Evolution ‘on purpose’: how behaviour has shaped the evolutionary process

Abstract

The idea that behaviour has played an important role in evolution has had its ups and downs over the past two centuries. Now it appears to be up once again. Lamarck can claim priority for this insight, along with Darwin's more guarded view. However, there followed a long ‘dark‐age’, which began with Weismann's mutation theory and spanned the gene‐centred era that followed during most of the 20th Century, although it was punctuated by various contrarians, from Baldwin's ‘Organic Selection theory’ to Simpson's ‘Baldwin effect’, Mayr's ‘Pacemaker’ model, and Waddington's ‘genetic assimilation’, amongst others. Nowadays, even as we are reading genomes and using this information to illuminate biological causation and decipher evolutionary patterns, behavioural processes are more fully appreciated, with ‘multilevel selection theory’ providing a more ecumenical, multicausal model of evolutionary change. This has been accompanied by a flood of research on how behavioural influences contribute to the ongoing evolutionary process, from research on phenotypic plasticity to niche construction theory and gene–culture co‐evolution theory. However, the theoretical implications of this paradigm shift still have not been fully integrated into our current thinking about evolution. Behaviour has a purpose (teleonomy); it is ends‐directed. Living organisms are not passive objects of ‘chance and necessity’ (as Jacques Monod put it). Nor is the currently popular concept of phenotypic plasticity sufficient. Organisms are active participants in the evolutionary process (cybernetic systems) and have played a major causal role in determining its direction. It could be called ‘constrained purposiveness’, and one of the important themes in evolution, culminating in humankind, has been the ‘progressive’ evolution of self‐determination (intelligence) and its ever‐expanding potency. I call this agency ‘Teleonomic Selection’. In a very real sense, our species invented itself. For better and worse, the course of evolution is increasingly being shaped by the ‘Sorcerer's Apprentice’. Monod's mantra needs to be updated. Evolution is a process that combines ‘chance, necessity, teleonomy and selection’. © 2013 The Linnean Society of London, Biological Journal of the Linnean Society, 2014, 112, 242–260.

“Synergistic selection”: A Darwinian frame for the evolution of complexity

“…It could be a functionally-significant mutation, a chromosomal transposition, a change in the physical environment that affects development (ontogeny), a change in one species that affects another species, or (often enough) it could be a change at the behavioral level that results in a new organismenvironment relationship. (For an in-depth discussion of the role of behavior as a shaping influence in the evolutionary process, see Corning, 2014;also Bateson, 1988also Bateson, , 2004Weber and Depew, 2003;Jablonka and Lamb, 2006a. See also the important work on "niche construction theory" and "ecosystem engineering" in Odling-Smee et al, 1996Laland et al, 1999, inter alia.…”

“…Just as natural selection is agnostic about the sources of the "variations" that can influence differential survival and reproduction, the synergism hypothesis is agnostic about how synergistic effects may arise in nature. They could be self-organized; they could be a product of some chance variation; they could arise from a happenstance symbiotic relationship; or they could be the result of a purpose-driven behavioral innovation by some living organism (see Corning, 2014).…”

Etho-Eco-Morphological Mismatches, an Overlooked Phenomenon in Ecology, Evolution and Evo-Devo That Supports ONCE (Organic Nonoptimal Constrained Evolution) and the Key Evolutionary Role of Organismal Behavior

“…Moreover, this general bias was often related to and/or further influenced by teleological ideas about "progress" or "purpose" in evolution, e.g., toward an increase in "perfection" of the fit between the "design" of organisms and their environments (e.g., Bonner, 1988Bonner, , 2013McShea, 1991McShea, , 1996McShea, , 2012Ruse, 1996Ruse, , 2003Ruse, , 2013Turner, 2000Turner, , 2007Turner, , 2013Turner, , 2016Rosslenbroich, 2006;Omland et al, 2008;Reiss, 2009;McShea and Brandon, 2010;Corning, 2013;Diogo et al, 2015c). Gould (2002) was particularly vocal about the occurrence of mismatches in living organisms, as he used them to emphasize the point that organisms are not designed by a supernatural entity but instead are the result of a complex, constrained, contingent and also random evolutionary history.…”

Independent Evolution of Similar Complex Cognitive Skills: The Importance of Embodied Degrees of Freedom

“…In similar vein, it is likely that cognition could itself provide selective pressures for cognitive development. This is not a novel take on behavioral evolution, having pre-Darwinian roots in Lamarck (for an in-depth review see Corning, 2013). The idea that behavior brings about evolution is close to a truism in behaviorally oriented biology, but what is usually not appreciated is that the origin of most flexible behavior in animals lies with cognition.…”