Clinging To Existence
Epistolution and evolution are twin theories, in a way, but both are necessary to explain life. Recently I have begun to point to examples, like sleep and beauty and music and hallucination that are not explained by evolution, and I have realized just how many phenomena we have piled into the heap of “evolution must explain this” without ever demonstrating that it does. Many many phenomena that are merely compatible with evolution are currently considered to be explained by evolution when they are not. No one witnessed evolution occurring, rather we just postulate from basic premises that it must have occurred. In this sense natural selection is, as Popper said, “almost a tautology.” In other words, if some things are living today and they descend from things that were living long ago, yet not all descendants have survived, then there must be some form of change that the environment imposes onto the set of living things by discriminating between descendants. This is almost true by definition, and therefore it’s not nearly as good an explanation of what we see before us in the living world as is often pretended.
The best example of what is taken for granted in evolution is the property, that all living beings possess, of clinging to their own existence. This is taken for granted in evolution, for nothing that does not have this property can evolve. Minerals, for instance, or beams of sunlight, or clouds, do not behave as if they want to continue in the form they are in. They have no “will,” as it were. They appear to be entirely indifferent to whether they dash themselves to bits or remain immobile for eons or tumble about erratically. They are inanimate. And yet we are also composed of these same materials. We are made of bits of mineral, bits of clouds, and bits of sunlight.
Clinging to existence is a prerequisite for evolution. Rocks and beams of light exist, but they cannot evolve because there is no part of their process that seeks its own continuation. Crystals replicate themselves, but they do not seek their own replication or resist its denial. This is the mystery at the center of life. Without this life would not be life, it would just be transient existence. Life carries a continuity that requires continual adjustment to the circumstances that changing conditions bring to bear. Life carries a form of immortal process from generation to generation. It is not explained by evolution, rather evolution is built on this platform. Once you have this, natural selection is nearly a tautology.
This is the property that epistolution as a theory is designed to explain. Imagine an organism as a house that begets other houses. DNA templates are the tools that are necessary for building the house, just as other materials are necessary, like lumber, roofing, insulation, etc. Evolution tells us why those tools are there and not other tools, and microbiology shows that the tools have consequences for how the house looks and works and whether it can serve its useful purpose to propagate houses once that purpose exists. But what force motivates the tools to build? Epistolution is about the origins of that purpose. Epistolution is a theory of exactly what kind of physical process it is that can manufacture a purpose. It is about what motivates the activity. Epistolution says that the tools are employed in house-building because the house is a set of synchronizers that take instruction from their environment and to do that is to be motivated to cling to existence. To do that is to be a process that evinces metabolism, cognition and intelligence. That’s why I often say that epistolution is a theory that is necessary because we don’t know what an organism is.
My friend asked me if the relation between epistolution and evolution in explaining organisms was like the relation between quantum physics and political science in explaining the invasion of Ukraine. Soldiers are indeed composed of entangled quanta, but we need a higher level of abstraction to understand why they do what they do. I said yes, but what followed surprised him. I said that unlike in his example, to understand the motivations of organisms, one needs to use the lower level rather than the higher level of abstraction. Epistolution is the lower level explanation, more like quantum physics, and evolution is the higher level one, like political science. Epistolution is a prerequisite for evolution, but evolution is not a prerequisite for epistolution. In fact, the experiment I am working on is precisely the first one that will build a non-evolved epistevolver. He wanted to know why so many of the parameters of this code we are working on are seemingly inserted and tweaked by hand, like the number of nodes, the weight and number of connections, etc. It is because these are the parameters that are provided to organisms by evolution, and they are secondary to what an organism is really about.
In order to evolve and improve through natural selection, something has to have both form and motive. The form is explained by evolution, but not the motive. The motive is explained by epistolution, but not the form (only the organization of that form). Neo-Darwinists have tried to explain the motive of life with replication. The argument goes that whatever happened to replicate itself provided the original impetus to begin the process of evolution, and from then on all that was necessary was a shaping of the forms through natural selection. But there are no bare replicators. All replicators require a cell, and cellular metabolism is a clinging to existence that requires a motive, so the explanation does not achieve what it sets out to achieve. In my opinion, the reason this argument may not have been more carefully considered is that it implies that the motive is provided by God. Epistolution supplies the motive through holism, which provides a materialistic mechanism for the motive to come from the entire universe. This is very similar to saying that “organisms are controlled by God, and God is in all things,” but epistolution does not imply that there is anything other than the laws of physics involved in this process. No magic is needed.
Epistolution says that an organism is a set of networks that are trying to synchronize with their niches by taking on the rhythms embodied in it, and this happens by periodic updates according to the epistolution formula. Once you understand this conjecture, you can see that it must be possible to model epistolution using non-biological materials. It will be necessary to do this in order to demonstrate that it is epistolutionary purposefulness that is really at the center of life rather than purposeless evolution. The exceptions to the Central Dogma of molecular biology refute the idea that evolution is empty of purpose. The defenders of this dogma have tried to save it by insisting that nothing counts as “information” except precise coding. Certainly coding is vitally important, but every translator knows that knowledge can be stated in more than one set of words. The actual test of this dogma is whether acquired functional knowledge can shape genetic evolution, and modern genetics has shown that genetic change is often nonrandom with regard to function. The most obvious proof of this is that horizontal gene transfer is widespread among single-celled life. This is an organism choosing to change its DNA by conjugating with another organism of a different type. If an organism can change its own DNA in a nonrandom way to make it more functional for its own survival, then life cannot be purposeless. Purpose is required for this to be true; otherwise life would lose all the order it has accumulated and devolve into lifelessness.
An organism is a set of oscillators that is trying to cling to its existence by synchronizing with its niche, and this gives it purpose, the “will” to survive. This solution is very hard to see, but once you see it, it is very simple and very, very beautiful.
