Abstract Darwin's ‘endless forms most beautiful’ was his testimony to the creative power of natural selection. Creativity, by definition, implies novelty: bringing into existence something which had never before existed. Novelty constitutes the grist for the mill of natural selection to refine those endless forms most beautiful. But whence evolutionary novelty? Since the rise of the Neodarwinian idea of gene selectionism, evolutionary novelty is supposed to arise through new presentation of selective environments and gene modification, reflecting Darwin's own ambition of creating a naturalistic explanation for the generation of his ‘endless forms most beautiful’. The Neodarwinian idea deprives organisms of their fundamental agency of purposefulness and intentionality, which are regarded as illusions rather than fundamental to life itself. Surprisingly, those fundamental attributes arise naturally from the thermodynamics of life combined with a proper understanding of the phenomenon of homeostasis. Adaptation as a purposeful phenomenon driven by organismal intelligence and self-knowledge emerges naturally from this, as well as a new perspective on the evolutionary origins of novel forms and functions.
J. Scott Turner (Thu,) studied this question.