Evolutionary development: A universal perspective

Abstract

This paper offers a general systems definition of the phrase “evolutionary development” and an introduction to its application to autopoetic (self-reproducing) complex systems, including the universe as a system. Evolutionary development, evo devo or ED, is a term that can be used by philosophers, scientists, historians, and others as a replacement for the more general term “evolution,” whenever a scholar thinks experimental, selectionist, stochastic, and contingent or “evolutionary” processes, and also convergent, statistically deterministic (probabilistically predictable), or “developmental” processes, including replication, may be simultaneously contributing to selection and adaptation in any complex system, including the universe as a system. Like living systems, our universe broadly exhibits both contingent and deterministic components, in all historical epochs and at all levels of scale. It has a definite birth and it is inevitably senescing toward heat death. The idea that we live in an “evo devo universe,” one that has self-organized over past replications both to generate multilocal evolutionary variation (experimental diversity) and to convergently develop and pass to future generations selected aspects of its accumulated complexity (“intelligence”), is an obvious hypothesis. Yet today, few cosmologists or physicists, even among theorists of universal replication and the multiverse, have entertained the hypothesis that our universe may be both evolving and developing (engaging in both unpredictable experimentation and goal-driven, teleological, directional change and a replicative life cycle), as in living systems. Our models of universal replication, like Lee Smolin’s cosmological natural selection (CNS), do not yet use the concept of universal development, or refer to development literature. I will argue that some variety of evo devo universe models must emerge in coming years, including models of CNS with Intelligence (CNSI), which explore the ways emergent intelligence can be expected to constrain and direct “natural” selection, as it does in living systems. Evo devo models are one of several early approaches to an Extended Evolutionary Synthesis (EES), one that explores adaptation in both living and nonliving replicators. They have much to offer as a general approach to adaptive complexity, and may be required to understand several important phenomena under current research, including galaxy formation, the origin of life, the fine-tuned universe hypothesis, possible Earthlike and life fecundity in astrobiology, convergent evolution, the future of artificial intelligence, and our own apparent history of unreasonably smooth and resilient acceleration of both total and “leading edge” adapted complexity and intelligence growth, even under frequent and occasionally extreme past catastrophic selection events. If they are to become better validated in living systems and in nonliving adaptive replicators, including stars, prebiotic chemistry, and the universe as a system, they will require both better simulation capacity and advances in a variety of theories, which I shall briefly review.