Evolution of the “window” (original) (raw)
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Interface focus, 2017
This paper briefly describes process metaphysics, and argues that it is better suited for describing life than the more standard thing, or substance, metaphysics. It then explores the implications of process metaphysics for conceptualizing evolution. After explaining what it is for an organism to be a process, the paper takes up the Hull/Ghiselin thesis of species as individuals and explores the conditions under which a species or lineage could constitute an individual process. It is argued that only sexual species satisfy these conditions, and that within sexual species the degree of organization varies. This, in turn, has important implications for species' evolvability. One important moral is that evolution will work differently in different biological domains.
This article presents a general theory of the evolution of the evolutionary mechanisms that discover and perpetuate adaptations in living systems. I propose that new evolutionary mechanisms arise because they overcome the limitation in the ability of evolutionary mechanisms that operate at the level of individual entities to systematically discover beneficial cooperative arrangements between the individuals. Evolutionary mechanisms that arise to overcome this limitation are hierarchical in structure. This is because the limitation can be comprehensively overcome by a form of organization in which arrangements intervene across a dynamic of individuals to sustain beneficial cooperative adaptations. These intervening arrangements must be in hierarchical relationship with the dynamic of interacting individuals if they are to escape the limitations of the evolutionary processes that operate at the level of individuals in the dynamic. Variation in these interventions, and sorting of this variation on the basis of its benefit to the organization, will allow beneficial cooperative adaptations to be discovered and sustained. The repeated arising of evolutionary mechanisms in this way produces the familiar nested hierarchies of living processes, and, as each new level of organization is formed, extends the scope in space and time of cooperation among living processes. The paper identifies other key metaevolutionary trends within and across levels of organization of living processes, and considers the evolution of human organization from this metaevolutionary perspective.
In contrast to the traditional relational semiotics, biosemiotics decisively deviates towards dynamical aspects of signs at the evolutionary and developmental time scales. The analysis of sign dynamics requires constructivism (in a broad sense) to explain how new components such as subagents, sensors, effectors, and interpretation networks are produced by developing and evolving organisms. Semiotic networks that include signs, tools, and subagents are multilevel, and this feature supports the plasticity , robustness, and evolvability of organisms. The origin of life is described here as the emergence of simple self-constructing semiotic networks that progressively increased the diversity of their components and relations. Primitive organisms have no capacity to classify and track objects; thus, we need to admit the existence of proto-signs that directly regulate activities of agents without being associated with objects. However, object recognition and handling became possible in eukaryotic species with the development of extensive rewritable epigenetic memory as well as sensorial and effector capacities. Semiotic networks are based on sequential and recursive construction, where each step produces components (i.e., agents, scaffolds, signs, and resources) that are needed for the following steps of construction. Construction is not limited to repair and reproduction of what already exists or is unambiguously encoded, it also includes production of new components and behaviors via learning and evolution. A special case is the emergence of new levels of organization known as metasystem transition. Multilevel semiotic networks reshape the phenotype of organisms by combining a mosaic of features developed via learning and evolution of cooperating and/or conflicting subagents.
A new conceptual framework is proposed to situate and integrate the parallel theories of Turchin, Powers, Campbell and Simon. A system is defined as a constraint on variety. This entails a 2 × 2 × 2 classification scheme for "higher-order" systems, using the dimensions of constraint, (static) variety, and (dynamic) variation. The scheme distinguishes two classes of metasystems from supersystems and other types of emergent phenomena. Metasystems are defined as constrained variations of constrained variety. Control is characterized as a constraint exerted by a separate system. The emergence of hierarchical systems is motivated by evolutionary principles. The positive feedback between variety and constraint, which underlies the "branching growth of the penultimate level", leads to the interpretation of metasystem transitions as phases of accelerated change in a continuous evolutionary progression toward increasing variety. The most important MST's in the history of evolution are reinterpreted in this framework:
Beyond Systems Theoretical Explanations of an Organism’s Becoming: A Process Philosophical Approach, 2014
This essay may be read as an application of one of the most central ideas in Whitehead's work: that the main task of metaphysical schemes of thought is to criticize scientific abstractions or, more specifically, to criticize the confusion of something abstract with something concrete in different sciences. This will be discussed in the context of a classical topic of natural philosophy, the equifinality of an organism's generation. This is a problem which has not adequately been considered by philosophers in recent decades. Instead, they focused their attention on supposedly more interesting issues, such as the evolution of the species, the generation of life and above all the nature of consciousness. Unfortunately, the choice of focus ignored the fact that the metabolism of even the simplest bacterium is more than just a very complex physicochemical system.This essay is divided into two parts. The aim of the first part is to show that thinking embryogenesis only in terms of efficient causation, which operates on the basis of the theory of nonlinear dynamical systems, poses serious problems. Failing to recognize this would be a clear case of Whitehead's "fallacy of misplaced concreteness," meaning the confusion of the abstract with the concrete. In an attempt to overcome this problem, the second part of the article presents an alternative approach to teleology which I call "mentalistic teleology."
Approaches to Biosemiotics, 2023
In this chapter we will discuss the biosemiotic view of evolution. In order to understand the role that sign action may play in the evolution of organisms, we attempt to provide an explanation encompassing an overview of what biosemiotics does, how its concepts play out in a naturalistic view of organisms, and what dimension these concepts open in regard to functional explanations in biology. The semiotic view of evolution is informed by the consideration that meaning-making is an essential feature of organisms with a causal role in behavior and evolution both at the individual level and in long time scales. Biosemiotic theory tries to uncover how exactly meaning-making builds and is built upon networks of relevance for organisms that act as markers for behavior, which is in turn inherited and an active participant in the long-term changes of organisms.
From Darwinian Metaphysics towards Understanding the Evolution of Evolutionary Mechanisms
2012
This work proposes and elaborates a philosophy of nature that, although influenced by Darwinism, aims ultimately to transcend Darwinism. My particular focus is on two purified versions of Darwinism: gene-Darwinism and process-Darwinism. The essential claims of these two approaches are first explicated and then subjected to criticism. This elaborated critique is not exogeneous to Darwinism, proposing another philosophy of nature from the outset; instead an immanent critique is developed, starting from within the investigated Darwinian paradigms. Focussing on internal inconsistencies of these paradigms, reveals tendencies that will lead us beyond Darwinism.But not only theories can transcend themselves, the central claim of this work is that Nature, due to inner or outer necessities, continually transcends itself, not only in its products but in its evolutionary mechanisms. As theories are moulded not only by external forces, but by inherent tendencies as well (where the rules of change may sometimes depend on the theory itself), also evolution may depend on evolved evolutionary mechanisms.
Evolutionary Transitions and Top-Down Causation
Top-down causation has been suggested to occur at all scales of biological organization as a mechanism for explaining the hierarchy of structure and causation in living systems (Campbell, 1974; Auletta et al., 2008; Davies, 2006b, 2012; Ellis, 2012). Here we propose that a transition from bottom-up to top-down causation – mediated by a reversal in the flow of information from lower to higher levels of organization, to that from higher to lower levels of organization – is a driving force for most major evolutionary transitions. We suggest that many major evolutionary transitions might therefore be marked by a transition in causal structure. We use logistic growth as a toy model for demonstrating how such a transition can drive the emergence of collective behavior in replicative systems. We then outline how this scenario may have played out in those major evolutionary transitions in which new, higher levels of organization emerged, and propose possible methods via which our hypothesis might be tested.