Hardcover Universitätsverlag Göttingen Momme von Sydow From Darwinian Metaphysics towards Understanding the Evolution of Evolutionary Mechanisms Momme von Sydow From Darwinian Metaphysics towards Understanding the Evolution of Evolutionary Mechanisms This work is licensed under the Creative Commons License 3 .0 “by - nd”, allowing you to download, distribute and print the document in a few copies for private or educational use, given that the document stays unchanged and the creator is mentioned. You are not allowed to sell copies of the free version. erschienen im Universitätsverlag Göttingen 2012 Momme von Sydow From Darwinian Metaphysics towards Understanding the Evolution of Evolutionary Mechanisms A Historical and Philosophical Analysis of Gene-Darwinism and Universal Darwinism Universitätsverlag Göttingen 2012 Bibliographische Information der Deutschen Nationalbibliothek Die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek verzeichnet diese Publikation in der Deutschen Nationalbibliographie; detaillierte bibliographische Daten sind im Internet über <http://dnb.ddb.de> abrufbar. Address of the Author Dr. Dr. Momme von Sydow e-mail: Momme.von-Sydow@uni-heidelberg.de This work is protected by German Intellectual Property Right Law. It is also available as an Open Access version through the publisher’s homepage and the Online Catalogue of the State and University Library of Goettingen (http://www.sub.uni-goettingen.de). Users of the free online version are invited to read, download and distribute it. Users may also print a small number for educational or private use. However they may not sell print versions of the online book. Satz und Layout: Momme von Sydow Umschlaggestaltung: Franziska Lorenz Titelabbildung: M.C. Escher: Drawing Hands. All M.C. Escher works (c) 2011 The M.C. Escher Company - the Netherlands. All rights reserved. Used by permission. www.mcescher.com © 2012 Universitätsverlag Göttingen http://univerlag.uni-goettingen.de ISBN: 978-3-86395-006-4 “The progress of biology and psychology has probably been checked by the uncritical assumption of half-truths. If science is not to degenerate into a medley of ad hoc hypotheses, it must become philosophical and must enter into a thorough criticism of its own foundations.” A. N. Whitehead, 1925/1926. Preface It is a daring task for a single author to embark on an interdisciplinary inquiry dealing with Darwinism historically, biologically and philosophically; even more so if one finally proposes a critique of assumptions central to current Darwinian paradigms. Interdisciplinary work requires specialized devotion to various fields, merely to gain an overview of pertinent research – be it on the historical person of Darwin or on some current dispute in philosophy of biology. Yet, I consider it a genuine task of philosophy to undertake such broad interdisciplinary investigations. Moreover, the outcome demonstrates that more is at stake than some theories in biology. That is this interdisciplinary study in fact points to a Darwinian metaphysic virtually omnipresent in the Zeitgeist at the turn of the millennium. This metaphysics is not influential in biology, epistemology and psychology, but even in politics and economics. Moreover, in this work several lines of arguments are developed providing the basis for a systematic critique of this metaphysics. Appropriately, my thoughts on the matter underwent a kind of evolution. For this reason I wish to provide a short, somewhat personal account of how I came to my present interdisciplinary interest. At a point, Sita von Richthoven, a friend of mine, gave me a copy of the book The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins that I have been engaged with fundamental questions in the field of sociobiology and evolutionary biology – sometimes even in dreams. It was immediately clear to me that this provocative book had a bearing on many philosophical topics; but it was not until later that I realised the book itself warranted philosophical examination. Perhaps it was due to some critical prepartation I had received through the classical writings of Plato, Aristotle, Hegel, and particularly Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, that I had been resisting some of tacit assumptions of Darwinian metaphysics und gene-Darwinism. However, over the years the idea of the “selfish gene” did gain futher popularity. In fact, I would concede that this idea did have some positive effects: for instance, it provided a kind of intellectual inoculation against naïve utopias and outdated biological theories of altruism. And yet I think that the idea has proliferated so quickly that critical objections have not received due attention, not just by me but by the scholarly world in general, and hence gene- Darwinism had become a major pest to our intellectual ecology. Although in this last decade the “selfish gene” idea has increasingly had to share the spotlight with other tendencies in biology and even in behavioural economics, what still remains to be worked out is a synthesis of these alternative approaches into a convincing paradigm. Although a large part of current work in the field is concerned with biological theories of gene-Darwinism and process-Darwinism, such theories do not touch on all areas of Darwinian metaphysics. It was clear to me, having studied philosophy and psychology, that there were structural similarities between the Darwinian process of mutation-and-selection and Thorndike’s psychological approach of trial-and-error learning. Moreover, the Darwinian metaphysic is fundamentally connected with philosophical issues linked to Hume’s problem of induction. While working on these Preface VIII topics I became increasingly aware that this metaphysic is present in many other subject areas as well, such as the theory of science or of economics. Furthermore, across the globe it seems to have played a crucial role in the neo-liberal policies of unconstrained market-competition and privatisation at the turn of the millennium. My present work begins with a historical investigation of the background to biological Darwinian paradigms. This background is no irrelevant ornament to the main theme of systematically discussing Darwinism; rather, it provides the basis from which to establish differences between Darwinian paradigms and detect the conceptual core of universal Darwinism. The definition of this core in turn has an incontrovertible impact on the systematic critique of gene-Darwinism, process- Darwinism and Darwinian metaphysics in general. Although I have done my best to address the different subject-areas, the broad scope of this work nevertheless has the disadvantage of not being able to treat all broached discourses in the depth they deserve. That being said, I still maintain that it would be more unfortunate, if not negligent, to underplay, at the expense of other discourses, the one long argument that acts as the constant thread throughout the book – that is the historically grounded explication and definition of Darwinism and Darwinian metaphysics, enableing a systematic critique of biological as well as metaphysical Darwinism. In recent years I have worked at the University of Göttingen and now at the University of Heidelberg in psychology in a quite positivistic and technical manner on issues like Bayesian hypothesis-testing. Hence, I am inclined to reconsider this book, based as it is on earlier thought, and I can see that parts of the book are rather speculative. Moreover, I am aware that it could profit from further polishing and updating. This book is based on my PhD thesis in philosophy from 2001 and this edition has only partly been updated and shortened. I have elaborated the section on the problem of induction in more detail in a later PhD thesis in psychology and in my further research, but this later work has not been explicitly concerned with the critique of Darwininian metaphysics, but with logical, statistical and psychological issues. I had the opportunity to keep in touch with recent discussions in evolutionary theory and sociobiology in the Courant Research Centre Evolution of Social Behavior at the University of Göttingen, and therefore I am aware that the book does not account for many of the recent developments in evolutionary biology, sociobiology, and genetics. Nonetheless, the overall argument of this book still applies. On the one hand, since the time of my earlier work some of its claims – such as the advocacy of multilevel selectionism and the role of evolutionary constraints – have become hotly disputed topics in biology and the philosophy of biology. In this regard I appear to have come closer to the academic mainstream; yet even more daring claims are made in this book. For my ideas challenging Darwinian metaphysics, and in particular Darwinian process-monism, are still innovative, roughly 150 years after The Origin of Species first came out. And it may well be that many scholars will find these ideas are too innovative. Nevertheless, I am convinced that the evolution of ideas will go on and eventually question Darwinian process-monism, in biology as well as in other areas dominated by Darwinian metaphysics. Many lessons can and should be learned from Darwinian metaphysics, but I advocate here that such a metaphysic, postulating Preface IX the inalterable blindness of the evolutionary process, should be replaced by the idea of an evolution of evolutionary mechanisms themselves, with the potential or even the propabilistic inherent tendency to overcome the primordial blindness. Facts are not at issue; nor is the idea of evolution itself. The crux here is how to interpret evolution. The proposed interpretation of evolution is of course of no minor significance. First, it may contribute to a new framework that may allow for the integration of recent biological developments (concerning, for instance, system- theoretical biology, morphological constraints, Bayesian genetics, and multilevel selection). Moreover, although it cannot be questioned that we can learn very much from Darwinism, it is claimed that Universal Darwinism as an interpretative framework can and should be replaced by an account of the evolution of evolutionary mechanisms – both in biology and in metaphysics. Momme v. Sydow, Heidelberg, 2011 Acknowledgments My greatest debt is to the authors – friend and foe alike – whom I have read, and whose texts alone made my further work possible. I should mention especially Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett. Their writings inspired me, even if in many respects I ultimately came to different conclusions. Although I tried mainly to radicalise and then transcend gene-Darwinism and process-Darwinism from within, I of course also owe much to historical and present critics of Darwinism, both paving the way for my argumentation and me confirming me that a different approach was both possible and necessary. More directly, I am deeply grateful to Professor Dr. David Knight, supervisor of my philosophical (and historical) doctoral thesis on this matter, for his constantly patient, supportive and friendly help. His advice and encouragement helped me sub- stantially, when writing the thesis, in bringing this complex work to a close. I am indebted to the German Heinrich-Böll Stiftung, the Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst and the Kölner Gymnasial- und Studienstiftung , whose scholarships made the work possible. I gratefully acknowledge the substantial help and critical advice of Peter Bowler, Matthew D. Eddy, Paul Embleton, Mary Midgley, Fiona Pierce, Bill Pollard, Soran Reader, Jennifer Smith, Rob Talbot, and Alistair Wright. Additionally, I want to thank my father, Friedrich v. Sydow, not only for having taught me a love of truth early on, but because he had proof read several parts of the original thesis with his own logical rigour and linguistic sensitivity. Finally, when editing the present revised edition of this work, I received considerable help from Martha Cunningham and Johanna Frisch In recent years, I have been concerned with the normative and descriptive models of Bayesian reasoning, providing a wholely different approach to knowledge- acquisition from that of blind (Darwinian) trial-and-error processes. And although the current book does not focus on novel Bayesian approaches within biology, the success of the Bayesian paradigm per se (even if mainly in cognitive psychology) contributed to my confidence in a critique of Darwinian metaphysics in the face of Hume’s problem of induction. With this in mind, I would like to express my gratitude to the cognitive psychology lab at Göttingen and to the researchers I met in this sometimes quite technical – but not philosophically irrelevant – field of research. I also want to thank the German Research Foundation for supporting the research on Bayesian models (DFG Sy 111-1, Sy 111-2). When I became affiliated with the Courant Research Centre of the Evolution of Social Behaviour (University of Göttingen), funded by the German Academic Excellence Initiative, I enjoyed the interdisciplinary conferences, such as “Darwin Among the Disciplines,” organised by this group. Even more important, I am very grateful to the heterogeneous and interesting group of re- searchers at the Courant Centre, who have kept me up-to-date with the debates cur- rently operating in the fields of biology and primatology. Although many of these re- searchers would call themselves Darwinians – perhaps with a different meaning than the one developed here – it can be concluded from this first hand experience that bio- Acknowledgment XI logy is much more diverse and multifaceted than a pure metaphysics of Darwinism or the somewhat narrow popularisations of biological research would suggest. Finally, personal debts can never be adequately acknowledged; but I want to thank my parents, Anne and Friedrich, and my wife, Sandra, who have provided me with the support, help and love to finish this work. Table of Contents Preface .............................................................................................. VII Acknowledgments ...................................................................................................... X Introduction: Nature of Philosophy and Philosophy of Nature .......... 1 The Nature of Philosophy and Its Relation to Science ......................................... 3 a) Metaphysics as an Essential Task of Philosophy ........................................ 3 b) Metaphysics Entrenched in Science.............................................................. 4 c) Science as Philosophy and Art....................................................................... 5 d) The Dialogue Between Philosophy and Science......................................... 6 The Philosophy of Nature – Universal Darwinism and Its Transcendence ...... 7 a) The Glory and Poverty of Gene-Darwinism – The Need for a Third Way ............................................................................. 8 b) A Strict Definition of Darwinism and Process-Darwinism .................... 10 c) From Darwinism to an Evolutionary Theory of Evolution ................... 12 d) The Philosophy of Nature after Times of Ecological and Economic Crisis ............................................................................................. 16 e) Darwinism, Religion and Philosophy ......................................................... 18 One Long Argument – Outline of the Book ........................................................ 22 Part I: Sociobiology and Its Ethical Implications – The Cause of this Investigation ......................................... 29 Chapter 1: Sociobiology as Discipline and Paradigm ........................ 31 1.1 Two Basic Postulates ......................................................................................... 33 a) The Postulate of ‘Selfish’ Genes as the Only Units of Evolution ......... 33 b) The Postulate of Genic or Biological Determinism ................................. 35 1.2 The Main Theories of the Evolution of Apparent Altruism – Sociobiological Theorems? ............................................................................... 36 a) The Theory of Kin Selection ....................................................................... 37 b) The Theory of Reciprocal ‘Altruism’ .......................................................... 38 Chapter 2: Ethical Implications – The Morality of the Gene?........... 41 2.1 Biology and Ethics: Different but Not Unrelated ......................................... 42 2.2 Philosophical Reactions and Some Accounts of a ‘Sociobiological Ethics’ ...................................................................................... 45 Table of Contents XIII 2.3 The Moral of the Gene? – ‘The Currency Used in the Casino of Evolution Is Survival’ ...................... 51 2.4 Meme ‘Altruisms’? – A Further Extension of the Sociobiological Paradigm ................................ 57 a) Memes – A Limited Comeback of the Idea of Logos ............................. 57 b) Problems of the Extended Genetic-Memetic Approach as a Basis for Ethics....................................................................................... 59 2.5 The Need for a New Paradigm in Biology ..................................................... 62 Part II: The Unfolding of Logos in Regard to the Conceptions of ‘Physis’ and Darwinism ............................ 65 Chapter 3: The Unfolding of the Pre-Darwinian Philosphical Conceptions of Nature ....................................................................... 69 3.1 The Ancient Views of φύσις – Nature as Organism ..................................... 69 a) From Myth to the Pre-Socratics – The Development of Basic Notions........................................................... 70 b) Platonism – Physis as ‘Techne’ .................................................................... 71 c) Aristotelianism – Physis as ‘Autopoiesis’ ................................................... 72 3.2 Medieval Philosophy – The Divine De-enchantment of Nature ............... 73 a) The World as ‘Machina Mundi’ ................................................................... 74 b) The Human as ‘Alter Deus’ ......................................................................... 75 c) Universalia – From Realism to Nominalism ............................................. 75 3.3 Modern Philosophy – Nature as Clockwork; Creator as Watchmaker...... 76 a) The Rise of Science – The Alter Deus Explores the Clockwork of God: Copernicus, Bacon, Newton......................................................... 76 b) Humanism – The Alter Deus Replaces the Christian Deus ................... 78 c) Descartes and Kant – Dualism of Human Freedom and the Clockwork of Nature ................. 79 d) Idealism and Romanticism – The Dynamic Trial of a Unification........ 82 (i) ‘Naturphilosophie’ and Idealism ............................................................ 82 (ii) Unity, Dynamism and Organicism........................................................ 84 (iii) The Breakdown of Romantic Science ................................................. 86 3.4 The Rise of Biology as Science – Torn between Eternal Form and Evolution .................................................. 87 a) Hierarchical Taxonomy instead of ‘Scala Naturae’ – Linnaeus .............. 89 b) Romanticising Materialistic Biology – Buffon, Lamarck ......................... 90 c) Transcendental and Essentialist Biology – Cuvier, (early) Owen, Agassiz ...................................................................... 92 Table of Contents XIV d) Romantic Biology – Oken, Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, (late) Owen ........... 95 e) Conclusion: Overview of the Preceding Three Schools.......................... 98 Chapter 4: The Internal Logic of Evolutionary Theories – From Darwin to Dawkins ................................................................. 102 4.1 From Darwin to Weismann – The Birth of Darwinism ............................ 106 a) Darwin – Not a Darwinist in the Strict Sense......................................... 106 b) Darwin’s Biological Theory – Focus on the Individual Organism ...... 110 c) Darwin’s Descent of Man – Social Darwinism? ..................................... 112 (i) Ambivalence about the Universality of Natural Selection ............. 112 (ii) Explaining Man, Culture and Ethics? ................................................ 115 d) Neo-Darwinism: Weismann Turns Darwin’s Theory into ‘Darwinism’ ................................................................................................... 118 4.2 Darwinism on Its Deathbed ........................................................................... 121 4.3 Evolutionary Synthesis .................................................................................... 123 a) First Phase – Synthesis of Genetics and Population Statistics ............. 125 b) Second Phase – Population Structure and Macroscopic Mechanisms ............................. 127 c) Evolutionary Factors and the Importance of Populations ................... 130 d) Disengagement from Ideological Programmes? ..................................... 134 4.4 ‘Sociobiology’ as Gene-Darwinism – A New Synthesis? ........................... 138 a) Germ-Line Reductionism ........................................................................... 139 b) Gene-Atomism............................................................................................. 140 c) Darwinian Process Monism ....................................................................... 142 4.5 Criticism – A Better Synthesis in Sight?........................................................ 144 a) New Views in Micro- and Macrobiology ................................................. 146 b) A Multilevel Synthesis – Darwinism versus Developmentalism? ........ 152 (i) Multi-Level-Darwinism........................................................................ 153 (ii) Multi-Level-Evolutionism: Developmental Approaches and Selforganisational Approaches ........................................................... 156 Chapter 5: The External History of Darwinism – From Whig Biology to Neo-Liberal Biology? .................................. 160 5.1 Darwin – A Malthusian Synthesis of Romantic and Newtonian Thought ............... 162 a) Romanticism and Romanticising Materialism ......................................... 163 b) The Impact of Newtonism – Darwin’s Process-Monism ..................... 168 c) Thomas Malthus, Adam Smith – The Influence of Economic Thought and Practice ............................... 173 d) God – A Blind and Brute Creator? ........................................................... 183 Table of Contents XV 5.2 Evolutionary Synthesis – Thermodynamics and the Philosophical Zeitgeist ...................................... 184 a) The Influence of Thermodynamics .......................................................... 184 b) The Impact of the Philosophical Zeitgeist and the Development of Logical Positivism and Logical Atomism? ............................................... 186 (i.) Philosophy at the Time of the Eclipse of Darwinism .................... 187 (ii) Parallels of Logical Atomism and Logical Positivism to Fisherism? ......................................................................................... 188 (iii) Contextual Turns in Philosophy and Biology .................................. 190 5.3 Gene-Darwinism – Reductionism Generalised ........................................... 191 a) The Different Biological Legacies of the Schools of Evolutionary Biology .................................................................................. 193 b) A Misled Neo-Romantic Aspiration for Unification and Interdisciplinarity ......................................................................................... 193 c) ‘Naturalistic Turn’ – Reductionism and Materialism in Philosophy.... 197 d) ‘Import’ of Economical Concepts – Gene-Capitalism? ........................ 198 5.4 Summary: Biology as ‘Geisteswissenschaft’?................................................ 202 Part III: Universal Darwinism .......................................... 205 Chapter 6: Darwinian Metaphysics – Biologistic and Process-Darwinism .................................................207 6.1 The Problem of Induction – The Necessity of Blind Variation and External Elimination? ................... 209 a) Darwinism Seen as Universal Principle.................................................... 209 b) The Problem of Induction (Hume and Popper) .................................... 210 c) Toward a Critique of a Falsificationist Necessity of Universal Darwinism................................................................................... 212 6.2 Biologistic Darwinism – Gene-Darwinism as Prototype ........................... 215 6.3 Universal Process-Darwinism – A New Alkahest ...................................... 216 Chapter 7: Process-Darwinism in Particular Subject Areas ............. 221 7.1 Darwinian Epistemologies and Darwinian Philosophies of Science ....... 221 a) Darwinian Biological Epistemology and Darwinian Process Epistemology ............................................................. 221 b) Operant Conditioning – Learning as Darwinian Process?.................... 227 c) Popper’s Falsificationism – Science as Darwinian Process? ................. 232 7.2 Other Components of Process-Darwinism ................................................. 235 a) Antibodies and Neurones........................................................................... 235 b) Darwinian Economics? ............................................................................... 236 Table of Contents XVI Conclusion – The Universal War of Entities ................................... 240 Part IV: Transcendence of Gene-Darwinism and Universal Process-Darwinism .......................................... 243 Chapter 8: Transcendence of Substance-Reductionism .................. 245 8.1 Problems of Physicalism and Reductionism in General ............................ 245 a) The Difference between Explanation and (Downward) Reduction.... 245 b) Problems of Modern Physicalism with Traditional Materialism .......... 246 c) Logical Problems of the Modern Understanding of Substance – Is a Tree a Million Matches? ...................................................................... 248 d) The Inconsistency between Biologism and Physicalism – Genes or Information versus Quarks? ..................................................... 255 8.2 Genetic Reductionism I: Gene-Atomistic Reductionism and Its Transcendence.............................. 264 a) Gene-Atomism – Empty or Wrong Claim? ............................................ 264 b) Higher Genetic Units – Despite the Meiotic Shuffle............................. 267 (i) The General Possibility of Emergent Higher Genic Units ............ 267 (ii) Higher Genic Units Despite the Meiotic Shuffle ............................ 269 c) Top-Down Causation and Higher-Level Genes at Different Loci...... 272 (i) The Relationship of Higher-Level Genes and Downward Causation........................................................................... 272 (ii) The Stability of Higher-Level Genes on Different Loci ................ 274 d) The Fallacy of Claiming Gene-Atomism Tautologically ....................... 277 (i) The Testable Claim of Gene-Atomism ............................................. 279 (ii) The Tautological Claim of Gene-Atomism ...................................... 280 e) Higher-Level Properties of Different Organisms – Four Possibilities for Achieving the Good of the Group ..................... 284 (i) Wholes in the Individual and the Many – Loci and Alleles ........... 284 (ii) Four Possibilities for Achieving the Good of the Group .............. 289 f) Stable Synergetic Properties and Selection above Groups – Species and Ecosystems.............................................................................. 301 (i) Species .................................................................................................... 302 (ii) Ecosystems ............................................................................................ 304 8.3 Genetic Reductionism II: Germ-Line Reductionism and Its Transcendence ...................................... 311 a) Germ-Line Reductionism – The Strong Interpretation of the Weismann Barrier ............................. 311 (i) Different Interpretations of the Central Dogma ............................. 312 (ii) Violations of the Weismannian Dogma? .......................................... 313 Table of Contents XVII (iii) The Central Dogma as Only Partial Description of the Relationships between Genotype and Phenotype ........................... 315 b) Information, Exformation and Phenotype as Evolutionary Factors ................................................................................... 316 (i) The General Concept of Exformation.............................................. 316 (ii) Exformation and the Stuffness of the Phenotype........................... 317 (iii) Phenotype Interpreting Genotype ..................................................... 319 (iv) Stuffness and Inner Dynamics of the Phenotype............................ 321 (v) Phenotype as Evolutionary Factor in Its Own Right ...................... 322 c) Forms, Fields and the Concept of External Memory ............................ 324 (i) Environmental Forms and Fields ...................................................... 324 (ii) External Memory .................................................................................. 326 d) A Partial Revival of Morphological Taxonomy? .................................... 329 (i) The Evolutionary Factor of Constraints as Object of Taxonomy............................................................................ 330 (ii) Morphological Resonance as Object of Taxonomy........................ 331 e) Summary ....................................................................................................... 331 Chapter 9: Transcendence of Process-Reductionism ......................333 9.1 Inconsistencies and Tautologies of a Darwinian Mono-Mechanistic Metaphysic................................................... 336 a) Inconsistencies of Different Levels of Multilevel Darwinism.............. 336 b) On the Tautological Basis of Pan-Adaptationism .................................. 339 c) On the Tautological Basis of Pan-Selectionism ...................................... 350 9.2 Re-defining the Notions of Darwinism and Lamarckism.......................... 358 a) A Strict Definition of Darwinism ............................................................. 358 b) A Spectrum between Darwinism and Lamarckism ................................ 359 9.3 Toward Radical Evolutionism – The Evolution of Evolutionary Mechanisms .............................................. 363 a) Synthesis versus Pure Diversification of Information – Discussion of the First Criterion for a Darwinian Process................... 364 b) Directed Variation versus Blind Variation – Discussion of the Second Criterion .......................................................... 368 (i) Not Blind by Definition ...................................................................... 371 (ii) Different Types of Variation .............................................................. 374 (iii) Is There Adaptive Variation? .............................................................. 377 (iv) Adaptive Variation as Reaction to the Environment? .................... 389 (v) Summary and Conclusion ................................................................... 392 c) From Hetero-Selection to Auto-Selection – Discussion of the Third Criterion ............................................................. 394 (i) Darwinian Externalism ........................................................................ 395 Table of Contents XVIII (ii) Opportunistic Response to the Moment? ........................................ 396 (iii) Auto-Selection and Autonomy ........................................................... 398 d) The Evolution of Evolutionary Mechanisms .......................................... 405 (i) The Necessary Concept of an Evolution of Evolutionary Mechanisms ................................................................... 405 (ii) Process-Emergence, Circularity and Autonomy.............................. 409 9.4 Summary of the Chapter on Process-Reductionism................................... 415 Chapter 10: Towards the Transcendence of Selfishness .................. 418 Summary and Outlook – Towards Ecological Idealism.................. 427 Beyond the Two Cultures? ..................................................................................... 427 Summary ................................................................................................................... 428 An Outlook – Towards Ecological Idealism....................................................... 434 Bibliography ..................................................................................... 437 Index ................................................................................................. 471