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2.4Why There’s No Such Thing as “Progress” in the Arts, Including Music2.4.1Evolutionary Theory and the Definition of Progress
As discussed in Chapter 1, natural selection ain’t pretty. Animals have to eat other living things, or die. Evolution amounts to a constant arms race. Natural selection equips predator species with adaptations such as powerful leg muscles, sharp fangs, or long claws. Natural selection equips prey species with keen hearing, sight, and smell, the better to escape predators and pass on their genes to the next generation. Such favourable adaptations accumulate in the genomes of both prey and predator species.
In this sense, cumulative mutations amount to a kind of progress, even though natural selection has no inherent sense of direction. Suppose keener hearing prevents a prey species such as a rabbit from getting eaten because it can hear an approaching predator and escape to safety under bramble bushes. Then keener hearing marks an improvement, or “progress,” over the previous state of hearing, which would not have been keen enough to enable the rabbit to hear the predator creep close enough to pounce and kill the unfortunate rabbit.
Progress means usefulness of the adaptation in the evolutionary arms race. If a mutation results in keener hearing and saves rabbits from getting caught and eaten, then it’s likely to remain as an adaptation. If another mutation shows up in some unlucky rabbit that reverses hearing sensitivity to the previous state, that individual rabbit will likely get eaten before it passes on the mutated gene, thus preventing the reversal of evolutionary “progress” from spreading to other rabbits.