18 Evolution: A Generative Source for Conceptualizing the Attributes of Personality
creators, the active shapers of their own destiny. Rising above
the passive and accidental nature of existence, humans gener-
ate their own purposes and thereby provide themselves with
a true basis of freedom.
Strategies of Replication
In their mature stage, organisms possess the requisite compe-
tencies to maintain entropic stability. When these competen-
cies can no longer adapt and sustain existence, organisms
succumb inexorably to death and decomposition. This fate
does not signify finality, however. Prior to their demise, all
ephemeral species create duplicates that circumvent their ex-
tinction, engaging in acts that enable them to transcend the
entropic dissolution of their members’ individual existences.
If an organism merely duplicates itself prior to death, then
its replica is doomed to repeat the same fate it suffered. How-
ever, if new potentials for extending existence can be fash-
ioned by chance or routine events, then the possibility of
achieving a different and conceivably superior outcome may
be increased. And it is this co-occurrence of random and re-
combinant processes that does lead to the prolongation of a
species’ existence. This third hallmark of evolution’s proces-
sion also undergirds another of nature’s fundamental polari-
ties, that between self and other.
Reproductive Nurturance and Reproductive Propagation:
The Other-Self Polarity
At its most basic and universal level, the manifold varieties of
organisms living today have evolved, as Mayr (1964) has
phrased it, to cope with the challenge of continuously chang-
ing and immensely diversified environments, the resources of
which are not inexhaustible. The means by which organisms
cope with environmental change and diversity are well
known. Inorganic structures survive for extended periods of
time by virtue of the extraordinary strength of their bonding.
This contrasts with the very earliest forerunners of organic
life. Until they could replicate themselves, their distinctive
assemblages existed precariously, subject to events that could
put a swift end to the discrete and unique qualities that char-
acterized their composition, leaving them essentially as tran-
sient and ephemeral phenomena. After replicative procedures
were perfected, the chemical machinery for copying organis-
mic life, the DNA double helix, became so precise that it
could produce perfect clones—ifnothing interfered with its
structure or its mechanisms of execution. But the patterning
and processes of complex molecular change are not immune
to accident. High temperatures and radiation dislodge and
rearrange atomic structures, producing what are termed
mutations, alterations in the controlling and directing DNA
configuration that undergirds the replication of organismic
morphology.
Despite the deleterious impact of most mutations, it is the
genetic variations to which they give rise that have served as
one of the primary means by which simpleorganisms acquire
traits making them capable of adapting to diverse and chang-
ing environments. But isomorphic replication, aided by an
occasional beneficent mutation, is a most inefficient if not
hazardous means of surmounting ecological crises faced by
complex and slowly reproducing organisms. Advantageous
mutations do not appear in sufficient numbers and with suffi-
cient dependability to generate the novel capabilities required
to adapt to frequent or marked shifts in the ecosystem. How
then did the more intricate and intermittently reproducing or-
ganisms evolve the means to resolve the diverse hazards of
unpredictable environments?
The answer to this daunting task was the evolution of a re-
combinant mechanism, one in which a pair of organisms ex-
change their genetic resources: They develop what we term
sexual mating. Here, the potentials and traits each partner
possesses are sorted into new configurations that differ in
their composition from those of their origins, generating
thereby new variants and capabilities, of which some may
prove more adaptive (and others less so) in changing envi-
ronments than were their antecedents. Great advantages ac-
crue by the occasional favorable combinations that occur
through this random shuffling of genes.
Recombinant replication, with its consequential benefits
of selective diversification, requires the partnership of two
parents, each contributing its genetic resources in a distinc-
tive and species-characteristic manner. Similarly, the atten-
tion and care given the offspring of a species’ matings are
also distinctive. Worthy of note is the difference between the
mating parents in the degree to which they protect and nour-
ish their joint offspring. Although the investment of energy
devoted to upbringing is balanced and complementary, rarely
is it identical or even comparable in either devotion or deter-
mination. This disparity in reproductive investment strate-
gies, especially evident among nonhuman animal species
(e.g., insects, reptiles, birds, mammals), underlies the evolu-
tion of the male and female genders, the foundation for the
third cardinal polarity I propose to account for evolution’s
procession.
Somewhat less profound than that of the first polarity,
which represents the line separating the enhancement of
order (existence-life) from the prevention of disorder
(nonexistence-death), or that of the second polarity, differen-
tiating the adaptive modes of accommodation (passive-plant)
from those of modification (active-animal), the third polarity,