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Christopher L Buckley

Co-author contributing to connectionist approaches to evolutionary transitions.

complexity science
systems engineering
Authored
1
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Authored papers (1)

  • Design for an Individual: Connectionist Approaches to the Evolutionary Transitions in Individuality2022

    Evolutionary transitions in individuality (ETIs) require interaction structures among lower-level units that compute non-linearly separable functions — the same class of functions that single-layer Perceptrons cannot represent and that necessitate depth in connectionist models. Watson, Levin, and Buckley formalize this claim through the framework of evolutionary connectionism, which demonstrates a functional equivalence (not merely analogy) between the action of natural selection on heritable variation in relationships and unsupervised associative learning in neural networks. The core argument distinguishes non-decomposable collective characters — where the sign of the effect of one particle's character on collective fitness reverses depending on context, as in an XOR or division-of-labour game — from merely non-aggregative but monotonic interactions, which remain explanatorily redundant at the collective level. Two formal hypotheses follow: H1, that individuality requires a developmental process computing a non-linearly separable function of embryonic particle characters to coordinate reproduction; and H2, that the conditions for deep model induction, familiar from multi-layer Perceptrons and LeCun et al. (2015)-style deep learning, are predictive of the conditions under which bottom-up natural selection can produce an ETI. Power's Sudoku-based ecological model and Tudge et al.'s two-player division-of-labour simulations provide partial empirical scaffolding, but neither delivers a unified evolutionary model with deep, asymmetric interaction structures and no system-level selection. The paper argues this implies that ETIs are inseparable from the evolution of developmental (basal cognitive) processes and that four conditions — heritable relational variation, asymmetric interaction structures capable of depth, repeated environmental perturbations, and parsimony pressure — are jointly necessary and potentially sufficient for a transition in individuality to occur under bottom-up selection.

More papers — OpenAlex / S2

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