EVENTS

STOQ 2009 – THE STOQ INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON
«BIOLOGICAL EVOLUTION. Facts and Theories»

Abstracts of the Lectures:

Ludovico Galleni, University of Pisa, Italy

Moving Towards Humankind?

In April 1955 Pierre Teilhard de Chardin died. He is very well known for his synthesis in Science and Faith and for the theological and philosophical consequences of his papers.
He was a scientist, one of the most outstanding paleontologists of the XX century, one of forerunner of many contemporary topics in evolutionary biology. He considered biology as the science of the complexity of living and the Biosphere as the complex object to be studied in order to fully understand the mechanisms of evolution.
These new perspectives in evolutionary biology started from a philosophical necessity: that of finding a peculiar place of humankind in nature.
Was the thinking creature the casual result of stochastic mechanisms or the final result of describable natural laws? These laws gave as a result the moving towards complexity and consciousness.
In a book published in 1871, "The genesis of species" the English zoologist St. George Jackson Mivart proposed mechanisms of evolution based on deterministic laws similar to those of chemistry. This was a clear alternative to the mechanisms proposed by Darwin and related to the casual encounter between the origin of the variability and the diffusion of variants thanks to natural selection.
Among the proofs described by Mivart there are those related to parallelisms in evolution.
The search for parallelisms was also one of the main scientific topics developed by Teilhard de Chardin and by the Russian genetist Vavilov.

Parallelisms were the experimental proof of evolution as a moving towards and in Teilhard de Chardin also of the complexity and consciousness law.
Teilhard de Chardin and biological complexity: changing the scale of investigation also the mechanisms must change : what is good for a local population is not valid for larger space and times: continental evolution is a topic to be investigated side by side with the population level. The present day discussion about evolution of Mammals at the continental level is a good example of the validity of Teilhard proposal. His last issue is the science of the Biosphere investigated by a new science: Geobiology. The laws of Biosphere are the very motors of evolutions when Biosphere is considered a complex system evolving.
Here are coming out all the potentiality of Teilhard work: the Biosphere as a complex system. This proposal recovers the system theory in biology in parallel with Waddington.
The development of this proposal is given by the mechanisms described by Lovelock and related to the maintenance of stability. These mechanisms could generate a top down causation conditioning evolution of livings and giving reason of the moving toward complexity.
Other aspects of complexity such as threshold effects and the presence of the so called deterministic chaos could be related to the moving towards.
These groups of perspectives are a good way to find a solution between deterministic and stochastic models, and a good tool to show that there is moving towards in spite of non strictly determinist mechanisms.
The final discussion is about the philosophical implications of this model. The evolution of the universe and life are not based on strictly deterministic laws not leaving any room for the free action of the thinking creature. Neither they are based only on stochastic mechanisms. The moving towards is based on mechanisms of complexity where the thinking creature will find the best conditions for his/her free acting.