ABSTRACT
In what sense, if any, can evolution be said to have a direction or a purpose? It is hard to see whom we could credit with such a purpose, unless we call upon the Lord. Yet the word “evolution” commits us in some sense to taking what happens, or at least much of it, as being in order. To evolve means to unfold or unroll. It suggests typically the opening of a scroll or a bud, bringing into action what was only potential within them. This means both that certain definite potentialities were present from the start, greatly limiting what could emerge, and that these, rather than many other changes that must have been possible, were in some sense the right or suitable candidates. A bud eaten by a caterpillar has fulfilled some of its potentialities, since it always was potential caterpillar food. But it has not fulfilled those proper and central to it. Ought we to say, similarly, that evolution would have failed, fallen short, or become deflected if it had followed a different path? Would there be something wrong if, for instance, birds or ants, snakes or people had never developed? 1
This is an alarming question. But we commit ourselves to some kind of answer to it whenever we mention higher or lower life-forms. And the matter becomes far more pressing if we start, like Wilson in Sociobiology, to map the relative heights of different kinds of societies, and to say things like:
Four groups occupy pinnacles high above the others, the colonial invertebrates, the social insects, the nonhuman mammals, and man. Each has basic qualities of social life unique to itself. Here, then, is the paradox. Although the sequence just given proceeds from unquestionably more primitive and older forms of life to more advanced and recent ones, the key properties of social existence, including cohesiveness, altruism and co-operativeness, decline. It seems as though social evolution has slowed as the body plan of the individual organism became more elaborate. [p. 379]
How do we decide which are the key properties of social existence? Apart from man and the mammals, none of these groups is descended from any of the others, so we are not following any actual development.2 How can we evaluate and compare patterns that play totally different parts in their lives? It seems vacuous to grade different kinds of
1 There are obviously related problems about the word develop itself, and also about a whole range of concepts like growth, progress, advance, modernity, primitive, and the avant-garde; also the Future when that is used as a term of admiration (see pp. 152-153).
