Jerry M. quotes
Dawkins:
"Gould's definition of progress, calculated to deliver a negative answer to the question whether evolution is progressive, is "a tendency for life to increase in anatomical complexity, or neurological elaboration, or size and flexibility of behavioral repertoire, or any criterion obviously concocted (if we would only be honest and introspective enough about our motives) to place Homo sapiens atop a supposed heap." My alternative, 'adaptationist' definition of progress is "a tendency for lineages to improve cumulatively their adaptive fit to their particular way of life, by increasing the numbers of features which combine together in adaptive complexes." I'll defend this definition and my consequent, limited, progressivist conclusion, later.
^^^^^ CB: What about that environments change, so that the accumulated adaptive fit can suddenly become maladaptive to the new environment, as dinosaur species after the comet hit, or other species after humans hit ?
Can it really be said that humans today have an improved adaptive fit compared with earlier humans ? ! I think not with nuclear weapons and climate change. We have accumulated a few traits that may make us less fit than earlier human cultures. It is a great open question as to whether human society today represents biological adaptive progress over human society 100,000 years ago, because we have characteristics ( nuclear weapons) that may make us more vulnerable to extinction than earlier human societies. Nuclear weapons create a plausible scenario of human species extinction ( with nuclear winter and all)
And we can say for certain that the fitness of the adaptation of humans from 100,000 years ago was perfect or 100% on the fitness scale , because in fact the human species did _not_ go extinct under the hunter/gatherer/gardening/stone adaptations of the earliest human societies. We still survive. Modern human society's adaptive fitness is still in question. Plus, it will take another 200,000 years to see whether the modern adaptations of humans are fit ( don't cause us to go extinct) as the "old time religion" ( they didn't cause us to go instinct).
The question is still out as to whether capitalism is more (or less) progressively adaptive than hunting and gathering/gardening.
Anyway, seems "cumulative" would be a good term for the adaptive accumulations Dawkins refers to. It is too early to tell whether they are "progressive" in the sense of making us more secure in species survival than earlier adaptive human culture.