The Evolutionary Unfolding of Complexity

We analyze the population dynamics of a broad class of fitness functions that exhibit epochal evolution---a dynamical behavior, commonly observed in both natural and artificial evolutionary processes, in which long periods of stasis in an evolving population are punctuated by sudden bursts of change. Our approach---statistical dynamics---combines methods from both statistical mechanics and dynamical systems theory in a way that offers an alternative to current ``landscape'' models of evolutionary optimization. We describe the population dynamics on the macroscopic level of fitness classes or phenotype subbasins, while averaging out the genotypic variation that is consistent with a macroscopic state. Metastability in epochal evolution occurs solely at the macroscopic level of the fitness distribution. While a balance between selection and mutation maintains a quasistationary distribution of fitness, individuals diffuse randomly through selectively neutral subbasins in genotype space. Sudden innovations occur when, through this diffusion, a genotypic portal is discovered that connects to a new subbasin of higher fitness genotypes. In this way, we identify innovations with the unfolding and stabilization of a new dimension in the macroscopic state space. The architectural view of subbasins and portals in genotype space clarifies how frozen accidents and the resulting phenotypic constraints guide the evolution to higher complexity.Comment: 28 pages, 5 figure

It Ain't Social, It Ain't Capital and It Ain't Africa

Two concepts have dominated the social sciences over the past decade. In the lead is globalisation. Not far behind is social capital. One attempts to deal with contemporary realities at the international level; the other at national or lower levels. The two rarely meet. For, as has been frequently observed, in raising the virtues of civil society to pedestal status, social capital has studiously ignored questions of power, conflict, the ruling elite and the systemic imperatives of (contemporary) capitalism. Though fundamentally flawed as a concept and equally flexible as the global financial system that it takes as its metaphor, globalisation cannot be so indicted. 1 For globalisation seeks to address the nature of the world at the turn of the millennium, by grounding concepts in prevailing empirical realities, and unavoidably confronts issues of control and dissent. By contrast, social capital purports to reign over a domain that ranges, even for a single author and leading promoter of social capital, Robert Putnam (1993 and 2000), from twelfth century Italy to twentieth century United States. Concepts with such scope of ambition should be treated with caution if not contempt. At a more polemical level, in drawing comparison wit

Musical and Intellectual Values: Interpreting the History of Tonal Theory

For many years, the history of music theory seemed most useful as a source for dissertation topics, the models of choice being the critically annotated translation of some little-read treatise, "book report"-style coverage of a wider range of a theorist's work, or sometimes the tracing of a concept or category through several generations of theorists. The unstated assumption that there would be little overwhelming relevance in such topics guaranteed their suitability as journeyman demonstrations of scholarly aptitude. Students could safely work in distant tributaries, away from the roaring cataracts of central issues. Intellectual investment would be limited to showing a consciousness of the relationship of such tributaries to the main stream, either by locating originary traces of modern theories or by indulging in the compensatory satisfaction of being able to appraise earlier theories as primitive and unenlightened. But as more and more theorists have been brought to light in this manner and the list of critical editions grows, there is an equally growing apprehension that the history of our theoretical assumptions has moved closer to the center of our concerns in musicology. For as we become increasingly self-aware of the ways we talk about music, as talk about music eclipses music itself as the most fascinating object in the academic firmament, the history of such talk suddenly assumes a luminous relevance

Eugenics and the afterlife: Lombroso, Doyle, and the spritualist purification of the race

No abstract availabl