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THE THOMIST A SPECULATIVE QUARTERLY REVIEW OF THEOLOGY AND PHILOSOPHY EDITORS: THE DoMINICAN FATHERS oF THE PROVINCE oF ST. JosEPH Publishers: The Thomist Press, Washington, D. C. ~0017 VoL. XXXVI APRIL, 1972 No.2 CAUSALITY AND EVOLUTION The Search for a Proportionate Cause of Evolutionary Processes I WILL ASSUME in the following that the principle of causality which states that " nothing which comes to be, comes to be without a proportionate cause" cannot be eliminated from empirical science, although the effort has repeatedly been made.1 Consequently, we have to face squarely a fundamental question about all theories of evolution: How can more complex 1 Even positivistic philosophers of science have not been able to eliminate the principle of causality as a necessary assumption of science, although they have striven to give it a Humean form by arguing that it is not an inductive generalization , but a rule of thinking which is necessarily required by any theoretical science as long as science retains the goals which it has historically accepted. See the discussion in Ernest Nagel, The Structure of Science (Harcourt, Brace and World, Inc.: N.Y. 1961), pp. 316-324. "But it is difficult to understand how it would be possible for modem theoretical science to surrender the general ideal expressed by the principle (of causality) without becoming thereby transformed into something incomparably different from what that enterprise actually is." p. 324. See also Mario Bunge, Causality, The Place of the Causal Principle in Modern Science (Harvard University Press: Cambridge, Mass., 1959). 199 200 BENEDICT M. ASHLEY and highly integrated entities arise out of simpler and less organized entities? How can the " greater come from the less"? How can a new entity" emerge"? What is the proportionate cause of this emergence? Some have tried to escape the difficulty by arguing that "evolution" (as the etymology of the word indicates) is only an " unfolding," an explicitation of what is somehow already there, like the development of an embryo. Others have argued that it is only subjective to consider an elephant " greater " than an amoeba. But neither argument is more than an evasion of a genuine problem. We now have a rather detailed knowledge of various evolutionary processes, and none of these resemble embryological development except by the loosest of analogies. Again there is a precise, objective, and empirical sense in which an atom is a more complex and integrated system than an electron, a molecule than an atom, an organism than a molecule, a mammal than a protozoan, the human brain than a bird brain.2 I£, therefore, we are to have a coherent, philosophical understanding of the evolutionary view of the world and man which modern science has shown to be the only plausible account, we must identify in that world-picture a proportionate cause, a sufficient agent of evolutionary emergence. Four principle levels of this emergence are commonly distinguished today: 8 (I) Nuclear evolution which proceeds by nuclear synthesis and gives rise to atoms. (~) Chemical evolution which proceeds by chemical reactions and gives rise to molecules of greater and greater complexity. • Ludwig von Bertalanffy, General System Theory (George Braziller: New York, 1968), pp. £7-£9, referring especially to the work of Kenneth Boulding. • Melvin Calvin," Chemical Evolution and the Origin of Life," American Scientist, 44 (July, 1956), £48-£63 proposes this four-fold evolution and gives the following time table. Nuclear evolution-10 billion years; chemical evolution-£lh billion years; biological evolution-! billion years; psychosocial evolution lh million years. See also his Chemical Evolution: Molecular Evolution towards the Origin of Living Systems on Earth and Elsewhere (Oxford, 1969). CAUSALITY AND EVOLUTION flOI (3) Biological evolution which proceeds first by abiogenesis, and then by genetic mutation and natural selection to give rise to the species of living organisms of increasing complexity and greater flexibility in adapting to environmental changes. (4) Psychosocial evolution by which the human species produces a vast array of cultures which are not genetically determined but invented, and in which there has been a progress toward control of the environment by scientific technology, and the emergence of self-directed human personalities. These four kinds of evolution take place through radically different processes and are only analogously...

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