Reproductive global regularities. There is yet another kind of global regularity, because there is another kind of non-basic, or derivative, substance that can work together with space as an ontological cause to generate global regularities, namely, reproductive cycles. Such ontological causes derive from material and structural causation, but reproductive cycles work together with space to generate what are, by far, the most spectacular global regularities, namely, evolutionary change.

The ontological cause of reproductive global regularities is a derivative substance. It is constituted by a material structure that uses free energy to do work. But reproductive cycles are basically different from material structures, because their essential nature as a (derivative) substance has a temporal structure. Each reproductive cycle is, as the name suggests, a whole cycle of changes (exhibiting various irreversible structural global regularities), and thus, it takes place over a period of time.

There is an existential aspect to reproductive cycles, as there is to any substance, because they endure through time. But in the case of reproductive cycles, endurance through time does not come directly from matter enduring through time, but rather indirectly, because it also depends on how one cycle gives rise to another cycle as time passes.

Since each cycle in such a sequence takes time to be completed, the cycle itself does not exist fully at any moment. What does exist fully at each moment is the (complex) material structure that is going through the cycle (or what will be called the "primary structure"), and since it is the ontological cause of the irreversible structural global regularities that are the cycle of changes, the whole cycle is implicit in what exists at each moment as it is present.

Reproductive cycles have, in other words, more basic ontological causes. In addition to space (spatial causation), each series of cycles depends on a thermodynamic flow to supply the free energy (material causation) and a complex material structure that uses free energy to generate the cycle of changes (structural causation). Moreover, since reproductive cycles derive from more basic forms of ontological causation only with the addition of a temporal structure to their essential nature, that is, as a cycle of changes, time as well as space might also be said to be an ontological cause. But in any case, since a cycle of changes is what a complex material structure ( that is, the primary structure) generates, reproductive cycles themselves endure through time like substances. 

Though their endurance through time makes it possible for reproductive cycles to work together with space as an ontological cause, they would not be able to generate a new kind of global regularity (that is, one that is basically different from the irreversible structural global regularities, or “structural effects,” generated ontologically by the complex material structure), if the complex material structure did not generate two basically different kinds of structural global regularities during each cycle, one that reproduces the complex material structure and the other that does non-reproductive work. The inclusion of reproduction along with other structural effects is what makes them reproductive cycles, rather than mere cycles, and as we shall see, having both kinds of structural effects is what makes reproduction the basic cause of natural selection and, thus, of evolutionary change..

Primary structures. The material structures going through reproductive cycles are ordinarily called "organisms" or "reproducing organisms," but since we will be recognizing a series of levels of part-whole complexity in organisms, I will use a technical term, "primary structure," to refer to the material structure that is responsible for the reproductive cycles being discussed.

Primary structures (including ordinary organisms) are complex material structures, because they are made up of many different parts each serving as a structural cause of a different structural global regularity during the reproductive cycle. But primary structures are a distinctive kind of complex material structure, because they are also the ontological cause of structural global regularity in which the entire, complex material structure is reproduced. That is, in addition to various forms of non-reproductive work, primary structures normally construct one or more new primary structures of the same kind to go through the next reproductive cycle alongside one another. In other words, in addition to surviving, organisms also reproduce.

The basic ontological effect of reproductive cycles and space is gradual change in the direction of greater power.

Because they reproduce, organisms tend to multiply in space as their reproductive cycles follow one another in time, and thus, since the organisms are all contained in the same region of space, their population growth causes a scarcity of free energy (if nothing else). Not all the organisms can continue going through reproductive cycles. But it is not just chance which ones continue, because they do non-reproductive work as well as reproduce. There is a natural selection that favors those organisms whose non-reproductive work promotes their reproduction, and thus, there is a change in the whole region in which organisms become increasingly powerful in controlling conditions that affect their reproduction.

Reproduction is, in other words, the basic cause of natural selection. Evolutionary change does not depend on changes in the environment. Insofar as natural selection is caused by reproduction, rather than environmental change, evolution is, as we shall see, a gradual change in the direction of an optimal state, or “natural perfection.” Gradual evolution is, therefore, progressive.

Besides “gradual evolution,” however, there is another global regularity caused by reproductive cycles, namely, “revolutionary evolution,” by which one stage of gradual evolution gives rise to another in a determinate series of evolutionary stages. The ontological cause of this aspect of reproductive global regularities is higher levels of part-whole complexity in the structures of the organisms going through reproductive cycles, that is, by higher levels of part-whole complexity in their primary structures.

Organisms are just complex material structures, or "primary structures," and thus, it is possible for organisms that have become nearly optimal by going through reproductive cycles to become bundled together as so many different structural causes that go through reproductive cycles as a whole, complex material structure, that is, on a higher level of part-whole complexity.

The advent of such a higher level of part-whole complexity in the structures of organisms is a revolutionary change, because it begins a new stage of gradual evolution, or change in the direction of natural perfection. The organisms that are evolving at the new stage start off simple, uniform and weak, and they gradually become increasingly complex, diverse and powerful. But since they have structures with a higher level of part-whole complexity, they are inherently more powerful in controlling relevant conditions than those at the previous stage, and their gradual evolution will make them far more powerful than the organisms that evolved at previous stages.

Since they are caused by higher levels of part-whole complexity in reproducing organisms, stages of evolution can occur only in a certain sequence, and thus, the overall course of evolution is an inevitable series of evolutionary stages. Since those stages are also change in the direction of increasing power, the overall course of evolution is progressive in a far grander way than the gradual evolution that occurs at each stage, for it proceeds by one revolutionary change after another in the direction of ever greater power to control relevant conditions.

(It should be noted at the outset that there are several sequences of stages of evolution in the overall course of evolution. The basic stages are caused by higher levels of part-whole complexity in primary structures, but there are other sequences of evolutionary stages, because new stages of evolution can also be caused by higher levels of part-whole complexity in secondary structures, or structures that are set up or maintained by the same kind of primary structure, including, as we shall see, levels of part-whole complexity in brain structure and levels of part-whole complexity in linguistic structures, such as arguments.)

Comparison to Darwinism. These reproductive global regularities, both gradual and revolutionary, are the ontological effect of reproductive cycles and how they add up in space as time passes. I will call it "evolution by reproductive causation." But it is basically the "mechanism" that Darwin discovered, the mechanism of random variation and natural selection. However, by deriving reproductive causation from spatiomaterialism (and the kind of space and matter required by the basic laws of physics), evolution is explained ontologically, as a global regularity. That will show not only that there are many aspects of evolution that are not currently recognized, but also that those aspects are inevitable in all spatiomaterial worlds like our own, that is, (conditionally) ontologically necessary.

At the outset, therefore, it may help put what is at issue in perspective to compare reproductive causation with Darwin’s “mechanism,” especially the current understanding of his mechanism. Evolutionary biologists tend to think of natural selection as an empirically discovered tendency, for that is how they defend their explanation of evolutionary change from creationists. But as we shall see, much more can be known about evolutionary change when it is explained ontologically.

Reproductive causation departs from contemporary Darwinism in two ways. On is its explanation of gradual evolution, and the other is its recognition of revolutionary evolution.

The basic cause of evolutionary change was discovered by Darwin as he thought about what happens in populations of organisms as they reproduce themselves. He saw that if variations on traits occur randomly in such organisms, and if those traits are inherited by their offspring, evolutionary change could occur simply as a result of the greater reproductive success of those organisms that have traits that are useful. This is what happens in breeding plants and animals, but he called it “natural selection,” because it occurs in nature without human intervention. Over time, the natural selection of random, heritable variations gives species traits that adapt them to their environments.

Such adaptations depend only on efficient causes, and thus, Darwin showed how evolution could happen in a materialist world, where everything is caused by how bits of matter move and interact with one another over time. It removed any need to appeal to a "designer" in explaining the wonderful functions found in the natural world. But there is considerable dispute about the status of Darwin’s “mechanism” and, thus, about the explanations of evolutionary change based on it.

Views range from thinking of Darwin’s mechanism as a principle or peculiar law of nature to thinking of it as a mere tautology (the survival of the fittest, where “fitness” is defined as surviving). Somewhere between them comes the belief that it is just a pattern for giving a kind of historical explanation of the evolution of traits, which is filled out by mentioning all the contingent details by which natural selection worked in any particular case. More recently, the computer analogy has led some to call it an algorithm (see Dennett 1995). And others take Darwin's mechanism to be a basic tenet that naturalists simply accept, helping to define “naturalism” (see Rosenberg 1996, p. 4).

However Darwin’s mechanism is characterized, contemporary Darwinists universally deny that there is any reason to believe that evolution is progressive. Most are wedded to an interpretation of Darwin’s mechanism that denies there is anything necessary about the overall course of evolution or about the species that evolve. It would all happen differently, if evolution were started over and allowed to play itself out again. I will call this prevailing commitment to the contingency of evolution accidentalism. The grounds for accidentalism come down to two main factors.

First, environmental change is what is thought to cause natural selection. If selection pressures are imposed on species by changes in the environment whose causes are external to evolution itself, the course of evolution cannot be predicted by Darwin’s mechanism alone, and in the words of Stephen Jay Gould (1976) , “Evolution by natural selection is no more than a tracking of . . . changing environments by differential preservation of organisms better designed to live in them”. (Gould, “Darwin’s Untimely Burial”, Natural History, Vol. 85, No, 8, 1976; reprinted in Ruse, 1989, p. 98.)^[1]

Elliot Sober (1984, p. 174) endorses this view of the effect of natural selection as “‘tracking’ the environment,” and he attributes it to Lewontin (1978) pp. 156-169. Even Richard Dawkins (1986, p. 179) agrees that evolution “constantly ‘tracks’ the changing environment.”

Second, when a change in a species’ environment occurs, there is no guarantee that the best adaptation will occur in response. Natural selection operates on random variations, and it has only whatever variations happen to be available at the time from which to select. There may be other variations which would be better, but since they are not tried out (or tried out only later, after another variation has already evolved), they cannot be selected.

As Michael Ruse (1986, p. 19), a leading philosopher of biology, puts it, “Given a need, the option taken to satisfy it is a function of what you have at hand, rather than what the perfect answer would be.”

According to E. Sober (1984, p. 174), evolution does the best it can with the random variations it has when the environment imposes a new selection pressure, but it is just a makeshift response to the exigency of the moment. See also Philip Kitcher, 1985, pp. 213-226. The most famous example of this contingency is, thanks to Gould (1980), the Panda’s thumb.

The upshot of accidentalism is that there is nothing necessary about the species that come to exist or the course of evolution. By seeing evolution as tracking environmental changes, accidentalists are taking the traits that accumulate in any species to be a record of the history of the environmental changes that happened to occur. After adapting to one environmental change, new traits are acquired that adapt the species to the next, and thus, the nature that a species now has depends on a series of selection pressures that could have been different.

Contemporary Darwinism makes it seem, in Kauffman’s (1993) words, that evolution merely “cobbles together jury-rigged contraptions” (p. 3). It sees “organisms as overwhelmingly contingent historical accidents, abetted by design” (p. 26). Or as Ruse (1986, p. 93) says, “you could as well have one organic state as another”.

As Mark Ridley (1985) explains, “Evolution is continually going on; the traits of lineages continually change. What will define a group at one time may not define it at another. The traits defining groups are temporarily contingent, not essential. Biological groups do not have Aristotelian ‘essences.’” (Reprinted as “Principles of Classification,” in Ruse, 1989, p. 178.)

E. Mayr, insisting that evolution is “opportunistic and unpredictable,” holds that “If evolutionists have learned anything from a detailed analysis of evolution, it is the lesson that the origin of taxa is largely a chance event.” He cites such factors as “the genetic composition of the founding population, the special internal structure of its genotype, and the physical as well as biotic environments that supplies the selection forces of the next species population.” (“Probability of Extraterrestrial, Intelligent Life,” reprinted in Ruse, 1989, p. 283.)

Richard Lewontin suggests that “[a]s far as we know all living organisms are connected by an unbroken chain of historical contingency,” in “The Shape of Optimality”, collected in Dupré (1987, p. 158).

Michael Ruse (1986, p. 20) says “there is nothing in selection itself which encourages progressionism” because “[w]hat counts is reproduction, here and now and in the immediate future. If the simpler, less intelligent form can do it better—and it often can—then so be it.”

The appearance that evolution is progressive has recently been given an accidentalist explanation by Gould (1996). He argues that there is an overall change in the direction of greater complexity, because starting with the simplest, that is the only direction that evolution can go.

What undercuts the traditional belief in “fixed species” is, therefore, the role of contingent factors in evolution, for they show that species will lack the necessity of natural kinds or essences.

Evolution by reproductive causation is not, however, accidentalist, but rather progressive. Nor does this progressivism abandon Darwin's mechanism.

It accepts the consensus among Darwinists about the three elements involved in the evolution of a population of reproducing organisms by Darwin’s mechanism. It agrees that there must be random variations in the traits of the organisms, that such traits must be heritable by their offspring, and that there must be a natural selection by greater reproductive success of members with certain traits.

But instead of assuming that that natural selection is due to externally caused changes in the environment, this ontological explanation of Darwin’s mechanism implies that natural selection is, in addition, due to the scarcity caused by reproduction itself. As organisms reproduce, their population increases, and the resources they need becomes scarce. Only some of them can succeed in reproducing. But it is not just chance which ones succeed, since different varieties have different powers to control conditions in the world. The survivors tend to be those that are more powerful in some relevant way.

Moreover, if the scarcity due to their own reproduction is a cause of natural selection, it must be the main cause, for there is one resource that is always eventually in short supply: free (or usable) energy. Thus, evolutionary change would occur, not just in response to changes in the environment, but continuously. As we shall see, such a steady cause has a continuous effect, and there is inevitably a gradual accumulation of traits in the direction of an optimal state, which I will call “natural perfection.”

This view of evolution will be called “reproductive causation,” because it takes reproductive cycles and how they add up in space over time to be the ontological cause of evolution. In other words, it takes the reproduction of organisms to be the ultimate cause of natural selection, for that is why their non-reproductive work is increasingly powerful.

Though this is different from the explanation of evolution given by contemporary Darwinists, it is worth noting that it may have been Darwin’s own view. In The Origin of Species, he introduced natural selection by appealing to Malthus’ theory of population growth—which holds that, while human population tends to increase by a geometrical progression, their resources increase by a mere arithmetical progression. Since it suggests that those who are best able to survive are the ones most likely to succeed in reproducing, Darwin called natural selection a “struggle for survival.” It was Spencer who called it the “survival of the fittest.”

Whatever it is called, the point is that reproduction itself is what puts members of a species at odds with one another. The cause of evolution is internal. Organisms need energy, and in any environment, reproduction will eventually cause a scarcity of usable energy, if nothing else, for it is a physical fact that the usable energy in any finite region of space is finite. Thus, even without externally caused changes, evolution would take place, whatever the environment. Thus, reproductive causation implies that accidentalism is false.

Reproduction is also the ultimate cause of stages of evolution, the other main departure from contemporary Darwinism. Stages of evolution are caused by the capacity of higher levels of part-whole complexity in the structures of the organisms to go though reproductive cycles as a whole, for once they occur as random variations, they impose natural selection of themselves and gradually become more powerful.

Contemporary Darwinists recognize what they call “punctuated equilibria” in the fossil record of evolution, but they have no general explanation of their cause. On the contrary, they are taken as evidence that Darwin’s mechanism is not the only cause of evolutionary change.

By tracing natural selection to its ontological causes, however, we can see why such revolutionary episodes in the course of evolution are inevitable. When higher levels of part-whole complexity that make organisms more powerful can occur as a random variation at all, they are inevitable, because they will eventually be tried out and, when they are, they will impose natural selection on themselves by their own reproduction, beginning a new stage of gradual evolution. Each stage is gradual change in the direction of increasing power for organisms of its kind, and thus, the series of stages is a step-like change in the direction of the increasing power of life itself.

By following out what is ontologically necessary about evolution in a spatiomaterial world like ours, therefore, we shall derive novel implications for almost every branch of natural and social science. And what is more, the progressivism of evolution provides an explanation of the nature of goodness.

These two reproductive global regularities are explained in greater detail in the following two sections.

The next section, gradual evolution, will explain the nature of the new (derivative) ontological cause (reproductive cycles) more completely than the foregoing sketch and use it to show the inevitability of a long term, gradual change in the direction of greater power. It will show that the outcome of such change is “natural perfection” for both organisms and the ecology of which they are part.

The following section, revolutionary evolution, deals with a consequence of recognizing reproductive cycles as an ontological cause, which is not even suspected by Darwinists. It will explain how space combines with reproductive cycles in a new way (by making possible higher levels of part-whole complexity in the structures of organisms) to cause more radical changes in evolution, each of which begins a new stage of gradual evolution. Thus, reproductive causation implies that evolutionary change involves an inevitable series of stages of evolution, and this section will describe in detail the essential natures of the organisms that evolve at each stage, which includes, by far, the bulk of the implications of ontological philosophy.