How Evolution Evolves
A book in progress by Ash Ryan — the first of a planned five book trilogy (Hitchhiker’s Guide or Incerto style) about integration and innovation in Life, the Universe, and Everything.
I propose that evolution does have a direction, that evolutionary progress does exist—or to be precise, that it has two directions, one emerging from the other and then interacting with it, competing and collaborating with it, to give rise to definite patterns in long-term evolutionary trends. My basic thesis is that at the most fundamental level evolution moves toward increased differentiation or specialization, becoming more narrowly adapted to a particular environmental niche—but a higher-order process emerges out of this creating a second evolutionary direction toward greater integration or generalization, synthesizing a broader range of functions and enabling a population of organisms to become more adaptable to a broader range of niches. Call these two distinct directional evolutionary processes “involution” and “exvolution”, respectively. And over longer time scales, these two processes themselves compete with each other in a higher-order level of selection, and the integrative, exvolutionary processes generally win out (the history of life is full of examples of this), so a pattern emerges that can be clearly defined at a qualitative level and perhaps even quantified.
Darwin largely answered the big questions about where we came from and how we got here—I want to complete his work by answering questions about where we’re heading and how we’ll get there.
Posts previewing the book’s framework are collected under [the series link]. New posts go out by email:
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