of recognition of
directionality, since directionality would not be needed if arrival
at its destination or destinations had been put in place and
realised earlier or all along. But the directionality of culture,
including the arts and the sciences, can perhaps be reconciled
41
with a theological interpretation along the lines implicitly put
forward by Xenophanes. The gods, he suggests, did not disclose
everything originally, so that human beings could gradually
discover what was better (59), no doubt through exercising their
curiosity, their cognitive capacities and their world-building
potentials. What is attained in these ways, it could be argued, is
more valuable than a world of much ampler knowledge and
understanding arising from plenary briefings to humanity from
the gods or other creative powers, for these are attainments
resulting from the exercise of creaturely powers of reflection
and evaluation of alternative solutions, and such exercise has
value in itself. If so, the directionality of culture is just what
might be expected.
To some slight extent, the same applies to the course of human
history, as the history of the arts and the sciences are an
important component of this history. We should, I suggest, with
Popper, reject laws of progress, but that does not commit us to
rejecting all traces of historical progress. However, the record is
42
extremely patchy and diverse, and cannot here be further
appraised.
For it remains to consider the related problem about
directionality relevant to evolution, and to the ‘Darwinian bush’
kind of multiple directionality apparent there. Would not a
creator desirous of intrinsic value introduce a swifter process
than that of evolution, if the goal was the manifestation of the
various kinds of directionality and of the achievements that
sometimes accompany them (the flowering of the bush, as it
might be said (so as to preserve the metaphor)? But here a
parallel reply becomes at least a possibility. Perhaps the creator
wanted the achievements of dolphins, whales, gorillas and
human beings to come about as a result of the trial and error
processes characteristic of evolution. Popper himself regarded
these processes as primitive counterparts of the conscious
procedures of science itself; and, despite their dissimilarities
(much remarked by Ruse) their characteristic of proceeding by
trial and error can be seen as a common characteristic.
43
But we do not need to go all the way with Popper in this matter
to take seriously the thoughts that the creative exertions of
earlier creatures made possible those of later and more
sophisticated ones, and that, rather than organisms being created
with these capacities already in place and honed for practices
like science, it could have appeared better that such capacities
should themselves evolve over long tracts of time. That way, the
process of evolution contrived to support greater biodiversity
and possibly, all ages considered, as much value, if not greater.
Before we turn to conclusions, it is worth considering the recent
suggestion of Robert John Russell about the way in which God
may guide the course of evolution. Granted that evolution
depends both on natural selection and on genetic mutations
between which this selection is made, the core of Russell’s
suggestion is that God may guide evolution through actions
affecting such mutations (60). Expressed like this, his proposal
may appear to involve intervention with the operation of laws of
44
nature, or even to involve ‘a God of the gaps’. So, whether or
not we endorse Russell’s stance, it is important to explain that,
at least overtly, these are mistaken appearances.
As a believer in creation, Russell accepts that God, as creator, is
responsible for the laws of nature, and maintains them without
intervening in their operation. But at the same time the created
universe is so constructed that God can act without ‘intervening
in the flow of natural processes’ (61). One of the levels of such
action is that of quantum mechanics, which is integrally
involved in genetic mutations (62), and reflects ontological
indeterminism in nature (63), given a realist interpretation of the
Heisenberg/Schrödinger Indeterminacy Principle. Divine action
at this level does not involve generating ‘gaps’ as sites for
changing the causal sequence of events, but was embodied in
the overall plan of creation, while remaining invisible except to
the eye of faith. Providential action, mediated through quantum
processes (64), can make a difference to mutations, such as
those related to the molecular bonds of DNA (65), and thus
45
affect the phenotypic expression of such mutations (66).
Accordingly Russell’s proposal, for non-interventional but
objective divine action, avoids at least the more obvious kinds
of objections liable to be directed at it, and at the same time
serves to show one way in which God may possibly guide or
steer evolution, thus potentially underpinning directionality,
whether in the direction of diversity, of consciousness, or of
both.
Russell’s ingenious proposal could thus be seen as lending
support to belief in divine purposes being progressively fulfilled
in the course of evolution. However, it would not explain the
‘step us, lock up’ phenomenon remarked by Rolston, since that
involves the continuing survival of initially selected mutations,
and not their generation. Further, Russell’s commitment to a
plurality of acts of special providence spread out across the
history of life (67) continues to be reminiscent of a ‘God of the
gaps’ approach, not least because each of them is held to change
the antecedent course of evolutionary history, although this
46
problem might perhaps be averted if this divine action were
instead regarded as an aspect of the general providence implicit
in creation itself. In any case, adherents of belief in the out-
working of divine purposes across evolution have no need to
appeal to this possibility, but could, as Morris does, appeal
instead to aspects of the overall creative plan, such as the limited
range of solutions to life-problems and the ability of evolving
life to converge upon them. Belief in providence, then, need not
turn on acceptance of Russell’s proposal.
7. CONCLUSIONS
Ruse concluded that there is a much stronger case for belief in
progress (albeit relative progress) in science than in history and
society, and that the case for progress in organic nature was
slender in the extreme, since adaptation turns on genetic
mutations, which are random and lack intentionality (68). At the
same time, he was more convinced that within science there are
attempts to move closer to the truth (because of the
intentionality of scientists) than that non-relative or absolute
47
progress is made (69). He also rejected the views of biologists
who have accepted progress in science and in nature too on the
basis that the same sociobiological processes are present in both
realms (70), stressing again that the intentionality of science
(and generally of culture) marks it off from the natural realm. At
times, though, he represented these findings from his
comparisons as largely matters of taste (71).
In this essay I have adopted a more robust view of (non-relative)
progress in science and the humanities, grounded not only in the
intentionality of the participants, but also in their rationality and
rational collaboration; and this is an interpretation that co-
incides with widespread contemporary intuitions. Such progress
is neither inevitable nor necessarily continuous, but accepting it
is more than a matter of taste, for these are realms where
progress (involving a better understanding of relevant
phenomena) is widely recognised as a matter of fact. I have
found myself in agreement with Ruse that the grounds for belief
in progress in the distinct realms of science, society and nature
48
are different, and that radical forms of evolutionary
epistemology that assimilate selection in science to selection in
nature are to be rejected. But I have also raised questions about
Ruse’s own more moderate version of evolutionary
epistemology, for other reasons.
Yet I have concluded that progress is achievable and
directionality is observable within both the sciences and the
humanities, and that they sometimes figure, albeit with a less
predictable frequency, within history and society. With regard to
organic nature, my conclusions are, following Rolston, that the
history of speciation has brought salutary advances in point of
biodiversity, and that the growth of variety, complexity and
sophistication among organisms (for which Darwin’s radiating
tree is an appropriate model) embodies multiple directionality,
even though such evolutionary progress takes place as a result of
unintended mutations and adaptations. Nature does not display
the kind of directionality that science does, because of the lack
of intentionality on the part of most of the organisms involved;
49
but unintentional yet valuable directionality and progress can
still be discerned.
I have also argued that there is a consilience between the
emergence of value in nature, science and society as thus
understood, and their creation by a value-loving creator. These
theological intuitions do not follow from the nature of organic
nature, science or society; but they can still illuminate what we
encounter when we contemplate these phenomena.
NOTES
1. Michael Ruse, ‘A Threefold Parallelism for Our Time?
Progressive Development in Society, Science and the Organic
World’, in Ruse, Evolutionary Naturalism: Selected Essays
(London and New York: Routledge, 1995), 112-137.
2. Ruse, ibid., 113.
3. J.B. Bury, The Idea of Progress: an inquiry into its origin
and growth (New York: Dover, 1955; first published, 1932);
50
John Baillie, The Belief in Progress (London: Oxford University
Press, 1950); Robert Nisbet, History of the Idea of Progress
(London: Heinemann, 1980).
4. Karl Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies (London:
Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1945), Vol. II (The High Tide of
Prophecy: Hegel Marx and the Aftermath), 261-274.
5. See Karl Popper, The Poverty of Historicism (London:
Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1957) and The Open Universe: An
Argument for Indeterminism (London: Hutchinson, 1982); for
his refutation of historicism, see The Open Universe, 62-64.
6. The Open Society, Vol. II, 322 (note 13).
7. Poverty of Historicism, 154-157.
8. Karl Popper, ‘The Unknown Xenophanes’, in Popper, The
World of Parmenides: Essays on the Presocratic Enlightenment,
ed. Arne F. Petersen with the assistance of Jørgen Mejer
(London and New York: Routledge, 1998), 33−67.
9. Karl Popper, Conjectures and Refutations: The Growth of
Scientific Knowledge (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1963)
215-217.
51
10. Herbert Butterfield, The Whig Interpretation of History,
(London: Bell, 1931).
11. Butterfield, Christianity and History (London: Bell, 1949).
12. As is done by Keith Sewell, Herbert Butterfield and the
Interpretation of History (Basingstoke, UK and New York:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 213-216.
13. See David L. Hull, Science as Progress, An Evolutionary
Account of the Social and Conceptual Development of Science
(Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 57-
72.
14. Michael Ruse, “Scientific Change is a Family Affair”, in
Ruse, Evolutionary Naturalism: Selected Essays (London and
New York: Routledge, 1995), 138-153, at p. 148.
15. Ruse, ibid., 149.
16. Michael Ruse, “A Threefold Parallelism For Our Time:
Progressive Development in Society, Science and the Organic
World”, in Ruse, Evolutionary Naturalism, 112-137.
17. Holmes Rolston III, Environmental Ethics: Duties to and
Values in the Natural World (Philadelphia: Temple University
52
Press, 1988), 21-22.
18. Stephen Toulmin, “The Evolutionary Development of
Science”, American Scientist, 57 (1967), 456-71; Toulmin,
Human Understanding (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972).
19. Toulmin, ‘The Evolutionary Development of Science’,
465.
20. Toulmin, ibid., 170.
21. Karl Popper, Objective Knowledge (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1972).
22. David Hull, “A Mechanism and Its Metaphysics: An
Evolutionary Account of the Social and Conceptual
Development of Science”, Biology and Philosophy 3, 1988,
123-155, at p. 126.
23. Hull, ibid., 127.
24. Hull, ibid., 134.
25. Hull, ibid., 139.
26. Hull, ibid., 146.
27. Michael Ruse, Evolutionary Naturalism: Selected Essays
(London and New York: Routledge, 1995), 178.
53
28. Ruse, ibid., 179.
29. Ruse, ibid., 178-9.
30. Hull, op. cit., 144.
31. Robin Attfield, “Cultural Evolution, Sperber, Memes and
Religion”, Philosophical Inquiry, 35, 3-4 (Summer-Fall 2011),
36-55; ISSN, 1105-235X.
32. Ruse, op. cit., 179.
33. Ruse, ibid., 179-80.
34. Hull’s passage is in fact from ‘A Mechanism and Its
Metaphysics’, 146-7. Ruse quotes this passage at ibid., 180-1,
but wrongly ascribes it (unless it was published twice in the
same year) to pp. 40-42. His comments are on p. 181.
35. Larry Laudan, “A Confutation of Convergent Realism”,
Philosophy of Science, 48.1, 1981, pp. 19-49, at pp. 43-44.
36. For a defence of generic realism, see Robin Attfield,
Creation, Evolution and Meaning (Aldershot, UK and
Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2006), ch. 2.
37. See Stephen Mitchell and Gregory Nagy (eds), The Singer
of Tales, second edition (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard
54
University Press, 2000).
38. Karl Popper, “The Unknown Xenophanes”, in Popper, The
World of Parmenides: Essays on the Presocratic Enlightenment
(London and New York: Routledge, 1998), 33-67, at pp. 36-38
39. Xenophanes, fragment B18; see Popper, ibid., 48.
40. Popper, ibid., 48-49.
41. Popper, ibid., 49-50; Popper, Conjectures and Refutations:
The Growth of Scientific Knowledge (London: Routledge &
Kegan Paul, 1963), pp. 187-188.
42. Robin Attfield, “Popper and Xenophanes”, Philosophy, 89,
(2014), 113-133.
43. Ruse, ibid., 158-9, 163.
44. See, for example, David Chalmers, “Why Isn’t There
More Progress in Philosophy?”, Philosophy, 90, January 2015,
1-31.
45. Ruse, op. cit., 128.
46. George Williams, “Huxley’s Evolution and Ethics in
Sociobiological Perspective”, Zygon, 23, 383-407.
47. E.O. Wilson, On Human Nature (Cambridge, MA:
55
Cambridge University Press, 1978); Biophilia (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 1984).
48. Ruse, op. cit., 133.
49. Ruse, ibid., 134.
50. See Ruse, ibid., 140.
51. See Midgley, Evolution as a Religion: Strange Hopes and
Stranger Fears (London and New York: Methuen, 1985), 34;
also Stephen Jay Gould, Ever Since Darwin: Reflections in
Natural History (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1980), ch. 3.
52. Darwin, The Origin of Species (third edition), in M.
Peckham (ed.), The ‘Origin of Species’ by Charles Darwin: A
Variorum Text (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press,
1959); cited by Ruse, op. cit., 146-147.
53. Mary Midgley, Evolution as a Religion, 34 and 69;
Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species, first edition (London:
John Murray, 1859), chapter IV.
54. Holmes Rolston III, “Naturalizing and Systematizing
Evil”, in Willem B. Drees (ed.), Is Nature Ever Evil?: Science,
Religion and Value (London and New York: Routledge, 2003),
56
76-77, 83-84.
55. Simon Conway Morris, Life’s Solution: Inevitable Humans
in a Lonely Universe (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University
Press, 2003); see pp. 106-196.
56. Morris, ibid., pp. 107 and 329.
57. Morris, ibid., p. 329
58. Rolston, “Disvalues in Nature”, The Monist, 75 (1992),
250-278. I have discussed this problem in Attfield, Creation,
Evolution and Meaning, chs. 6 and 7.
59. Xenophanes, fragment B18: see Popper, The World of
Parmenides, p. 48 .
60. See Robert John Russell, Cosmology From Alpha to Omega:
The creative mutual interaction of theology and science
(Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2008), p. 216.
61. Russell, ibid., p. 19; see also p. 212.
62. Russell, ibid., p. 19.
63. Russell, ibid., p. 120.
64. Russell, ibid., p. 153.
65. Russell, ibid., pp. 165-6.
57
66. Russell, ibid., p. 182.
67. Russell, ibid., pp. 121, 153, 181-4.
68. Ruse, Evolutionary Naturalism, 136, 140, 178-182.
69. Ruse, ibid., 133.
70. Ruse, ibid., 132-133.
71. Ruse, ibid., 128, 182.
ADDRESS OF AUTHOR
Professor Robin Attfield,
Cardiff University,
John Percival Building,
Colum Drive,
Cardiff CF10 3EU,
United Kingdom
AUTHOR’S E-MAIL: attfieldr@cf.ac.uk