(2022-10-03) Brander Coevolution Creates Living Complexity

Gordon Brander: Coevolution creates living complexity. Adewale Oshineye... coins the concept of a Gall-Meadows ladder. (Gall's Law, Donella Meadows)

to get from a simple working system to a complex working system you have to find a sequence of working systems that increase the level of complexity

Life wants to spiral upwards

Coevolution creates upward-spiraling complexity

hill climbing will get you stuck at the top of the nearest hill. In the language of ML, we call this getting stuck in a local maxima.

living ecosystems seem to avoid getting trapped in maxima

dynamically avoid attractors.

Life evolves in open-ended directions, refusing to get stuck in any one place, continually finding new hills to climb

One major difference is that evolutionary landscapes aren’t static. Why? Coevolution! Ever since there were two organisms, life has been a matter of coevolution. (Stewart Brand)

if you played the fitness landscape over time, you would see it is dancing.

So if we want to kick off a Gall-Meadows spiral, we need to create the initial conditions for coevolution.

My sense is that three might be a minimum for kickstarting open-ended coevolution.

Perhaps three might be enough to create a kind of three-body problem for coevolving participants? Keeping them from reaching stable equilibrium, and generating more open-ended outcomes.