Scientists and philosophers team up to study concept of evolution beyond biological context | Carnegie Science
A paper written by a consortium of scientists and philosophers led by Carnegie’s Michael Wong and Robert Hazen, has outlined a law that some of us have been arguing is a fundamental law of evolution for many years. Their "law of increasing functional information" states:
The functional information of a system will increase (i.e., the system will evolve) if many different configurations of the system undergo selection for one or more functions.
Basically, in any selective environment, systems will tend towards structures that improve function by accumulating small (micro) differences which eventually result in large (macro) changes. In other words, replication in a selective environment will inevitably result in evolution towards greater fitness in that environment. Where that improved fitness comes from new or improved function then there will be an increase in complexity.
The exception to that law is in parasites where the whole system (the parasite-host complex) can become increasingly complex (by the host taking on many of the functions of the parasite) but the parasite itself can lose complexity.
The force driving that increase in complexity is, of course, natural selection, where selectors in the environment ensure those arrangements better suited to produce the next generation do so in preference to those less suited.
This fundamental law is of course, not restricted to biological systems but will operate in any situation where there is replication and selection, echoing something I wrote many years ago (Darwin's Powerful Science).
The consortium expresses this fundamental law as:
