The mechanisms of variation, selection and inheritance, on which evolution by natural selection depends, are not fixed over evolutionary time. Current evolutionary biology is increasingly focussed on understanding how the evolution of developmental organisations modifies the distribution of phenotypic variation, the evolution of ecological relationships modifies the selective environment, and the evolution of reproductive relationships modifies the heritability of the evolutionary unit. The major transitions in evolution, in particular, involve radical changes in developmental, ecological and reproductive organisations that instantiate variation, selection and inheritance at a higher level of biological organisation. However, current evolutionary theory is poorly equipped to describe how these organisations change over evolutionary time and especially how that results in adaptive complexes at successive scales of organisation (the key problem is that evolution is self-referential, i.e. the products of evolution change the parameters of the evolutionary process). Here we first reinterpret the central open questions in these domains from a perspective that emphasises the common underlying themes. We then synthesise the findings from a developing body of work that is building a new theoretical approach to these questions by converting well-understood theory and results from models of cognitive learning. Specifically, connectionist models of memory and learning demonstrate how simple incremental mechanisms, adjusting the relationships between individually-simple components, can produce organisations that exhibit complex system-level behaviours and improve the adaptive capabilities of the system. We use the term “evolutionary connectionism” to recognise that, by functionally equivalent processes, natural selection acting on the relationships within and between evolutionary entities can result in organisations that produce complex system-level behaviours in evolutionary systems and modify the adaptive capabilities of natural selection over time. We review the evidence supporting the functional equivalences between the domains of learning and of evolution, and discuss the potential for this to resolve conceptual problems in our understanding of the evolution of developmental, ecological and reproductive organisations and, in particular, the major evolutionary transitions.

中文翻译：

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进化联结主义：Evo-Devo、Evo-Eco 和进化过渡中生物组织进化的算法原理。


自然选择进化所依赖的变异、选择和遗传机制在进化过程中并不固定。当前的进化生物学越来越关注理解发育组织的进化如何改变表型变异的分布，生态关系的进化如何改变选择环境，以及生殖关系的进化如何改变进化单位的遗传力。特别是，进化中的重大转变涉及发育、生态和生殖组织的根本变化，这些变化在生物组织的更高层次上体现了变异、选择和遗传。然而，当前的进化理论不足以描述这些组织如何随着进化时间而变化，特别是如何在连续的组织规模上产生适应性复合体（关键问题是进化是自我指涉的，即进化的产物改变了参数）的进化过程）。在这里，我们首先从强调共同的基本主题的角度重新解释这些领域的核心开放问题。然后，我们综合了正在开发的工作中的发现，该工作正在通过转换众所周知的理论和认知学习模型的结果来构建解决这些问题的新理论方法。具体来说，记忆和学习的联结主义模型证明了简单的增量机制，调整各个简单组件之间的关系，如何能够产生表现出复杂系统级行为并提高系统适应能力的组织。 我们使用“进化联结主义”一词来认识到，通过功能等效的过程，作用于进化实体内部和之间关系的自然选择可以导致组织在进化系统中产生复杂的系统级行为，并修改自然选择的适应能力随着时间的推移。我们回顾了支持学习和进化领域之间功能等价性的证据，并讨论了解决我们理解发育、生态和生殖组织进化，特别是主要进化转变过程中的概念问题的潜力。