In the process of billions of years of natural selection, is there an inexorable tendency to higher complexity?
Why did intelligence evolve in animals? Why did it evolve so highly in humans?
If these questions are interesting to you, then the following PDFs will be fascinating. One of them needs to be rotated left in Adobe, but it is entirely worth the read.
http://filebin.ca/wqonxk/Rescher.pdf
http://eplex.cs.ucf.edu/papers/lehman_gecco10a.pdf
---------- Post added at 04:25 AM ---------- Previous post was at 04:16 AM ----------
(I'm aware of a hard, fast rule on the forum that I am required to leave my own "discussion material" in addition to whatever else I link. Having used forums for many years, I have come to notice that if I do provide my own discussion, the forum users inevitably use this as an excuse to not watch the videos, to not read the PDFs, and to not actually read the article I link.)
Having said that. I happen to be a person who believes there is an inexorable push in nature towards higher complexity. This puts me firmly against the philosophy of Richard Dawkins. It may also place me against Dan Dennett.
In the interest of keeping this thread from being closed within a few hours by anxious moderators, I provide a list of items which appear to support my position.
- The philosophy of Teilhard de Chardin.
- Genetic Drift as a means of biological change, or even speciation.
- The Baldwin Effect. In a nutshell, says that when organisms gain the capacity to learn, evolution is sped up dramatically.
- The work of Stuart Kaufman and Ilya Prigogine.