Book Review – Darwin’s Table (Are Evolving Organisms Progressing?)

In this blog post, I’ve read Darwin’s Table, a book by Korean professor Dae-Ik Jang, and I’d like to discuss whether evolution is progress.

 

The theory of evolution, which was born from the roots of Darwin’s Origin of Species, has grown up under the tree, and many theories related to evolution have settled in the modern era. Many of these theories are complementary to each other, but there are also opposing theories that try to explain parts of evolution from different perspectives. In Darwin’s Table, a book by Korean professor Dae-Ik Jang, the leading proponents of each of these competing theories are divided into “Team Dawkins” and “Team Gould,” and are given a week-long debate on a given topic to explain their position and deny the other side’s position. The two teams argue fiercely about topics such as whether rape is an adaptation, explanations for altruistic behavior, and the speed of evolution. I’m going to focus on one of these topics, “Is Evolution Progress?”. Life on Earth has evolved over billions of years, from primitive cells in the beginning of time to humans today. But are the higher up the evolutionary ladder really more advanced, or in other words, more advanced? Dawkins’ team answers “yes” to this question, while Gould’s team answers “no” to this question.
I will answer this question by saying that “for now” the pro-evolution team seems to be right. Before I give my opinion, let’s see what Darwin, the father of evolution, had to say about both teams. In one of his notes, Darwin expressed skepticism about progress by saying, “Do not speak of higher or lower forms,” while in his book The Origin of Species, he wrote that all living things will evolve toward perfection. Thus, even for Darwin, whose Origin of Species laid the groundwork for the theory of evolution, this was a very difficult issue to decide. To get back to the point, Dawkins’ team first explains that all life progresses, and that it’s natural for species to become more complex as they evolve. They use common sense to explain that evolution is the same story as progress, given that the human body is more complex than a bacterial body. But Gould’s team counters that complexity is not the measure of progress. A simple analogy is that of a drunken man walking down the street, and if there’s a wall on his left, he’ll naturally bump into it, and eventually end up on the right. The idea is that evolution happens in all directions, but that we see increasingly complex species of organisms because there is a lower limit to evolution, i.e., the wall on the left in the analogy, which is bacteria. In support of this, he cites the distinction between passive and automatic trends in evolution, with passive trends being the most common. In an automatic trend, once a species has evolved, for example, a bacterium has evolved and become a new species, there is no further specific evolution in the bacteria, and the next species will evolve. In a passive trend, however, new speciation occurs in each species regardless of whether it evolves or not, and regardless of the passage of time. In fact, passive trends have been observed, supporting Gould’s team’s logic. To put this in simple terms, the Gould team believes that “progress” is very closely related to the direction of evolution. They argue that the observation of passive trends shows that evolution to date has not shown any trends, and therefore progress is not the right term.
In response to this logic, Dawkins’ team argues that it is an anthropocentric bias to view progress only in terms of complexity. They argue that progress can be clearly explained if it is viewed from an adaptationist perspective: evolution in a direction that favors successful adaptation in a given environment is called progress. This can be explained by the theory of natural selection, which states that species that are favored to survive and reproduce are selected, so they argue that if the same environment persists for a long time, then evolution and progress can be seen on the same axis. However, Gould’s team points out that the same environment hasn’t been the same for a long time, which is the premise of the above premise, as organisms have started from scratch again through multiple accidental extinctions. Finally, Dawkins’ team acknowledges the limitations of the adaptationist view and talks about the “evolution of evolutionary capabilities. They argue that there are at least eight watersheds in evolution, from the evolution of self-replicating molecules into families of molecules in primitive cells, to the evolution of independent replicators into chromosomes, to the evolution of primate societies into human societies, and that each watershed represents a quantum leap in life’s ability to evolve. They also argue that life after these watersheds cannot return to its pre-watershed state, just as multicellular organisms cannot give birth to unicellular organisms. In this sense, in Gould and colleagues’ analogy of the drinker above, when the drinker goes too far to the right, it is called a transition, and we can change the example to say that the wall on the left moves to the right. In other words, at some point, you can no longer go back to being a lower creature. Gould’s team doesn’t have a clear rebuttal to this, and the discussion ends.
Once again, my current thinking leans toward the evolutionary position. When I read the above, I was particularly struck by the progression of the adaptationist view, and if you take a short excerpt from the book The Selfish Gene, it says that genes always want to leave their mark on the next generation, and to do this, genes that are more favorable for survival and reproduction survive, and I think this is where the concept of progression is hidden. When genes that are favorable for survival and reproduction survive and are subject to natural selection, this is called evolution, and if you think about it from the perspective of nature, the better adapted and better survived an individual is, the more advanced it is. In this sense, it’s hard to see how evolution can be explained without the word progress. Next, I was also impressed by the word “watershed” in the evolution of evolutionary capabilities. When a watershed occurs in the evolution of life, it is said to drive an irreversible progressive breakthrough in the evolution of life. When a single-celled organism evolves into a multicellular organism, the offspring of the multicellular organism cannot become a single-celled organism, so there is no reverse evolution from a multicellular organism to a single-celled organism. If Darwin’s theory of natural selection is correct, then we can dare to say that “multicellular organisms are higher than unicellular organisms” because unicellular organisms are naturally selected to become multicellular organisms, which is progress from an adaptationist point of view, and there is no going back. I think it’s the same with the development of our written language. In the past, there were very simple scripts, such as hieroglyphs, pictograms, and wedge scripts, but over time, countless scripts were created, and eventually we got to where we are today. I think there must have been some kind of evolutionary watershed in between, otherwise we would still be drawing pictures of fish and telling stories. If there is a mass extinction and human civilization disappears at some point, and a new species is born in the future, writing will still develop. It may not look the same as it does today, but I think it will start from the same foundation of drawings and evolve from there.
In conclusion, I think we can look at progress in terms of adaptationism and evolution of evolutionary capabilities. The current debate ends in a close contest between these two sharply opposing forces, with me winning. But if we turn the hourglass of time to the distant future, a “super bacterium” that dominates a large number of bacteria may have wiped out all life on Earth, and we may be debating progress, rewriting the book The Theory of Evolution, and creating a new human race after dozens of mass extinctions. We don’t know the answer yet, but I wonder if future creatures will have a clearer definition of progress, and a clearer answer to the tricky question that modern scholars have not been able to fully resolve: “Do evolving organisms make progress?” So, in my ignorance of the future, I cowardly make the small excuse that, “for now,” the progressive position seems to be correct.