The Universe Institute's Papers section lists all published and unpublished papers and white papers. The Papers section is arranged by categories. Some categories may contain papers unrelated to the Universe Institute's mission and goals, or may not have been created with DMAP or DTF, but they will be labeled as such.

 

 

Progressive Evolution and Limited Progressive Evolution

At the Universe Institute we support and forward a particular branch of evolutionary theory called progressive evolution, or more precisely imited progressive evolution.

What We Mean by Progressive Evolution, and What We Do Not Mean

Throughout this section, we use both the established term progressive evolution and the more precise term limited progressive evolution.

We retain progressive evolution because it has an established history in evolutionary thought and because researchers such as John E. Stewart have used it explicitly to describe evolutionary processes involving increasing cooperation, integration, organization, and evolvability.

But we add the word limited for an important scientific reason.

We are not claiming that evolution as a whole always progresses.

We are not claiming that every lineage becomes more complex.

We are not claiming that biological evolution has a predetermined destination.

We are not claiming that human history inevitably improves.

We are not claiming that everything occurring later in evolution is somehow "higher," morally better, or more valuable than everything that occurred earlier.

And we are not claiming that the universe as a whole has been scientifically demonstrated to be progressing toward a predetermined purpose or endpoint.

Instead, limited progressive evolution refers to identifiable evolutionary processes in which particular capabilities or forms of organization have increased under particular conditions, during particular periods, in particular lineages or systems.

Those increases can include such things as:

• cooperation;
• coordination;
• division of labor;
• integration of previously independent units;
• communication;
• information storage and transmission;
• cumulative learning;
• adaptive flexibility;
• specialization combined with interdependence;
• regulation of destructive internal conflict;
• expansion of the scale at which cooperation can operate;
• and, in some circumstances, increased evolvability, meaning an increased capacity to generate useful heritable variation.

These patterns are real enough to study scientifically. They do not require us to turn them into a universal law of evolution.

That distinction is the foundation of what we mean by limited progressive evolution.

 

Evolution Is Branching, Conditional, and Open-Ended

Darwinian evolution has no requirement that every evolutionary pathway lead toward greater complexity, intelligence, cooperation, or anything humans might call progress.

Evolution responds to changing environments, available variation, historical circumstances, competition, cooperation, chance events, developmental constraints, and many other factors.

Different circumstances can favor very different evolutionary solutions.

Sometimes greater size is advantageous. Sometimes smaller size is.

Sometimes specialization succeeds. Sometimes generalism succeeds.

Sometimes cooperation expands. Sometimes competition intensifies.

Sometimes organisms become more complex. Sometimes successful evolution involves simplification.

Sometimes previously independent organisms become increasingly interdependent. In other circumstances, relationships break apart.

Species flourish and species disappear.

Evolutionary innovations can persist for hundreds of millions of years, or they can fail.

Consequently, the evolutionary tree of life should not be pictured as a ladder leading steadily upward. It is better understood as an enormous branching process involving diversification, experimentation, persistence, extinction, convergence, cooperation, conflict, innovation, and continual adaptation to changing circumstances.

John Maynard Smith and Eörs Szathmáry, whose work on the major transitions in evolution became foundational to this field, explicitly warned against assuming a universal increase in complexity. They noted that there is no general theoretical requirement that evolutionary lineages continually become more complex, even though some of the great transitions in life's history clearly produced new forms of complexity and organization.

Research by Daniel McShea similarly found that claims about universal evolutionary increases in complexity become much less clear once "complexity" is carefully defined and measured. Evidence for directional trends differs depending upon the kind of complexity, lineage, and period being examined.

This is exactly why we qualify our use of the term.

Progressive evolution can occur without evolution as a whole being progressive.

 

The Strongest Scientific Foundation: Major Evolutionary Transitions

One of the clearest scientific foundations for limited progressive evolution comes from research on what evolutionary biologists call major evolutionary transitions.

During several extraordinary episodes in the history of life, entities that previously existed and reproduced with substantial independence became organized into more cooperative systems.

Over time, some of those systems became sufficiently integrated that a new level of biological organization emerged.

Among the commonly discussed examples are transitions associated with:

• genes becoming organized within chromosomes and genomes;
• formerly independent microorganisms contributing to the emergence of the eukaryotic cell;
• cells becoming integrated into multicellular organisms;
• specialized cells dividing reproductive and non-reproductive functions;
• and, in some lineages, individual organisms becoming extraordinarily integrated social groups.

Maynard Smith and Szathmáry emphasized that major transitions frequently involved fundamental changes in how biological information was stored, transmitted, reproduced, and coordinated.

Later research has developed this framework substantially.

Stuart West, Roberta Fisher, Andy Gardner, and Toby Kiers describe major evolutionary transitions as involving two broad stages.

First, previously independent entities form a cooperative group.

Second, under some conditions, that group becomes sufficiently integrated to function as a new evolutionary entity.

Successful transitions commonly involve cooperation, division of labor, communication, mutual dependence, coordination, and substantial reduction of destructive conflict among the component parts. Crucially, they emphasize that most cooperative groups do not automatically undergo such a transition. Special conditions are required.

This qualification is essential.

Cooperation alone is not enough.

 

Cooperation Creates Possibilities, but Also Creates New Problems

Whenever previously independent entities begin cooperating, they can obtain benefits unavailable to isolated individuals.

Different participants can specialize.

They can divide tasks.

They can share resources.

They can coordinate behavior.

They can sometimes accomplish things that none of them could accomplish independently.

But cooperation immediately generates another evolutionary problem:

What prevents individual participants from taking the benefits of cooperation while avoiding its costs?

In evolutionary theory this appears in many forms: cheating, free-riding, within-group competition, exploitation, or conflict between selection operating at different organizational levels.

Richard Michod's work on the evolution of multicellularity has been especially important here. A collection of cooperating cells does not automatically become a successful organism. Mechanisms must arise that regulate internal conflict sufficiently for the larger system to persist and reproduce effectively.

This produces one of the most important principles in limited progressive evolution:

The evolution of greater cooperation usually requires the evolution of mechanisms that protect cooperation from being destroyed by excessive internal conflict or exploitation.

Evolution has produced many such mechanisms.

Depending upon the system, they include genetic relatedness, reproductive bottlenecks, reciprocity, partner choice, reputation, policing, sanctions, compartmentalization, communication, mutual dependency, division of labor, and changes in the level at which selection operates.

Martin Nowak summarized several major pathways by which cooperation can evolve, including kin selection, direct reciprocity, indirect reciprocity, network effects, and group or multilevel processes.

There remains active scientific debate over how some of these mechanisms should be described mathematically, especially the relationship between kin selection and multilevel selection. But the existence of multiple mechanisms capable of supporting cooperation is not seriously in question.

 

John Stewart's Contribution: Cooperative Organization and Management

John E. Stewart has developed one of the more explicit theories of progressive evolution.

His central observation overlaps with the major-transitions tradition: some of the largest changes in evolutionary history have involved increases in the scale of cooperative organization.

Simple units have sometimes combined into larger cooperative systems, and those systems have sometimes developed mechanisms capable of coordinating their components and controlling behaviors that would otherwise undermine the larger organization.

In his work on evolutionary progress, Stewart argues that potential benefits from cooperation create opportunities for evolutionary systems that can organize cooperators and restrain destructive cheating. In his later peer-reviewed work, he develops this into what he calls Management Theory, proposing that major cooperative transitions depend upon systems capable of organizing and regulating lower-level participants.

The term manager can be misleading if interpreted too literally.

In evolutionary theory, a manager need not be a conscious leader, government, ruler, or central authority.

The relevant function can be performed by biological or social mechanisms that:

• coordinate activity;
• align incentives;
• regulate conflict;
• suppress cheating;
• reward contributions;
• distribute benefits;
• transmit information;
• monitor behavior;
• or otherwise make sustained cooperation possible.

This broader interpretation is highly compatible with mainstream research on evolutionary transitions, which repeatedly identifies communication, coordination, division of labor, mutual dependence, conflict mediation, and suppression of within-group competition as important conditions for successful higher-level organization.

Stewart also identifies two broad historical patterns: increasing diversification of life and episodes of increasing integration, in which smaller entities become parts of larger cooperative organizations. He interprets the history of integration as evidence for an evolutionary direction toward increasingly large-scale cooperation.

This is where an important distinction must be made.

The existence of particular major cooperative transitions is well established.

The mechanisms involved in cooperation and conflict regulation have a substantial scientific literature.

The stronger proposition that these transitions demonstrate an overarching direction for evolution as a whole, or predict the eventual formation of a globally integrated evolutionary entity, is Stewart's broader theoretical interpretation and is not a settled conclusion of evolutionary biology.

Our concept of limited progressive evolution therefore incorporates the scientifically useful mechanisms identified by Stewart without requiring acceptance of every larger extrapolation he draws from them.

 

Progressive Patterns in Biological Evolution

With those qualifications, several kinds of limited progressive patterns can reasonably be identified within biological evolution.

1. Increasing cooperative integration

At several points in evolutionary history, formerly more-independent components became parts of larger integrated systems.

Multicellular organisms provide a particularly clear example.

Cells can specialize in different functions, communicate, coordinate activity, and become mutually dependent. Reproductive functions may become concentrated in particular cell lineages while other cells perform structural, metabolic, sensory, defensive, or other functions.

Such arrangements can create capabilities unavailable to isolated cells.

But multicellularity also demonstrates the limits of progress language.

Multicellularity has evolved multiple times, and not every multicellular lineage follows the same trajectory. Cooperation can be destabilized by cheating cells, and the regulation of internal conflict is therefore central to maintaining multicellular organization. Experimental research has directly demonstrated circumstances in which reduced relatedness can undermine cellular cooperation.

2. Division of labor

Increasing specialization can make a cooperative system more effective.

Cells within organisms, organisms within some social groups, and humans within societies can perform different tasks while depending on one another's contributions.

The result can be capabilities that no participant could generate independently.

But specialization also creates vulnerability.

Increasing dependence means that failure of critical components can damage the whole.

Therefore greater specialization is not automatically evolutionary improvement. Its consequences depend upon the surrounding system.

3. Improved communication and coordination

Major transitions repeatedly involve improved mechanisms for transmitting information and coordinating behavior.

The genetic code, cellular signaling, nervous systems, language, writing, institutional record keeping, scientific communication, and digital technologies belong to radically different categories and should not be collapsed into one mechanism.

Nevertheless, they illustrate a recurring functional problem:

How can information be preserved, transmitted, evaluated, and coordinated across increasingly complicated systems?

Major-transitions research has repeatedly identified changes in information storage and transmission as central to evolutionary innovation.

4. Increased ability to generate useful variation

Evolutionary systems can themselves change in ways that affect their capacity to produce heritable variation.

This property is commonly called evolvability.

Modern research supports the proposition that evolvability itself can change and evolve, although researchers continue debating the mechanisms involved and when such changes should be regarded as adaptations rather than by-products of other evolutionary processes.

This provides another possible form of limited evolutionary progress: under some circumstances, systems can become better able to explore possible adaptive solutions.

Again, can is the important word.

 

Evolution Can Also Reverse, Simplify, Fragment, and Fail

Any scientifically credible account of progressive evolution must give equal attention to evolutionary pathways that run in other directions.

Complex structures can disappear.

Cooperative relationships can collapse.

Formerly integrated systems can become less integrated.

Organisms can become simpler when simplification is advantageous.

Parasites can discard functions that their hosts provide.

Environmental changes can transform formerly beneficial adaptations into liabilities.

Competition can overwhelm cooperation.

Internal conflict can reappear.

Entire evolutionary lineages can become extinct.

Recent theoretical work on evolutionary transitions explicitly examines the possibility of reversions in individuality, including circumstances under which a previously achieved level of integration can partially or completely break down.

Evolution therefore does not place a permanent stamp marked PROGRESS ACHIEVED on a system and move on. Nature, displaying its usual lack of respect for human filing systems, keeps changing the conditions.

Progressive outcomes must usually be maintained.

 

Limited Progressive Evolution in Human Evolution

Human evolution introduces another level of complexity because biological evolution became increasingly entangled with cultural evolution.

Humans did not merely inherit genes.

We developed extraordinary capacities to inherit information socially.

Language, teaching, imitation, shared norms, technologies, institutions, stories, records, and eventually formal science allowed information acquired by one generation to influence subsequent generations.

This created the possibility of cumulative cultural evolution: later generations can inherit discoveries and practices they did not individually invent, modify them, and transmit modified versions onward.

Cumulative culture is one of the clearest examples of a progressive process in a limited sense.

Knowledge can accumulate.

Technologies can build upon previous technologies.

Methods can be tested and refined.

Institutional arrangements can be modified.

Scientific knowledge can become more accurate.

People can acquire capabilities that would be impossible for a single isolated individual to recreate within one lifetime.

But even cumulative culture is not simply an upward staircase.

Cultures can lose knowledge.

Technologies can create new dangers.

False ideas can spread.

Institutions can preserve dysfunctional practices.

Highly effective cultural adaptations for one environment can become maladaptive when circumstances change.

Social learning can propagate mistakes just as efficiently as discoveries.

And recent research emphasizes that human culture may be distinguished not simply by accumulation but by an extraordinary capacity for open-ended innovation and recombination.

 

Human Cooperation Is Extraordinary, but Not Automatically Beneficial

Humans also developed capacities for cooperation across scales rarely approached by other vertebrates.

We cooperate with relatives, friends, trading partners, institutions, strangers, organizations, and very large networks of people we may never meet.

Human cooperation is supported by multiple mechanisms including reciprocity, reputation, social norms, punishment, institutions, shared identities, cultural learning, and systems that alter the incentives associated with cooperation and defection.

Boyd and Richerson and many other cultural-evolution researchers have argued that cultural processes played an important role in allowing human cooperation to expand beyond the scale normally explained by kinship alone.

This enlargement of cooperative capacity is highly relevant to limited progressive evolution.

However, larger-scale cooperation is not necessarily morally good cooperation.

A highly coordinated group can cooperate to exploit outsiders.

An authoritarian organization can be extremely integrated.

A military organization may exhibit extraordinary coordination and division of labor while pursuing destructive goals.

A society can become technologically sophisticated while becoming socially unjust.

Greater integration can increase both constructive and destructive power.

Therefore, in this section, progressive describes an increase in a specified evolutionary or developmental capacity. It does not, by itself, mean ethically superior.

That distinction will become especially important when we later examine the relationship between evolutionary facts and human values.

 

Are Human Societies Undergoing Another Major Evolutionary Transition?

This is an important but unresolved question.

Modern societies exhibit several characteristics that resemble features of earlier major evolutionary transitions:

• very large cooperative systems;
• extensive division of labor;
• extraordinary communication networks;
• mutual dependence;
• institutions for regulating behavior;
• large-scale transportation and resource systems;
• cumulative knowledge;
• and increasingly dense technological interconnection.

A 2023 special issue of Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B examined precisely this possibility, bringing together evolutionary biology, anthropology, cultural evolution, systems theory, psychology, economics, linguistics, and philosophy of science. The editors treated the possibility of a human evolutionary transition in individuality as an important but controversial research question rather than an established fact.

Some researchers find substantial parallels between human cultural development and biological evolutionary transitions. Michod and Davison, for example, have explored whether human cultural evolution exhibits stages analogous to transitions in biological individuality.

Other researchers have documented enormous historical increases in the scale, specialization, connectivity, and interdependence of human societies while describing the proposition that humanity is undergoing a new evolutionary transition as a hypothesis requiring further testing.

And important objections remain. Recent critical work argues that human sociocultural systems may not satisfy the stricter biological requirements for an evolutionary transition in individuality, particularly the requirements surrounding reproduction and selection at the collective level.

Consequently, we should not tell readers that humanity is becoming a biological superorganism or new evolutionary individual.

We can responsibly say that researchers are investigating whether some principles discovered in major evolutionary transitions illuminate important aspects of human cultural and social evolution.

That is both more accurate and more interesting.

 

What Limited Progressive Evolution May Teach Us About Humanity's Present Situation

The relevance of this research becomes especially important when humanity confronts problems that cannot be solved adequately by isolated individuals, organizations, communities, or nations.

Climate disruption, ecological degradation, emerging technologies, artificial intelligence, nuclear risks, economic instability, global public-health threats, misinformation, resource pressures, institutional failures, and interacting polycrisis conditions all involve problems operating across multiple organizational levels.

Evolutionary research cannot tell us automatically what we ought to do about these problems.

It can, however, help us identify recurring conditions under which complex cooperative systems succeed or fail.

Among the questions it encourages us to investigate are:

How can cooperation be expanded without destroying useful diversity?

How can individuals and smaller groups retain appropriate autonomy while coordinating where larger-scale action is necessary?

How can benefits and costs be distributed so that cooperation remains stable?

How can free-riding and exploitation be limited without creating oppressive control systems?

How can institutions capture the consequences of their actions instead of exporting costs to other people, future generations, or ecosystems?

How can destructive competition be constrained while preserving constructive competition, experimentation, and innovation?

How can information move through a system accurately enough for the system to learn?

How can error correction occur before mistakes become catastrophic?

How can a system maintain diversity while gaining the coordination needed to confront shared threats?

How can successful arrangements adapt as conditions change rather than becoming rigid?

These questions connect limited progressive evolution directly with our larger study of civilization-level dysfunction, the causes of persistent injustice, and humanity's capacity to respond successfully to present and future challenges.

 

Progressive Evolution Is Conditional, Not Inevitable

Perhaps the most important principle in this entire section is:

Progressive evolutionary outcomes depend upon conditions.

Cooperation does not inevitably defeat conflict.

Better information does not inevitably defeat misinformation.

Greater intelligence does not guarantee wiser behavior.

More powerful technology does not guarantee better outcomes.

Larger organizations do not necessarily govern better than smaller organizations.

Greater complexity does not necessarily increase resilience.

Cultural evolution does not guarantee moral advancement.

And humanity's previous evolutionary successes do not guarantee its future survival.

Limited progressive evolution instead tells us something subtler and potentially more useful.

Under certain conditions, evolutionary processes have repeatedly generated new capacities for cooperation, coordination, specialization, information processing, adaptation, learning, and organization.

Under other conditions, those capacities stagnate, become maladaptive, collapse, or are redirected toward destructive purposes.

Understanding the difference between those conditions may be extremely important.

 

A Scientific Standard for Claiming Progressive Evolution

Because the word progress can easily become vague, every important claim in this section should answer several questions.

Progress in what?
The relevant variable must be identified: cooperation, information processing, adaptability, organizational scale, conflict regulation, learning capacity, resilience, or something else.

Compared with what?
There must be an identifiable earlier condition or alternative state.

At what level?
What benefits a gene, cell, organism, family, institution, society, species, or ecosystem may not benefit another level.

Under what conditions?
A pattern found in one environment cannot automatically be generalized to every environment.

By what mechanism?
We should identify the evolutionary or developmental process capable of producing the observed change.

For how long?
Temporary expansion is not necessarily a persistent evolutionary transition.

At what cost?
New capabilities can produce tradeoffs and vulnerabilities.

Can the development reverse?
If so, we should understand the conditions under which regression occurs.

How strong is the evidence?
We distinguish established findings from emerging evidence, disputed interpretations, and our own DMAP hypotheses.

This standard prevents the concept of progressive evolution from becoming a label placed on whatever outcome we happen to prefer.

 

Three Levels of Evidence We Will Keep Separate

Throughout this section, we will distinguish clearly among three levels.

1. Established or Strongly Supported Science

This includes well-supported findings from evolutionary biology, major-transitions research, cooperation theory, cultural evolution, genetics, anthropology, and related disciplines.

2. Emerging or Contested Scientific Interpretations

This includes plausible scientific theories for which credible disagreement remains, such as some interpretations of evolutionary directionality, group-level transitions, the precise mechanisms underlying large-scale human cooperation, and whether contemporary human civilization represents an evolutionary transition in individuality.

3. DMAP Hypotheses and Broader Philosophical Interpretations

This includes our attempts to ask what these findings may imply for humanity's future, civilization-level problem solving, Evolutioneers, Universe Citizenship, artificial intelligence, governance, long-term cooperation, and conscious participation in future evolutionary change.

We will not present the third category as though it belongs to the first.

 

Why Evolutioneers, Planetary Citizens and Universe Citizens Should Understand Limited Progressive Evolution

An Evolutioneer does not need to believe that evolution is universally progressive.

In fact, understanding evolution properly should make a person suspicious of such simplistic claims.

But an Evolutioneer should understand the limited progressive processes that evolutionary research has identified, because those processes may illuminate both humanity's extraordinary capabilities and some of our greatest failures.

Evolutioneers should understand how cooperation emerges.

They should understand why cooperation collapses.

They should understand how systems regulate internal conflict.

They should understand the role of diversity, experimentation, specialization, communication, feedback, incentives, consequence capture, and cumulative learning.

They should understand that systems can move toward greater integration and can also fragment.

They should understand that an adaptation successful yesterday may become dangerous tomorrow.

They should understand that evolutionary processes create possibilities, not guarantees.

Most importantly, they should understand that humanity now possesses an unusual capacity to examine these processes consciously.

Our species can study its evolutionary history, model possible futures, identify consequences, compare alternatives, revise institutions, preserve knowledge, and intentionally influence many of the conditions shaping future biological, cultural, technological, and social development.

Whether we will use those capabilities wisely is not predetermined by evolution.

That remains an open question.

 

A Necessary Boundary Before We Ask What Humanity Should Do

This introduction has intentionally remained primarily descriptive.

It asks:

What has evolution done?

Under what conditions have particular progressive patterns emerged?

What mechanisms appear to support or undermine them?

Those questions concern evolutionary facts and scientific explanations.

A different question is:

If evolution has produced a particular pattern, does that give humans any reason to continue, protect, modify, or reject that pattern?

We should not quietly assume that the answer is yes.

The fact that something evolved does not automatically establish that it is good.

The fact that cooperation sometimes increases evolutionary effectiveness does not, by itself, prove that humans morally ought to cooperate.

The fact that larger-scale organization has emerged repeatedly does not prove that humanity ought to create ever-larger political or social organizations.

And natural selection has produced many outcomes that humans have strong ethical reasons not to imitate.

This creates the next major question in our inquiry:

Can scientifically established facts about evolution ever contribute legitimately to conclusions about what humans should do, and if so, what additional values, premises, reasoning, and safeguards are required to make that transition without committing the naturalistic fallacy?

That question deserves a separate examination.

For now, our position is narrower and more defensible:

"Limited progressive evolution describes real but conditional patterns in which particular evolutionary or developmental processes have produced increased cooperation, integration, coordination, information processing, cumulative learning, adaptability, or other identifiable capacities. These patterns are neither universal nor irreversible, and they do not demonstrate inevitable progress in life, humanity, or the universe. Understanding how and why these patterns arise, persist, fail, or reverse may nevertheless provide important knowledge for understanding humanity's present condition and the possibilities available to us."

 

The Naturalistic Fallacy and How it Does Not Disprove the Value or the Usefulness of the Principles of Limited Progressive Evolution

This article carefully explains how the principles of limited progressive evolution can be used to prescribe human behavior that can be more successful under given conditions. This article is more an overview of a strongly contested issue in philosophy for many decades. We think you will find our discerning and nuanced approach to qualifying the use of the naturalistic fallacy adequately supports using scientific facts to imply, or support, that certain behaviors may be more beneficial than others. 

Click here for this important article if you are of a philosophic nature and need to see every proof for why you should consider using the principles of limited progressive evolution.

 

Progressive Evolution Papers

John Stewart, a proficient DMAP user and proponent, has published extensively on the Progressive Evolution subject, as found below:

John Stewart's newest paper, "The Meaning of Life in a Universe Whose Ultimate Origins are Unknown," is published here. Stewart, John E. (2022), The Evolution and Development of Consciousness: The Subject-Object Emergence Hypothesis. Biosystems, 217: 104687. Stewart, John E. (2020), Towards a general theory of the major cooperative evolutionary transitions. BioSystems, 198: 104237. Stewart, John E. (2019), The Trajectory of Evolution and its Implications for Humanity. Journal of Big History, 3, pp 141-155. Stewart, John E. (2019), The Origins of Life: The Managed-Metabolism Hypothesis. Foundations of Science, 24, pp 171-195. Stewart, John E. (2018), Evolutionary Possibilities: Can a society be constrained so the "the good" self-organizes? World Futures, 74, pp 1-35. Stewart, J. E. (2016), The Evolution of Cooperative Organization and the Origins of Life.  Presented at the OEE Workshop held at ALIFE XV, Cancun, Mexico, 4 July 2016. Stewart, J. E. (2015), The Self-Organizing Society: A Grower's Guide. ECCO Working paper 2015-12. Stewart, J. E. (2014), The direction of evolution: The rise of cooperative organisation, BioSystems, 123: 27-36 download Stewart, J. E. (2010), The meaning of life in a developing universe, Foundations of Science, 15, pp. 395-409. Stewart, J. E. (2007), The future evolution of consciousness, Journal of Consciousness Studies, 14, pp. 58-92. Stewart, J. E. (2001), Future psychological evolution, Journal of Dynamical Psychology. Stewart, J. E. (2000), Evolution’s Arrow: the direction of evolution and the future of humanity, (Rivett, Canberra: Chapman Press). Stewart, J. E. (1997), Evolutionary Progress, Journal of Social and Evolutionary Systems, 20, pp. 335-62. Stewart, J. E. (1997), Evolutionary transitions and artificial life, Artificial Life, 3, pp. 101-120. Stewart, J. E. (1997), The evolution of genetic cognition, Journal of Social and Evolutionary Systems, 20, pp 53-73 Stewart, J. E. (1995), Metaevolution, Journal of Social and Evolutionary Systems, 18, 113-114. Stewart, J. E. (1993), The maintenance of sex, Evolutionary Theory, 10,195-202.

Podcasts, Videos, Interviews, and Discussions on Progressive Evolution

Nine YouTube Videos in which John Stewart talks about the evolutionary worldview and its implications for humanity, go to: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLpotN6lpXPsYj_MVoznhE27lJ3RqyJ4L-

For example, see this discussion with John Vervaeke: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0NUb2HaElhA&t=6s