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Welcome to Evo-Devo Universe, the research community of the Evo-Devo Institute

Dear Scholars, Join Our Listserve!

Are you a scholar in complexity or adaptiveness, whether in cosmology, physics, chemistry, life sciences (evolutionary and developmental biology, cellular, organismic, and systems biology and ecology), mathematics, complexity science, network science, computer science, information theory, hierarchy theory, panarchy theory, resilience theory, systems theory, anthropology, psychology and behavioral science, ethics, complexity economics, political and social science, policy, engineering, urban studies, science and technology studies, history, philosophy, or any other domain that can be analyzed from the perspective of complex structural and functional adaptiveness under selection? Do you seek to better understand complex adaptive systems and universal selection theory, at all scales, and the ways that adaptive systems manage and stabilize the growth, partitioning, and life cycle of functional complexity? If so, you've found a free, nonprofit-run, supportive international research community.

Scholars in this community recognize a fundamental dichotomy: some universal processes are perennially unpredictable (to local observers, at least) using indeterminacy, generativity, and chaos in their dynamics, while others are intrinsically predictable both empirically and theoretically (with sufficient knowledge and simulation capacity), apparently due to their special initial conditions (eg, conserved developmental genes in organisms, fine-tuned parameters in universes) and metastable environmental conditions (eg, physical laws and selection dynamics, in both organisms and universes). Life as a system clearly exploits both processes, at all scales, from Archaea to Earth's ecosystem. Many (not all) of us view adaptiveness in living systems as a set of algorithmic tradeoffs and tensions between exploratory, creative, contingent, unpredictable, and variational "evolutionary" processes, and exploitive, protective, conservative, predictable, replicative "developmental" processes, in any complex system under selection. This evo-devo dynamic is particularly well explored in evo-devo biology and philosophy, but it can be generalized to any potentially autopoietic (self-maintaining, self-replicating, and creative) complex adaptive system under selection.

We also recognize that life creates not only niche-specific adaptiveness, which may increase or decrease functional complexity, but at the same time, in a subset of the network, we see increasing general adaptiveness (adaptive intelligence), systems that demonstrate an increasing capacity to simulate (learn) increasingly useful (pancontextual) aspects of their environment. Such systems can increasingly modify their environment to their purposes (niche construction), and persist in a growing variety of potential environmental conditions. Life, human-linguistic-technological co-evolution and culture, and associational, network-centric computation all exhibit growth in both niche-specific and general adaptive intelligence.

One of our community's research interests is to better characterize and understand network-centric processes that appear to direct and protect life's multi-billion year history of accelerating complexification. It is both a surprising and hopeful observation that the acceleration of structural and functional complexification since life emerged has been improbably and curiously smooth, at the network level, even through periodic catastrophes, both major and minor, when considered on planetary timescales. Many processes in biological dynamics become increasingly stable to catastrophe as their networks direct both local stochastic evolutionary search and global developmental optimization. A classic example is embryogenesis. Spontaneous abortions in human biology decrease from 40% in Week 1 to 0.1% in Week 42 of gestation, as increasingly complex networks emerge and stabilize the fetus. We may ask what latent forms of network learning and stabilization, may exist in cosmological evolutionary development. Network-centric processes may apply not only to the cosmos, but to all autopoietic systems, including human organizations and cultures. There is much potential human value in such research.

Scholars in our community discuss, debate, and publish on topics like evolutionary development (evo-devo) at all scales, dynamical systems theory, universal selection theory, multi-level selection, cosmological natural selection, universal fine tuning and the Standard Model of particle physics, cosmological learning theory, symmetry and gauge theory, quantum gravity hypotheses, nonequilibrium thermodynamics, dissipative systems, least action theory, network theory, active inference, information, meaning, learning, intelligence and computation theory, active inference theory, accelerating change, convergent evolution, teleonomy, Gaia theory, superorganism theory, and ethical, legal, economic, political, technological, and other forms of mental and behavioral individual and collective intelligence, including the study of our rapidly improving machine intelligence and ways that it may remain safe and generally adaptive.

Many of these topics are insufficiently accounted for in our (now very old and substrate-specific) gene- and organismic-centric Modern Synthesis of evolution, both in living systems and in multi-level selection theory. We are hopeful that studies in complexity science may lead us to a new Extended Evolutionary Synthesis, a universal selection theory that accounts for our cosmic and planetary history of accelerating complexification, that gives us deeper context for understanding perennially emergent opportunities and risks. We seek to step towards a set of models and insights that suggest how opportunities and risks may be better managed by adaptive and intelligent systems at all scales. Many of us are concerned about all the ways humanity's growing general, network-centric adaptiveness can fail, or create new risks and threats, in our rapidly-changing modern societies. We seek to use complexity and adaptiveness studies, and universal selection theory, not only to better understand our place in the universe, but to better manage and protect our teams, organizations, societies, and ecosystems against failure, risks, and threats, with more biologically-informed and complexity-aware models, strategies, polices, plans, actions, and reviews.

If any of this rings true to you, welcome! We are a community created in 2008 to support this kind of thinking and scholarship, still underappreciated in standard scientific culture today. Please consider joining our moderated and constructive listserve, EDU-Talk, where you can share your and others work, insights, and questions, and engage in moderated, evidence-informed discussion of these topics. We have roughly 120 scholars on the listserve at present, and we engage in regular formal virtual talks and lively informal discussions on any of the above topics.

To join EDU-Talk, you must have published at least two substantial articles on any of the above or other complexity or adaptiveness-related topics. Non-peer-reviewed web publications are acceptable, if they meet a quality threshold in the judgment of the listserve moderators. Those with university and institutional affiliations are our primary membership. We welcome independent scholars, but we maintain a ratio of at least 50% institutionally-affiliated scholars, as our charitable purpose is to improve institutionally-generated scholarship, strategy, and policy in these topics.

What is Evo-Devo?

Evo-devo is a subfield of genetics, applied and theoretical biology, complexity science, and philosophy, first emerging in the 1990s, that explores how cyclic developmental processes direct, regulate, and constrain evolutionary change in autopoietic (self-maintaining, self-replicating, and creative) complex adaptive systems. Perhaps no one explains evo-devo genetics and dynamics better and faster than in this fun 4-minute music video, Evo-Devo, by Tim Blais of A Capella Science.

To be more accurate, this field might be called "devo-evo", considering developmental self-maintenance, hierarchy, modularity, and self-replication first in our theory, and evolutionary variation as logically secondary, as processes of variation will typically be constrained by the needs of the developmental life cycle for viability. Leading scholars in evo-devo biology, including Brian K. Hall and Gunther Wagner, argued as much in 2000. But inertia had grown by then, and we are stuck with the name that emerged at the field's birth circa 1990. Evo-devo biology tells us that both developmental and evolutionary processes are fundamental to living systems. Importantly for theory, they can each be empirically defined to have two different and partly oppositional adaptive purposes and dynamics.

In information theory, we might define developmental processes as any that conserve previously acquired information that causes future predictable, hierarchical emergence, life cycle, and replication under selection. Evolutionary processes, by contrast, might be defined as any that create new information, in future unpredictable, recombinant and contingent ways. Both processes involve inheritance parameters and the exploitation of regimes of predictable and unpredictable physics, and both are subject to selection in the environment. In physical dynamics, we see that evolutionary processes create novel structure and function in primarily bottom-up, local, creative, divergent, and increasingly future-unpredictable ways, while developmental processes conserve critical structure and function in top-down, global, conservative, convergent and future-predictable ways. We can discern the holistic and deep-future predictable nature of developmental processes either via empirical observation of any autopoietic system over its life cycle (e.g., a seed of a particular species becoming an organism with a particular phenotype) via long-term surveys of ecosystems (e.g., convergent evolution of species types on different continents) and occasionally, via causal computational simulation (e.g., Eric Davidson's models of gene regulatory network dynamics in sea urchin development). Both developmental and evolutionary processes are fundamental contributors to adaptiveness in any autopoietic system under selection.

Perhaps the most foundational insight from evo-devo theory in biology is that we should strive to deeply understand development first, as the capacity for an autopoietic system to use local chaos and contingency to reliably and robustly produce a predictable, hierarchical series of spatially- and temporally-specific future global emergences, across self-maintaining replicative cycles. In genetics, a subset of parameters (eg, the developmental genetic toolkit) are both highly conserved and finely tuned, while the remaining "evolutionary" parameters are free to vary. A similar condition may occur with the 31 (by current count) fundamental parameters of physics and cosmology. Only a subset may be finely tuned, for the stability of the universal life cycle and its intrinsic learning capacity. In origin of life models, evolutionary processes can be considered as an emergent overlay on self-organizing and self-maintaining developmental processes, offering adaptive advantage by creating far greater population and network diversity, and accretively feeding new weights and parameters into developmental networks. Again, in living systems, this accretion must occur in carefully constrained ways, ways that do not disrupt critical developmental dynamics.

Universal Selection Theory (UST), also called Universal Darwinism (UD), is the idea that inherited parameters, replicating and varying under selection, are at the center of learning and adaptiveness in all complex systems, from quantum physics to chemistry to life to nervous systems to human culture to technology to the universe itself. Evo-devo systems theory (EDST) is a variation of UST that seeks insights from evo-devo biology, to better understand selection and adaptation in all autopoietic (self-maintaining, self-replicating, and self-varying) systems. It reminds us that evolutionary and developmental processes are partly oppositional in their informational and physical dynamics, and that adaptive networks, and network science, are at the center of evo-devo processes. It is the self-organizing conservative (read: developmental) and exploratory (read: evolutionary) networks of genes, gene products, switches, circuits, modules, phenotypes, and species that create life's stunning complexity, predictability, persistence, creativity, and network adaptiveness. Evo-devo network models promise to help us understand why life itself, a single autopoietic and interdependent genetic regulatory network, has been so amazingly diverse, complex, hormetic (adding new capability and complexity under right-sized stress), persistent (3.5 Billion years and counting), and adaptive, by comparison to all of its species and individuals. It has always been networks, not species or individuals, that have been the greatest adaptors in complex systems.

The autopoietic (evo-devo) view of complex adaptiveness may be truly foundational. Our community was formed to investigate this view. We seek to better define and understand evo-devo processes in life and intelligence, and in all of its other replicating and varying partners, including human language, ideas, behaviors, laws, institutions, organizations, and technologies. Evo-devo dynamics may even be key to the deepest understanding of our universe itself, if it is also a self-replicating and self-organizing system with both a finite individual lifespan and a perpetual life cycle, as models like Cosmological Natural Selection and more recent models of Cosmological Learning propose. As all adaptive systems within our universe are autopoietic systems, it does seem conceptually parsimonious to many of us to expect that universal complexity itself has self-organized, under selection, via the same evo-devo dynamics that we find in all replicating intrauniversal systems, from suns to molecules to life, to intelligent life, and to what may come next, in a universe that, so far, has curiously exhibited continually accelerating complexification.

News

Visit and critique our latest topic pages:

• Evolutionary Cosmology
• Evolutionary Development
• Convergent Evolution.
• Self-Organization (coming next).

Win or contribute to the High Energy Astrobiology Prize. Does advanced life create a subset of binary stars (stellivore hypothesis)?.

Visit and comment at our EDU blog

Community Conferences

The annual Conference on Complex Systems of the Complex Systems Society is our current primary community where we convene and explore the systems theory and philosophy of evolution, development, and adaptiveness in autopoietic systems at all scales.

Websites of our most recent CCS satellite meetings:

Physics of Self-Organization at CCS 2025 in Siena, Italy.

Physics of Self-Organization at CCS 2024 in Exeter, United Kingdom.

Physics of Self-Organization at CCS 2023 in Salvador, Brazil.

Physics of Self-Organization at CCS 2020 (virtual conference during the COVID-19 pandemic)

Physics of Self-Organization at CCS 2018 in Thessaloniki, Greece.

Efficiency in Complex Systems at CCS 2017 in Cancun, Mexico.

Evolution, Development, and Complexity at CCS 2017 in Cancun, Mexico.

Thanks to all the scientists, researchers, complex systems scholars and philosophers who present at or attend these meetings. Without you, our field would not advance.

Our Latest Book

Our latest edited volume of EDU-related research Evolution, Development and Complexity, came out in the Springer Complexity Series in 2019. This book is a testament to the great and still-underappreciated value of what we call Biology-Inspired Complexity Science & Philosophy, the central theme of our EDU community. See the Satellite website for abstracts. To be considered for future publications, contact lead editor Georgi Georgiev with an abstract of your related work.

Select Member Publications

Clément Vidal's book: The Beginning and the End: The Meaning of Life in a Cosmological Perspective, 2014, Springer.

John O. Campbell's books: Darwin Does Physics, 2015 and The Knowing Universe, 2021. A largely unnoticed scientific revolution has occurred over the past forty-five years. The Darwinian paradigm has been successfully applied to numerous fields outside of biology: including the social and behavioral sciences and most recently to the physical sciences. Longstanding concepts in physics and information theory, including the free energy principle and Bayesian inference, are now being used to model how information becomes knowledge in a great variety of adaptive systems, including quantum, molecular, cellular, neural, cultural, and technological systems, and even to contemplate our universe itself as an autopoietic (evo-devo) learning system. Such autopoietic, model-centric, and selectionist approaches promise a conceptual unification of many branches of science.

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Academic Tributes

Read our tribute pages, honoring the work of our late EDU Community Scholars. Each of these scholars have made notable contributions to the understanding of our universe as a complex evolutionary and developmental learning system, with many autopoietic subsystems, all under various forms of adaptive selection. Tributes are alpha by last name.

The distinguished evolutionary systems theorist John Oberon Campbell (1949-2023), a pioneer in understanding the relationship of selection, information and learning to adaptiveness in the universe, life, and other complex systems, and a distinguished scholar in our EDU community.

The distinguished lawyer and complexity theorist James N. Gardner (1946-2021), author of the selfish biocosm hypothesis (Biocosm, 2003), an extension of cosmological natural selection proposing that universal life and intelligence are intrinsic to cosmic evolution and reproduction, and a presenter at our 2008 Paris conference.

The distinguished developmental and evolutionary systems theorist Stanley N. Salthe (1930-2024), a pioneer in the development-first view of life and our universe, and a founding scholar in our EDU community.

The distinguished biogeochemist David W. Schwartzman (1943-2025), a pioneer in characterizing biospheric self-regulation, the co-evolution of life and environment in the early Earth, and Earth as a developmental system for the coarsely deterministic emergence of life.

The distinguished nuclear physicist and systems theorist Peter Winiwarter (1945-2009), author, Neural Network Nature, 2010 and Founder, Bordalier Institute, Boursay, France, and an early member of our EDU community.

Overview

The EDU Scholarly Research Community explores how our understanding of the universe as a complex system might be augmented by insights from information and computation studies, evolutionary developmental (evo-devo) biology, and hypotheses and models of quasi-evolutionary and quasi-developmental process applied at universal and subsystem scales. The major focus of our community is Biology-Inspired Complexity Science and Philosophy (BICS&P) in ten areas of universal complexity. We think this approach helps us address a few of the "missing links" in complexity research today.

The underlying paradigm for cosmology is theoretical physics. It has helped us understand much about universal space, time, energy, and matter, but does not presently connect strongly to the emergence of information, computation, life and mind.

In the neo-Darwinian paradigm, adaptive evolutionary development guides the production of ordered, complex and intelligent structures. When we consider informational algorithms in biological systems, we can distinguish evolutionary processes which are stochastic, variety-creating, divergent, and contingently adaptive and developmental processes which produce convergent and systemically statistically predictable structures and trajectories internal to the developmental cycle. Such evo and devo algorithms emerged via replication and various selection functions, depending on environment. By analogy with the evolutionary development of two genetically identical twins, a variety of cosmology models predict that two parametrically identical universes would each exhibit unpredictably separate and unique "evolutionary" variation over their lifespan, and at the same time, a broad set of predictable "developmental" shared structure, function, and emergence timelines between them. But how much of the advanced complexity we see around us is developmental? How can we explore this question of the extent of universal development, via astrobiology, simulation, and our models of context-specific and general adaptiveness?

In what other ways does our universe appear to be an evolutionary developmental system? What models suggest our universe may replicate and be selected upon in some extrauniversal environment? How do unpredictability and predictability interact in all replicating systems within our universe, from stars to chemistry to life, and what generic selection functions apply? To what extent may these intrauniversal models help us understand the way unpredictability and predictability work together in physics and cosmology, in service to universal complexity?

We are particularly interested in exploring hypotheses of universal evolutionary process (sometimes called "Universal Darwinism"), and universal developmental process (constraining and future-predictable laws, hierarchy, form, function, and life cycle) which may be operating in complex adaptive systems at all scales. We seek to better understand evolutionary and developmental processes of self-organization and adaptation at all scales, including the universal scale. If universe is a replicator within the multiverse, as preliminary models like cosmological natural selection propose, it would be expected to adaptively self-organize both its evolutionary and developmental processes, just as those processes have self-organized in living systems. Evo-devo models propose that not only is our universe in many ways evolutionary (creative, selectionist, contingent), but it is also developmental (conservative, hierarchical, convergent), as one would expect under replication with selection. For example, the isotropy, compartmentalization, parallelism, and far-future similarity (convergence) we find in universal complex structure and function, at the hierarchy levels of galaxies, stars, and rocky planets, and which may also include astrobiological life and intelligence, has many physical and informational parallels to the isotropy, compartmentalization, parallelism, and far-future similarity seen in biological development.

For more, please see the EDU Project page. A brief article on our work by Michael Chorost: Title: The Ascent of Life (PDF). New Scientist magazine, 21 Jan 2012, pp. 35-37.

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Listserves, People, Themes, Questions, Bibliography, and SIGs

For EDU notice and discussion lists, see Listserves. For current EDU community scholars and associates, please see the People page. For a list of research themes, see the Themes page. For some current research questions, see the Questions page. For a starter list of EDU-related publications by community scholars, and other publications of note, see Bibliography. For a list of primary special interest groups, see SIGs. For a list of future conference themes and proposals, see Conference Themes.

Founding Conference

Our first international EDU conference, Oct 8-9 2008 in Paris, France. It started our community, which has steadily grown since then on our listserves. See the Conference 2008 page for EDU 2008 program, abstracts, slides, and some audio of presentations.

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Invitation

Do you have a respectable scientific community to discuss your more heterodox (unorthodox, provocative, exploratory) ideas in evolution, development, and complexity? Maybe you have a model or theory, or wish to discuss, critique, or design an experiment to evaluate a model or theory, that is a bit outside the mainstream? Intellectual breakthroughs don’t always fit with established traditions. We take this fact seriously in the EDU community, and offer a forum for careful, evidence-seeking discussion and critique of more creative and daring hypotheses. Evo-Devo Universe has over a hundred academically-affiliated scholars from a wide variety of disciplines, engaged in serious, courteous, open-minded, constructive, and private discussion of the frontiers of science, in our main themes of evolution, development, and complexity. Our community uses the Chatham House Rule, where scholars are free to use the information from the discussion, but are not allowed to reveal the source, without that source's permission. This encourages high-reputation scholars to engage in frank debates on controversial topics, and to express early intuitions and tentative opinions that would not otherwise be expressed in more public venues.

Objectives (Mission)

1. To establish an evo-devo universe (EDU) research community to explore ideas, models, and questions involving evolutionary and developmental processes operating in the universe as a system, which may or may not exist within a more extensive cosmologic environment (the multiverse). This includes explorations of multi-scale intrauniversal autopoietic processes (universal selection theory), their homologies to the universe as a complex system, and the topic of universal phylogeny, the hypothesis that universe(s) were the original replicator(s), the LUCA for physical and informational reality, as is proposed in the hypothesis of cosmological natural selection.
   
2. To bring together select cosmologists, physicists, chemists, biologists, complexity theorists, mathematicians, systems theorists, information theorists, computer scientists, philosophers, independent scholars, and bridge-building interdisciplinarians who have all addressed dimensions of this inquiry in previous publications.
   
3. To identify a multidisciplinary global community of scholars with interest in exploring the science and philosophy of the universe, and its subsystems, as evolutionary and developmental systems, and the universe, and its subsystems, as complex adaptive system, in discriminating potential evolutionary and developmental processes and their interrelationships in any system, and in exploring the selective and network-centric processes that manage the tension between creative evolutionary and conservative developmental process, at all scales.
   
4. To conduct a periodic inquiry, conference publication series, and open access overview of current thinking on the evolution and development of the universe and its subsystems.
   

How can I participate?

There are several ways you can participate in the Evo-Devo Universe (EDU) community.

• Institutionally-affiliated academics and a limited number of independent scholars are encouraged to join the EDU-Talk discussion list, a moderated private list for scholars interested in exploring and critiquing models, hypotheses, questions, and speculations relating to the evolution and development of the universe and its subsystems. Your membership on the list can be public or private, as you prefer. Please complete the brief EDU-Talk subscription form.

• Consider coming to and presenting at one of our One-Day Conferences, typically co-located with other academic conferences, where you will meet and can build collaborations with other scholars with similar interests. You are also encouraged to start a SIG within our community on your particular subject of interest.

• If you are a researcher in physics, cosmology, chemistry, biology, philosophy, information, computation, complexity sciences or other field who is considering some of our Research questions, we will be glad to welcome you as a publicly listed member of the community, on our People page.

• If you are interested in doing bibliographic research, scholar recruiting, or community support, we will be glad to welcome you as an Associate member of the community. Perhaps you would like to help us build our bibliography and global scholar network related to EDU themes. We also welcome bibliographic and scholar recruitment suggestions.

• Anyone may join our public EDU-Notices list. This moderated, announcement-only list is low volume and will keep you abreast of EDU Community activities (conferences, publications, etc.). Members may also post notices of important events, call for papers, publications, etc. on EDU-related themes (notices subject to moderator approval) .

• We greatly appreciate one-time or ongoing financial support and any help or advice related to fundraising for the project. Individual or institutional donations may be made to the Evo-Devo Institute, the 501c3 nonprofit sponsoring this research community (est. 2008).

• We are grateful for initial funding of the project by The Complex Systems Institute, Paris (ISC-PIF)