Coevolutionary Tuning of Fitness Landscape

Candidate Law #3:

Coevolutionary Tuning of Fitness Landscapes and Organisms to a Self-Organized Critical State

On a coevolutionary timescale, coevolving autonomous agents as a community attain a self-organized critical state by tuning landscape structure (ways of making a living) and coupling between landscapes, yielding a global power law distribution of extinction and speciation events and a power law distribution of species lifetimes.
--Stuart Kauffman

Kauffman makes some fundamental errors with this one. Although he states, "Not all complex systems can be assembled by an evolutionary process!" Having said this, he proceeds to ignore it.

Next he points out, "And it turns out that an evolutionary process based on mutation, recombination, and selection the genetic search mechanisms of current life, does very well on a special kind of fitness landscape, where the high peaks tend to cluster near one another and the sides of the peaks are reasonably smooth, rather like the high Alps."

So, such an environment must have already existed before such an unlikely thing as mutation, recombination and selection (let alone sexual reproduction) could evolve. Co-evolution cannot be the explanation of how such a landscape came to be, only of how it persists.

This seems to be the ideal place to demonstrate the power of metamath to find a preference for building smooth landscapes with clustered maxima.

See also Math and Candidate Laws for Coevolving Systems

— Scotus - 02 Jun 2002