Evolutionary Ontology

Universal Darwinism

Evolution is usually understood as a biological process, but following Richard Dawkins, and with antecedents well before him, attempts have been made to formulate what is called by Dawkins “universal Darwinism.” This is a generalized model of evolution that is independent of the physical substrate—a kind of general theory of any possible evolutionary process that might be called “Darwinian.” Philosopher David Hull has applied it most extensively to the evolution of science, for example. We will consider biological evolution, but with an eye to the generalized ontological implications.

When we ask what “evolutionary theory” requires, of course we must take some representation of it, as that theory is itself evolving over time. The most widely discussed form is, of course, the conception of Richard Dawkins, sometimes called the “selfish-gene perspective,” after his seminal book, or the “received view.” Out of this and later works, a distinction was refined by David Hull, which has become known as the “Hull-Dawkins distinction,” between replicators (genes and anything that is copied accurately like genes, including cultural items, called memes) and the economic systems they are part of and are reproduced when they are copied, which Hull calls interactors (organisms and anything like them that are differentially successful at getting the resources needed to replicate), although Dawkins prefers a less voluntaristic term, vehicles. Replicators are defined in Dawkins's The Selfish Gene as being those entities that are fecund (make more of themselves), faithful (have a high fidelity of replication), and are long-lived (persist over evolutionary time frames). Organisms do not persist over intergenerational time frames and so are not significant in evolutionary terms. Replicators are divided into “dead-end” replicators (for example, somatic genes),and germ line replicators (gamete genes).

The received view has been opposed or modified by critics, particularly Ernst Mayr (1988), who asserts that the objects subject to selection are organisms, not genes, which are “hidden” from evolution. Another critical stream is called “developmental systems theory,” and its adherents hold that the evolutionary objects subjected to selection are developmental systems and life cycles. It is worth noting that Dawkins's view is a reworking and development of George C. Williams's notion of an evolutionary gene, which is, as he called it, a “cybernetic abstraction,” defined as “any inherited information for which there is a favorable or unfavorable selection bias equal to several or many times its rate of endogenous change.” A primary feature of evolutionary theory is that what is hereditable, whether they are replicators or not, must have variant forms (in genetics, alleles) that can be in competition for resources in order for selection to occur.

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