What is Epistolution?

The story of life upon which modern biology is based contains a logical contradiction, and hasn’t stood up to empirical scrutiny. Neo-Darwinism, our best current theory of life, holds that DNA contains the efficient cause of an organism and everything else provides only material causes. This can’t be true because DNA alone does not spring to life; it requires a cell and the cell requires a niche. It’s also refuted by the results that show that there are many ways organisms change their own DNA, and those that show that mutations are not random with respect to function. The necessary logical conclusion from this is that the whole niche, rather than the DNA, provides the logic that organizes life. This means that an organism must be a self-organizing set of synchronizers rather than a self-organizing set of computers. A synchronizer gets its logic from its external environment; while a computer simply executes its code. This conjecture is testable. By instantiating more and more complex sets of synchronizers and placing them in increasingly humanlike niches, we can determine if this is the correct path to solve the problem of artificial general intelligence. If all the networks of an organism self-organize, they must all follow some formula that allows them to change through variation and selective retention. A general formula that could describe this in a universal fashion might be: if used, then reinforce; else mutate stochastically.