The naive understanding of evolution is that nature is directed and purposeful and that humans are its inevitable, penultimate product. Pirsig's understanding of biological evolution is naive in this sense. Actually, this naive view of evolution is the most popular view among non-scientists and it has permeated the culture so much that even scientists fall under its spell.

Stephen Jay Gould lays this all out very nicely in the first few chapters of his book, Full House (1996). He spends a few pages detailing how this view is epitomized by the psychologist M. Scott Peck in his book, The Road Less Travelled (1978), which was on the NYTimes best-seller list for over 600 weeks and is, by his account, the highest grossing book of all time, by far! Gould disagrees with Peck on two major points.

First Peck claims that life is a miracle because evolution itself should not occur given that it runs counter to the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics (that the universe is running down and self-organizing mechanisms should be impossible because of that). The reason that thinking is flawed, Gould points out, is that Earth is not a closed system but is constantly being bathed in energy by the sun. So as long as the sun is shining, planet Earth can buck entropy. (Pirsig, who apparently has heard this argument but misses the point of it entirely, doesn't think it's the sun, because he says if you leave a chemistry professor out in the sun too long it will turn him into a decayed blob of chemicals.)

Second, Peck trumpets the interpretation of biological evolution we are calling naive.

The process of evolution has been a development of organisms from lower to higher and higher states of complexity, differentiation, and organization.... And so it goes, up the scale of evolution, a scale of increasing complexity and organization and differentiation, with man who possesses an enormous cerebral cortex and extraordinarily complex behavioral patterns, being, as far as we can tell, at the top.
- Peck
The quote is true enough but it has a mischievous bias about how life should be rated, no doubt caused by a human-centric perspective that is hard to lay aside. By some measures, viruses and bacteria top the list of life's success story, being the most ancient and plentiful, whereas mammals are a fleeting blip on the outer leaves of the branch of life.

Putting these two together, the implicit assumption of the naive view is that some mystical or unknown force of nature is thrusting life "upward", fighting the force of entropy. Peck diagrams life's history as a pyramid, where the most plentiful, simplest organisms form the base and the rarer, more complex organisms are higher up with man at the apex.

Inside the pyramid I have placed an arrow to symbolize this thrusting evolutionary force, the 'SOMETHING' that has so successfully and consistently defied 'natural law' over millions upon millions of generations and that must itself represent natural law as yet UNDEFINED. [caps mine]
- Peck
To students of the MOQ, this "undefined something" should sound eerily familiar. It's what Pirsig calls Dynamic Quality. Pirsig, like Peck, believes that laws of nature need to be violated or circumvented for life to express itself. Only in this way can atoms form chemistry professors and birds fly into the sky. In typical bizarro fashion, Pirsig proposes that we measure the degree of evolution of an organism by the degree to which it disobeys the law of gravity. (Presumably we could only measure things this way after Newton, since he created the law of gravity and gravity itself.) Therefore birds are more evolved than chimps or slugs. I'm sure he thinks the Indian's reverence for birds also gives this idea credibility.

Anyway, to counter the naive view, Gould proposes that life started out being as simple as it could be, and would have gotten more complex even if only random processes "designed" it. Like a drunkard on a random walk on a sidewalk, with a building on one side and the street on the other, the drunk is bound to fall off the curb at some point. From a bird's eye view, it looks like the drunk has a purpose and a direction - it always starts at the wall and moves away from it toward the street, given enough time. Gould claims this is a fair analogy to the way organisms evolve. They start out at a "wall" of simplicity that can't be simpler, and if they are going to change at all, the change will be toward more complexity (the direction of the "street"). The analogy is also accurate in that it correctly models the fact that simple organisms far outnumber complex organisms - the drunkard spends most of its time near the wall.

Clearly, Gould's is a simplified explanation and it has come under attack from Robert Wright, who wrote a book called Nonzero (2000). Wright's thesis is that evolution is driven by non-zero sum games, in which symbiosis between organisms in nature, and people and institutions in society, wins out over a dog-eat-dog world of zero-sum games with only winners and losers, and this is responsible for getting the world to where it is today. On the issue of directionality, Wright and Gould agree that new genes are generated randomly, but Wright believes the odds of that gene surviving are greater if it results in a more complex organism, whereas Gould believes there is no preference for complexity. Wright says that Gould ignores mechanisms that propel evolution toward complexity, such as "arms races" amongst organisms. See www.nonzero.org/newyorker.htm

Wright doesn't claim any need for a mystical force to drive evolution toward greater complexity, but in an email exchange between Wright and Steven Pinker about Nonzero, Pinker suggests that it could be read that way, depending on how much you read into the meaning of goal-orientedness.

Pirsig believes the MOQ is compatible with teleological theories like Creationism and Intelligent Design, and natural selection.

There is no quarrel whatsoever between the Metaphysics of Quality and the Darwinian Theory of Evolution. Neither is there a quarrel between the Metaphysics of Quality and the "teleological" theories which insist that life has some purpose.
- Pirsig, Lila ch. 11
The second line is clearly true. The first line isn't clearly true. In fact it seems to be false, considering what we know about the majority's view of natural selection, which states that random processes are responsible for new traits in genes. It seems inconsistent to have any random event be acceptable within an MOQ belief system, as DQ is the "source of all things", and that source is moral, not random. It seems Pirsig did not examine or understand this issue deeply enough when he wrote this or in his exuberance for acceptance he tried to appeal to all camps.

Glenn's Postmortem MOQ Page