Global evolutionism as the basic paradigm of modern natural science

Global evolutionism and the modern scientific picture of the world are a subject that many researchers have devoted their works to. At present, it is becoming increasingly popular, since it addresses the most important issues of science.

The concept of global (universal) evolutionism assumes that the structure of the world is consistently being improved. The world in it is viewed as an integrity that allows us to talk about the unity of the general laws of being and makes it possible to make the universe "proportionate" to a person, to correlate it with him. The concept of global evolutionism, its history, basic principles and concepts are discussed in this article.

Prehistory

The idea of developing the world is one of the most important in European civilization. In the simplest forms (Kant's cosmogony, epigenesis, preformism), it penetrated the natural sciences in the 18th century. Already the 19th century can rightly be called the century of evolution. Theoretical modeling of objects characterized by development, began to pay much attention first in geology, and then in biology and sociology.

The teachings of Charles Darwin, the study of G. Spencer

Charles Darwin was the first to apply the principle of evolutionism to the realm of reality, thus laying the foundations of modern theoretical biology. Herbert Spencer made an attempt to project his ideas into sociology. This scientist has proved that the evolutionary concept can be applied to various areas of the world that do not belong to the subject of biology. However, classical natural science as a whole did not take this idea into account. Evolutionary systems for a long time were considered by scientists as a random deviation, which appeared as a result of local disturbances. Physicists made the first attempt to extend this concept beyond the social and biological sciences, putting forward the hypothesis that the universe is expanding.

The concept of the Big Bang

The data obtained by astronomers confirmed the inconsistency of the opinion on the stationarity of the universe. Scientists have found out that it has been developing since the time of the Big Bang, which, according to the assumption, provided energy for its development. This concept appeared in the 40s of the last century, and in the 1970s was finally established. Thus, evolutionary concepts have penetrated into cosmology. The concept of the Big Bang significantly changed the idea of how the substances in the universe arose.

Only towards the end of the 20th century did natural science receive methodological and theoretical means for forming a unified model of evolution, the discovery of general laws of nature that unite the appearance of the universe, the solar system, the planet Earth, life and, finally, man and society. Universal (global) evolutionism is such a model.

The emergence of global evolutionism

In the early 80-ies of the last century, the concept of interest entered our modern philosophy. Global evolutionism began to be considered for the first time in the study of integrative phenomena in science, which are associated with the generalization of evolutionary knowledge accumulated in various branches of natural science. This term was the first to determine the desire of such disciplines as geology, biology, physics and astronomy to generalize the mechanisms of evolution, to extrapolation. At least, this is the meaning embedded in the concept of interest to us at first.

Academician NN Moiseev pointed out that global evolutionism can bring scientists closer to the solution of the issue of meeting the interests of the biosphere and mankind in order to prevent a global ecological catastrophe. The discussion was conducted not only within the framework of methodological science. Not surprisingly, the idea of global evolutionism has a special worldview load, in contrast to traditional evolutionism. The latter, as you remember, was laid in the works of Charles Darwin.

Global evolutionism and the modern scientific picture of the world

At present, many assessments of the idea that interests us in the development of the scientific worldview are alternative. In particular, the view was expressed that global evolutionism should form the basis of the scientific picture of the world, as it integrates the sciences of man and nature. In other words, it was stressed that this concept is of fundamental importance in the development of modern natural science. Global evolutionism today is a systemic education. As VS Stepin points out, in modern science his positions gradually become the dominant of the synthesis of knowledge. This is the core idea that permeates special pictures of the world. Global evolutionism, according to VS Stepin, is a global research program that sets the research strategy. Currently, it exists in a variety of versions and variants, characterized by a different level of conceptual elaboration: from filling the ordinary consciousness of poorly grounded statements to detailed concepts that are considered in detail the entire course of the evolution of the world.

The essence of global evolutionism

The emergence of this concept is associated with the expansion of the boundaries of the evolutionary approach adopted in the social and biological sciences. The fact that there are qualitative leaps to the biological, and from it to the social world, is in many ways a mystery. It can be understood only by allowing the need for such transitions between other types of movement. In other words, proceeding from the fact of the existence of the evolution of the world in the later stages of history, it can be assumed that in general it is an evolutionary system. This means that as a result of a consistent change, all other forms of movement, other than social and biological, were formed.

This statement can be considered as the most general formulation of what is global evolutionism. Let's briefly outline its main principles. This will help you better understand what is at stake.

Basic principles

The paradigm of interest manifested itself as a formalized concept and an important component of the modern world picture in the last third of the last century in the works of specialists in cosmology (AD Ursula, NN Moiseev).

In the opinion of NN Moiseev, the following basic principles underlie global evolutionism:

• The universe is a single self-developing system.
• The development of systems, their evolution has a directional character: it follows the path of growth of their diversity, the complexity of these systems, as well as their stability.
• The random factors that influence development are inevitably present in all evolutionary processes.
• Heredity dominates the universe: the present and the future depend on the past, but they are not clearly defined by it.
• Considering the dynamics of the world as a constant selection, in which a system of many different virtual states chooses the most real.
• The presence of bifurcation states is not denied, as a result, further evolution becomes fundamentally unpredictable, since during the transition random factors act.

The universe in the concept of global evolutionism

The universe in it appears as a natural whole, evolving in time. Global evolutionism is an idea according to which the whole history of the Universe is considered as a single process. The cosmic, biological, chemical and social types of evolution in it are interconnected successively and genetically.

Interaction with various fields of knowledge

Evolutionism is the most important component of the evolutionary-synergetic paradigm in modern science. It is understood not in the traditional sense (Darwinian), but through the idea of universal (global) evolutionism.

The primary task of developing the concept we are interested in is to overcome the gaps between the different areas of being. Its supporters concentrate on those fields of knowledge that can be extrapolated to the whole universe and which could link different fragments of being into a kind of unity. Such disciplines are evolutionary biology, thermodynamics, and recently contributes a great deal to global evolutionism and synergetics.

However, the concept of interest at the same time reveals the contradictions between the second law of thermodynamics and the evolutionary theory of Charles Darwin. The latter proclaims the selection of states and forms of the living, the strengthening of order, and the first - the growth of the measure of chaos (entropy).

The problem of the anthropic principle

Global evolutionism emphasizes that the development of the global whole is aimed at improving the structural organization. According to this concept, the whole history of the universe is a single process of self-organization, evolution, self-development of matter. Global evolutionism is a principle that requires a deep understanding of the logic of the development of the universe, the cosmic order of things. This concept currently has multilateral coverage. Scientists consider its axiological, logical-methodological and philosophical aspects. The problem of the anthropic principle is of particular interest. Discussions on this issue are still ongoing. This principle has a close connection with the idea of global evolutionism. It is often regarded as the most modern version of it.

The anthropic principle is that the emergence of humanity was possible due to certain large-scale properties of the universe. If they were different, then there would be no one to know the world. This principle was put forward by B. Carter several decades ago. According to him, there is a relationship between the existence of reason in the universe and its parameters. This led to the question of how much the parameters of our world are random, how interconnected they are. What happens if they change a little? As the analysis has shown, even a small change in the basic physical parameters will lead to the fact that life, and hence the mind, simply can not exist in the universe.

Carter expressed the relationship between the emergence of the mind in the universe and its parameters in a strong and weak formulation. The weak anthropic principle only establishes the fact that the conditions in it do not contradict the existence of man. A strong anthropic principle implies a more rigid relationship. The universe, according to him, should be such that at a certain stage of development in it the existence of observers was allowed.

Coevolution

In the theory of global evolutionism, a notion such as "co-evolution" is very important. This term is used to refer to a new stage in which the existence of man and nature is coherent. The concept of co-evolution is based on the fact that people, changing the biosphere, to adapt it to their needs, must change themselves to meet the objective requirements of nature. This concept in a concentrated form expresses the experience of mankind in the course of history, which contains certain imperatives and regulations of socioprogenous interaction.

Finally

Global evolutionism and the modern picture of the world are a very urgent topic in natural science. In this article, only the main issues and concepts were considered. The problems of global evolutionism, if desired, can be studied for a very long time.