Here is an interesting-looking paper that confirms some general
ideas of John Stewart and myself:
A Simple Model of Unbounded Evolutionary Versatility as a
Largest-Scale Trend in Organismal Evolution
Peter D. Turney (National Research Council of Canada)
http://cogprints.org/2499/
The idea that there are any large-scale trends
in the evolution of biological organisms is highly controversial. It
is commonly believed, for example, that there is a large-scale trend
in evolution towards increasing complexity, but empirical and
theoretical arguments undermine this belief. Natural selection
results in organisms that are well adapted to their local
environments, but it is not clear how local adaptation can produce a
global trend. In this paper, I present a simple computational model,
in which local adaptation to a randomly changing environment results
in a global trend towards increasing evolutionary versatility. In
this model, for evolutionary versatility to increase without bound,
the environment must be highly dynamic. The model also shows that
unbounded evolutionary versatility implies an accelerating
evolutionary pace. I believe that unbounded increase in evolutionary
versatility is a large-scale trend in evolution. I discuss some of
the testable predictions about organismal evolution that are
suggested by the model.
More about evolutionary progress on Peter Turney's home page,
which also contains a lot of very neat stuff on using word
co-occurrences mined from the web to answer various verbal tests that
would normally require advanced knowledge and intelligence:
http://purl.org/peter.turney/
--
Francis Heylighen
"Evolution, Complexity and Cognition" research group
Free University of Brussels
http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/HEYL.html
Francis Heylighen
"Evolution, Complexity and Cognition" research group
Free University of Brussels
http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/HEYL.html
