Despite its current popularity, “emergence” is a concept with a venerable history and an elusive, ambiguous standing in contemporary evolutionary theory. This paper briefly recounts the history of the term and details some of its current usages. Not only are there radically varying interpretations about how to define emergence but “reductionist” and “holistic” theorists hold very different views about the issue of causation. However, these two seemingly polar positions are not irreconcilable. Reductionism, or detailed analysis of the parts and their (...) interactions, is essential for answering the “how” question in evolution—how does a complex living system work? But holism is equally necessary for answering the “why” question—why did a particular arrangement of parts evolve? In order to answer the “why” question, a broader, multi-leveled paradigm is required. The reductionist approach to explaining emergent complexity has entailed a search for underlying “laws of emergence.” In contrast, the “Synergism Hypothesis” focuses on the “economics”—the functional effects produced by emergent wholes and their selective consequences in evolutionary change. This paper also argues that emergent phenomena represent, in effect, a subset of a larger universe of cooperative, synergistic effects in the natural world. (shrink)

There are currently three major theories on the origin and evolution of the genetic code: the stereochemical theory, the coevolution theory, and the error-minimization theory. The first two assume that the genetic code originated respectively from chemical affinities and from metabolic relationships between codons and amino acids. The error-minimization theory maintains that in primitive systems the apparatus of protein synthesis was extremely prone to errors, and postulates that the genetic code evolved in order to minimize the deleterious effects of the (...) translation errors. This article describes a fourth theory which starts from the hypothesis that the ancestral genetic code was ambiguous and proposes that its evolution took place with a mechanism that systematically reduced its ambiguity and eventually removed it altogether. This proposal is distinct from the stereochemical and the coevolution theories because they do not contemplate any ambiguity in the genetic code, and it is distinct from the error-minimization theory because ambiguity-reduction is fundamentally different from error-minimization. The concept of ambiguity-reduction has been repeatedly mentioned in the scientific literature, but so far it has remained only an abstract possibility because no model has been proposed for its mechanism. Such a model is described in the present article and may be the first step in a new approach to the study of the evolution of the genetic code. (shrink)

Drawing on recent advances in evolutionary biology, prominent scholars return to the question posed in a pathbreaking book: how evolution itself evolved.

In recent years, evolutionary theorists have come to recognize that the reductionist, individualist, gene-centered approach to evolution cannot sufficiently account for the emergence of complex biological systems over time. Peter A. Corning has been at the forefront of a new generation of complexity theorists who have been working to reshape the foundations of evolutionary theory. Well known for his Synergism Hypothesis—a theory of complexity in evolution that assigns a key causal role to various forms of functional synergy—Corning puts this theory (...) into a much broader framework in _Holistic Darwinism_, addressing many of the issues and concepts associated with the evolution of complex systems. Corning's paradigm embraces and integrates many related theoretical developments of recent years, from multilevel selection theory to niche construction theory, gene-culture coevolution theory, and theories of self-organization. Offering new approaches to thermodynamics, information theory, and economic analysis, Corning suggests how all of these domains can be brought firmly within what he characterizes as a post–neo-Darwinian evolutionary synthesis. (shrink)

Expanding on the results of previous contributions I advance several hypotheses on the interaction of physical and semiotic processes, both in organisms and in human artifacts. I then proceed to employ these ideas to formulate a general account of evolutionary processes in terms of concrete generalization, where, in analogy with conceptual generalization, novel creations retain antecedent features as special or restricted cases. I argue the following theses: 1) the main point of intersection of physical and semiotic causation is the process (...) of regulation; 2) The broadest form of regulation is a course of actions known as modulation ; 3) Modulation is a universal means of conveyance by which a form is lifted from one supporting vehicle and re-embodied into another replica. These considerations suggest viewing biological evolution as a complex generalization of semiotic evolution. Biological reproduction is then regarded as a complex generalization of sign replication. The latter is a relatively simple affair: the embodied form is external and largely independent of its indifferent supporting medium. Biological reproduction, on the contrary, is an extremely complex dynamical process in which the embodied type is duplicated from within the medium, through the subsidiary internal replication of molecular genetic records. These ideas are developed and illustrated through comparisons between the evolution of organisms and that of human artifacts. (shrink)