Responses to Evolution: Spencer's Evolutionism, Bergsonism, and Complexity Theory

International audienceAnsell-Pearson, Paul-Antoine Miquel, and Michael Vaughan's "Responses to Evolution" introduces the reader to Bergson's Creative Evolution and its "ambitious and rich" attempt to explain how "philosophy and science can reach a new rapport concerning questions of life" (348). They begin with a clear review of Bergson's alternative to Herbert Spencers' evolutionism. Their account of Deleuze's assessment of Bergson's insight that philosophy must "pass from" the "transcendental" approach "to a genetic one" -- indeed a "double genesis" that overcomes the tendency to reify intellect or matter, mind or world -- sets up their claim about the relevance of this Bergsonian notion for contemporary biology, including the "failure of the human genome project to explain life in mechanical terms." (370). For Bergson, they succinctly put it, "mechanism lacks an adequate philosophy of life as a whole, vitalism lacks an adequate philosophy of particular living organisms" (370-71)