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Etyczne konsekwencje ewolucji

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Elżanowski A.

Kosmos

2009

vol. 58

issue 3-4

585-593

Darwin's discoveries have profound ethical implications that continue to be misrepresented and/or ignored. In contrast to socialdarwinistic misuses of his theory, Darwin was a great humanitarian who paved the way for an integrated scientific and ethical world view. As an ethical doctrine, socialdarwinism is long dead ever since its defeat by E. G. Moore although the socialdarwinistic thought is a hard-die in the biological community. The accusations of sociobiology for being socialdarwinistic are unfounded and stem from the moralistic fallacy that is, a false assumption that morality is good by definition. Both social and developmental psychology demonstrate that the moral agency is a motivational device for executing reciprocity that remains at the core of any morality across all studied societies and throughout the ontogeny of moral judgment. The level of true universalizing ethical reflection (Kohlberg's postconvential stages or Gibbs's existential phase) is achieved by a small minority of humans, thus showing that Homo sapiens is a moral but not an ethical animal. While the origin of reciprocity has been perfectly explained by sociobiology, the evolutionary assembly of affective and cognitive elements that make up the moral agency is being successfully studied by the social/personality/developmental psychology as extended to non-human primates. As Darwin (1871) expected, the key innovation for the evolution of moral agency was the emergence of empathy that evolved independently at least three times: in elephants, dolphins and primates. Empathy has a motivational power of its own; it is also necessary for moral agency that requires two cognitive abilities: reflective self-consciousness and understanding of causality; the two make possible the attribution of responsibility. All these requirements are met by the chimpanzees whose moral agency operates in dyads. In contrast, the human moral agency allows for a third party intervention that opens up vast opportunities for ideologies, especially religions, to use and misuse the moral agency to enforce a reciprocation that may be harmful to both individuals and the entire group. Also, the moral agency is known to enforce enhanced intragroup cohesion and loyalty in response to conflict and war, which suggests that the two prima facie opposed human universals, morality and warfare, may have coevolved. The most important ethical consequence that follows from the increasing understanding of the primate moral agency is that every received morality is ethically flawed, none can be taken as a paragon of goodness, and each needs corrections by science-informed ethics. In fact, Darwin pioneered the integration of science and ethics, an approach that has come to be appreciated only recently under the heading of consilience.

Jak wzrasta złożoność organizmów

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Elżanowski A.

Kosmos

2009

vol. 58

issue 3-4

417-428

The genetic reduction or "genocentrism" of the Synthetic Theory of Evolution was unconducive to its integration with evolutionary morphology and did not leave any room for even addressing the complexity of organisms. For the same reason the concept of function was effectively ignored in the conceptual scheme of this theory that pooled all phenotypic and genetic determinants of reproductive success under the heading of fitness. In fact the concept of function is critical to understanding the complexity of any goal-directed system and the growth of organismal complexity comes down to an increase in the number of functions even it may be easier to measure by morphological diversity. It is a great realization of the 20th century that body parts at all levels are commnly coopted to new functions and thus genuine multifunctionality (i.e., performing multiple, discrete and unrelated functions) is constantly generated by an evolving organization. What seems to be less well understood is that new fuctions arise from ubiquitous nonfunctinal interactions of body parts with their environment that may be external (Umwelt, niche) or internal (milieu intérieur) to the organism. While these interactions arise as inevitable causal by-products of a structure's functioning or static properties, their impact is accidental to any organismal needs (that is, ultimately, any current functions) and only sometimes happens to be useful in which case an interaction becomes a function. The is exactly the way mutations are used by natural selection, hence the dynamics of nonfunctional interactions that are generated by body parts is considered here to be a major factor of evolution and referred to as parafunctional variation. The growth of complexity as observed in the evolution of organims would not be possible without multiplication of parts. This is because cooptions to new functions lead to adaptive (and sometimes also direct, functional) conflicts with old ones and because all functions tend to be crude and generalized (euryfunctional) at the beginning and need refinements through a subdivision of tasks. The escape from adaptive conflict between unrelated functions (as acquired via the mechanism of cooption) is resolved through Dohrn's exchange of functions between duplicated structures (serial homologues or paralogues) where one of them takes over a minor function of the ancestral structure and becomes adapted to it as to the main function. Most cases described as neofunctionalization of duplicated genes are in fact cases of the exchange of functions. Refinements of generalized functions are achieved by the way of Severtsov's subdivision of function into partial tasks or subfunctions, which generates the complexity of organismic apparatuses (e.g., osteomuscular devices) and molecular quaternary structures such as heteromers that arise by duplication and coaptation of molecules (as in the heterotetramers of hemoglobin). Some cases described under the heading of subfunctionalization fall into this category while others represent cases of simple divergence of paralogues under independent expression control. The latter is facilitated by the mobility of genomic sequences and the relative freedom of association between regulatory and structural genes. Other than that, the complexity of both organs and molecules seems to evolve under similar rules that have yet to be better understood and integrated. The combined action of natural selection, genetic variation, and parafunctional variation is deemed suffcient to explain the evolutionary growth of complexity. While natural selection seizes upon any beneficial effects including those afforded by the thermodynamic propensities of organic configurations, there is no good reason or evidence to believe in the spontaneous generation of higher levels of organization such as multicellularity.

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