Emergence

emergence, in evolutionary theory, the rise of a system that cannot be predicted or explained from antecedent conditions. George Henry Lewes, the 19th-century English philosopher of science, distinguished between resultants and emergents—phenomena that are predictable from their constituent parts and those that are not (e.g., a physical mixture of sand and talcum powder as contrasted with a chemical compound such as salt, which looks nothing like sodium or chlorine). The evolutionary account of life is a continuous history marked by stages at which fundamentally new forms have appeared: (1) the origin of life; (2) the origin of nucleus-bearing protozoa; (3) the origin of sexually reproducing forms, with an individual destiny lacking in cells that reproduce by fission; (4) the rise of sentient animals, with nervous systems and protobrains; and (5) the appearance of cogitative animals, namely humans. Each of these new modes of life, though grounded in the physicochemical and biochemical conditions of the previous and simpler stage, is intelligible only in terms of its own ordering principle. These are thus cases of emergence.

Early in the 20th century, the British zoologist C. Lloyd Morgan, one of the founders of animal psychology, emphasized the antipode of the principle: nothing should be called an emergent unless it can be shown not to be a resultant. Like Lewes, he treated the distinction as inductive and empirical, not as metempirical or metaphysical—i.e., not beyond the observable realm. Morgan condemned the 20th-century French intuitionist Henri Bergson’s creative evolution as speculative, while proclaiming emergent evolution as a scientific theory. Even so, the theory has not been accepted universally by biologists. With genetics illuminating the mechanism of heredity (and hence the very conditions of evolution) and biochemistry elucidating the workings of the cell nucleus, some biologists are confirmed in their belief that scientific treatment admits only of analysis into parts and not into new kinds of wholes. Thus, they tend to concentrate on the mechanisms of mutation and of natural selection, effective in microevolution—the change from variety to variety and species to species—and to extrapolate these findings to macroevolution, to the origin of the great groups of living things.

Nevertheless, the concept of emergence still figures in some evolutionary thinking. In the 1920s and ’30s, Samuel Alexander, a British realist metaphysician, and Jan Smuts, the South African statesman, espoused emergence theories; and later, others, such as the Jesuit paleontologist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin and the French zoologist Albert Vandel, emphasized the series of levels of organization, moving toward higher forms of consciousness. The philosophy of organism of Alfred North Whitehead, the leading process metaphysician, with its doctrine of creative advance, is a philosophy of emergence; so also is the theory of personal knowledge of Michael Polanyi, a Hungarian scientist and philosopher, with its levels of being and of knowing, none of which are wholly intelligible to those they describe.