Five Principles of Evolution

You won’t understand life, but you won’t understand emergence, or consciousness, as long as you stick to the physical model. If life is a special case of matter, in relation to which it contains additional rules, then these must be emphasized as such.

For life does things that inanimate matter does not. Even the most inveterate physicalist will admit that inanimate matter, unlike animate matter, does not reproduce itself, is not itself active, or confronts inanimate nature as an agent.

As far as life is concerned, the physical model must be replaced or supplemented by a biological one. It must be replaced with regard to the specific principles of life, supplemented with an additional empiricism that contributes to the view of the whole. And the whole is something different in relation to life than the whole in relation to inanimate nature.

Physical networks, for example, are rigid, biological networks change, physical networks are passive, biological networks are active, physical networks are deterministic, biological networks create their own determinism.

In the following, I summarize the five most important principles of evolution. They are free of scars and occur at all stages of life and in all biological regulatory cycles.

Evo N° 1: Autocatalysis

The basis of all life was once the formation of autocatalytic reaction circuits. It was only when they isolated themselves from the environment by means of a membrane as cells that this so-called autopoietic system called life emerged.

A single cycle became a system that became more and more differentiated. There is no alternative to autocatalysis, after all, there is no planner who writes the algorithms of life. They must be self-explainable. The self-propelling, sustaining and growing process is the specificity of life.

Every single subsystem of an organism functions according to this specificity, whether genome, heart or brain. If we talk about the brain and change the technical perspective and thus also the technical language, then it is true that consciousness also functions according to this specificity. The higher the regulatory level, the more complex the autocatalytic interdependence. Although each level (genome, cell, cell group, organs, CNS) has its own working logic, they are all integrated into an overall organism and influence each other from bottom to top and vice versa. Each level can be seen as an emergent system, but all together form an integral.

Evo N° 2: Negentropy excess

Life is the agent, the subject of its actions. As such, it is in the exchange of energy and information with the environment. It transforms the physical conditions of the environment into the modality that is compatible with it. This transformation generates a surplus of energy and information, which makes growth and differentiation possible in the first place. This net surplus results from the ability of life to integrate material things into its metabolism. This is true at all levels, right down to the nervous system. There, too, there is a net increase in the form of information. Information is understood here as structure in the sense of the second law of thermodynamics.

This surplus would lead to disaster within a very short time if it were not systematically reduced.

Evo N° 3: Reduction of complexity

This reduction is done by compression in the sense of an abstraction. It is not only abstracted from superfluous components, but the transformation of energy or information summarizes structures and thus forms shorter connections, thus increasing the density.

This can be illustrated with the following example: If the simple equation 1+1+1+1+1+1=5 is transformed into a denser form, namely 5x1=5, a shorter representation with lower resource consumption is achieved. This type of densification allows for a high degree of specialization and differentiation, which leads to a high number of connections at the neuronal level.

Life converts energy or information into a higher structural form. In cognitive psychology, this is known as abstract thinking. Thus, the increase of information as a structural differentiation is an integral part of life.

Evo N° 4: Random-Walk

The extremely high rate of adaptation of evolution cannot be attributed to random endogenous mutations, this is mathematically simply impossible. The alternative to Darwin’s model is the adaptive random walk. Here, using the example of evolutionary graph theory, edges and nodes are weighted by feedback in such a way that the most effective adaptation is achieved. This means that through trial and error within a space of possibilities, only those variants can be formed that correspond to the individual and environmental conditions. The edges couple with compatible edges via valence coupling and avoid non-compatible ones, whereby the compatibility must be within a tolerance range. By means of similar values of the edges, new weights are created by coupling and thus enable the formation of new connections.

In the cognitive domain, this can be demonstrated by the spread of ideologies.

We have emphasized that the biological model considers life as an agent, as the subject of its actions. Therefore, the adaptive random walk is not a mechanistic process, but one controlled from within.

Evo N° 5: Metastructures

How does this control arise as the basis of an autopoietic self-organization? It arises from the above-mentioned condensation of information. Let’s take the cognitive level again. We do not perceive things in their entirety, but in a coarse-grained way, emphasizing the essential things and omitting the non-essentials. For example, we recognize a tree by an acute-angled triangle. Due to the constant and ever-increasing abstraction, we only think in terms of abstractions and these determine our actions. I refer to these patterns of thought and action as metastructures. They have causal power, because they guide action.

This correlation applies to all levels of regulation, but is most evident at the cognitive level. Of course, different levels overlap so that actions are fed from different sources. A concrete action thus has abstract and symbolic, conscious and unconscious, arbitrary and involuntary parts. In this respect, one must speak of synthetic actions into which metastructures of all levels flow. The totality of these structures form the I.

Life generates these causal forces at every level of regulation. It is the basis of what we call free will in man.

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See also: https://medium.com/@drwolfgangstegemann