What does evolution make? Dynamics underlying learning in living lineages and machines.
Living forms present three fundamental challenges to our understanding: First, they self-assemble – performing all of the decision-making needed to construct a functional, complex body while the computational material itself is being reorganized on-the-fly. Second, they reach the correct target morphology reliably, utilizing heredity mechanisms to propagate specific patterns of form and behavior through time. Crucially, third, this process is almost never hard-wired, but instead offers immense plasticity, able to complete morphogenetic tasks despite perturbations of external environment and internal components. This capacity to navigate the morphospace of possible anatomies, to produce the correct final pattern in the face of novel situations, or to create something completely different (never before seen by evolution) but nevertheless coherent and adaptively functional, is an example of problem-solving ability in a high-dimensional latent space. This lynchpin capacity ties together fi