The conventional view of evolution is an "inside-out" approach concerning the action of internal biochemical mechanisms constructing a vehicle of varying parameters around itself to further its own replication.
If we were to watch this process contained in a bubble in which there was no negative feedback - each individual was inviolate with regard to its fellows and nothing was ever killed and nothing ever died of its own accord - and there were no issues of resource scarcity or competition - then the only seeming 'direction' we ever might be able to observe the total population heading would be one of speed of replication. The highest proportion of the population of such a bubble would always be the phenotype which replicated the fastest.
This would be pure "inside-out" evolution, which has no regard for external enviromental factors.
However, of course, no such thing exists. Death always weilds his scythe. The ultimate critic, The ultimate aesthete, with his own unchanging criteria - "
Does it work..?"; "
Does it work better..?"
But then, as the vehicles become more complex, and compete, various different fundamental schisms occur.
Small - in the form of parasites and bacteria, and viruses at the extreme, does battle with
big - in the forms of plants and animals. And this leads, pretty much invariably, to sexual, rather than asexual reproduction.
A society of hermaphrodites - true equals in the sexual game of life - is unstable, invadable by specialists - This battle leads to yet another schism, this time within species themselves, rather than between - and usually the production of two distinct specialised sexual characters - the carrier and the impregnator - the female, and the male.
At this point, inside-out evolution begins to give way to outside-in - As competition shifts from the purely 'speciel phenotype vs. the enviroment' to 'Y vs. X'. Of course the internal component is never lost, but the external factors become ever more numerous.
Death alters his criteria from a simple "
Does it work..?" to a more convoluted addition "
Is it attractive..?" From there, it moves onto more bio-philosophic ground - From "
Is it attractive..?" to "
Is it trustworthy in its attractiveness..?"
Which shifts the ground to truth vs. deception played out in flesh.
However, once a species becomes sufficiently cognitively complex, and able to manipulate and mould its enviroment rather than simply be manipulated and moulded
by that enviroment... Then the outside truly becomes able to worm its way in.
The question then, after this short introduction - to what degree is it empirically valid to discuss evolution at the scale of not DNA, but of individual, and group behaviour..?
To make my own position clear - I believe that in a sentient species such as ourselves, indeed in any sentient, social and technologied species, evolution curves back on itself, and becomes a loop - we create our own enviroment both physic and metaphysic, and evolve in accord with it - according to the 'suction' caused by the social and cultural topography apparant at any given time.
DNA, our old master, is relegated simply to a means, the ends now co-opted by the very vehicles it created to aid it.
