What Comes Next? The Operator Theory as an Operationalisation of the Teilhardian View on Cosmogenesis
In: G. Jagers (ed.) Evolution and Transitions in Complexity: the science of hierarchical organisation in nature. Dordrecht: Springer, 253-258. DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-43802-3 (2016)
5 Pages Posted: 12 Oct 2016 Last revised: 14 Oct 2016
Date Written: October 11, 2016
Abstract
The Scala naturae concept, – i.e. the idea that certain levels of complexity can be discerned in nature, and that the history of life and evolution is characterised by a basic tendency towards increased complexity –, has been vehemently challenged and discarded as “romantic”, “unscientific” or “pre-scientific” by a large number of opponents, most eloquently perhaps by Stephen Jay Gould in his book Ontogeny and Phylogeny (1977). The very idea of a drive towards complexity is often regarded as belonging to a metaphysical worldview, and as incompatible with a modern biological approach. Many see it as a remnant of Naturphilosophie, inspired by philosophers such as Hegel and Schelling and predating what Gaston Bachelard (1938) has referred to as the “epistemological rupture”, i.e. the birth of real (detached, quantitative, experimental) science. And yet, up to the present, the Scala naturae concept proves to be a remarkably stubborn and recurring idea, resurging every now and then as a kind of “return of the repressed”, and as a philosophical, but also as a biological conception. Against the backdrop of this polemical debate between critics and adherents, – which to a certain extent tended to coincide with a debate between disciplines, namely biology and (continental) philosophy –, the operator hierarchy constitutes a provocative gesture. It aims to rehabilitate the scala naturae idea by recasting it in scientific and biological terms, in close dialogue with insights from contemporary research fields. From this perspective one could argue that the operator theory seems congruent with an important precedent, namely the view of Teilhard de Chardin, a Jesuit priest, but also a paleo-anthropologist, who contributed to the discovery of Homo erectus fossils in China in the 1920s
Keywords: Evolution, Philosophy of biology, Teilhard de Chardin, Bachelard
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