Emergent Evolution: Qualitative Novelty and the Levels of Reality

This volume examines the background, origin, and debate over emergent evolution, a philosophy of evolution developed by the comparative psychologist C. Lloyd Morgan. Part One studies the 19th century background in the debate over the philosophical framework for evolutionary theory in the writings of Darwin, Spencer, Huxley, Wallace, and G.J. Romanes. Questions examined include the continuity of the evolutionary process, the status of qualitative as well as quantitative change, the scope of evolution, and its metaphysical implications. Part Two traces Lloyd Morgan's development of emergent evolution as a philosophy relating the various sciences, and its main thesis that qualitative novelty can occur in the course of a continuous, universal and monistic evolutionary process, proceeding from the material level to those of life and mind. The third part traces the debate over emergent evolution, and argues that, despite its temporary eclipse by reductionist and physicalist philosophies in the period from the mid-1930s to the mid-1950s, emergent evolution is an active trend of thought at the interface between philosophy and science.