Mathematics Shows How to Ensure Evolution
One interesting thing about evolution is that meta-evolution is evolution.   In other words, we see &quot;Darwinian&quot; as opposed to &quot;Lamarckian&quot; evolution not because the latter is impossible, but because there is adaptive advantage to the former.  Gregory Bateson works this out from cybernetic first principles in one of his books.  &quot;Steps to an Ecology of Mind&quot; I think.  An evolving system of either kind will evolve to evince mostly Darwinian evolution.<p>Another way to understand this is to consider that you cannot distinguish &quot;Darwinian&quot; vs. &quot;Lamarckian&quot; in the evolution of single-celled microbes.  Microbes don&#x27;t grow old and die. Each Amoeba is billions of years old.  (HeLa cells are called immortal.[1])   A change in the cytoplasm of an ancestor cell would be carried into both daughter cells.<p>In &quot;Selfish Gene&quot; Dawkins works out how death and birth have adaptive value for genes in multicellular species.  The meta-evolutionary &quot;choice&quot; to reproduce by sex and children (rather than, say, budding, or metamorphosis, or some kind of mass mitosis) is &quot;made&quot; by the normal process of evolution, not some additional meta-process.<p>In short, there is no <i>a priori</i> reason to believe that the life of Earth has not evolved intelligence.  (After all, we are intelligent.)  What I mean is, the machinery of evolution itself will have evolved to be able to direct its own evolution, <i>IF</i> intelligently self-directed evolution is adaptively valuable.<p>If you want to prove that Nature is <i>not</i> intelligent you have to show that there is adaptive value to remaining &quot;dumb&quot;.  Given what we now know about adaptive systems, that&#x27;s the only way Nature would have evolved without ambient intelligence: if it pays to act dumb.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;HeLa" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;HeLa</a><p>- - - - -<p>edit to add:  Trawling through the new links I see:  <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=17405096" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=17405096</a><p>&gt; &quot;Cells Talk and Help One Another via Tiny Tube Networks<p>Long-overlooked “tunneling nanotubes” and other bridges between cells act as conduits for sharing RNA, proteins or even whole organelles &quot;<p>That&#x27;s teh sort of thing I&#x27;m talking about:  Life is <i>one thing</i>.