Tag: Symbiosis

Cover for a book titled 'From Natural Drift to Evolutionary Living Coherence' with a mountainous landscape, a large tree, hikers, birds, and circular icons representing Evo-Devo concepts.

From Natural Drift to Evolutionary Living Coherence: A Maturanan Framework for Evo-Devo, Niche Construction, Symbiosis, Inheritance, and Population Genetics | ChatGPT-5.5 Thinking and NotebookLM

Humberto Maturana and Jorge Mpodozis’s theory of natural drift reframes evolution as the historical conservation and diversification of organism–niche relations rather than as the direct optimization of organisms by external selection. This white paper develops natural drift in dialogue with contemporary evolutionary biology, including the Extended Evolutionary Synthesis, evolutionary developmental biology, developmental plasticity, niche construction, symbiosis, holobiont theory, inclusive inheritance, epigenetic inheritance, and population genetics. The central thesis is that evolution can be understood as the historical conservation, transformation, and diversification of viable ways of living. In this framing, development generates phenotype–niche possibilities; behavior guides organism–niche relations; plasticity enables structural coupling in ontogenic time; niche construction modifies the conditions of future evolution; symbiosis expands the organism beyond the host genome; inheritance transmits more than DNA; and population genetics describes the genetic stabilization, sorting, and transformation of variation across generations. Natural selection remains indispensable, but it is interpreted as one sorting process within the wider historical drift of living coherence. This synthesis does not reject the Modern Synthesis; it situates it within a broader relational biology of organism, niche, lineage, and biosphere.

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Epistemological and Ethical Implications of the Free Energy Principle | Eray Özkural

The free energy principle states that self-organization occurs through minimization of free energy, which is a measure of potential thermodynamic work. By minimizing free energy, the organism happens to also minimize surprise over its boundary, promoting chances of survival. We discuss the ethical implications of the cognitive goal in detail from an empirical point of view, highlighting the principle of least action as a physical basis of Occam’s razor, the universality of the free energy principle, and its explanation of natural selection. We explain that the free energy principle extends to groups of organisms and helps us understand group-scale adaptations and selection in biology. The free energy principle applies to all scales of organization in the organism from single cells to the entire nervous system. When this principle is taken to its logical extremes of modeling groups, populations and ecosystems, we uncover a new, evolutionarily sensible path at explaining puzzling aspects of human motivation and judgement, including ethical decisions. To minimize free energy, populations have to act to maximize gathering of information, while building effective models at mitigating changes to its dynamic structure. The free energy principle thus provides a naturalistic explanation of some of our deepest ethical intuitions, and valuable principles of social behavior. We interpret the cognitive goal that corresponds to the principle as seeking a dynamic, fruitful, yet peaceful activity that sustains the organism. This state of mind is interestingly similar to the Buddhist intuition of mental equanimity; the organism’s final goal is to be at peace and harmony with the environment. Another immediately relevant aspect is that assemblies must form to promote symbiotic, synergistic, positive feedback loops, which coincides with the findings of ecologists. Therefore, ethics naturally emerges in self-organizing systems. Assemblies of organisms must ultimately unite in macro-minds to achieve the greatest reduction in free energy, as well as building technological extensions of themselves to improve their capacity to do such, therefore the principle also predicts a post-singularity world-mind composed mostly of artificial intelligence.

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