Charles Darwin gave us the intellectual tools we needed to make sense of fossil data, toward a better understanding of how we humans have come to exist. But those tools tell us nothing about where life is going. To glimpse the future of life, we need to tweak Darwin’s theory just a little bit.
It is not by culling of the least fit that evolution makes progress, but by proliferation of the most fit. This simple little twist in how we model natural selection properly focuses our attention on life’s successes rather than its failures. And those successes reveal an abstract directionality in life’s natural progression.
This new way of thinking about evolution is more generally applicable, enabling us to see how many different kinds of progress are driven by nature’s laws and forces — not just in biology, but also in culture, technology, economic production, and so on. Perhaps this style of evolution underlies all kinds of progressive systems.
In a Nutshell
Several different lines of evolutionary thinking converge in this article to open a much clearer view into how evolution works. If arguments here see farther it is because they stand on the shoulders of hugely important concepts, independently conceived decades ago by a diverse set of distinguished authors: a renowned zoologist, a rebel biologist, a brilliant chemist, and a complexity-theorizing economist. Those critical concepts, when combined, show us a very different way of thinking about evolution. They reveal a combinatorial process driven by sets of patterns acting collectively — cooperating — toward their mutual proliferation, as among the genes of any successful organism.
Evolutionary progress occurs whenever new combinations of evolving patterns discover better ways of causing their mutual proliferation, even when those cooperating patterns exist in very different species or domains. This cooperation-based view of evolution is somewhat revolutionary in its simplicity, generality, and especially its predictive capability. Yet, it requires only a slight deviation from the Darwinian model. We have been taught to think of natural selection in terms of competitive culling — a destructive process. But a constructive form of selection also happens through differential proliferation of cooperating patterns, some combinations of them proliferating faster than others.
By focusing our attention entirely on the constructive side of evolution, we are then able to see a predictable directionality in its progress, pointing to life’s ultimate destiny. It clearly defines a natural purpose for life — to make ongoing progress toward the fulfillment of evolution’s destiny. And we learn a lot about how ultra-intelligent machines are likely to evolve over coming decades.