Evolutionary Development and the VCRIS Model of Natural Selection

Abstract

This paper offers a systems definition of the phrase evolutionary development (evo devo, ED), and a few examples of generic evolutionary and developmental process in autopoetic (self-reproducing) systems. It introduces a toy conceptual model, the VCRIS evo devo model of natural selection, exploring autopoetic selection in both evolutionary and developmental terms. It includes an empirical observation, the 95/5 rule, generalized from observations in evo-devo biology, to offer a preliminary sketch of the dynamical interaction of evolutionary and developmental processes in living replicators. Autopoetic models may be applied to both to living systems and to nonliving adaptive replicators at many scales, even to the universe as a complex system, if it is a replicator in the multiverse. Evo devo models offer potentially fundamental dynamical and informational ways to understand autopoetic systems. If such models are to become validated in living systems, and generalized to nonliving autopoetic systems, they will require significant advances in both simulation and theory in coming years.