The Structure of Evolutionary Theory

(Michael S) #1

Structural Constraints, Spandrels, and Exaptation 1209


But Kauffman's specific insights and foci of concern differ widely from D'Arcy
Thompson's emphasis upon morphometric geometry under laws of classical
Newtonian dynamics. In the two major disparities, Kauffman first calls upon a
different set of physical principles that has recently inspired both professional activity
and public interest. In a second, and welcome, difference, Kauffman wishes to abet
selection by supplying "order for free" from the inherent nature of the physical world,
whereas D'Arcy Thompson tried to develop a largely substitutional theory of adaptive
form that would relegate natural selection of effective insignificance.
In stating his fealty and staking out his differences, Kauffman (1993, p. 643)
pays homage to D'Arcy Thompson and acknowledges the "small trickling of
intellectual tradition" that this "outlier" species of structuralism has engendered,
although Kauffman would surely wish to enlarge the flow to Mississippian
proportions:


D'Arcy Thompson's famous and elegant book On Growth and Form stands as
one of the best efforts to find aspects of organismic order which can be
understood as aspects which we might, on good grounds, expect. His enquiry,
which led him to consider minimal energy surfaces, transformations of
coordinate systems as a function of differential growth, and a whole beautiful
panoply of phenomena, has stood as a persistent spring for a small trickling of
intellectual tradition down through contemporary biology. Thompson applied
classical physics to biology. It has been said that a weakness of some
biologists is persistent physics-envy: the seeking of a deep structure to
biology.

Kauffman then extols the virtues of physics-envy, while recommending that
biologists redirect their jealousy away from the Newtonian mechanics that D'Arcy
Thompson revered (p. 644): "There is a new physics aborning, and it is time to again
fall open victim to physics-envy. For want of a better name, the area which is
emerging is something like a theory of complex systems ... This book is an effort to
continue in Thompson's tradition with the spirit now animating parts of physics. It
seeks origins of order in the generic properties of complex systems."
By pluralizing his title, and by being even more explicit in his subtitle,
Kauffman emphasizes his different aim of arranging a marriage between selection
and inherent order, with the latter as the older and more experienced partner who
encourages a younger spouse to invigorate and direct the united effort emerging from
a preexisting substrate: The Origins of Order. Self-Organization and Selection in
Evolution. "I have made bold to suggest that much of the order seen in organisms is
precisely the spontaneous order in the systems of which we are composed. Such order
has beauty and elegance, casting an image of permanence and underlying law over
biology. Evolution is not just 'chance caught on the wing.' It is not just a tinkering of
the ad hoc, of bricolage, of contraption. It is emergent order honored and honed by
selection" (p. 644).
"My own aim," Kauffman adds (p. 26), "is not so much to challenge as to

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