ABSTRACT
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 Reorganisation (SOR) because it involves internal self-organising 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.
Competing Interest Statement
The authors have declared no competing interest.
Footnotes
Minor typos corrected and one reference corrected.
7 In SOR there is no replication by way of a self-assembly code. However, there is replication of a more piecemeal, imprecise kind that occurs through the transmission/duplication of components. The replication of conceptual RAF structure (e.g., when a parent teaches a child how to cook) may entail the generation of novelty (e.g., the child may intentionally double the quantity of chocolate chips), but replication has still taken place. Indeed, novelty gets introduced each generation even when organisms replicate; offspring are not identical to parents. We do not use the term ‘replicator’ here since it is often assumed that replicator evolution necessarily involves inheritance of germ-line material.
