Why Evolution Is Bigger than all of Us: A Reply to Smocovitis

Abstract

When reading the appreciative and accurate summary of our chapter by Smocovitis, we were struck, among other things, by her choice of one of our, somewhat cliched, rhetorical flourishes for the title of her commentary. This led us to ponder upon the special quality of evolution that makes this cliche particularly apt and resonant, and led to this musing inspired by her commentary on our chapter, particularly its title. We suspect that a major reason for this is the dual existence of evolution as both a ‘character’ (Urdu: کِردار/kirdaar) that embellishes, and a ‘perspective’ (Urdu: نظریہ/nazariya) that informs, biology. Smocovitis emphasizes in her summation, invoking the ‘Rashomon Effect’, that ‘we all may have plausible claims about the natural world and evolutionary change’. We entirely agree with this assertion and suggest that this stems from thinking of evolution as a perspective far more than from evolution as a character. As a character, evolution is a discipline within biology, with a reasonably well-defined set of tools—observational, experimental, and conceptual—which it deploys to understand the diversity, relatedness, and adaptedness of life forms, even as it has grown explosively since the 1940s, as Smocovitis puts it. As a perspective, evolution transcends the domain of biology, as first explicitly predicted by Ernst Haeckel: Smocovitis brings up how an evolutionary perspective informs agriculture, medicine, and even robotics and AI. In a way, this dual existence is consonant with the original lexical root of evolution as an unfolding: just as specific individual characters unfold in the course of a play, so too, overall, does the script, based on the perspective in which it is embedded.