Adaptation, control information, and the human condition

Abstract

Abstract Following the inductive logic of Hume’s fork, this book has partitioned Hamilton’s rule so that it offers a general necessary and concrete sufficiency condition for the origins of major transitions in evolution (MTEs). My conjecture could in principle have been formulated decades ago, but several forms of confusion have compromised its development. First, Darwinism was “environmentalized” throughout the 20th century, becoming a branch of ecology and allowing researchers to avoid asking questions about adaptive design. This problem disappears only when adhering to a strict definition of what an environment really is, as George Williams did in 1966 and Helena Cronin updated in 2005. Second, many have failed to appreciate that the gene’s eye view of adaptive evolution is a concept of genetic information and phenotypic agency rather than of genetic reductionism. Making that perspective explicit helps to connect inclusive fitness theory to Shannon’s information theory, because both are about the use of information for prediction and control. It then emerges that inclusive fitness theory, captured by Price equation logic of selection and transmission, is the only biological theory that might ultimately be reconciled with theoretical physics via quantum Darwinism. Third, anthropomorphic bias has been rampant in biology, particularly in conceptualizing the human MTE. Our own transition is exceptional in not having originated via a new level of lifetime commitment and obligate reproductive division of labor, but from an already complex society that became domesticated by cumulative culture—an endosymbiosis between individual brains and sets of self-organizing algorithmic symbionts. Under that assumption, a dual Price equation framework may be the best unbiased tool for unraveling the extent of cooperation and conflicts between our genetic endowment and the reproductive interests of our Lamarckian brain symbionts. Dual host–symbiont agency appears to make anthropomorphic concepts such as “self-domestication” and “self-deception” moot, and to shed intriguing light on patterns of MTE symmetry over time.