7 Complexity and biological evolution
Firstly the relevant sorts of language needs to be addressed. Such a language would have to be able to include a full description of the genotype and the processes of interpretation and evolution that occurred to them, but might greatly vary in the detail given to the phenotype. The atomic parts in this representation would have to include the genes or at least the unit codes used in encoding them. Also the reproductive, selective, decoding and self-organising (if there is any) would need to be covered.
This still leaves two broad overall frameworks: one where we take the genes as the atomic parts and one where we take the essential features of evolution as basic. In the former we are concerned with the formulation of the characteristics of the biology (or more generally the phenotype) in terms of decoding the genetic code and in the later we are concerned with the process of arriving at the gene population in terms of what is known about the base processes of evolution that we postulate.
Within these frameworks we still need to specify the sort of overall difficulty in the overall formulation of behaviour we intend. Two distinct approaches suggest themselves for types of difficulty: the difficulty in analysing how an organism functions and the difficulty that a proto-typical predator would have in being able to usefully predict the overall behaviour of an organism, i.e. our view as scientists versus the environment's view (via a suitable representative)*1.
This gives us four possibilities to which I have given some obvious working names (table 1). I am not claiming these are the only ones, merely singling them out as important examples.
We are immediately concerned with evolutionary analytic complexity, it is the immediate problem that faces us as inquiring humans; the difficulty of formulating an overall understanding of organisms given the processes of evolution. This does not have a direct connection with the most concrete case, which is biological fitness complexity; the difficulty an environmental agent has is exploiting an organism given its genetic make-up. This has a direct relationship with the evolutionary selection process as we understand it. It is part of our task to discover the relationship. If we conflate the two kinds of complexity we may miss something important.
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