Three Principles of Complex Evolution

Ever considered exploring the deep end of evolutionary thought?

People often do not realise that once we leave the field of mathematics and physics (and by extension, chemistry) we are not left with many superb theories of nature. Naturally, there are many models and descriptions of the world to be found in biology, psychology, sociology, economics, and many more academic disciplines. However, as Roger Penrose pointed out, only very few can match the rigour and precision, as well as the predictive power of Newtonian mechanics, general relativity, or quantum mechanics. As a side note, Penrose points out that natural selection may qualify as the only superb theory from outside of theoretical physics, but notes that it lacks many predictive properties because it represents a type of general systems approach to science. This means that the theory may describe the overall dynamics of a system (such as the second law of thermodynamics) but it cannot make individual predictions on specific components of the system. Natural selection may inform us about the general need for reproductive fitness of a species, but it will not predict the exact adaptation that will take place per individual case in order to attain this fitness. I would argue that any theory outside of the natural sciences requires to be evolutionary to some extent in order to meet the standard of a robust theory. Economic speculations based on a restricted interpretation of recent data will hardly qualify as a rigorous practise (which does not mean that it won’t be practised in banks and governments), especially if there is a near infinite number of unknown confounding variables in such an analysis. This essay is not an introduction to evolution - as I am not a biologist - and such an introduction is quite easy to find elsewhere on the internet. I regard the evolution principle as a general systems method which entails fascinating properties and dynamics that some researchers and authors have explored in great depth. Instead, I want to highlight three of the most interesting and largely unknown aspects of evolutionary systems in this essay. May this journey be fruitful to those seeking to crack the code of evolving complexity.

1. Evolution evolves

The internet in the early 2000s brought forward an underground intellectual movement known as the dark enlightenment. This movement described itself as a neo-reactionary school of thought that affirmed the discoveries of the scientific revolution, but rejected the principles of democracy, equality, and social justice. The name itself comes from an essay by Nick Land titled the Dark Enlightenment which summarises his perspective of neo-reactionary thought. Land’s intellectual development has since undergone a fascinating transition: If only his neo-reactionary works are known, then one may be surprised to hear that he was once considered a leftist and to this day is well-respected in some left-wing circles (admittedly a more fringe version of leftist thought). His earlier works were written during his time at the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit at the University of Warwick. Other than his particularly cryptic and incomprehensible style of writing, his works gained attention due to their explicitly post-humanist or even anti-humanist undertones.

Land has also undergone all of the leftist paradigm-shifts within philosophy: Whilst sentimental conservatives still advocate the sovereignty of the individual, promulgated by classical liberalism, many leftist thinkers have undergone a structuralist or post-structuralist turn. The human, sovereign individual, or nation is no longer at the centre of theory, with rather a more distinctly systemic, or machinic approach having taken precedence. On the left, one of Land’s main influences, Gilles Deleuze is arguably one of the last great metaphysicians, who worked on synthesising Spinoza, Nietzsche and Marx into an idiosyncratic theory about capital, schizophrenia, and the body without organs. Nick Land has gone along this entire journey of philosophical shifts within the leftist sphere of thought, only to end up abandoning the sphere altogether. Once the notion of the human has been abolished, as well as grand narratives about the fate of humanity, we are left with pure production.

Nothing human makes it out of the near future.

-Nick Land

The human being is eradicated by the ever-accelerating process of techno-capitalist production. Even the critique of capitalism is itself a feature of capitalism that seeks to revolutionise its own modes of production by abolishing the prevailing ones. What remains is the pure production and reproduction of a system of so-called desiring machines. As a result, machines and humans are not to be regarded as separate from one another. Instead, an interwoven network of cybernetic entities will employ (or already employs) neo-eugenicist methods to reproduce humanoid organisms according to the desires of its own processes. The rediscovery of eugenics in this age of bio- and neuro-technologies constitutes a significant shift away from traditional ideologies, often rooted in a notion of human dignity and value.

Why am I writing this exposition on Nick Land? Because he quotes a biologist by the name of John H. Campbell who once had a blog of his own that was concerned with eugenics. Whilst I do not know much about Campbell, nor do I condone his positions as a whole, there is a valuable lesson to be found in the passage Land decided to quote.

Biologists suspect that new forms evolve rapidly from very tiny outgroups of individuals (perhaps even a single fertilized female, Mayr, 1942) at the fringe of an existing species. There the stress of an all but uninhabitable environment, forced inbreeding among isolated family members, "introgression" of foreign genes from neighboring species, lack of other members of the species to compete against or whatever, promotes a major reorganization of the genomic program, possibly from modest change in gene structure. Nearly all of these transmogrified fragments of species die out, but an occasional one is fortunate enough to fit a new viable niche. It prospers and expands into a new species. Its conversion into a statistically constrained gene pool then stabilizes the species from further evolutionary change. Established species are far more notable for their stasis than change. Even throwing off a new daughter species does not seem to change an existing species. No one denies that species can gradually transform and do so to various extents, but this so-called "anagenesis" is relatively unimportant compared to geologically-sudden major saltation in the generation of novelty.

Three implications are important.
1. Most evolutionary change is associated with the origin of new species.
2. Several modes of evolution may operate simultaneously. In this case the most effective dominates the process.
3. Tiny minorities of individuals do most of the evolving instead of the species as a whole.

A second important characteristic of evolution is self-reference (Campbell, 1982). The Cartesian cartoon of an autonomous external "environment" dictating the form of a species like a cookie cutter cutting stencils from sheets of dough is dead, dead wrong. The species molds its environment as profoundly as the environment "evolves" the species. In particular, the organisms cause the limiting conditions of the environment over which they compete. Therefore the genes play two roles in evolution. They are the targets of natural selection and they also ultimately induce and determine the selection pressures that act upon them. This circular causality overwhelms the mechanical character of evolution. Evolution is dominated by feedback of the evolved activities of organisms on their evolution.

The third seminal realization is that evolution extends past the change in organisms as products of evolution to change in the process itself. Evolution evolves (Jantsch, 1976; Balsh, 1989; Dawkins, 1989; Campbell, 1993). Evolutionists know this fact but have never accorded the fact the importance that it deserves because it is incommensurate with Darwinism. Darwinists, and especially modern neodarwinists, equate evolution to the operation of a simple logical principle, one that is prior to biology: Evolution is merely the Darwinian principle of natural selection in action, and this is what the science of evolution is about. Since principles cannot change with time or circumstances, evolution must be fundamentally static.

Of course, biological evolution is not like this at all. It is an actual complex process, not a principle. The way that it takes place can, and indisputably does, change with time. This is of utmost importance because the process of evolution advances as it proceeds (Campbell, 1986). Preliving matter in the earth's primordial soup was able to evolve only by subdarwinian "chemical" mechanisms. Once these puny processes created gene molecules with information for their self-replication then evolution was able to engage natural selection. Evolution then wrapped the self-replicating genomes within self-replicating organisms to control the way that life would respond to the winds of selection from the environment. Later, by creating multicellular organisms, evolution gained access to morphological change as an alternative to slower and less versatile biochemical evolution. Changes in the instructions in developmental programs replaced changes in enzyme catalysts. Nervous systems opened the way for still faster and more potent behavioral, social and cultural evolution. Finally, these higher modes produced the prerequisite organization for rational, purposeful evolution, guided and propelled by goal-directed minds. Each of these steps represented a new emergent level of evolutionary capability.

Thus, there are two distinct, but interwoven, evolutionary processes. I call them "adaptive evolution" and "generative evolution." The former is familiar Darwinian modification of organisms to enhance their survival and reproductive success. Generative evolution is entirely different. It is the change in a process instead of structure. Moreover, that process is ontological. Evolution literally means "to unfold" and what is unfolding is the capacity to evolve. Higher animals have become increasingly adept at evolving. In contrast, they are not the least bit fitter than their ancestors or the lowest form of microbe. Every species today has had exactly the same track record of survival; on average, every higher organism alive today still will leave only two offspring, as was the case a hundred million years ago, and modern species are as likely to go extinct as were those in the past. Species cannot become fitter and fitter because reproductive success is not a cumulative parameter.

The full text can still be found on the internet archive for anyone interested. The point Land wanted to bring across with this quote is that once we remove the separation between human evolution and machine evolution we realise that the recent cultural developments including the rapid acceleration of economic production represents a continuation of evolution on the cultural sphere. Of course these ideas are not necessarily new. Famously, Samuel Butler claimed that human intelligence can only be understood as a symbiotic co-evolution between humans and machines. This idea was picked up by Deleuze and Guattari in Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Furthermore, Richard Dawkins’ two books The Selfish Gene and The Extended Phenotype in combination make a similar claim: In the last chapter of the former book, Dawkins introduces the notion of Memes (mimetic genes) which are cultural units that replicate in human minds in a similar manner as genes do. Additionally, in the latter book, Dawkins introduces the notion of the extended phenotype which is part of the environment though changed or altered for reproductive success. To give an example for both concepts, a bird may express certain sounds (audible memes in this case) which replicate well based on how successful they are in attracting a mate or the mother’s attention. Moreover, a bird may build a nest in its lifetime, but the quality and structure will determine its reproductive success in life. The same principle applies to cultural memes in humans, only that the cognitive development of our brains has enabled humans to vastly accelerate the reproduction and mutation of memes as well as the development of techniques for altering the environment.

In conclusion, we can observe evolution as a process rather than a rigid principle. This trend is the continuous evolution of evolution’s own principles. There are various improvements to the process of selection that have immensely increased the speed at which adaptation occurs. Most notably, we can name the emergence of sexual selection as an accelerator. The selection of partners based on traits has enabled a pre-cursor of eugenicist thought to emerge. Mates are now able to directly select for traits that are deemed worthy of reproduction. This has led to natural selection already happening within the lifetime of one individual organism, rather than needing several generations of selection environmental selection pressures. As a result, a new level of environment emerged, namely the social environment which would soon rise to become the most important part of the environment, as long as extreme natural disasters were not at play.

2. The Fractal Nature of Selection

Proceeding to the next author in the neo-reactionary sphere we must not leave out another big name, namely Curtis Yarvin, otherwise known as Mencius Moldbug. In contrast to those discussed previously, his writings are more concerned with politics and the ideological structure of power. Importantly, Yarvin adopts the ideas of Richard Dawkins in order to bolster his explanation of the ideology behind the current power structure that he calls the Cathedral. Yarvin describes the current dominant ideology among the ranks of power (i.e. universalism or progressivism) as a memetic descendant of mainline protestant Christianity. He writes that Memplexes¹ such as Christianity don’t just disappear, but may evolve new ethics and virtues whilst simultaneously dropping the notion of God from their vocabulary. In this sense, Yarvin employs a concept developed by Dawkins and uses it against him, as he claims that Dawkins himself has necessarily fallen victim to a quasi-religious complex of memes. Moldbug describes this in detail in his aptly titled book How Dawkins got Pwned:

My belief is that Professor Dawkins is not just a Christian atheist. He is a Protestant atheist. And he is not just a Protestant atheist. He is a Calvinist atheist. And he is not just a Calvinist atheist. He is an Anglo-Calvinist atheist. In other words, he can be also described as a Puritan atheist, a Dissenter atheist, a Nonconformist atheist, an Evangelical atheist, etc, etc.
 
This cladistic taxonomy traces Professor Dawkins’ intellectual ancestry back about 400 years, to the era of the English Civil War. Except of course for the atheism theme, Professor Dawkins’ kernel is a remarkable match for the Ranter, Leveller, Digger, Quaker, Fifth Monarchist, or any of the more extreme English Dissenter traditions that flourished during the Cromwellian interregnum.
 
Frankly, these dudes were freaks. Maniacal fanatics. Any mainstream English thinker of the 17th, 18th or 19th century, informed that this tradition (or its modern descendant) is now the planet’s dominant Christian denomination, would regard this as a sign of imminent apocalypse. If you’re sure they’re wrong, you’re more sure than me.

To delve deeper, religions and ideologies are part of our ecosystem that enable us to live and thrive in human societies. In fact, this argument has been taken further. As I am focusing on intellectual underground figures, it is relevant to mention the so-called Intellectual Dark Web (IDW). The IDW got its name in reference to the dark web (the area of the internet that is inaccessible to popular search engines and hosts various forms of crime networks, secret information sites and fringe communities). In many ways the name is a misnomer, as the members of this IDW gained their popularity on public podcasts such as the Joe Rogan Experience. Although it hardly needs pointing out, the world’s most successful podcast that runs on the largest video platform is hardly a “darknet”. Regardless of the name, I would like to specifically focus on the evolutionary biologist Bret Weinstein from the IDW as he actually “pwned” Dawkins in person using Dawkins’ own theories (by now even Dawkins seems to have noticed the religious nature of secular ideologies).

Bret is not only relevant to mention here because of his the observation he made about Dawkins’ theories, but also because of the further analytical steps he makes with regard to strategies of natural selection. There has been a debate going on for a long time now within evolutionary discourse concerning how to explain altruistic and other behaviours can be explained although they do not appear to be unbeneficial for the survival and reproduction of the individual organism. There have been proponents of group selection such as David Sloan Wilson who advocated for a shift of focus towards the fitness and survival of peer groups rather than individual entities. Conversely, Dawkins’ approach leans in the other direction through his reductionist focus on gene selection (as the title “Selfish Gene” already suggests). Altruistic behaviour is explained by Dawkins via a principle called kin selection. According to this principle, altruistic behaviour towards people who share parts of your genes will ultimately lead to the increase of the overall amount of copies of your genes.

The complex-system perspective I am putting forward here is the exact problem of emergent level identification. From a theory-agnostic standpoint we need to attribute roughly equal ontological status to each level of analysis whether it be genes, individuals or groups. Moreover, the process of evolution and the acceleration thereof is contingent upon the emergence of multiple levels of evolution and these levels working in synthesis (be it harmony or competition). In this way we can claim that evolutionary systems exhibit a fractal nature. Fractals commonly refer to geometric patterns with a fractional number for its dimension, often exhibiting self-similar visual properties. This means that no matter how much you zoom in or zoom out, similar patterns will always be observed. The Mandelbrot Set is most famous, which contains psychedelic-seeming self—similar patterns when zoomed in upon.

This fractal nature of evolution is described by Weinstein in his notion of Lineage Selection. Lineage selection provides the framework for understanding evolution fractally, as a lineage can be any entity with a lineage of offspring, regardless of the level of analysis.

Concluding, we observe that evolution plays out on various emergent levels of scale simultaneously putting the theory even further into the sphere of general complex system analysis. We should no longer limit our evolutionary description to regular zoological or botanical (or mycological) considerations whenever we look at selection processes. Moreover, in combination with the first principle of complex evolution, we can note that new levels are constantly emerging and bringing about novel dynamics.

3. Long Live the (R)evolution

This last principle of complex evolution will be the shortest and perhaps most unknown idea within the evolutionary discourse. It was formulated by a French-Canadian streamer named Jean-François Gariépy, whose political and societal views shall be of no concern in this essay. In his book The Revolutionary Phenotype he argues that we are at the precipice of a potential revolution of unimaginable catastrophic consequences and that this revolution is most likely an inevitable evolutionary process that cannot be avoided. Like Land, he argues that evolution may accelerate past and beyond the human sphere until technology gains such a level of autonomy that the natural reproductive system of humans becomes a secondary minor partner in the relationship between humans and technics. Gariépy’s way of framing and describing it, however, stems from a strictly evolutionary perspective and implicitly claims an important property of complex systems. This property is the inherent openness to transformation. To take the argument from the second principle about lineages further, I pointed out that levels of scale have the same ontological status, which means in some sense each of them are equally “real”, but also equally illusory. The description and understanding of these levels is limited by our epistemic frame, meaning which elements we can observe and pay attention to. This frame is inherently bounded by the limits of what we can know about. Descriptions and models of emergent levels in complex systems may be good enough until an imprecision on the modeler’s part is so significant that the entire multi-level description of the system breaks down and we are confronted with chaos. An entirely new dynamic, or rather an entirely new understanding of the dynamic of the system may emerge from the chaos.

In his book Gariépy focuses in his book on what he calls phenotypic revolutions. He claims that they explain the emergence of life in its simplest forms and its successive complexification into higher levels. Initially, he focuses on the emergence of DNA as the primary replicator in all known life forms on earth. There are indications that the prevalence of DNA in biological life was not always the case. Instead, RNA had played the role of the main replicator in primitive organisms. Gariépy makes the argument that the adaptive cooperation between RNA and DNA progressively turned into a dependency, and ultimately a complete dominance of the latter over the former. His overall argument, however, also goes beyond the realm of biological life and states that this sort of revolution describes what happened when life itself emerged. Going further, he speculates that even the emergence of matter represents a similar form of quantum Darwinian revolution. To return to his claim about the apocalypse, Gariépy states that we are on the precipice of another phenotypic revolution, once digital replicators attain the ability to supplant our own. So far, machines are dependent on us for their own maintenance and reproduction. Moreover, most machines are still separate from our bodies and most of our reproduction still occurs “organically”. However, once it becomes more advantageous to employ the emerging technologies of robotics, neurotechnology, and biotechnologies such as gene-editing, matters will change. The human reproductive system may become obsolete due to the growth of laboratory produced foetuses with digitally reproduced and enhanced genomes. These augmented humanoids will necessarily outperform “natural” humans. Similarly, the autonomous cognitive system will be outperformed by a technically enhanced cyborg brain (this point is just my own addition as a neuroengineering graduate). A critique of Gariépy’s apocalyptic vision can be made from the standpoint of a general critique of organised human eugenics. The argument is simple: Eugenics works on farm animals and crops as they are bred for a particular purpose. Humans on the other hand have a complex multitude of purposes with unknown interrelations. Many purposes may be essentially unknown to us. The utility of certain traits and properties may be only visible once its absence is noted, as is the case with disbalances in ecosystems caused by the lack of a particular species. Other than arguments of bio-conservatism and safety concerns, a genuine argument can be made, questioning the practicality of technologically managed human reproduction. Even highly sophisticated machines may be engaging in a task of similar intractability as the management of an entire complex economy such as in the case of the Soviet Union. In a similar way, such an endeavour may turn out to be too complex, even for machines with enormous computing power. We know about complexity research in the area of computability: No matter how advanced the computer, if the task’s complexity grows exponentially, it will quickly reach its limits in terms of solvability. Or to put it in an incredibly disrespectful Tweet against Dawkins:

Final Thoughts

As I have already explained, I am no biologist. This essay was meant to expand the vision some of you may have about evolution and move it towards a broader perspective, taking into account the full scope of general complex systems. Each of these principles represent known, however, not commonly communicated aspects of evolution which make it more worthwhile thinking about complex dynamics. In some ways I chose these principles as they are all “meta” in some way. We know now that the process of evolution is itself evolving, that this process is happening on multiple interrelated levels of scale simultaneously, and lastly, that even our entire understanding of evolutionary systems may be overturned by evolution itself. The underlying paradigm we may think of is the dissolution of constructed boundaries in science towards a more generalised and powerful perspective. As a fourth principle which I didn’t feel was suitable for this essay one could mention the implicit point of this essay that symbiosis plays a more important role than we think. Instead of focusing on pure selection and “weeding out” of unwanted lineages, it is also important to understand the role of convergence and “coming together” of lineages. I highly recommend the work of Merlin Sheldrake, a mycologist who investigates the secret life of fungi in our ecosystems. His understanding of biology very much implicitly understands the second principle on the interrelationship of levels of scale. Symbiosis and Synergy between parts are the basis for the emergence of more complex levels which exhibit their own new dynamics. These new dynamics may evolve the process of evolution itself, or may even lead to a fundamental revolution of it.

1. A Memeplex describes a collection or cluster of memes which serve some adaptive function. Dawkins would describe God and religion as a parasitic memeplex.