The term was originated by the psychologist C. Lloyd Morgan in 1922 in his Gifford Lectures at St. Andrews, which would later be published as the 1923 book Emergent Evolution.
[9] The term emergent was first used to describe the concept by George Lewes in volume two of his 1875 book Problems of Life and Mind (p. 412).
Henri Bergson covered similar themes in his popular 1907 book Creative Evolution on the Élan vital.
Emergence was further developed by Samuel Alexander in his Gifford Lectures at Glasgow during 1916–18 and published as Space, Time, and Deity (1920).
In an appendix to a lecture in his book, Morgan acknowledged the contributions of Roy Wood Sellars's Evolutionary Naturalism (1922).
Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace's presentation of natural selection, coupled to the idea of evolution in Western thought, had gained acceptance due to the wealth of observational data provided and the seeming replacement of divine law with natural law in the affairs of men.
[10] Wallace throughout his life continued to support and extend the scope of Darwin's theory of evolution via the mechanism of natural selection.
... even if it were proved to be an exact representation of the facts, it would not be an explanation... because it would not account for the forces, the directive agency, and the organising power which are essential features of growth …[11]In examining this aspect, excluded ab initio by Darwin, Wallace came to the conclusion that Life in its essence cannot be understood except through "an organising and directive Life-Principle."
These necessarily involve a "Creative Power" possessed of a "directive Mind" working toward "an ultimate Purpose" (the development of Man).
So there are undoubtedly different degrees and probably also different kinds of mind in various grades of animal life ... And ... so the mind-giver ... enables each class or order of animals to obtain the amount of mind requisite for its place in nature ...[11]The issue of how order emerged from primordial chaos, by chance or necessity, can be found in classical Greek thought.
(Reid, p. 72)[10] Hegel spoke of the revolutionary progression of life from non-living to conscious and then to the spiritual and Kant perceived that simple parts of an organism interact to produce a progressively complex series of emergences of functional forms, a distinction that carried over to John Stuart Mill (1843), who stated that even chemical compounds have novel features that cannot be predicted from their elements.
Henry Drummond in The Descent of Man (1894) stated that emergence can be seen in the fact that the laws of nature are different for the organic or vital compared to inert inorganic matter.
[12]Another major scientist to question natural selection as the motive force of evolution was C. Lloyd Morgan, a zoologist and student of T.H.
To offset any attempt to read anthropomorphism into his view, he created the famous, but often misunderstood methodological canon: In no case may we interpret an action as the outcome of the exercise of a higher psychical faculty, if it can be interpreted as the outcome of the exercise of one which stands lower in the psychological scale.However, Morgan realizing that this was being misused to advocate reductionism (rather than as a general methodological caution), introduced a qualification into the second edition of his An Introduction to Comparative Psychology (1903): To this, however, it should be added, lest the range of the principle be misunderstood, that the canon by no means excludes the interpretation of a particular activity in terms of the higher processes, if we already have independent evidence of the occurrence of these higher processes in the animal under observation.As Reid observes, While the so-called historiographical "rehabilitation of the canon" has been underway for some time now, Morgan's emergent evolutionist position (which was the highest expression of his attempt to place the study of mind back into such a "wider" natural history) is seldom mentioned in more than passing terms even within contemporary history of psychology textbooks.
Time is the quality that creates motion through Space, and matter is simply motion expressed in forms in Space, or as Alexander says a little later, “complexes of motion.” Matter arises out of the basic ground of Space-Time continuity and has an element of “body” (lower order) and an element of “mind” (higher order), or “the conception that a secondary quality is the mind of its primary substrate.” Mind is an emergent from life and life itself is an emergent from matter.
The new character or quality which the vital physico-chemical complex possesses stands to it as soul or mind to the neural basis.
a given stage of material complexity is characterised by such and such special features…By accepting this we at any rate confine ourselves to noting the facts…and do not invent entities for which there seems to be no other justification than that something is done in life which is not done in matter.
[6][7][8] Biologist Ernst Mayr heavily criticized the book claiming it was a misinformed attack on natural selection.
Mayr commented that Reid was working from an "obsolete conceptual framework", provided no solid evidence and that he was arguing for a teleological process of evolution.
[15] In 2004, biologist Samuel Scheiner stated that Reid's "presentation is both a caricature of evolutionary theory and severely out of date.
[17][18] According to Massimo Pigliucci "Biological Emergences by Robert Reid is an interesting contribution to the ongoing debate on the status of evolutionary theory, but it is hard to separate the good stuff from the more dubious claims."
[19] It was positively reviewed by biologist Alexander Badyaev who commented that "the book succeeds in drawing attention to an under appreciated aspect of the evolutionary process".