Excerpt

When Darwin discovered the three principles that enable biological evolution—inheritance, variation, and selection—he was a long way from a mechanistic understanding of the adaptive process because the informational basis of these three principles—concerning the storage, modification, and meaning of information (Adami 2024)—was still far in the future. The theory of evolution made great strides starting with the rediscovery of Mendel’s laws at the turn of the twentieth century. In the 1930s, J. B. S. Haldane developed the theory of fixation of beneficial mutations, which can be seen as a mathematical consequence of Mendel’s laws (Haldane 1932), Sewall Wright (1932) introduced the concept of adaptive fitness landscapes, and Ronald Fisher (1930) formulated the fundamental principle of natural selection. But because the carriers of information (nucleic acid molecules) were yet to be discovered, these mathematical developments still fell short of a mechanistic picture of adaptation. In particular, the theory could not account for the generation of novelty, but instead only formalized how changes in gene frequency affect organismal fitness.

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