Making Space

Abstract

In the process of “buying” time, life not only disturbs material space but creates an abstract space specifying the capacity to engage functionally with the surroundings. This capacity space emerges from the inheritance system, which provides the material information and therefore causal capacity for organisms to impose themselves on their surroundings for survival and reproduction. The realm of all possible inheritances represents potential capacity; the realm of actual inheritances is realized capacity. In the evolving expanding space, realized capacity grows but potential capacity grows even more, ensuring an ever-present realm of possibilities—an “adjacent possible”—for the inheritance system to explore given opportunities presented by the nature of the conditions. Opportunity space emerges from the conditions, but capacity space (nature of the organism) limits how these opportunities may be used. Fitness space is the intersection between capacity and opportunity, the subset of realized opportunity space that supports survival and reproduction. The portion of fundamental fitness space accessed by organisms at any given time and place is realized fitness space; the difference between these is proportional to how “sloppy” fitness space is, i.e., how much capacity there is to do something new when conditions change. Within sloppy fitness space, the historically conservative and largely autonomous nature of inheritance produces reproductive over-run, creating natural selection in proportion to the degree of conflict between organisms and the environment (i.e., Darwin’s Necessary Misfit). The primary mechanism for life to resolve this conflict is ecological fitting, an umbrella term for a fundamental phenomenon that allows living systems to cope with the conditions by exploring novel portions of fitness space using preexisting information they inherited from their ancestors.