Emergence, Development, and Evolution

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I have mainly described standing dynamical systems; presumably these are the product of individual developmental processes, which in turn recapitulate, probably with some short-cuts taken, the evolutionary history of various developmental trajectories.

Each new emergence occured in the development of some system, at some level of organization or re-organization (thus symbiosis and most obviously endo-symbiosis for eukaryotes occurs above the level of the "organism"), and some of these have been conserved by lineage memory -- which in my amateur view is contained not in DNA as such, but in the cross-level relations of DNA, egg cell lineages, in some cases maternal organism physiology, and in all cases the stable and reliable boundary conditions and resources of ecosystems and environments.

An emergent level of organization must arise from or cause a major disruption of dynamics at lower levels; prior attractors are replaced by new ones, and prior trajectories headed for meta-stable attractors are in effect disrupted or interrupted, and their developmental potential at level N-1 is re-organized at level N in the service of development toward a new regime; this is most commonly described for cases of "neotenous" development.