An evolutionary process without variation and selection

Natural selection successfully explains how organisms accumulate adaptive change despite that traits acquired over a lifetime are eliminated at the end of each generation. However, in some domains that exhibit cumulative, adaptive change—e.g. cultural evolution, and earliest life—acquired traits are retained; these domains do not face the problem that Darwin’s theory was designed to solve. Lack of transmission of acquired traits occurs when germ cells are protected from environmental change, due to a self-assembly code used in two distinct ways: (i) actively interpreted during development to generate a soma, and (ii) passively copied without interpretation during reproduction to generate germ cells. Early life and cultural evolution appear not to involve a self-assembly code used in these two ways. We suggest that cumulative, adaptive change in these domains is due to a lower-fidelity evolutionary process, and model it using reflexively autocatalytic and foodset-generated networks. We refer to this more primitive evolutionary process as self–other reorganization (SOR) because it involves internal self-organizing and self-maintaining processes within entities, as well as interaction between entities. SOR encompasses learning but in general operates across groups. We discuss the relationship between SOR and Lamarckism, and illustrate a special case of SOR without variation.

A Model for Evolutionary Structural Plasticity and Synchronization of a Network of Neurons

A model of time-dependent structural plasticity for the synchronization of neuron networks is presented. It is known that synchronized oscillations reproduce structured communities, and this synchronization is transient since it can be enhanced or suppressed, and the proposed model reproduces this characteristic. The evolutionary behavior of the couplings is comparable to those of a network of biological neurons. In the structural network, the physical connections of axons and dendrites between neurons are modeled, and the evolution in the connections depends on the neurons’ potential. Moreover, it is shown that the coupling force’s function behaves as an adaptive controller that leads the neurons in the network to synchronization. The change in the node’s degree shows that the network exhibits time-dependent structural plasticity, achieved through the evolutionary or adaptive change of the coupling force between the nodes. The coupling force function is based on the computed magnitude of the membrane potential deviations with its neighbors and a threshold that determines the neuron’s connections. These rule the functional network structure along the time.

Resilience: The Power of Interactive Life

Chapter 2 examines the heuristic of ‘Resilience’, through which island ontologies have been most obviously adopted by mainstream academic and policy-thinking. Resilience is conceptualised here as an analytical field through which islands have emerged in postmodern framings of governance, as an alternative to linear thinking about progress and sustainability in the Anthropocene. Resilience seeks to capture the art of adaptation or of adaptive change. Working with islands has been significant to the rise of Resilience thinking because islands are imagined to have powers of creative and productive differentiation and individuation, faced with unprecedented changes and challenges. The chapter also turns to the work of Charles Darwin, and the power he attributed to islands as powerful, adaptative, differentiating ‘engines’ for life itself. Island life has become a high-profile symbol of non-linear emergence and diversification as islands are seen to enable contexts to intensify and magnify interactive feedback effects as well as acting as a baseline for understanding ‘vulnerability and resilience’, relational contingencies and ‘system effects’ that cannot be accessed directly by way of modern frameworks of reasoning. The island, as an important figure for working through the central problematic of relational entanglements, makes it particularly generative and productive for Resilience thinking in the Anthropocene.

ADAPTATION OF DOLPHINS (TURSIOPS TRUNCATUS) LOCATION SIGNALS WHEN SEARCHING AND RECOGNIZING OBJECTS HIDDEN BY SEA SEDIMENTS

An experimental study was conducted to research dolphin sonar adaptation capabilities for location of objects obscured by marine sediments. It was shown that dolphins are able to alter spectral and temporal characteristics of their location signals. Adaptive change of length, spectral width, and amplitude of impulses provides optimal tools to fight interference and allows dolphins to effectively identify objects.