Title in English: Limits to Darwinism
The first edition of the book met with a great response, inspired a number of talks and programmes and soon required a reprint. This confirmed the author's wish to draw attention to the numerous proposals to develop or even revise neo-Darwinism in contemporary evolutionary biology.
Jiří Vácha now presents the second edition. He has completely revised the chapters Functions of Consciousness and The Trap of Skepticism. The text of the other chapters has also been changed and updated. It has been shortened and condensed. The author has added a new chapter 14 containing five appendices, previously only available online. As a result, the book can now serve as an all-round introduction to the fundamental problems of evolutionary biology. It provides a comprehensive assessment of contemporary Darwinism ("synthetic theory of evolution") from a structuralist and philosophically phenomenological position. It emphasizes the capacity of organisms to experience - in a broad sense their consciousness. Consciousness cannot be classified among the processes accessible to biological methods, and therefore it cannot be shown that consciousness is an adaptation to environmental conditions: a Darwinianly shaped world could exist without pleasure and distress, the basic coordinates of life. Darwinism is not wrong within its dsicipline, but its horizon has limits: natural selection is not the sole explanation of the mystery of life.
