I came across this passage while looking at the philosophical problem of emergent properties (which I think are purely epistemic). I thought it would be good to put up here…
“Creative” and “emergent” evolution
The present discussion has dealt with the problem of evolution as one depending wholly on mechanism and chance. In recent years, there has been some tendency to revert to more or less mystical conceptions revolving about such phrases as “emergent evolution” and “creative evolution.” The writer must confess to a certain sympathy with such viewpoints philosophically but feels that they can have no place in an attempt at scientific analysis of the problem. One may recognize that the only reality directly experienced is that of mind, including choice, that mechanism is merely a term for regular behavior, and that there can be no ultimate explanation in terms of mechanism—merely an analytic description. Such a description, however, is the essential task of science and because of these very considerations, objective and subjective terms cannot be used in the same description without danger of something like 100 percent duplication. Whatever incompleteness is involved in scientific analysis applies to the simplest problems of mechanics as well as to evolution. It is present in most aggravated form, perhaps, in the development and behavior of individual organisms, but even here there seems to be no necessary limit (short of quantum phenomena) to the extent to which mechanistic analysis may be carried. An organism appears to be a system, linked up in such a way, through chains of trigger mechanisms, that a high degree of freedom of behavior as a whole merely requires departures from regularity of behavior among the ultimate parts, of the order of infinitesimals raised to powers as high as the lengths of the above chains. This view implies considerable limitations in the synthetic phases of science, but in any case it seems to have reached the point of demonstration in the field of quantum physics that prediction can be expressed only in terms of probabilities, decreasing with the period of time. As to evolution, its entities, species and ecologic systems, are much less closely knit than individual organisms. One may conceive of the process as involving freedom, most readily traceable in the factor called here individual adaptability. This, however, is a subjective interpretation and can have no place in the objective scientific analysis of the problem. [Wright, Sewall. 1931. Evolution in Mendelian populations. Genetics 16 (2):97-159]
“One may recognize that the only reality directly experienced is that of mind, including choice, that mechanism is merely a term for regular behavior, and that there can be no ultimate explanation in terms of mechanism—merely an analytic description.”
As for “the only reality directly experienced is that of mind,” well, in 1931 a lot of philosophers were still talking abut sense data, so maybe that’s not a surprising statement.
As for “there can be no ultimate explanation in terms of mechanism”… Bishop Berkeley would have agreed to that, so… But it really lays down an extraordinarily high standard for what can count as an (“ultimate”) explanation, doesn’t it?
Thanks for posting the quote: it IS interesting!
This description seems to me very similar to that of a “complexity” theorist like Kauffman, except that Kauffman’s experiments on the aggregate effect of constituent parts of highly complex systems had the effect of more regularity and less “freedom,” rather than the opposite. That is, what “emerged” in Kauffman’s complex systems was order, not freedom. (I’m thinking for example of his computer simulations of circuit systems in the 1960s.)
Many people who argue against chance and mechanics as the main engines of evolution are doing so not because such explanations are too rigid, but because they are too plastic (and thereby approach a mysticism of their own), failing to account for the physical laws that impinge on biological development.