Critique of Williams’ Opposition to Evolutionary Progress: An Argument for Evolutionary Progress from an Individual Life History Perspective

Abstract

George C. Williams put forward a famous critique of evolutionary progress in 1966. As the theories supporting evolutionary progress have gradually developed, most of Williams’ viewpoints had been well responded to. For example, evolutionary progress can be discussed from a non-anthropocentric stance. However, there is still one argument in Williams’ critique remaining unanswered: when specialization is used as the standard for evolutionary progress, specialization often manifests in an improvement in one adaptation accompanied by a decline in another. This characteristic makes it impossible for specialization to support cumulative progress. This paper argues that the core point of Williams’ critique is that relying solely on the traditional population-level framework, there is no clear and feasible method to measure the positive and negative impacts brought about by functional improvement. Based on Howard’s Selective Effect Theory, this paper constructs two idealized models: First, a single selective pressure model establishes the ontological reality of evolutionary progress, thereby countering Williams’ claim that evolutionary progress lacks any empirical support; Second, by incorporating individual life history event frequencies into a multiple selective pressure model, we demonstrate that the benefits and costs of a given functional improvement can be quantitatively integrated. This approach ultimately resolves the challenge of identifying evolutionary progress amid concurrent adaptation enhancement and decline. This paper argues that based solely on the SE theory, we can only retrospectively identify progress. Only when we additionally have information about whether the environment has changed can we achieve a certain degree of rough prediction of evolutionary trends.