Developing a mathematics for evolved systems

Abstract: Systems that arise through the evolutionary process—iterative selection and variation—are qualitatively distinct from engineered systems in many ways from a functional and evolutionary standpoint. However, our capacity to understand how evolved systems manifest these differences is substantially limited because evolved systems are apparently extremely complex, comprised of many parts that interact together in unintuitive ways. Our laboratory has demonstrated that naturally evolved systems are hierarchically organized into layers of information that encode the complex whole. This result motivates creating a new mathematics that can use data collected on natural systems to generate hierarchically layered, functional emergent systems. We anticipate that our findings will lay the foundation for the mathematics of natural emergent simplicity, thereby creating generative models qualitatively distinct from those that exist today. The personnel involved in this effort are Dr. Bipul Pandey (Ph.D., Physics; Postdoctoral Scholar, University of Chicago) and Benjamin A. Doran (Graduate Student; Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering, University of Chicago).