Excerpt

Biological systems—from cells to tissues to individuals to societies—are hierarchically organized (e.g., Feldman and Eschel 1982; Buss 1987; Smith and Szathmáry 1998; Valentine and May 1996; Michod 2000; Frank 2003). To many, hierarchical organization suggests the nesting of components or individuals into groups, with these groups aggregating into yet larger groups. But this view—at least superficially—privileges space and matter over time and information. Many types of neural coding, for example, require averaging or summing over neural firing rates. The neurons’ spatial location—that they are in proximity—is, of course, important, but at least as important to the encoding is their behavior in time. Likewise, in some monkey societies, as I will discuss in detail later in this review, individuals estimate the future cost of social interaction by encoding the average outcome of past interactions in special signals and then summing over these signals.

In both examples, information from events distributed in time as well as space (fig. 1) is captured with encodings that are used to control some behavioral output. My collaborators and I in the Center for Complexity & Collective Computation (C4) are exploring the idea that hierarchical organization at its core is a nesting of these kinds of functional encodings. As I will explain, we think these functional encodings result from biological systems manipulating space and time (fig. 2) to facilitate information extraction, which in turn facilitates more efficient extraction of energy.

This information hierarchy appears to be a universal property of biological systems and may be the key to one of life’s greatest mysteries—the origins of biological complexity. In this essay, I review a body of work by David Krakauer, myself, and our research group that has been inspired by many years of work at the Santa Fe Institute (e.g., Crutchfield 1994; Gell-Mann 1996; Gell-Mann and Lloyd 1996; Fontana and Buss 1996; West, Brown, and Enquist 1997; Fontana and Schuster 1998; Ancel and Fontana 2000; Stadler, Stadler, Wagner, and Fontana 2001; Smith 2003; Crutchfield and Görnerup 2006; Smith 2008). Our work suggests that complexity and the multiscale structure of biological systems are the predictable outcome of evolutionary dynamics driven by uncertainty minimization (Krakauer 2011; Flack 2012; Flack, Erwin, Elliot, and Krakauer 2013).

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