Evolutionary individuality and hierarchical agency

Claims (15)

• Evolution is more intelligent than we realised.Watson's reinterpretation of formal equivalence between evolution and learning, beyond random variation framework.
• Acting with unity of purpose in multicellular organisms does not require genetic homogeneity
• Distinction between Organismic and Evolutionary Individuality
• Evolution does not simply make hardwired machines that execute a predetermined set of steps; instead, it produces problem-solving hardware.Key insight about the nature of evolved systems.
• Evolution makes problem-solving agents, not solutions; commitment to mutation and uncontrollable environments as ratchet for intelligence
• Evolution re-uses many of the same mechanisms and strategies across scales of organization and problem spaces.Claims that scale-free dynamics, like bioelectric networks, are ancient and conserved.
• Evolutionary transitions must be explained by bottom-up selection on existing lower-level units without presupposing higher-level unit
• Evolved machines increasingly exhibit self-similar, hierarchical structure like living systems.Artificially evolved neural networks and robots often lack modularity unless selected for, resembling life.
• Evolved vs. designed origin is not a definitive guide to agency; rationally engineered systems can be true cognitive agents.Rejects the notion that only evolutionary history confers intrinsic motivation or 'true' cognition.
• For a new level of individuality to have causal role as evolutionary unit, heritable fitness differences must be non-aggregative (not decomposable into lower-level differences).Core claim: monotonic non-linearities are insufficient; evolutionary outcomes must change depending on context.
• For collectives to be meaningful evolutionary units, fitness interactions must be non-linearly separable, not merely non-aggregative.Strengthens distinction between monotonic non-linear interactions (explanatorily redundant) and non-decomposable interactions (causally significant).
• Monotonic non-linearities are insufficient to reverse evolutionary outcomes
• Natural evolution is not the only acceptable origin story for a true Agent.Rational engineering can also create minds; evolution is just a hill-climbing algorithm.
• The boundary between evolved and designed agents is becoming blurred through biorobotics and synthetic morphology.
• Major evolutionary transitions—from prokaryotes to eukaryotes to multicellular life—are structure-preserving transformations at the scale of life-organization itself.