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Essays on the Extended Evolutionary Synthesis

Formalizations and Expansions

  • Book
  • © 2023

Overview

Authors:
  1. Rodrick Wallace

    1. Division of Epidemiology, The New York State Psychiatric Institute, New York, USA

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  • Provides comprehensive formal foundation for the Extended Evolutionary Synthesis
  • Examines the evolutionary exaptation of crosstalk between physiological and other information processes
  • Serves as a roadmap for development of new statistical tools

Part of the book series: SpringerBriefs in Evolutionary Biology (BRIEFSEVOLUTION)

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Table of contents (9 chapters)

  1. Front Matter

    Pages i-xx
    Download chapter PDF

  2. On the Major Transitions

    • Rodrick Wallace
    Pages 1-20

  3. On the Extended Evolutionary Synthesis

    • Rodrick Wallace
    Pages 21-43

  4. On Regulation

    • Rodrick Wallace
    Pages 45-69

  5. Punctuated Regulation as an Evolutionary Mechanism

    • Rodrick Wallace
    Pages 71-81

  6. Institutional Dynamics Under Selection Pressure and Uncertainty

    • Rodrick Wallace
    Pages 83-107

  7. On ‘Speciation’: Fragment Size in Information System Phase Transitions

    • Rodrick Wallace
    Pages 109-117

  8. Adapting Cognition Models to Biomolecular Condensate Dynamics

    • Rodrick Wallace
    Pages 119-134

  9. Evolutionary Exaptation: Shared Interbrain Activity in Social Communication

    • Rodrick Wallace
    Pages 135-160

  10. Afterward

    • Rodrick Wallace
    Pages 161-162
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Keywords

About this book

From the ‘punctuated equilibrium' of Eldrege and Gould, through Lewontin's ‘triple helix' and the various visions and revisions of the Extended Evolutionary Synthesis (EES) of Laland and others, both data and theory have demanded an opening-up of the 1950's Evolutionary Synthesis that so firmly wedded evolutionary theory to the mathematics of gene frequency analysis. It can, however, be argued that a single deep and comprehensive mathematical theory may simply not be possible for the almost infinite varieties of evolutionary process active at and across the full range of scales of biological, social, institutional, and cultural phenomena. Indeed, the case history of 'meme theory' should have raised a red flag that narrow gene-centered models of evolutionary process may indeed have serious limitations. What is attempted here is less grand, but still broader than a gene-centered analysis. Following the instruction of Maturana and Varela that all living systems are cognitive, in a certainsense, and that living as a process is a process of cognition, the asymptotic limit theorems of information and control theories that bound all cognition provide a basis for constructing an only modestly deep but wider-ranging series of probability models that might be converted into useful statistical tools for the analysis of observational and experimental data related to evolutionary process. The line of argument in this series of interrelated essays proves to be surprisingly direct.

Authors and Affiliations

  • Division of Epidemiology, The New York State Psychiatric Institute, New York, USA

    Rodrick Wallace

About the author

Rodrick Wallace is a research scientist in the Division of Epidemiology at the New York State Psychiatric Institute, affiliated with Columbia University’s Department of Psychiatry. He has an undergraduate degree in mathematics and a PhD in physics from Columbia, and completed postdoctoral training in the epidemiology of mental disorders at Rutgers. He worked as a public interest lobbyist, including two decades conducting empirical studies of fire service deployment, and subsequently received an Investigator Award in Health Policy Research from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. In addition to material on public health and public policy, he has published peer reviewed studies modeling evolutionary process and heterodox economics, as well as many quantitative analyses of institutional and machine cognition. He publishes in the military science literature, and in 2019 received one of the UK MoD RUSI Trench Gascoigne Essay Awards.

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