Chapter 129 21.3 Seven trends of super evolution

A word of caution: I have observed that biological evolution has developed 7 major trends in the painstaking efforts of each moment.As we all know, these seven trends will also accompany the long journey of artificial evolution.They are: irreversibility, increasing complexity, increasing diversity, increasing number of individuals, increasing specificity, increasing interdependence, increasing evolution. irreversibility.Evolution cannot be regressed (that is, the famous Dorothy's law of irreversibility).Of course, there are some exceptions to this.For example, the whale in a sense regresses back and becomes a fish again.And it is these exceptions that testify to the rule.Generally speaking, the various manifestations of life today are not regressing past ecological niches.

It is not easy to let go of hard-won attributes.This is an axiom of the evolution of civilization: a technology that has been invented can no longer be treated as if it had never been invented.Once a living system has evolved language or memory, it never gives up on it. Similarly, when life appears, it will not retreat.I noticed that none of the geological domains would ever fall silent after the infiltration of organic life.Life tenaciously maintains some degree of existence once it settles down in an environment, whether it's a scalding hot spring, a mountain outcrop, or the metal surface of a robot.Life utilizes the world of inorganic matter and transforms it into organic matter in spite of everything.As Vernadsky wrote, "Once an atom is caught up in the torrent of living matter, there is no hope that it will leave easily."

The pre-life Earth was theoretically a barren and desolate planet.It is now generally acknowledged that, though the earth was then a desolate place, it was slowly cooking up the ingredients for life.In fact, the earth is a spherical medium waiting to be inoculated.As you can imagine, there is a large bowl with a radius of 8,000 miles, filled with pasteurized chicken stock.One day you drop a cell into it, and the next day, the cells grow exponentially to fill this massive bowl.Over the past few decades, various mutated cells have built into every corner.Even if it takes hundreds of years, it is just a moment in geological time.Life is born, in an instant!Life is overwhelming.

Likewise, once an artificial life infiltrates a computer, it stays somewhere in the computer forever, never to disappear. Incremental complexity.Whenever I ask my friends, does evolution have a direction?Always get the answer (if there is one): "it's getting more and more complex". While it is clear to almost everyone that evolution is moving toward greater complexity, we have very few meaningful definitions of complexity at hand.Contemporary biologists, however, question the notion that life tends toward complexity.Steven Jay Gould once said to me emphatically: "The illusion of increasing complexity is an artificial phenomenon. Because you have to build something simple first, and then naturally complex things follow. gone."

However, there are many simple things that nature never does.If there wasn't some drive towards complexity, why didn't nature stay in the age of bacteria and develop millions of various single-celled species?And why doesn't it stay at the fish stage and create all the fish forms it can create?Why make things more complicated?For that matter, why did life begin in a simple form?As far as we know, there isn't a single rule that says things have to get more and more complicated. If complexity is a real trend, something must be driving it.Over the past hundred years, scientists have proposed a variety of theories to explain this complex phenomenon.We can superimpose these theories and a summary of the main ideas, in chronological order in which the hypotheses were proposed, as follows:

Runaway duplication and component duplication lead to complexity (1871). The harshness of the real environment leads to the differentiation of building blocks, and the collection of differentiation becomes complexity (1890). Complexity is more thermodynamically efficient (1960) Complexity is just an accidental by-product of (natural) selection of other attributes (1960). Complex organisms establish a niche to gather more complexity around them; complexity is thus a positive feedback loop that amplifies itself (1969). It is relatively easier to add a component to a system than to remove one, so complexity is cumulative (1976).

Non-equilibrium systems accumulate complexity as entropy is dissipated or heat is dissipated (1972). Accidents themselves generate complexity (1986) An Endless Arms Race to Increasing Complexity (1986) Because the definition of complexity remains vague and largely unscientific, no one has yet systematically studied the fossil record to determine whether measurable complexity has increased over time.Some studies (using various methods to measure complexity) have been done on specific short-lineage organisms.Studies have shown that some aspects of the complexity of these organisms do sometimes increase, but sometimes they do not.In short, we don't know exactly what happened with the apparent complexity of biology.

Increased diversity.This needs to be stated carefully.The famous collection of mollusk fossils, the Burgess Shale in Canada, is forcing us to rethink what exactly we mean by "diversity".As Gould said in his book "Fantastic Life", the Burgess Shale shows the emergence and flourishing of a series of remarkable new organisms during the Cambrian explosion of life.These wonderful groups of organisms are more diverse in their basic forms than were our progenitors.Gould argues that the biological basemaps we've seen since the Burgess Shale have been ones of diminishing diversity and massive increases of small patterns.

For example, life tosses millions of insects and trims them to be more beautiful, but does not develop more new species such as insects.The variations of trilobites are endless, but there are no new species such as trilobites.With the vast assortment of biological structure basemaps revealed by Burgess Shale fossils beyond the insignificant basemaps of life in the same regions today, one might argue that the idea that diversity begins with small changes and Conventional wisdom, inflated over time, may be putting the cart before the horse. If you look at differences as significant diversity, the differences are shrinking.Some paleontologists refer to this more essential diversity of underlying patterns as "differences," distinguishing it from ordinary species diversity.There is a fundamental difference between a hammer and a saw, but not so much between a table saw and a circular saw, or the thousands of strange appliances in production today.Gould explained it this way: "Three blind mice of different species do not form a diverse ecogeographical fauna, whereas an elephant, a tree, and an ant can form such a community—even though this combination contains only three species.” Recognizing that it is difficult to conceive of a fundamental biological base map that is truly innovative, we give more weight to fundamental principles of apparently different logic (try to come up with a generic alternative to the inner structure of a tube and see! ).

Because universal basemaps are so rare, the fact that after the Cambrian mass extinction there is no substitute for most species is irreplaceable, which is great news.It evoked Gould's lament: "The astonishing fact of the history of life—strikingly documenting a sharp decline in diversity, followed by a surge in diversity among the few surviving species."Ten of them were taken, and nine were discarded, and the remaining ten did produce a great deal of variation, such as the beetle.Therefore, it is more appropriate to understand this "increasingly diverse cone" that reminds us of evolution after the Cambrian period in terms of species diversity, because there are more species types living in the world today than ever before.

increase in the number of individuals.There is also a huge increase in the total number of living organisms in the world today compared to a billion years ago, or even a million years ago.Assuming that life has only one origin, then there was once only a lonely ancestor of life in this world.Now, there are countless species of life. The sudden increase in the number of biological entities takes another form.Supergroups and subgroups form special individuals in a hierarchical manner.Bees swarm into a colony such that the number of particular individuals plus the number of individual bees constitutes a superorganism.Man is also such a life super-organism, which is composed of millions of individual cells.And these cells can also be regarded as special individuals that increase the total number of individual lives.In addition, these cells may be parasitic, so the number of individuals is even greater.An individual's ideas can be nested with other individuals in the same limited space in a variety of overlapping ways.Therefore, in a certain volume, the total number of individuals of a bee colony including all cells, mites, and viral infections may greatly exceed the total number of bacterial individuals filled in the same volume.As Stanley Sells described in "Evolving Hierarchies": "If individuals can be nested in each other, then in a finite world, there may be countless unique life individuals, and the world's The scope has thus been extended." Incremental specificity.Life begins as a universal process that does many things.Over time, a single being splits into many individuals doing more specialized things.Just as an ordinary egg cell differentiates into many different specialized cells through gradual development, animals and plants also differentiate into more different types in evolution to adapt to a narrower ecological niche.In fact, the word "evolution" was originally used only to denote the process by which an egg cell divides and expands into an embryonic organism.It was not until 1862 that Herbert Spencer first used the term to describe organic change over time.He defined evolution as "the process of changing from an indefinite and incoherent state of homogeneity to a definite and coherent heterogeneous state through continual differentiation and integration." Putting together the trends listed above with increasing specificity, a general picture can be created: life begins as a simple, ambiguous, unformed idea that, over time, stabilizes Form a mass of precise, stable, machine-like structures.Once a cell line is differentiated, it is rare to return to a more general state, and once an animal line is specialized, it is extremely rare to return to a more general state.Over time, the proportion, variety, and degree of specialized organisms have increased.Evolution has also moved in a more granular direction. Incremental interdependence.Biologists have noticed that primitive organisms are directly dependent on their natural environment.Some bacteria live in rocks; some lichens feed on stones.The slightest disturbance of the natural habitat of these organisms can have a powerful impact (this is why lichens can be used as natural monitors of acid rain pollution).With the evolution, life gradually gets rid of the shackles of inorganic matter, and interacts more with organic matter.Plants are rooted directly in the land, freeing animals that depend on plants from the land and making them freer.Amphibians and reptiles generally lay fertilized eggs, which are then released into the natural environment, while birds and mammals raise their offspring, so they are in closer contact with life from birth.Over time, their closeness to the earth and its minerals gave way to a reliance on other living things.Parasites that live comfortably in an animal's warm digestive system may never have access to the environment outside the organism.The same goes for social creatures: While ants can live underground, their individual life is more dependent on other ants than on the surrounding soil.The deepening of socialization is just another form of life-increasing interdependence and symbiosis.Humans are an extreme example of an increasing dependence on living things rather than non-living things. Whenever possible, evolution strives to pull life away from inertia and into closer union with itself, creating something satisfying out of nothing. Evolutionary increment. In 1987, Richard Dawkins, a zoologist from Cambridge, presented a paper at the First Artificial Life Symposium entitled "Evolution of Evolution", in which he took a close look at the evolution of evolution itself Feasibility and favorable conditions.Around the same time, Chris Toffer Wells, in The Wisdom of Genes, also published inferences about how genes control their own evolution. Dawkins' attempt to create artificial evolution in the field of biomorphism inspired his thinking.He realized that a certain innovation rarely seen in playing God would not only provide the individual with the opportunity for immediate advancement, but also, as an "evolutionary conception," loosen the constraints on offspring's ability to mutate.He took the animal of the first level branch in the evolution of real life as an example, which he called "a monster ... rather than a remarkably successful individual." The major event related to the branch of animal is a watershed in the evolution of life, from which A series of descendants will become the evolutionary winners. Dawkins advanced the claim of a higher level of natural selection, "which favors not just a successfully adapted phenotype, but an evolutionary tendency in a given direction, or an evolutionary tendency at all." In other words, evolution not only selects for survivability, but also selects for evolvability. The ability to evolve doesn't sit still in a single trait or function—such as mutation rate—functions like mutation rate also play a role in an organism's evolvability.A species cannot evolve without producing the necessary variation.The ability of a species to change itself has as much a place in its evolvability as the plasticity of its behavior.And the fitness of the genome is crucial.In general, the evolution of a species is a characteristic of a system, and it is not partial, just as the viability of an organism is not partial. Evolvability, like all traits selected by evolution, must be cumulative.A less competitive innovation, once accepted, can serve as a platform for more competitive innovations to emerge.In such a way, the weak evolutionary nature builds a forward base for the further rise of the evolutionary nature.Evolution has been an essential component of survivability for a long time.Thus, a family of organisms, together with genes linked for increased evolvability, will accumulate into evolutionary defining capabilities and advantages.And so on and on forever. Evolution of evolution is like making a wish that Aladdin's lamp won't let you: the wish to get three other wishes.It's a legitimate game-changing force.Marvin Minsky noted that in the development of the child's mind there is a "like force to change its own rules".Minsky believes: "Just relying on the continuous accumulation of more and more new knowledge, the mind cannot really grow well. It must also develop newer and better methods of using existing knowledge." This is Papert's principle : "Some of the most critical steps in the process of mental development are based not only on the acquisition of new skills but on the acquisition of new ways of applying known knowledge." Altering the course of change is the larger goal of evolution.Although it can necessitate the evolution of the mutation rate, the evolution of evolution does not just cause the evolution of the mutation rate.In fact, the mutation rate has been consistently striking for a long time not only through the organic world, but also through the machine world and the super-life world. (It's very rare for a mutation rate to go over a few percent or drop off a hundred percent. A fluctuation of about one-tenth of a percent seems ideal. That means only one out of a thousand ridiculously wild ideas is needed to keep things evolving. Of course, 1/1000 is a crazy ratio in some cases.) Natural selection tends to maintain a mutation rate that maximizes evolution.But for the same benefit, natural selection will move all the parameters of the system to the optimum point so that further natural selection can take place.Still, this evolutionary best thing is a moving target, reach for it and it drifts.An evolutionary system is stable in the sense that it continually reverts itself to the optimal evolutionary preferred state.But because this optimal point changes—like the color of a chameleon on a mirror—the system is always in a non-equilibrium state. The essence of an evolutionary system is a mechanism for producing perpetual change.Eternal change is not a recurring cycle, unlike the unimaginative street-corner kaleidoscope, which is seen as continuous and permanent.That is true eternal vitality.Perpetual change means constant imbalance, a perpetual state of falling.It means that change undergoes its own change.The result will be a system that is always on the verge of changing itself in order to survive. Or rather, into survival.The ability to evolve must evolve itself.So where did evolution first start? If we accept the theory that the evolution of life arose from certain types of non-life, or proto-life, then evolution must precede life.Natural selection is a non-living follow-up process; it also works well in protobiotic populations.Once the basic variation of evolution is in operation, more complex variation is added as the complexity of the form allows.What we see in the fossil record of life on Earth is the gradual accumulation of different types of simple evolution, culminating in an organic whole that we today call evolution.Evolution is the synthesis of many processes that form an evolving population.Evolution proceeds over time, so evolution itself grows in diversity, complexity and evolution.As the saying goes, change itself.