Powers of Organisms & Potentiality of Biological Matter in the Evolutionary Process | Daniel Kuebler

In the past forty years, our understanding of evolution has been enriched by the development of what is known as the Extended Evolutionary Synthesis (EES). In general, the EES has uncovered evolutionary processes that highlight the role of the organism and top-down causation in evolution. This emerging view of evolution appears to be much more compatible with Thomistic metaphysics, largely because it refocuses the process of evolution in terms of the inherent powers and abilities of the substantial wholes we know as organisms. In addition, the wholistic picture that emerges from the EES can be enriched by the concepts of matter and form as understood in classical metaphysics. In fact, there is a modest parallel between the way new biological forms emerge from preexisting material forms and the Thomistic understanding of forms being educed from the dispositions of matter. In particular, the ubiquity of evolutionary convergence seems to point to 1) the underlying potentiality of physical matter as playing a important role in the evolution of biological forms and 2) an inherent teleological nature of the evolutionary process.