Notes |
Understanding the emergence and evolution of biological order has been a fundamental goal of evolutionary theory ever since (even before) Darwin.
Darwin sought to explain adaptation by the action of natural selection, out of which process order would emerge (Darwin 1859). David Depew and I have argued that Darwin was able to accomplish this, in part, through appeal to a metaphorical extension of models based upon Newtonian dynamics, and that later, through the work of Haldane, Fisher, Wright and Chetverikov, Darwinism was able to reformulate the concept of natural selection by appeals to dynamical models that were extensions of statistical mechanics
and thermodynamics (Depew and Weber 1989; Depew and Weber 1995; Weber and Depew 1996). Currently there is debate as to whether natural selection as construed by the Modern Evolutionary Synthesis is sufficiently
robust to account for large-scale biological order in addition to local adaptation. |
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