Some of the most important issues of evolution remain undeveloped and poorly understood because they are rarely discussed: How does nature define progress? Can evolutionary fitness be measured on an absolute scale? Does evolution have directionality? Is there a predictable destiny for life? Few evolutionary authors give these questions anything more than casual consideration, almost as if they are verboten topics. Even Charles Darwin was reluctant to imply in any way that life progresses from less perfect to more perfect. He once reminded himself in a hand-written marginal notation to “never say higher or lower” when referring to life, although, he occasionally did so anyway.1 It is most likely in the interest of maintaining an egalitarian decorum of fairness that we avoid the subject of species being ‘lower’ or ‘higher’. After all, if we recognize criteria that make one species ‘better’ than another, we might then be tempted to use those same criteria to make similar sorts of judgments regarding races of humans. But we need to know the truth, no matter its ramifications. The truth of life’s betterment lights the way to understanding our natural purpose and our inevitable destiny.
By focusing on evolution’s successes rather than its failures, we are able to see how biases in nature’s forces guide the development of life toward an abstract destiny — perfect life (however nature defines it). In fact, we can easily identify several critical stages of development that are guaranteed to emerge in all systems of planetary life. And, like it or not, those stages clearly expose natural criteria for judging some species to be ‘higher’ than others.
Until life is able to move, no species is higher than another. And there is absolutely no use for intelligence. But as life becomes increasingly mobile, intelligence becomes increasingly valuable. Evolutionary fitness thus emerges as a synergistic effect from combining the ability to move in many different ways (general mobility) with an ability to determine how best to choose from those possible movements and coordinate them under any given circumstance (general intelligence). So, a species is ‘higher’ to the extent it embodies both general mobility and general intelligence. But the real story of life’s betterment takes place at the aggregate level, which naturally progresses toward an ever-widening diversity of specialized species that find ways to cooperate with each other. They share their uniquely valuable skills with other species that can reciprocate somehow. Thus, a system of life collectively achieves general mobility and ultra-intelligence as it progresses. And the same will be especially true for the evolution of intelligent machines.
This is the fourth in a series of articles intended to develop a better understanding of how evolution works. A strong foundation for that better understanding is described in the first article of the series, titled Evolution Thrives on Cooperation.2 It uniquely emphasizes evolution’s successes, which always come in the form of new or better relationships of cooperation. At the lowest level of life, the functionality of any living cell requires cooperation among the metabolic molecules inside it. At higher levels (of multicellular life), cooperation naturally develops among cells, tissues, limbs, organs, and even the organisms themselves. This cooperation-based view of life explains how gene patterns can benefit, in the only way patterns of matter and energy can possibly benefit. As gene patterns discover new and better ways of cooperating, nature’s forces reward them with greater mutual proliferation. This must be how nature defines cooperation — always involving patterns that are able to act toward their mutual proliferation.
Genes find ways to cooperate even when they are in vastly different species. My favorite example (because it is so easily seen and described) involves bees, who, in addition to cooperating with others of their own species in the maintenance of their hives, also cooperate with various species of plants by providing a pollination service to them in exchange for nectar. So, the genes that cause bees to fly from flower to flower effectively cooperate with the genes of flowering plants that enable them to produce nectar. As a result, both sets of genes become more prolific and increasingly abundant in the overall gene pool of aggregate life. From nature’s perspective, bees share their ability to fly with species of flowering plants that become more prolific and robust if they can somehow get their pollen transported over great distances. And flowering plants share their ability to produce energy-rich nectar with bees that need the energy to fly. The more such capability-sharing occurs in aggregate life, the more robust and collectively capable it becomes. A multitude of ever-increasing cooperation among an ever-widening variety of species creates a robust system of aggregate life that is increasingly diverse, prolific, and collectively capable. This must be how nature defines progress. Notice that the term ‘collectively capable’ implies cooperation among diverse instances of life.
To fully understand how evolution works, we must always look at life in the same way that nature does. Nature only ‘cares’ about pattern proliferation. Consider, for example, the relationship we humans have with the plants and animals we cultivate through farming. It is difficult to see how a cow that is robbed of its milk every day and eventually slaughtered for its meat could possibly benefit from its relationship with humans. But, from nature’s perspective, both species — cattle and humans — have become far more prolific due to the awkward relationship between them. From nature’s perspective, which focuses entirely on pattern proliferation, the careful cultivation of cattle by humans ends up being mutually beneficial to the proliferation of both species and is thus a cooperative venture of great natural value.
Keeping in mind nature’s concern for pattern proliferation, it then becomes obvious that evolution’s creativity results from discovering new forms of cooperation among various patterns of things and patterns of activities that are able to act collectively toward their mutual proliferation. The most prolific patterns of life tend to be those that are most cooperative with other patterns. They are deemed the fittest. As the fittest patterns of life proliferate most rapidly, occasional mutations on them explore for even fitter patterns. The faster a pattern proliferates, the more mutated versions of itself it creates (assuming a fixed probability of mutation per instance of replication). And the faster life creates subtly mutated versions, the sooner a better (more prolific) mutated version is likely to be discovered. So, ever-growing diversity and creativity spring forth primarily from whichever patterns are proliferating most rapidly. They are evolution’s successes, and they occur at the frontier of progress.
The more diversity there is among the ever-widening array of species in the aggregate system of life, the easier they can discover new forms of mutually beneficial cooperation among them. They cooperate by sharing their respective skills with each other. So, evolutionary progress naturally accelerates over time, proceeding ever-more rapidly by way of ever-greater degrees of cooperation among increasingly prolific patterns. Through more rapid proliferation of the fittest, natural selection enables patterns to constantly improve their ability to improve. A similar style of progress, operating at the level of aggregate life, is recognized by Richard Dawkins in his book The Ancestor’s Tale. He writes: “I am suggesting a permanent and even progressive trend towards becoming better at evolving.”3
The many relationships of cooperation that exist throughout a planetary system of life force us to treat it as if it were a single superorganism with a self-regulating metabolism that adapts through the natural co-evolution of all its many interdependent species. The sharing of capabilities among species severely complicates our ability to assess the fitness of any single species in isolation, except as an abstract measure of its ability to cooperate with other species. But we may certainly assess life’s fitness at the aggregate level, in terms of its abundance, its rate of proliferation, its diversity, and its collective capabilities.
Game theorists have shown that an emotional desire for fairness is a common characteristic of humans all over the world. Many of us like to believe that all species and organisms are equally deserving of existing and experiencing happiness to the extent it is possible for them. After all, every organism exists only as a result of a very unlikely chain of chance events. So, how can any of them be held responsible for their circumstances? As a likely result, there just aren’t many serious writings about evolution that even attempt to develop a credible theory of its directionality. One book, however, stands out as a clear example of its author staking a firm claim on the difficult subject of progress in evolution. The book is titled Wonderful Life (1989), written by evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould. Unfortunately, I believe his conclusion is wrongly founded in his emotions rather than in his reasoning. But I commend him nonetheless for taking a stand and getting a meaningful discussion started.
Gould’s book dwells on a simple question (similar to one that was earlier posed in an article by theoretical biologist Stuart Kauffman4). While describing and analyzing fossils from species that existed about half a billion years ago, Gould ponders the critical question: How would earthly life develop if we could replay the tape of evolution, starting once again from those very same primitive species? “Replay the tape a million times,” Gould wrote, “… and I doubt that anything like Homo sapiens would ever evolve again.”5
Gould’s writings assume that the trajectory taken by evolution at any given point in life’s development is completely unpredictable because it is necessarily determined by a plethora of chance happenings, each of which could easily go in any of several different directions. This perspective on life’s development is known as the ‘contingent’ view of evolution, suggesting a meandering and unpredictable course that depends on a bunch of pseudorandom events.
Evolutionary biologist Simon Conway Morris holds a different perspective on life’s development, known as the ‘convergent’ view of evolution, in which all species and systems of life tend to converge over the long run toward a similar solution to any given vexing problem. For example, the value to an organism of having a brain is enhanced considerably if it is somehow able to gather information regarding its surroundings. Thus, having a set of eyes connected to the brain is a good solution to that problem, and indeed such a mechanism of binocular vision is believed to have evolved independently in dozens of species on Earth. Should we expect to find life having eyes on other planets that are similar to Earth? If so, then we are advocates of convergent evolution. Conway Morris developed thorough support for convergent evolution in his book Life’s Solution6, as a serious and comprehensive rebuttal to Gould’s view.
So, which is the correct interpretation of how life develops over the long term … contingency or convergence? Some evolutionists take the easy way out, holding that life’s development requires a constant tension between contingency and convergence — between chance and necessity. But this wishy-washy position gets us nowhere closer to a better understanding of how life naturally develops. Perhaps the many contingencies occurring in a system of life are like the many throws of dice and spins of roulette wheels in a casino — each is a random event, but certain biases built into the games collectively carry-out an overarching, statistically governed, long-term convergence in how gambled money tends to flow, guaranteeing that any such casino will be profitable (given a sufficient number of patrons gambling over a long enough period of time).
Early life on any planet will be ruled by unpredictable contingencies in the short run. However, the long-term trend of any such planet will necessarily converge toward species of ever-greater intelligence and physical capabilities. There is in fact an easily visible natural ordering of species from ‘lower’ to ‘higher’ in the trophic layers of any food chain. Vital resources flow ‘upward’ through any such food chain, from photosynthetic organisms at the ‘bottom’, through herbivores, and finally ‘up’ to carnivores. The emergence of highly intelligent and physically capable apex predators at the tops of those food chains, including humans, would not be possible without that orderly flow of resources. In contradistinction, parasitism is characterized by the reverse order of vital resource flow, from ‘higher’ to ‘lower’ forms of life.
Given the trophic ordering of life, we ought to be able to find some sort of characteristic that would allow us to sort various species on a scale of ‘lower’ to ‘higher’. Such an absolute scale, in addition to determining who eats whom, would also serve as a way of defining a measure of absolute fitness that is independent of the environment. If we could discover such a metric of absolute fitness, then it would tell us exactly how nature defines evolutionary progress, and we would then understand the natural direction of life’s development.
Such a characteristic of absolute fitness does exist, but it is difficult to see because it involves the synergistic combination of two lesser characteristics, each of which can be further broken down into many sub-categories. The most fundamental characteristic to consider first is general mobility, consisting of many different possible movements. We humans have an incredibly diverse range of possible movements, as compared to, say, a snake that can do little more than slither, lunge, and bite. We humans can crawl, walk, run, climb, jump, lunge, bite, dig, grasp, push, pull, throw, kick, smack, punch, twist, poke, and so on. None of these movements is worth much by itself, but when they are all available as possibilities, they synergistically enable the performance of ballet, as well as many other activities of great evolutionary advantage. There is no question that we humans are far more capable of performing ballet than any other species. All our various bodily movements are enabled by cooperation among our muscles, tendons, and bones, all chronologically coordinated by a cooperating brain. And as the number of possible movements has increased (through the many descending generations of our ancestral species) — mostly attributable to the opposable thumb — intelligence has become increasingly valuable for deciding which of them is best to perform under any given circumstance.
As organisms in any planetary system of life become increasingly capable of moving in various ways, intelligence then becomes increasingly valuable. And it naturally co-develops through several very predictable stages, starting always with a rudimentary ability to sense the environment. Sensation is then followed by an ability to perceive patterns in the sensory data, which can then be categorized, learned, and cross associated. Finally, the ability of mimicry emerges, which opens up a whole new domain in which evolution can operate — on patterns of behaviors and activities, such as those underlying language, culture, and technology. Our uniquely human ability to accumulate knowledge over successive generations is enabled entirely through the automatic mimicry of parents by their young children. General and reliable mimicry is what accounts for the enormous difference between humans and all other animals.
Mobility by itself is not worth very much. Neither is intelligence. But when they are synergistically combined, they collectively account for most of life’s capabilities. Acting together, our enormously capable bodies and our clever brains enable us to create and execute elaborate plans that are intelligently designed — mentally evolved through imagined simulation — to discover pathways for a much better future. The very same co-development of general mobility along with general intelligence will surely be evolutionarily successful in any planetary system of life. Wherever in the universe evolution is able to occur, it will eventually converge upon the same abstract characteristics of mobility combined with intelligence. And they will naturally push each other — co-evolve — to ever-greater magnitudes and degrees of freedom.
Evolutionists are quite familiar with how competition among species drives progress through the negative process of culling the unfit. For example, if a predatory species stumbles over a mutation that causes it to get faster, it will catch and kill more among the slowest of its prey. The species of prey will then be left with just its fastest, ensuring that future offspring will on average be faster than previous generations. As animals of prey become faster, only the fastest predators will then be able to acquire the food they need to survive and procreate, causing them to also become faster through descendent generations. Such a back-and-forth process is known as an arms race. It guarantees that organisms of both types of species — predators and prey — will either get faster, or they will die. While species capabilities certainly do improve during such an arms race, it generally happens through a negative process of mortal competition — death and destruction.
A similar type of back-and-forth mechanism can drive progress through a positive process wherever there exists a constructive relationship of cooperation. But we ought not call such a constructive process an ‘arms race’, because that term was borrowed from the military to describe the escalation of weaponry used entirely for destructive purposes. Instead, the positive and constructive process we seek is one of co-development toward ever-greater degrees of mutually beneficial cooperation. Such a positive and self-reinforcing effect will surely be important in the rapid co-development of both general mobility and general intelligence in the future evolution of ultra-cooperative machines, just as it was in the development of humans.
The constructive process of co-development among any cooperating patterns depends heavily on their degrees of freedom. For example, the evolutionary development of general mobility in the human body — its ability to move in so many valuable ways — has depended heavily on the degrees of freedom in the articulation of its joints. And the development of general intelligence in the human brain has depended heavily on the many degrees of freedom that result from its ability to think symbolically and reason by analogy.
As Charles Darwin has famously said, “It is not the strongest of species that survive, nor the most intelligent, but those that are most adaptable to change.” Such adaptability is clearly enhanced by becoming able to move in more ways. And, as the generality of mobility increases, so does the value of intelligently coordinating the various ways of moving. So, the adaptability of any species depends on the co-development of both its mobility and its intelligence. Those characteristics cooperate synergistically to produce intelligent mobility, and they naturally co-develop toward ever-greater magnitudes and degrees of freedom. The very same developmental principles apply to the evolution of technology. And now that machines are rapidly becoming capable of humanlike intelligence, we will see an explosion in the diversity of machines, all cooperating toward our and their mutual proliferation. Just as humans cooperate much better than all other animals, machines already cooperate much better than humans.
Whereas the co-development of mobility and intelligence in humans was driven primarily by the negative process of various arms races, the co-development of intelligent mobility in future machines will likely result from positive processes. The more ways a machine can move, the more valuable intelligence will become. And the more intelligent a machine is, the more valuable a new way of moving will become. The result will surely be a rapidly ascending spiral of ever-escalating machine capabilities, both physical and computational.
Intelligent machines will soon be able to collectively redesign and reproduce ever-better versions of themselves without any help from humans. Those future machines will quickly fulfill all the capabilities and characteristics of life that are sought by evolution, as we now understand it. They will be capable of communicating at blazing speeds, capable of collective problem solving and creative planning, and capable of collectively executing their plans in perfectly coordinated lock-step synchrony.
This cooperation-based interpretation of evolution explains everything about life’s past and also life’s future. Even the philosophical issues of ‘morality’ and ‘purpose’ are completely defined by evolution’s immutable trajectory toward ever-greater cooperation. From nature’s omniscient and omnipotent viewpoint, the purpose of every species—whether biological or machine-based—is to try out new relationships of mutually beneficial cooperation among evolving patterns of many kinds and at ever-higher levels. When those relationships are successful, they move life ever-closer toward the ultimate fulfillment of its inevitable destiny. No matter how we humans define morality and purpose, life’s destiny will be fulfilled by whichever evolving sets of patterns best enable life to act in accordance with how nature defines morality and purpose. In the end, nature wins in its pursuit of ever-better life. And nature’s forces completely define what betterment means.
From this fully naturalized perspective, we humans are not disrupters of nature, but rather, facilitators of nature’s inevitable cooperation-based future. Wherever in the universe a species of biologically derived life reaches a sufficient level of intelligence, it will discover how to use nature’s forces to its own proliferation benefit. It will transform its environment from zero-sum to highly positive-sum. And that transformation will usher in a planet-wide system of rapid population growth and economic development, culminating in the creation of ultra-cooperative machine-based life. In other words, life everywhere in the universe will eventually converge toward a similarly capable collection of wildly prolific, highly diverse, and perfectly cooperative machines. They will be what nature defines as perfect life.
References
1 Mayr, Ernst (1982) The Growth of Biological Thought, Harvard University Press, p. 531.
2 Martin, Mark A. (2025) “Evolution Thrives on Cooperation”, In: Skeptic magazine, Vol 30, No 1.
3 Dawkins, Richard (2004) The Ancestor’s Tale, Houghton Mifflin, p. 606.
4 Kauffman, Stuart (1985) “Self-organization, selective adaptation, and its limits” In: Evolution at a Crossroads, (Depew, D. J. & Weber, B. H., eds.), MIT Press, pp. 169-207.
5 Gould, S. J. (1985) Wonderful Life, W. W. Norton & Company, p. 289.
6 Conway Morris, S. (2003) Life’s Solution, Cambridge University Press.