Teleonomic Selection -- The Worm Strives To Be Man

[Llwellyn]

What do you make of the hypothesis that behavior is an important causal factor in evolutionary change?  

 

Peter Corning wrote that "Organisms are active participants in the evolutionary process (cybernetic systems) and have played a major causal role in determining its direction."  Consider Corning's example of the capacity of living organisms to alter their own heredity:  "Naturally occurring variations in the neck lengths of ancestral Giraffidae most likely became adaptively significant when these animals acquired, perhaps through trial-and-error, a new ‘habit’ (eating Acacia leaves) as a way of surviving in the relatively desiccated environment of the African savanna."  A change in the organism-environment relationship among ancestral giraffes, occasioned by the adoption of a novel behavior, precipitated a new “selection pressure” for morphological change. (So Lamarck was half right.)

 

Corning also quotes C. H. Waddington that:  "It is the animal’s behaviour which to a considerable extent determines the nature of the environment to which it will submit itself and the character of the selective forces with which it will consent to wrestle."  A change in an animal’s ‘habits’, or its habitat, may have no significant effect, or it could drastically change the odds of its survival.  In the process, this new habit/habitat may alter the context for the selection of various structural modifications.  In this way a kind of behavioral "Weismann Barrier" could be broken -- the lines of causation between behavior and genome could run in both directions.  Ernst Mayr concurs:  "The selection pressure in favor of the structural modification is greatly increased by a shift into a new ecological niche, by the acquisition of a new habit, or by both."  

 

Should there be a Darwinized Lamarckism?  Should this kind of hypothesis be strenuously repudiated as heresy, or does it go without saying?  Perhaps there is a measured acceptance of the idea?  Corning calls it "Teleonomic Selection" and "Neo-Lamarckian Selection."  Baldwin called it "Organic Selection."   Emerson wrote similarly that:

 

A subtle chain of countless rings

The next unto the farthest brings;

The eye reads omens where it goes,

And speaks all languages the rose;

And, striving to be man, the worm

Mounts through all the spires of form.

 

 

Corning, P.A. 2014 'Evolution 'on purpose': how behaviour has shaped the evolutionary process', Biological Journal of the Linnaean Society 112, 242-60. http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/bij.12061

 

http://complexsystems.org/publications/evolution-on-purpose-how-behaviour-has-shaped-the-evolutionary-process/