Abstract
Early 20th century philosopher Henri Bergson posited an initial push that propelled the diversity of life forward into a varied, novel future: The élan vital, a necessary force or impulse that animated life’s progress and development. His idea had largely been abandoned by mid-century. Even so, much of the conceptual and explanatory work this impulse targeted is yet in want of an explanation. In particular, Bergson’s derelict ideas on evolution addressed three areas that have once again become relevant in the effort to unite evolutionary genetics, biological development, and ecological context (often shortened to evo/devo/eco): (1) the purposeful nature of individual organisms and their parts; (2) the integrative, holistic, non-linear emergent dynamics seen in evolutionary processes; and (3) how genuine novelty emerges into the universe (Ellegren and Galtier in Nat Rev Genet 17(7):422, 2016; Simondon et al. in On the mode of existence of technical objects. Univocal series, Univocal Publishing LLC, Minneapolis, 2017; Bang, in: Winther-Lindqvist, Bang, Valsiner (eds) Nothingness: philosophical insights into psychology, Transaction Publishers, Somerset, 2016; Moreno and Mossio in Biological autonomy: a philosophical and theoretical enquiry. History, philosophy and theory of the life sciences, Springer, Dordrecht, 2015). In this paper I argue that Bergson’s ideas may yet be relevant to these questions, and his work warrants a reexamination in light of current problems in evolutionary biology. This is not a call to ‘return’ to Bergson, nevertheless his notions about complexity suggest ways of looking at current biological problems in ways that offer a heuristic insight worth entertaining. Bergson’s Nobel Prize-winning book, Creative Evolution, provided a strikingly prescient early 20th century framework for understanding how Darwinian evolution acts as an engine for generating new forms (Bergson in Creative evolution (M. Vaughan, trans., vol. 231), University Press of America, Lanham, Bergson 1911).
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Notes
Bergson writes as an analogy of the élan vital, “Let us now imagine that, instead of moving in air, the hand has to pass through iron filings which are compressed and offer resistance to it in proportion as it goes forward. At a certain moment the hand will have exhausted its effort, and, at this very moment, the filings will be massed coordinated in a certain definite form, to wit, that of the hand that is stopped and of a part of the arm. Now, suppose that the hand and arm are invisible. Lookers-on will seek the reason of the arrangement in the filings themselves and in forces within the mass. Some will account for the position of each filing by the action exerted upon it by the neighboring filings: these are the mechanists. Others will prefer to think that a plan of the whole has presided over the detail of these elementary actions: they are the finalists. But the truth is that there has been merely one indivisible act, that of the hand passing through the filings canalize and limit its motion… The greater the effort of the hand, the farther it will go into the filings. But at whatever point it stops, instantaneously and automatically the filings coordinate and find their equilibrium. So with vision and its origan.”
Coalescence theory explores the genealogical history of a population. Rather than projecting future states of allele frequencies, it makes inferences from genetic samples of individuals to look at convergence times of different linages.
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Peck, S.L. The Rumors of Bergson’s Demise May Have Been Exaggerated: Novelty, Complexity, and Emergence in Biological Evolution. Found Sci 24, 541–557 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10699-019-09598-4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10699-019-09598-4