Philosophy of Evolutionary Biology

Abstract

Abstract Cognition is not a process of mastering truths, i.e., grains of ultimate knowledge. Even in the details, cognition only allows us to get closer to the ultimate truth, not to reach it. Consequently, the real tool of knowledge is not a proof, but a presumption. The latter refers to a certain decision that was successfully established in the past in an appropriate context and therefore can be taken without additional proofs, though only in the absence of serious contradictory evidence. Two paradigms compete within the framework of modern evolutionary biology, i.e., the dominant cladistic paradigm and the often disregarded but indestructible phyletic paradigm, which grew from the traditional view on systematics and evolution. Cladistics corresponds to the genetic (=population-genetic, “synthetic”) theory of evolution, whereas phyletics corresponds to the holistic (=“epigenetic”) one. The cladistic paradigm seemingly offers a strict procedure of objective analysis, but its prerequisites, such as the mandatory dichotomy of a particular phylum combined with the simultaneous disappearance of an ancestor, which disregards the possibility of speciation without divergence, are hardly consistent with the real order of things, and unavoidable sources of subjectivity are also usually ignored. The holistic paradigm does not represent a less clear procedure, but a more complex protocol of analysis, since it not only recognizes the unavoidable elements of subjectivity but also explicitly introduces them into the research protocol as a choice between the conflicting presumptions. Phyletics, as part of the holistic paradigm, provides taxonomic and phylogenetic schemes that are stabler in the long run, and the holistic theory of evolution, together with the adaptive compromise metaphor derived from it, can explain many evolutionary phenomena that are incompatible with the genetic (“synthetic”) theory of evolution, such as the discrete nature of biological diversity, the fundamental nonuniformity of the evolutionary process, and the paradox of the inverse correlation between the evolutionary rate and level of organization, e.g., the highest and lowest rates of the evolution of large mammals and microorganisms, respectively.

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