None of Campbell's critics have proposed rival models of how knowledge could have arisen out of ignorance, or how stupid processes could lead to intelligent adaptation. In rejecting Campbell's Dictum the critics have all noted that advances in knowledge are all based upon prior knowledge, but . . . this is largely an irrelevant criticism. In any situation in which the advances in knowledge are not wholly explicable in terms of previously attained knowledge, a BVSR [blind variation and selective retention] process must be at work. Unless of course, we really do live in a world in which prayer or meditation or passive induction can lead directly to new knowledge without any need for blind trials.1 (Gamble, 1983, pp. 359-360)
Evolution requires variation and selection. So does ontogenetic development. Both are essential for learning to occur. (Gibson, 1994, p. 75)
The analogy [of science] with evolutionary processes is striking. It looks to the uneducated eye that species are designed to fit their environment, or that particular species as a whole are "trying" to adapt. The truth, of course, is very much otherwise. Individual organisms are simply pursuing their own procreative interests as best they can. As result, the species evolves to be better adapted. The appearance of higher level design or intentionality is an artifact. So also, it seems, with science. (Giere, 1988, p. 222)
When man wanted to fly, he first turned to a natural example--the bird--to develop his early notions of how to accomplish this difficult task. Notable failures by Daedalus and numerous bird-like contraptions (ornithopters) at first pointed in the wrong direction, but eventually, persistence and the abstraction of the appropriate knowledge (lift over an airfoil) resulted in successful glider and powered flight. In contrast to this example, isn't it peculiar that when man has tried to build machines to think, learn, and adapt he has ignored and largely continues to ignore one of nature's most powerful examples of adaptation, genetics and natural selection? (quoted in Levy, 1992, p. 153)
[HOME] [NEXT]Darwin was not especially interested in drawing a direct analogy between the evolution of species and individual psychological development. Variation and selection were essential in Darwin's theory of evolutionary change, but he did not conceive of individual behavior as arising mainly out of random variation or groping trial-and-error. In his view, the basic pattern of individual development is an orderly growth process, the product of aeons of evolutionary trials; only heritable deviations from this pattern would arise out of variation and selection. Moreover, as we have seen, even in his discussion of the lowly worm Darwin seems to have believed that most individual variations in behavior are intelligently adaptive. Only their incorporation in the web of evolutionary change was dependent on random events. (Gruber, 1974, pp. 226-7)