Project
From Evo Devo Universe
[edit] Project Description
“If life follows from [primordial] soup with causal dependability, the laws of nature encode a hidden subtext, a cosmic imperative, which tells them: “Make life!” And, through life, its by-products: mind, knowledge, understanding. It means that the laws of the universe have engineered their own comprehension. This is a breathtaking vision of nature, magnificent and uplifting in its majestic sweep. I hope it is correct. It would be wonderful if it were correct. ...if it is, it represents a shift in the scientific world-view as profound as that initiated by Copernicus and Darwin put together.” -- Paul Davies, The Fifth Miracle, 1999, Simon and Schuster, p 246.
I am suggesting that there may come a time when physics will be willing to learn from biology as biology has been willing to learn from physics, a time when physics will accept the endless diversity of nature as one of its central themes, just as biology has accepted the unity of the genetic coding apparatus as one of its central dogmas. -- Freeman Dyson, Infinite in All Directions, 1988, Harper, p 47.
The idea that the universe and its physical laws may be fine-tuned to have the precise values that make life emerge has been championed for decades by scholars of the anthropic principle, a topic that some scientists, including Lee Smolin (Scientific alternatives to the anthropic principle, 2004), contend cannot yield any falsifiable predictions, and therefore cannot be a part of science, at least in its present formulation, and in the present early state of cosmology and astrophysics. Such problematic yet intriguing hypotheses are part of a broader striving by scientists, complexity theorists, and philosophers to articulate a 'meta-Darwinian' theory of universal change that predicts certain systemic aspects of complexity's emergence as statistically probable, arising from the unique parameters (laws, constants, conditions) of our particular universe, and at the same time seeks to reconcile this hypothesis with the prodigious evidence for the stochastic, contingent Darwinian mechanisms of emergence observed in living systems at multiple scales. This striving is today found at the edge of major scientific disciplines and in interdisciplinary inquiry, philosophy of science, and the writings of independent scholars. The scientific need to organize and make accessible the literature, evidence, and arguments of those proposing such articulation and reconciliation is great.
Fortunately, recent developments in evolutionary developmental ("evo-devo") biology, astrobiology, and cosmology have provided promising new avenues of research for meta-Darwinian investigations. Consider the following insight from evo-devo biology: two genetically identical twins are unpredictably unique in their stochastically-determined dynamics and structure (organogenesis, fingerprints, neural connectivity, etc.) yet predictably similar in a range of systemically convergent emergent aspects (gross physical appearance, key psychological attributes, lifespan, etc.). A number of nonbiological processes, such as snowflake formation, and biological ones, such as brain emergence, can be modeled as both locally chaotic, competitive, and contingently adaptive, or evolutionary while also systemically statistically predictable, or developmental.
By analogy, to what degree might we model our universe as another evolutionary and developmental nonlinear complex adaptive system? Would two initially parametrically identical universes each exhibit unpredictably unique and creative evolutionary differentiation over their lifespan, and at the same time, a broad set of predictable developmental milestones and shared structure and function between them? Such investigations may yield insights into both evolutionary and developmental (evo devo) processes operating at multiple levels in complex systems.
We can today find tentative evidence and hypotheses for both evolutionary and developmental process at all levels of universal scale, in the emergence of classical from quantum physics (Wojciech Zurek and Quantum Darwinism) in stellar nucleosynthesis (George Wallerstein and others), in models of RNA and cellular biogenesis (D. Eric Smith and others), in brain development (Gerald Edelman and Neural Darwinism and others), in cognitive selection (William Calvin, Donald T. Campbell, Daniel Dennett, and others), in evolutionary psychology (Jerome Barkow, Leda Cosmides, Michael Ghiselin, John Tooby and others), in cultural or 'memetic' selection (Robert Aunger, Susan Blackmore, Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett and others), in evolutionary computation and 'artificial life' (Chris Adami, John Holland, John Koza, Chris Langton, and others) in general technological evolutionary development (David Brin, Kevin Kelly, Ray Kurzweil and others) and even in the evolutionary development of the universe itself (Lee Smolin and Cosmological Natural Selection (CNS), James N. Gardner and early hypotheses of 'CNS with Intelligence' (CNS-I)). Work in each of these domains has often stressed evolutionary over developmental mechanisms, but in each case, tentative models of both evolutionary and developmental process and their interactions can be usefully defined and discussed. There are also a number of fascinating hypotheses for potentially developmental architecture and processes in our universe, including scale relativity (Jean Chaline, Laurent Nottale, and others), self-similar hierarchy (Robert L. Oldershaw and others), free energy rate density and cosmic expansion (Eric Chaisson), flow maximization in living and technological systems (Adrian Bejan and constructal theory), developmental ascendancy (James A. Coffman, Robert Ulanowicz), generic hierarchy and scale in ecology (John Bonner, Geoffrey West, and others), entropy production and infodynamics (Roderick Dewar, Stanley Salthe, and others), anthropic philosophy of cosmology (John D. Barrow, Paul Davies, Lawrence M. Krauss, Martin J. Rees, and others), and the interaction of cybernetic systems and evolution to produce self-organization in many domains (Carlos Gershenson, Francis Heylighen and others) which show great promise and deserve wider analysis and attention.
Furthermore, innovative scholars in the fields of chemical self-organization (Stewart A. Newman and dynamical patterning modules (DPMs)), in evo-devo and theoretical biology (Werner Callebaut, Sean B. Carroll, Christian de Duve, Gerd B. Müller, Massimo Pigliucci, Richard Reid, Stanley Salthe, Günter P. Wagner and others), in epigenetics (Eva Jablonka and others), in niche construction (Benjamin Kerr, Kevin N. Laland, John Odling-Smee) in evolutionary convergence (Simon Conway Morris and others), in evolutionary transitions (Eörs Szathmary) in evolutionary escalation (Geerat Vermeij) and related areas are pointing the way toward an "extended evolutionary synthesis" in the biological sciences, one that situates neo-Darwinian theory and gene-centric natural selection within a more complex and long-range explanatory and predictive evolutionary and developmental (evo-devo) paradigm. We have seen similar theoretical advances in the previous century. When classical physics, as powerful as it is, came to be understood as a subset of general relativity, we gained a theoretical framework with far greater long-range explanatory and predictive value. As evo-devo life scientists point the way to a new, meta-Darwinian synthesis in biological systems, with (intrinsically unpredictable) macroevolutionary and (statistically predictable) macrodevelopmental processes operating over four billion years of Earth's history, we may also gain insights into the nature and extent of quasi-evolutionary and quasi-developmental process at the universal scale.
Finally, hypotheses of universal evolutionary development must seek to better understand not only life but the role of intelligence within the universe. Theories of information and computation which attempt to translate between the scale spectrum of particular sciences, between classical and algorithmic information theory, and new cosmological models of our universe as a computational entity may aid our early endeavors. There is no a priori supposition that our universe is “alive” or “computational” in these investigations. Vitalistic and technologic analogies in complexity science may be useful cognitive tools, but only to a point. Likewise, there may be sharp limits to the generalizability of evolution and development as processes of change operating at multiple scales, and in representations possible in current nonlinear science. Nevertheless, humanity is very early in these investigations and we see much potential ahead.
[edit] Universal Evolutionary Development vs. Universal Darwinism
Universal evolutionary development (aka evo devo universe) investigations include evidence and hypotheses of universal selection, also called universal Darwinism, but go beyond this to also ask fundamental questions with respect to directional, hierarchical, and perhaps cyclical processes of universal development that are likely to coexist and interact with evolutionary process. Early 'grand synthetic' models of this type were pioneered by Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Vladimir Vernadsky, Ludwig Von Bertalanffy, Alfred North Whitehead, and other twentieth-century philosophers. There are today notable successors to these theorists (Ervin Laszlo and others), yet many of our synthetic models remain less well-grounded than modern science demands. Such models are often called hypotheses of 'universal evolution'. This is a misnomer. They are actually hypotheses of universal evolutionary development, as they are efforts to describe both evolutionary and developmental process at the universal scale. Though the distinction between these two processes was and still is rarely clearly made, both terms (evolution and development) are used extensively by these theorists and their successors to describe universal change.
By contrast, models of universal Darwinism do not, as a rule, admit to any inherent trajectory to the process of universal change, other than the traditional features of evolutionary process (increasing variation, increasing specialization, etc.). As such they fail to address such apparently developmental features as the accelerating emergence of hierarchy in the universal, biological, and human-historical record. Models of 'universal evolution,' when updated and named appropriately as universal evolutionary development, can and do address such features.
As in modern evo-devo biology, modern hypotheses of universal evolutionary development must attempt to investigate and describe the broad evidence of multi-level selection operating not just in biological systems, but also in pre-biological systems and in human culture and technology. But at the same time, they must seek to describe the many ways evolutionary processes are likely to be constrained and conserved by an equally fundamental set of processes of universal development, just as evolutionary processes appear to be constrained and conserved by developmental architecture and process in all biological systems.
In conclusion, evo devo universe investigations are an attempt at describing the state of hypotheses in universal evolutionary development, as a tentative 'next step' beyond the hypothesis of universal Darwinism toward a meta-Darwinian theory of universal change. Thank you for adding your insight and critique to our community. Please see Themes and Questions for more on research themes and questions being considered by the EDU community.
