Humanity Rising: Why Evolutionary Developmentalism Will Inherit the Future

Evo Devo Universe - An Interdisciplinary Research Community

Evo Devo Universe – Exploring Models of Universal Evolution and Development

An expanded version of this post was published as:
Full PDF (21 pages) is now available here.











Charles Darwin - Father of Evolutionary Theory

Charles Darwin, On the Origin of Species, 1859



Curiosity – A Discover Channel TV Series



Mankind Rising – Season 2, Episode 8 of Curiosity




Homo habilis, perhaps the first persistence hunters.



















The hand of Stenonychosaurus inequalis, with a partly opposable digit.

The hand of Troodon inequalis, with a partly opposable digit.



















A Good Overview of Evo-Devo Biology












Great New Book on Prediction

Great New Book on Statistical Social Prediction








Further Reading





  1. If our technology-driven civilization is the result of an ongoing developmental process that is still at work then it therefore follows that we are collectively “developing” (as opposed to “evolving”) into yet more complex social and knowledge structures. Some of these emerging trends and structures are relatively easy to predict (in my opinion) while others seem to strike out of the blue. For example, the Internet, in retrospect, seems to be one of those developmental milestones that would emerge out of any sufficiently advanced civilization. Yet the best thinkers of the day (most futurists, scientists and even science fiction writers) did a poor job of predicting it. What accounts for this? Is it because they failed to exercise proper foresight methodology or because the Internet was fundamentally different from anything that had ever come before? Will the next “Internet” level milestone catch us by surprise? Are we any better poised now to make future predictions concerning never before witnessed phenomena (as opposed to follow-on predictions based on extending current trends)?

    • Hi Knotanumber, thank you for the great feedback. I think we are both collectively evolving and collectively developing, and its mostly evolving, which is why development is hard to see and point out. Lots of evolutionary “noise” obscuring the developmental “signal.” According to one anecdote I read, Bill Gates may have quipped to his staff, contemplating the rapid rise of Google, which took them by surprise, “Let’s find the person (inside Microsoft) who predicted the internet and make him king.” The reality is that Microsoft culture may not have been sufficiently desirous of critical feedback, or sufficiently cognitively diverse.

      But outside Microsoft there were plenty who predicted the internet. We can find the harbingers back as far as H.G. Wells in the 1930’s with his Global Encyclopedia (think Wikipedia) and Vannevar Bush (As We May Think, 1945). Or Murray Lienster in his short story “A Logic Named Joe,” who saw the internet and the decentralization and miniaturization of computers in 1946, when everyone else saw computers as big, centralized machines. We need to have markets, platforms and systems that reward these early predictors, and bring them out of the crowd into the light. We’re building those on the current generation web. See Spigit and Bright Idea, and Recorded Future as a few leading current examples, but there are many others.

  2. I’ve been reading Nonzero by Richard Wright. He proposes that directional evolution (developmental) arises out of evolution as a natural result of non-zero sum (game theory) interactions. What is your take on this? Is developmental progress “baked in” to physical laws? Does it arise out of evolution’s random walk somehow? Or is there some other imperative at work?

    • I agree, Nonzero is a lovely book about positive sum games, which seem to me to be a key part of developmentalist ethics in an intelligent collective. I highly recommend it. Bob Wright spoke at my Accelerating Change 2005 conference. He’s a great speaker too. Funny and warm and smart.

  3. “If we saw such “early” alien intelligences from across a dimly lit room, if they somehow had access to a way to reach us before they turned postbiological (they don’t, and won’t) they would they look roughly like us” –

    can you expound on the ‘they don’t, and won’t’ part?

  4. John,

    One reaction I have that might be useful to you if it is shared by others – the main thing you can do to make this better understood by a wider audience may be to spend a bit more time clearly defining what “developmental” is. I’m still not crystal clear on what all you mean by it – for exactly the reasons of the bias you point out, namely that we all have had so much exposure to the idea of evolution that it needs no introduction, but not so with development as a process. You only have the sentence “programmed, convergent, conservative, and predictable selective change, a process we can call development.” That is just not easily parsed by people (largely me included) who don’t already know what development very really clearly.

    A wider thought – one of the things that is unclear to me about the concept of development is whether some of your references to it refer to truly universe-wide “easiest/only paths” or a whole spectrum of context-dependent “easiest/only paths”. What comes to mind is an analogy to the difference between local and global maxima (or really the sets of all local maxima divided by all possible locales, including the global one). The difference is important when drawing conclusions such as whether nearly all intelligent life would look like us across a hazy room. E.g. maybe once a certain evolutionary choice was made in an earlier epoch, then from then on that assertion would be true of all sufficiently “human” life, or maybe as you might be asserting, every stage of complexity has a single developmental bottleneck, so there is not a divergence at any point of complexity-increase that would lead to parallel tracks, each of which has different developmental bottlenecks of their own.

    I don’t have the expertise to guess between those two overall scenarios, but I would be suspicious that we have enough collective knowledge yet to be very certain of either.

    Keep it up – it’s all fascinating!


    • Hi Sibley,

      Thanks for the post. Yes, development is a quite special process, and not so easy to define. I go into it in more detail in the 50 page precis, but here I think less is more. I just removed “selective” from both definitions to try to make them easier to understand. Later in the post I talk about evolutionary vs. developmental selection, as two forms of natural selection. Perhaps the best way to think of development is how it works in biological twins. Development takes the chaos and contigency out of randomly different (within bounds) environmental conditions for each twin, and steers them to the same systemic forms and functions. It also does this hierarchically, and in a replicative lifecycle. All those processes may be necessary for any system to be developmental. It’s amazing that a small amount of information and process can do this, in any biological system, but it does, and evo-devo biologists and embryologists try to uncover how that happens.

      Context-dependent easiest/only paths are examples of evolutionary adaptive selection, not developmental selection. Evolutionary adaptive fitness landscapes have lots of low points/bottlenecks, but they are contingent/context dependent. We find many of them that are slightly different in different environments. If you ran the simulation twice, you’d get different sets of those landscapes and bottlenecks, as Stephen Jay Gould would argue. Developmental easiest/only paths must truly be system/universe wide, to be developmental/predictable over a very wide variety of evolutionary contexts. IF the humanoid form is a developmental bottleneck, then in all galaxies of our type throughout the universe, multicellular organisms at our level of adaptive complexity in a wide variety of evolutionary environments would predictably, with some high level of probability, go through that form, and they would do that on the way to yet other predictable form, such as postbiological life. Such assertions are increasingly testable in scientific simulation, and may be testable in astrobiology as well, the better our telescopes get. There are telescopes that future humans can build which use the gravitational lensing ability of our sun and see across our galaxy as well as we see other planets in our solar system (See Claudio Maccone’s FOCAL project for more details, if interested). I talk about how we could use such telescopes to validate developmentalism in my Transcension Hypothesis article online, if interested.

      So both of your scenarios, evolutionary and developmental fitness/selection/bottlenecks, must be plentiful in our universe if the evo devo model is correct. I’d further expect that the evolutionary bottlenecks would be at least 20 times more prevalent (the 95/5 rule I mentioned) than developmental ones, if the universe manages these two processes in ways similar to how biology appears to manage them. I hope this helps!

  5. Great article, John! A few thoughts:

    “all reasonable analysis suggests” is a very strong statement. I’d be compelled to keep reading even without “all” but I was tripped up a bit with it, wondering how you could show that.

    The examples following “Other examples of inevitable, ubiquitous developments in our universe may include…” would be easier to follow if in bullet form. The ideas are sufficiently challenging without squeezing them into a sentence of a hundred words.

    Troodon lived 75 mya, giving them 10 million years to evolve toward dinosauroid before the meteor hit. From your reading of the referenced works, is there evidence of convergence toward humanoid form?

    I like your paragraph opening with “Let me stress here that evolutionary development is no return to the…” because it compares and contrasts with familiar frameworks. Connecting to models we already know is powerful when introducing a new model.

    The gains you list from the evo-devo perspective are forceful: regain an open mind and our humility, lose pessimism of the future, gain understanding of universal purpose, and recognize parts of the future are predictable.

    Thank you for sharing your analysis and synthesis!

    • Thanks for this feedback Miguel! I dropped the “all”, and thank you for pointing that out. Using a more measured language is much more appropriate for this kind of speculative writing.

      I expanded the Troodon section to explain more of the argument regarding convergence to the humanoid form. For me, domination of the tree niche seems likely to be key to that development given what living in trees do to hands (make them versatile) and brains (make us excellent at predicting trajectories in relation to our grasping hands, and thus good rock throwers and club-wielders). I haven’t had a chance to see if any evolutionists have made a similar suggestion, or what more has been learned on Troodon’s or his clade’s relative success vs. other animals in the late Cretaceous, but I’m looking forward to eventually researching it on ISI Web of Knowledge, when I can find a free day.

  6. Dear John, this is a fascinating and powerful essay that brings together a number of issues I’ve been pondering for the last few months. I’m already familiar with the general outline of your ideas, having read your essay on evo-devo, but this piece puts them together in a magisterial way. I am still trying to wrap my head around how the processes of evolutionary divergence and developmental convergence can take place simultaneously in an integrated way; I have a vague visual intuition of a fractal relationship where divergence and convergence interact at many levels of scale. Perhaps someone can coin good words for evolutionary divergence (“exfoliation”?) and developmental convergence (“infoliation”?) But the term about which I’ve been thinking the most is “purpose.” You write, “I believe it is both the best definition and the purpose of humanity to use technology to continually reshape us, individually and collectively, into something more than our biological selves, and to do this in as deliberate and ethical a way as possible, using both evolutionary and developmental means.” Definition, okay. But as you acknowledge, “purpose” is tricky. If one cannot avoid the conclusion that the laws of the universe are set up to produce life (Kauffman, Morowitz, and Hazen), and that that life will inevitably increase in complexity (Kelly, Wright, Chaisson), and that the mind that emerges from that life will inevitably become more technologically powerful (Ian Morris) and more moral (Steven Pinker), one has to ask where those setting-up laws came from. It’s the Paley argument on a more subtle level. The obvious non-supernatural answer is the anthropic one: out of an infinite number of universes some will have the laws set up just right, and ours is one of them. This seems reasonable, though in his book “The Beginning of Infinity” David Deutsch casts doubt on anthropic explanations. I haven’t understood his argument yet. I might have to get him to explain it to me personally. (I’ve pitched an essay to a magazine that would give me a shot at doing this. I’ve been doing a lot of reading for it, as you can see.) But for the moment I am wondering what you think.
    Thanks again for this essay, and best regards,
    Mike Chorost

    • Hello Michael, thank you for the kind words, and all the great references. I’ve been meaning to read Ian Morris’s latest book, The Measure of Civilization, 2013. He is a bold historian, and I am hopeful that his developmentalist approach will greatly improve our understanding of the inevitables of human social change.

      I expanded the post with a section on William Paley and the Watchmaker Argument. I hope it is clearer now. Evo devo is an anthropic argument (our universe must be compatible with the conscious life that observes it, which constrains some of the random possibilities of universe type) but it is not a Many Worlds argument. I would consider that particular model implausible if the universe is evolutionary and developmental, because replicating systems within our universe don’t appear to work that way. For example, organic evolution is wasteful, but nothing at the level offered by the Many Worlds model.

      In an evo devo universe, instead of weak anthropic constraints, we should expect strong developmental constraints to explain the physical laws and processes we find. Developmental process always constrains the possible evolutionary experiments in living systems, so we should expect this in the universe as well. Evo devo models argue that the laws of the universe, like the laws of living systems, self-organize over multiple evolutionary and developmental cycles. Fortunately, evo devo approaches should be increasingly testable the better we can understand and model both biology and the universe.

      I hope you get an interview with David. You are a great popularizer of complex ideas and I would love to see what comes of that. For those who don’t know his latest book, The Beginning of Infinity, is a fantastic ode to science, and the value and limits of explanations/representations in the universe.

  7. I see shoots and springs of this evo-devo worldview emerging in academia, but there is a lot of hostility, confusion, and dismissal from established scientists. In evolutionary biology, any talk of progress or inevitability or even just trends towards complexification is treated with little respect. Convergent evolution is acknowledge but treated as a probabilistic result of adaptation to similar environments and not at all thought to be a predictable phenomenon. Simon Conway Morris has lost credibility in many biologists eyes, especially since he published his book supporting his Christianity. Multi-level selection, which is very harmonious with evo-devo thought, has been fighting a losing battle against the dominant inclusive fitness theory. Lee Smolin’s ideas are marginalized, and string theorists dominate with their weak anthropic principle taking over Smolin’s cosmological natural selection. And any talk of moral philosophy being placed on scientific grounds (non-zero sum games, convergent moral psychology, etc.) is dismissed as violating Hume’s razor, the is-ought dichotomy (and naturalistic fallacy). Even within transhumanist and singularity circles, these ideas are mocked as misunderstandings of established science. The last case is particularly egregious since they are in support of creating AIs with goal systems that try to shoehorn in moral decisions processes based on this directionless and strictly reductionist understanding of science, which could cause disastrous results (or, most probably in my opinion, no results since they’d fail to create an AGI using their current incomplete worldview).

    I am really interested in this evo-devo model, but I’m hesitant to adopt it completely until more science is done, so how can we get these ideas to be discussed and experimented upon within their respective mainstream academic fields?

    • Hello Haig, I think you’ve perfectly summed up the present situation.

      Shoots and springs of acceptance, and minor journals and communities in support, but a lot of hostility, misunderstanding and dismissal from the dominant communities. Paradigm shifts are apparently always like that, and this does seem to be a classic case of a paradigm shift, as it is a major rethink of the neo-Darwinian model that has been so successful for so long but is now showing its limitations.

      I’m sad to hear this news about Conway Morris. I heard he was a Christian, and had always hoped he was one of those reform Christians who are spiritual agnostics, going to his church for community and moral discussion. Unfortunately I don’t know the book you might be referring to. Agnostic scientism (we don’t know and ultimately may never know if there is a God in or behind the universe, but there is no evidence for an active God who intervenes in the ways described in our ancient religious texts, and we do know the value of science as a uniquely privileged way of understanding) and universism (belief in the universe as a powerful, intelligent system with its own functions and perhaps drives and goals) are for me the only defensible philosophies on spiritual questions at this stage of humanity. Hopefully he’ll keep moving in that direction. Fortunately he’s just one of the better scholars in this space, there are many more. I refer you to our Bibliography at for some examples

      I also strongly second your comments about the likely inability of rationalists to create self-improving AI using an incomplete engineering-only or evolution-only worldviews (both approaches seem to be prevalent), and the hubris of either group imagining they could get morality in any way other than the way we’ve seen it emerge in our own societies – a selective process happening in a collective of minds, minds shaped by both an evolutionary and a strong developmental component.

      As to how to get these ideas better discussed and experimented upon in mainstream academia, I don’t know the answer to that. I think time will eventually take us there, if macroscale statistical directionality and development are real phenomena awaiting rigorous explanation, as I think they are. Fortunately, these topics are being discussed in many secondary academic communities, and Clement Vidal and I set up one such community in 2008, at There are about sixty published scholars participating in our listserve, and our next goal is to grow the community to over 100. It’s a small goal, but its pushing the ball forward at a level we can handle. We’d love to have you in the community if interested. If you haven’t formally published yet you can join as an Associate (and can read but not post to listserve), and there are lots of small volunteer tasks available, if interested.

      • The book by Morris I was referring to is Life’s Solution: Inevitable Humans in a Lonely Universe, where he argues for both the incredibly small chance that life randomly starts anywhere in the universe and that once life does start, it converges onto human-like morphology. He uses this argument to explain why humans on earth are the only intelligent species in the universe, and that we are made in God’s image, particularly a Christian God, and that consciousness is inexplicable and transcendent. I was disappointed to say the least. This review,, by Jerry Coyne (and with a link at the end to an even more biting review by PZ Myers), displays the problems with both sides. Jerry and PZ are incredulous about any predictable convergence or direction in evolution, and that blind, directionless natural selection is the only game in town. Morris does evo-devo thought no favors with his book and recent thinking as it further polarizes and diminishes the evo-devo case.

        Getting these ideas to be taken seriously is a tricky problem due to the nature of understanding complex adaptive systems and the inherent problems with interdisciplinary science. These things are not handled very well within established institutions and methodologies. I think the big picture evo-devo worldview is a necessary but insufficient start to this paradigm change. In my opinion there are two complementary paths that need to be followed. The first is to continue what complexity scientists at the Santa Fe Institute and elsewhere have been trying to do in their pursuit of formal models of invariant phenomena that cross interdisciplinary boundaries. Agent-based models of systems that show similar dynamics at different scales and scopes are great, but we also need to formalize a mathematical description of computational constraints on these systems that show reproducible convergent phenomena and statistically significant directionality of teleonomic complexification. The second is to incorporate these findings into specific empirically falsifiable questions within individual fields and subfields, particularly physics/cosmology, evolutionary biology/psychology, and the social sciences. This doesn’t have to be in linear order, advances in each path complement each other.

      • Thanks for the clarification. I very much like that book, as it has so many well presented cases of convergence. His perspective about the “lonely Universe”, shared by Rare Earth Astrobiologists, I simply disagree with, and that is outside his specialty anyway. Frankly I considered it unimportant to his convergence arguments, which for me are the value of his book and his work. I expect astronomy and optical SETI will allow us improve our understanding of how rare life is or isn’t, and I expect our universe is life fecund. “God” is a very small part of the book as I recall. I couldn’t find it in the index, but remembered a line about it in his conclusion, where he says “None of it (Life’s Solution) presupposes, let alone proves, the existence of God, but all is congruent.” Of course, there are Godless theories that are congruent with evolutionary convergence, like evo devo, he’s just not seeing them.

        I can see how Coyne and Myers would take him to task, and I’m glad they’re doing it. It’s important to know Conway Morris has a religious motivation to see convergence, as that could bias him. But as far as I can see, he’s just done some shoddy thinking about theological implications of his convergence insights, and while they need independent checking there’s no reason to throw out the convergence research itself, which is impressive to my mind. Coyne and Myers paint themselves into a corner by throwing out convergence while also pointing out his God-speak. I hope they live long enough to see that they overreacted.

        Your comments about how to get evo devo taken seriously are very well formulated, I agree with them entirely. I’ve given a talk at SFI about the hypothesis but frankly anything developmentalist would be intellectually very risky for SFI to propose, at this stage. There’s still just too much strength and energy and useful math and training invested in the neo-Darwinian approach. And of course evolutionary methods remain the best way to approach 95% of processes we see, if my hunches about the interplay of evo vs devo are correct.

        I have hopes for what we need emerging out of scientific simulations in coming years. If we run our sims multiple times and find reliable convergence on certain subsets of future-specific structure and function, while the majority remains contingent and unpredictable, we will need better math and methods to describe why these two processes simultaneously occur, and why a particular balance between them is most adaptive in our agents. We should be able to apply those methods at various physical scales, if evo devo theory is generalizable. Fortunately if there really are these developmental processes, and if some of the critical ones are accelerating, all of this will continue to heat up and move in the right direction whether or not we are smart enough to see it at this stage.


  1. […] Mankind Rising: Why Evolutionary Developmentalism Will Inherit the Future – Ever Smarter World […]

  2. […] who know my work as a systems theorist, including my speculations about the evolutionary developmental (evo devo) nature of our universe, and the potential attraction of universal intelligence to black hole-like environments (the […]

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