Evolutionary Theory: Proposing Provolution
This article distinguishes evolution from progress and proposes provolution as a concept for progressive human evolutionary change
EVOLUTIONBIOLOGYPHILOSOPHY
Alexandra Chambers
8/10/20264 min read
Evolution is change, and progression is the direction beneficial to humanity. The word evolution has become socially misleading because in everyday language, people often misunderstand evolution to mean progress: a species becoming stronger, healthier, more capable or more advanced across generations.
However, that is not what evolution means in modern biology. Evolution describes change in the heritable characteristics of populations across generations. It has no necessary direction. A population can gain capacity and evolve, and it can lose capacity and evolve. It can adapt to an increasingly damaging environment and evolve. It can become biologically more compromised while remaining reproductively successful and still be described as evolving.
Evolutionary fitness is not synonymous with health, intelligence, creativity, ethical capacity or developmental potential. It describes differential reproductive or genetic persistence under particular conditions. Change the conditions and the traits favoured by selection may also change. The same principle applies to capacities with substantial value that cannot be expressed within the environment in which they occur. Intelligence, analytical reasoning and unusually strong pattern recognition may confer enormous potential while producing little realised advantage in systems organised around conformity, hierarchy, bureaucracy or repetitive labour.
That creates a conceptual problem. We have a word for change across generations, but no commonly used biological term for valuable improvement across generations. I propose the term provolution: Directional progression in which increasing consciousness, biological, environmental and social development increase integration, compatibility, resilience thereby generating evolutionary potential rather than merely producing change or persistence.
A highly analytical mind may flourish in an environment that rewards investigation, autonomy and unconventional problem-solving while being actively penalised in one that rewards obedience and procedural conformity. The environment therefore does not determine the inherent value of a capacity. It determines whether, and to what extent, that capacity can be expressed. Inherent capacity is not the same as realised value, and realised value is not the same as reproductive success.
Natural selection does not mean that the best organisms survive. It means that, under a particular set of conditions, some heritable variants leave more descendants than others. A polluted, violent, technologically distorted or otherwise degraded environment can therefore favour whatever happens to function successfully within that distortion. Evolution contains no inherent movement toward wisdom, health, intelligence, complexity or moral worth. This becomes still more important in humans because humans do not merely inhabit environments. They construct them. Industrialisation, pollution, medicine, diet, technology, institutions, economic systems, education, mating structures, contraception, migration and cultural norms all alter the conditions within which biological variation is expressed and selected. Humans therefore increasingly participate in creating the selection pressures to which humans themselves are subsequently exposed.
The environment may exert the proximate selection pressure, but humans can construct the environment that determines what those pressures are. This is the significance of niche construction. Organisms modify their environments, and those modified environments subsequently alter selection. Some human beings - in positions of power and privilege - possess an unusually powerful capacity to do this deliberately and at enormous scale. Contemporary human selection pressures therefore cannot automatically be treated as equivalent to selection pressures arising within relatively unmanaged ecological systems. An anthropogenic environment can manufacture conditions favouring compatibility with human-created institutions rather than compatibility with the ecological conditions under which human biology developed.
This also intersects with several established evolutionary concepts:
Ecological or evolutionary mismatch - traits shaped under one set of conditions encounter radically different conditions
Evolutionary traps - historically useful responses become harmful because environmental cues change faster than organisms can adapt
Niche construction - organisms modify the environments that subsequently exert selection upon them
Anthropogenic selection - human activity alters which phenotypes survive, reproduce or flourish.
These concepts make it possible to distinguish between biological failure and environmental incompatibility.
If humanity constructs an environment hostile to particular ancient, divergent or specialised biological configurations, difficulty functioning within that environment does not automatically demonstrate that those configurations are defective. Instead, it reveals something about the environment in which their value is being measured.
Likewise, if a society creates conditions in which exceptional analytical capacity, sensitivity, creativity or divergent cognition cannot flourish, reduced success within that society does not demonstrate that those capacities have ceased to be valuable. It demonstrates that the environment is rewarding something else. Natural selection therefore measures relative compatibility with prevailing conditions, not biological worth. That distinction becomes ethically significant when the prevailing conditions are themselves human-made.
Appeals to Darwin in discussions of contemporary human survival can become conceptually misleading when anthropogenic selection pressures are treated as though they were inevitable features of nature. Pollution, institutional structures, economic systems, technological environments, medical practices and cultural norms are not simply external forces acting upon humanity. They are, at least partly, products of human decisions.
Evolution can preserve, eliminate, constrain or reorganise variation according to prevailing conditions. There is no guarantee that the traits rewarded by a particular environment represent greater health, intelligence, creativity, resilience or developmental potential.
Therefore, what is persistence becoming? The direction of change can then be evaluated at the level of the organism-environment system: does it increase integration, resilience, regulatory capacity, complexity and developmental potential, or does it represent compensatory adaptation to increasingly dysfunctional conditions? Survival alone cannot answer that question. A dysfunctional environment can select for compatibility with dysfunction. When human-derived systems have constructed that environment, invoking natural selection should not absolve them of responsibility for what they have made adaptive.
That leaves another question: What direction should humans take? This is about universally improving the conditions under which all humans exist and prosper. Protecting biological and cognitive development, nutrition, reproduction, ecological compatibility and long-term health is not the engineering of a preferred population; it is biological stewardship. Human beings can do something natural selection cannot. We can examine the direction of biological change and decide that adapting to deterioration is not acceptable.
The language clarification: Evolution is change, but provolution is progressive change. The more important focus for humanity is not whether we are evolving; it is whether we are progressing. Provolution is measurable. We can track disease incidence, healthy life expectancy, reproductive health, developmental outcomes, metabolic health, immune function, disability burden and other defined biological indicators across generations. Science is fragmented and outcomes are often distorted, but the academic literature exists.
No single measure is sufficient, and changes in diagnosis, surveillance, age structure, treatment and environmental conditions must be accounted for, but the overall direction of population health can be quantified.
If successive generations show rising chronic disease, declining reproductive health, worsening developmental outcomes or greater dependence upon medical and technological compensation, that is evidence against provolution even if the population continues to survive and reproduce.
Are future generations moving towards greater health and capability - and, if they are not - can the conditions driving that decline be identified and reversed?