evolution

Taking the spiritual element out of animism, we could define it as follows:

Animism: The invariance of living nature is spirit.
Spirit = self-organizing software agent.

Darwin: evolution = competition between species.
Dawkins: evolution = competition between molecules.
Animism: evolution = competition between software agents.

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Evolving to Extinction

Cancerous cells do pretty well in the body, prospering and amassing more resources, far outcompeting their more obedient counterparts. For a while.
Multicellular organisms can only exist because they’ve evolved powerful internal mechanisms to outlaw evolution. If the cells start evolving, they rapidly evolve to extinction: the organism dies.

Evolution doesn’t operate on particular individuals; individuals keep whatever genes they’re born with. Evolution operates on a reproducing population, a species, over time. There’s a natural tendency to think that if an Evolution Fairy is operating on the species, she must be optimizing for the species. But what really changes are the gene frequencies, and frequencies don’t increase or decrease according to how much the gene helps the species as a whole.

Transclude of natural-selection#^34a937

Info

This note covers biological evolution - the process of change in living organisms over generations through natural selection, genetic drift, and other mechanisms.
For computational methods inspired by evolution, see evolutionary optimization.

References

The Simple Math of Evolution (series)

competition