New Monograph on Bergson’s Contemporary Relevance to Our Understanding of Evolution – Published by PUF. From the publisher’s website:
“The eye is made to see,” “only the best adapted survive,” “evolution is progress.” These familiar statements liken nature’s work to that of an engineer, shaping living matter with specific goals in mind: designing a visual instrument, adapting organisms to their environments, driving technical progress. Biology remains the only science that still gives such prominence to finalism—an idea that has been largely abandoned since modern times for its anthropomorphism. But is this merely a pedagogical tool?
Henri Bergson, writing in the early 20th century, saw it as symptomatic of science’s inability to fully grasp the nature of life. While supporting the idea of evolution, he was critical of the limitations in how it was studied. The evolutionary theory of his time, he argued, failed to account for the history and creative capacities of living beings, forcing science to implicitly attribute intention to nature—thus carrying heavy metaphysical assumptions.
What about today? Does neo-Darwinism avoid the pitfalls Bergson highlighted? Can evolution be understood without resorting to finalism?
