Note from Kim Peterson, November 3, 1999

Linked to the concept of integrative levels of organization posed by Ty at link:

Discussants of complexity,

The patterns of organization we recognize as resulting from biological evolution charm us with their intricacies, and cause us to wonder at their origins. Although natural selection may involve mechanisms based in mortality or fecundity (Mike Grant's comments elucidate this point), the crux of the semantic and logical problems associated with much of this discussion group seem to me to be manifest by confusion surrounding the origins of adaptations. Natural selection accounts for the persistence of adaptive patterns, but not exactly for their origin. On one hand their origin needs no special explanation beyond random happenstance.

Order in the form of structures, or physiological pathways, or hypervariable regions of molecules is just one of the possible outcomes of a variable process. Order happens! A lot of other possibilities that wouldn't impress us very much in terms of their adaptiveness just happen too, but they don't generally persist. This leads to the subtle role of natural selection in origins.

As complex systems evolve, structures get recycled. The iteration of combinatorial possibilities of persistent adaptations leads to some pretty fantastic (in the sense of remotely probable if drawn all-at-once from a hat of molecular soup) structures, behaviors, physiologies, etc., appearing and persisting through time. Similarities and distinctions can be drawn between complex evolving systems, and from these observations come key questions, to be addressed mathematically, which will contribute to a more general evolutionary theory.