Biological Evolution

Within the integral community, evolution refers to the ability of consciousness to continually transcend itself as it reaches toward its origin/destination, aka Spirit. For the biological sciences, though, evolution means something much more specific. There are certain approaches to evolutionary biology that suggest nucleic acids (genes) are the only causally operative forces in the organic world. The currently dominant (though, I think, quickly fading) ideology known as neo-Darwinism suggests that organisms (along with their consciousnesses, spiritual or otherwise) are merely survival machines, designed by natural selection as a result of random mutation, to pass genes from one generation to the next. I think this view is too narrow. The following is an ongoing series concerning more dialectic and holistic approaches to understanding biological evolution. I make use of insights from fields like developmental systems theory, complexity theory, biosemiotics, among others.




Gould and Lewontin's paper: http://ethomas.web.wesleyan.edu/wescourses/2004s/ees227/01/spandrels.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sociobiology


This video is a response to 2bsirius: http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=rsi9elkBj5U
Aristotle's four caues: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/aristotle-causality/#FouCau

(note: in this video I neglected the extent to which mechanistic/reductionistic science makes use of the notion of efficient causation, as well as material. It is formal and final causes that have been neglected.)


Hoffmeyer's paper: http://www.imbf.ku.dk/MolBioPages/abk/PersonalPages/Jesper/Basel.html