The evolving system of genetic material itself causes evolution to follow certain pathways not only because of selective pressure from outside but by virtue of its own internal dynamical ordering tendencies.

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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.claim0.795
  Central claim linking life's properties to the inherent competencies of its material substrate.
• Individual mechanical explanations for each property are too specific to provide a general explanation for why living structure repeatedly appears across all domains.claim0.792
  Alexander's argument that case-by-case mechanical explanations fail to address the universal recurrence of living structure
• We hypothesise this explains why stigmergy and other forms of extracellular signalling arise in biological systems, which is known to enhance the ability for a collective system to order itself.hypothesis0.786
  Hypothesis connecting fitness pressure from topological constraints to the evolutionary origin of stigmergy
• The evolutionary process contains an intelligence ratchet: as competency increases, selection struggles to see the structural genome, further driving selection for competency mechanisms.claim0.782
  Explains why planaria with messy genomes have robust morphologies.
• Evolution was using developmental bioelectricity long before neurons and muscles appeared, to solve the problem of creating and repairing complex bodies.claim0.781
  Claim about the primacy of bioelectric morphogenesis.
• What processes drive the expansion of intelligence on evolutionary time scales, and what causes changes in the intelligence of a being during its lifespan?question0.780
  Guides the exploration of scaling cognition.
• Evolutionary transitions in individuality correspond to deep interaction structures or perhaps other mechanisms of multi-scale dynamics.hypothesis0.778
  Concrete proposal about necessary architecture for ETIs.
• The kind of relationships necessary to produce evolutionary individuality – the generation and heritability of fitness differences at the collective level – are the same as those required to produce organismic individuality – the information integration and collective action characteristic of a self.claim0.772
  Core conjecture linking evolutionary and organismic individuality.