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Evolutionary progress is the idea that evolution is progressive, and that largest-scale trends in evolution have as their goal some absolute goal such as increasing biological complexity. Prominent historical figures who have championed some form of evolutionary progress include Alfred Russel Wallace, Herbert Spencer, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, and Henri Bergson. Evolutionary progress is not currently highly regarded, although there is evidence that the ideas are still prevalent. Charles Darwin seems to have believed in some form of progress (Darwin, 1859):
Michael Ruse in 1997 presented a detailed and carefully researched survey of the idea of progress in evolutionary biology, and argued that belief in evolutionary progress is still prevalent among evolutionary biologists today, although it is often denied or veiled, stating: "A major conclusion of this study is that some of the most significant of today's evolutionists are progressionists, and that because of this we find (absolute) progressionism alive and well in their work." He claims that progressionism has harmed the status of evolutionary biology as a mature, professional science. In examining the issue of evolutionary progress, the first step is to define progress. Francisco J. Ayala in 1988 defined progress as "systematic change in a feature belonging to all the members of a sequence in such a way that posterior members of the sequence exhibit an improvement of that feature." He argued that there are two elements in this definition, directional change and improvement according to some standard. Whether a directional change constitutes an improvement is not a scientific question; therefore Ayala suggested that science should focus on the question of whether there is directional change, without regard to whether the change is "improvement". This may be compared to Stephen Jay Gould's suggestion of "replacing the idea of progress with an operational notion of directionality". Richard Dawkins has proposed that Darwinian evolution is fundamentally progressive if progress is simply defined as "an increase, not in complexity, intelligence or some other anthropocentric value, but in the accumulating number of features contributing towards whatever adaptation the lineage in question exemplifies."〔(Human Chauvinism )〕 ==See also== Evolutionism 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Evolutionary progress」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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