Progress and Growth. A Comparison between Technical and Biological Evolution

Abstract

De Cesare and Bontems compare, in the article, the concepts of progress and growth in technical evolution and biological evolution, offering a critical analysis of the analogies between these two domains. Drawing on Gilbert Simondon’s philosophy of technology and contemporary evolutionary theory, especially as developed by Silvia De Cesare, the authors distinguish merely performative progress from genuine progress. On the technical level, Simondon defines progress as a process of concretization, through which objects become more coherent, selfsustaining, and better coupled to their milieu, thereby avoiding hypertelic evolutions marked by excessive specialization. On the biological level, the article shows that it is possible to speak of local progress as adaptive functional improvement without appealing to moral values, while emphasizing its limits due to the fragility associated with overadaptation. At longer timescales, evolvability is proposed as a criterion of global organic progress, understood as the capacity to generate diversity in the face of environmental instability. Finally, the text dissociates progress from growth (demographic or economic), arguing that the contemporary ecological situation requires rethinking technical progress independently of quantitative increase, even opening the way for the idea of “negative progress” oriented toward sustainability, the reduction of power, and the preservation of the evolvability of living systems.