Darwin's agential materials: evolutionary implications of multiscale competency in developmental biology (Levin, Cell Mol Life Sci 2023)

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• Biology's robustness, open-endedness, evolvability, and unique complexity likely depend on the fact that evolution works with an agential material.claim0.815
  Central claim linking life's properties to the inherent competencies of its material substrate.
• Biology employs a multiscale competency architecture where each level solves problems with some degree of competency in its own problem space.claim0.799
  General structural claim about organization of life.
• Synthetic morphology with agential materials (Davies & Levin, Nature Reviews Bioengineering 2023)concept0.790
  Paper on engineering with agential biological materials
• The evolutionary process contains an intelligence ratchet: as competency increases, selection struggles to see the structural genome, further driving selection for competency mechanisms.claim0.783
  Explains why planaria with messy genomes have robust morphologies.
• Multi-scale competency greatly accelerates evolution and enables generalization.claim0.779
  Central thesis about the role of agency in evolutionary dynamics.
• Selection (Darwinian)concept0.775
  The stage in the genetic algorithm where top 10% embryos by phenotypic fitness are selected.
• A multi-scale competency architecture facilitates evolution of robust problem-solving, living machines.claim0.771
  Key proposal linking multi-scale agency to evolutionary advantage.
• The multiscale competency architecture (MCA) speeds evolutionary search by providing generalization, reliability, tractable search space, cryptic variation, and functional intermediates.claim0.770
  Main functional claim about MCA.