Abstract
The morphological organization of organisms is predictable to a certain degree from the material properties and generative rules of their constituent tissues and cells. This adds a principle to (‘externalist’) natural selection, which Müller and Newman have dubbed “inherency.” Something is inherent if it will always happen (e.g., entropy) or if the potentiality for it always exists, even if its actuality can be obstructed. In evolution, inherency means that the morphological motifs of modern-day organisms have their origins in generic forms assumed by cell masses interacting with one another and their microenvironments, and were only later integrated into developmental repertoires by stabilizing and canalizing genetic evolution. Thus, the causal basis of phenotypic evolution is not reduced to gene regulatory evolution and population genetic events, but includes the formative factors inherent to the evolving organisms themselves, such as their physical material properties, their self-organizing capacities, and their reactive potential to external influence. Regarding development, inherency locates the causal basis of morphogenesis in the dynamics of interaction between genes, cells, and tissues, each of which are endowed with their own ‘autonomous’ physical and functional properties, thus defying ‘blueprint’ or ‘program’ notions. The paper explores how inherency relates to the widely alleged ‘contingency’ of evolution.
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Notes
- 1.
The term ‘paradigm’ is used here loosely as in common scientific parlance, and should not be taken to refer specifically to Thomas Kuhn’s theory (although many biologists use it in this way). In fact, rather than as a paradigm, the evolutionary synthesis may be more aptly characterized as a “treaty” that has allowed evolutionists and molecular biologists to work together under common presuppositions (Burian 1988; Callebaut 2010).
- 2.
According to the currently dominant adaptationist perspective, phenotypic variability, although a necessary condition of any evolutionary change, is not viewed as the cause of a particular adaptive shift; rather, it is treated as a (tacit) background assumption (Sterelny 2000, p. S373).
- 3.
Historical contingency is not to be confounded with contingency as understood in modal logic, where something is contingent if it is neither necessary nor impossible (which is not identical to “possible,” since what is necessary must also be possible).
- 4.
My aim in this paper is not to articulate, let alone to defend, my personal stance on this issue (Elgin 2006 is a good discussion of the state of the art). Let me just say here that I sympathize with Van Fraassen’s (1989) constructive empiricist position that there are no unproblematic criteria for laws of nature, and that we’d better dispense with the notion of laws at all in the philosophy of science. Giere (1999) offers additional arguments to the effect that we can understand the workings of science (his focus is on physics) without invoking laws of nature from a constructive realist perspective.
- 5.
This is in reference to the naïve correspondence view of fitness propounded by Konrad Lorenz, according to which “the hoof of the horse is already adapted to the ground of the steppe before the horse is born” (Lorenz [1962] 1982, pp. 124–125). More generally, Lewontin (1982, p. 162) rejects the “problem-solution model” according to which evolution is to be regarded as the “solution” by species of some predetermined “problems” on the grounds that “it is the life activities of the species themselves that determine both the problems and solutions simultaneously.”
- 6.
Lewontin’s (1982) article is justly regarded as pioneering the current view of niche construction (Odling-Smee et al. 2003).
- 7.
Oyama (2000, Ch. 6, “The accidental chordate: Contingency in developmental systems”) additionally argues for a notion of development “in which contingency is central and constitutive, not merely secondary alteration of more fundamental, ‘preprogrammed’ forms” (p. 116), thus departing from the common view that development is reoccurring regularly in nature and hence (to some extent) predictable, if not programmed, while evolution is taken to be neither (Sterelny 2000, pp. S369–S370). Oyama’s postmodern celebration of developmental contingency differs from Müller and Newman’s variety of EvoDevo in that the latter, and EvoDevo in general, extend the (non-deterministic!) programming of development by including epigenetic and environmental factors.
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Callebaut, W. (2010). Contingency and Inherency in Evolutionary Developmental Biology. In: Suárez, M., Dorato, M., Rédei, M. (eds) EPSA Philosophical Issues in the Sciences. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-90-481-3252-2_1
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