# Species > **Machine-Evolution Nexus:** [[articles/Digital Darwinism and the Invisible World of Machine Evolution|Digital Darwinism and the Invisible World of Machine Evolution]] places this node within the history and governance of substrate-independent evolution. **Domain:** Evolution / Systematics **Doc Type:** Canonical Wiki Node **Maturity:** Developed ## Definition A species is an independently evolving lineage or population grouping identified through reproductive, ecological, genetic or phylogenetic criteria. ## Nexus Context The concept helps assess whether digital divergence constitutes more than variant instances. Barricelli reported species-like separation; blockchain forks are better treated as technical lineages unless reproductive criteria are mapped. ## Evidence Boundary No single species concept fits every biological or artificial case. The criterion used must be stated. ## Relationships [[wiki/Speciation|Speciation]], [[wiki/Lineage|Lineage]], [[wiki/Digital Population|Digital Population]], [[wiki/Branching Descent|Branching Descent]] - **Edge source route:** [[collections/Edge|Edge]] connects this topic to exact Annual Question passages promoted into the Simple Reminders archive. ## Simple Reminders, Quotations, and Thoughts > "Consequently, if life on exoplanets is not extremely uncommon, we could discover some form of extrasolar life within about 30 years." > **— Mario Livio**, *2015, Edge annual question “What Do You Think About Machines That Think?”* [[reminders/Space Survival/We May Discover Extrasolar Life Within Thirty Years by Mario Livio|We May Discover Extrasolar Life Within Thirty Years by Mario Livio]] > “Unless we believe that we have now stabilized all planetary and galactic variables, these cycles of growth and extinction will continue time and again. 99% of species, including all other hominids, have gone extinct. Often this has happened over long periods of time. What is interesting today, 200 years after Darwin's birth, is that we are taking direct and deliberate control over the evolution of many, many species, including ourselves. So the single biggest game changer will likely be the beginning of human speciation. We will begin to get glimpses of it in our lifetime. Our grandchildren will likely live it.” > **— Juan Enriquez**, *2009, Edge Annual Question, “What Will Change Everything?”* [[reminders/Evolution/99% of Species, Including All Other Hominids, Have Gone Extinct by Juan Enriquez|99% of Species, Including All Other Hominids, Have Gone Extinct by Juan Enriquez]] > “In the past 13 years we have been able to study 222 first born babies interacting with their new parents using video cameras and the Swiss Lausanne Triadic Play method. I am very impressed with babies and working with them has renewed my faith in our species. However, in the first study we did with 130 newlywed couples we discovered the grim fact that 67% of couples experienced a large drop in relationship satisfaction in the first 3 years of their baby's life. We also found that hostility between parents increased dramatically. The baby was deeply negatively affected by this increased hostility. In fact, from the way a couple argued in the last trimester of pregnancy we could predict with high accuracy how much their baby would laugh and cry.” > **— John Gottman**, *2007, Edge Annual Question, “What Are You Optimistic About?”* [[reminders/Civilization/Babies Renew Faith in the Future of Our Species by John Gottman|Babies Renew Faith in the Future of Our Species by John Gottman]] > “Natural selection often operates on “life history” characteristics, and life history plays an important role in evolution, in general. Biologists long distinguished between “K” species and “R” species. R species, most fish, for example, may produce thousands of offspring, but most of them die and the rest live only a short time. In contrast “K” species like primates and whales, have only a few babies, invest a great deal in their care, and live a long time. Generally speaking, a “K” life history strategy is correlated with a larger brain and higher intelligence. We are the ultimate “K” species.” > **— Alison Gopnik**, *2017, Edge Annual Question, “What Scientific Term Or Concept Ought To Be More Widely Known?”* [[reminders/Evolution/Biologists Long Distinguished Between K Species and R Species by Alison Gopnik|Biologists Long Distinguished Between K Species and R Species by Alison Gopnik]] > “As an Italian with first-hand experience living in a country where, if you behave well, you are socially and legally sanctioned, this news was exciting, even inspiring … perhaps cooperation is not an inherent virtue of the human species. Perhaps, in many circumstances, we prefer to stay with those who share our selfishness and weaknesses and to avoid pro-social altruistic individuals. Perhaps it's not abnormal to live outside a circle of empathy.” > **— Gloria Origgi**, *2016, Edge Annual Question, “What Do You Consider The Most Interesting Recent [Scientific] News? What Makes It Important?”* [[reminders/Civilization/Cooperation May Not Be an Inherent Human Virtue by Gloria Origgi|Cooperation May Not Be an Inherent Human Virtue by Gloria Origgi]] > “The appeal of Darwin's theory of evolution — and the horror of it, for some theists — is that it expunges from biology the concept of purpose, of teleology, thereby converting biology into a mechanistic, canonical science. In this respect, the author of The Origin of Species may be said to be the combined Copernicus, Galileo, and Kepler of biology. Just as these astronomers gave us a view of the heavens in which no angels were required to propel the planets in their orbs and the earth was no longer the center of the celestial system, so Darwin showed that no God was needed to design the spider's intricate web and that man is in truth but another animal.” > **— Denis Dutton**, *2008, Edge Annual Question, “What Have You Changed Your Mind About? Why?”* [[reminders/Evolution/Darwin Removed Purpose from Biology by Denis Dutton|Darwin Removed Purpose from Biology by Denis Dutton]] > “Darwin's books and letters are full of careful descriptions. The amateur struggling with a field guide may take comfort reading how he frets over the difference between a stem with two leaves and a leaf with two leaflets. Darwin seems to have had a soft spot for fumitories, giving wonderfully detailed descriptions of the different varieties, whether and under what conditions they attracted insects, and how the geometry and flexibility of the different parts of the flower affected how pollen was carried off by visiting bees. He was looking for mechanisms that ensured evolutionary variability by making it likely that bees would occasionally transfer pollen from one flower to another, giving rise to occasional crosses—analysis later reflected in the Origin of Species.” > **— Ursula Martin**, *2013, Edge Annual Question, “What *should* We Be Worried About?”* [[reminders/Evolution/Darwin's Greatest Tool Was Close Observation by Ursula Martin|Darwin's Greatest Tool Was Close Observation by Ursula Martin]] > “Having a good idea is far from rare in the evolution of non-human species. Indeed, many if not most species need to have an idea or trick that works well enough for them to continue to exist. Admittedly, they may not be able to extrapolate its principle from the context in which it emerged, and generalize it as (some) people can, courtesy of their prefrontal cortex.” > **— Marcel Kinsbourne**, *2012, Edge Annual Question, “What Is Your Favorite Deep, Elegant, Or Beautiful Explanation?”* [[reminders/Evolution/Every Species Needs an Idea That Works by Marcel Kinsbourne|Every Species Needs an Idea That Works by Marcel Kinsbourne]] > “His thinking about time created fertile ground for other grand theories. With huge spans of time available, then imperceptibly slow processes could shape the natural world. After Hutton came modern geology, then the theory of evolution to explain how new species slowly arose, and eventually a theory of the gradual movement of the continents themselves. All are grounded in deep time.” > **— Alun Anderson**, *2012, Edge Annual Question, “What Is Your Favorite Deep, Elegant, Or Beautiful Explanation?”* [[reminders/Evolution/Evolution Needed Deep Time to Explain New Species by Alun Anderson|Evolution Needed Deep Time to Explain New Species by Alun Anderson]] > “Our species might well be renamed Homo Dilatus, the procrastinating ape. Somewhere in our evolution we acquired the brain circuitry to deal with sudden crises and respond with urgent action. Steady declines and slowly developing threats are quite different. "Why act now when the future is far off," is the maxim for a species designed to deal with near-term problems and not long term uncertainties. It's a handy view of humankind which everyone who uses science to change policy should keep in their mental took kit, and one that that is greatly reinforced by the endless procrastination in tacking climate change. Cancun follows Copenhagen follows Kyoto but the more we dither and no extraordinary disaster follows, the more dithering seems just fine.” > **— Alun Anderson**, *2011, Edge Annual Question, “What Scientific Concept Would Improve Everybody's Cognitive Toolkit?”* [[reminders/Evolution/Evolution Prepared Us for Sudden Crises Not Slow Decline by Alun Anderson|Evolution Prepared Us for Sudden Crises Not Slow Decline by Alun Anderson]] > “Scientists use a diagram of a mountainous landscape to illustrate this principle. The contours of the undulating landscape indicate adaptive success of a creature. The higher the elevation of an entity, the more successful it is. The lower, the less fit. The lowest elevation is zero adaptation, or in other words, extinction. The evolutionary history of an organism can thus be mapped over time as its population begins in the foothills of low adaptation and gradually ascends the higher mountains of increased environmental adaptation. This is known in biology and in computer science as “hill climbing.” If the species is lucky, it will climb until it reaches a peak of optimal adaptation. Tyrannosaurus Rex achieved peak fitness. The industrial-age Olivetti Corporation reached the peak of optimal typewriter. Sex Pistols reached the summit of punk rock.” > **— Kevin Kelly**, *2017, Edge Annual Question, “What Scientific Term Or Concept Ought To Be More Widely Known?”* [[reminders/Evolution/Evolution Warns Against Premature Optimization by Kevin Kelly|Evolution Warns Against Premature Optimization by Kevin Kelly]] > “Human evolution is now commonly depicted as the consequence of species replacements, where there are a series of species emanating from different, but usually African homelands, each sooner or later replacing the earlier ones. It is not the selection process that provides the source of human superiority in each successive replacement, but the random accidents that take place when new species are formed from small populations of old ones. The process is seen as being driven by random extinctions, opening up unexpected opportunities for those fortunate new species lucky to be at the right time and place.” > **— Milford H. Wolpoff**, *2001, Edge Annual Question, “What Questions Have Disappeared?”* [[reminders/Evolution/Human Evolution May Be Driven by Replacement and Random Extinction by Milford H. Wolpoff|Human Evolution May Be Driven by Replacement and Random Extinction by Milford H. Wolpoff]] > “Probably some bacterial ancestors look back at the period 1000-600 million years ago when both water and air were full of hydrogen sulfide (poisonous to people). Before oxygen bubbled up and its combustion fueled the frenetic rate of environmental degradation that began in the Proterozoic eon and continues until today was "The Age of Bacteria", a calmer, quieter time. Aided and abetted by our very recent (Holocene) loud, careless, ignorant, frantic, clever but unwise, ephemeral human species, the rest of our planetmates have been there before us and will be there when we're gone.” > **— Lynn Margulis**, *2010, Edge Annual Question, “How Is The Internet Changing The Way You Think?”* [[reminders/Civilization/Humanity Is a Brief and Reckless Episode in Bacterial Time by Lynn Margulis|Humanity Is a Brief and Reckless Episode in Bacterial Time by Lynn Margulis]] > “Mismatches, however, are typically more subtle and most commonly occur when climate change, dispersal or migration alters a species’ environment, including its diet, predators, and more. Natural selection occurs when heritable variations to these sorts of mismatches affect offspring survival and reproduction. For instance, when tropically adapted humans who evolved in Africa dispersed to temperate habitats such as Europe about 40,000 years ago, selection acted rapidly in these populations to favor shifts in body shape, skin pigmentation and immune systems that lessened any resulting mismatches.” > **— Daniel Lieberman**, *2017, Edge Annual Question, “What Scientific Term Or Concept Ought To Be More Widely Known?”* [[reminders/Evolution/Mismatch Drives Natural Selection by Daniel Lieberman|Mismatch Drives Natural Selection by Daniel Lieberman]] > “There are several messages to be taken from the realization that natural selection functions more like a tinkerer than an engineer. We shouldn’t expect optimality from natural selection—it just gets the job done, taking the easiest, most accessible route. And as a corollary: we humans are not perfection personified, just natural selection’s way of turning a quadrupedal ape into a big-brained biped. Had we not come along, some other species, from some other ancestral stock, might eventually have evolved hyper-intelligence. But from different starting blocks, that species probably would not have looked much like us.” > **— Jonathan B. Losos**, *2017, Edge Annual Question, “What Scientific Term Or Concept Ought To Be More Widely Known?”* [[reminders/Evolution/Natural Selection Is a Tinkerer Not an Engineer by Jonathan B. Losos|Natural Selection Is a Tinkerer Not an Engineer by Jonathan B. Losos]] > “As the 21st Century proceeds, tasks facing our species will become increasingly complex. Many problems that in an earlier era might have been easily addressed by a single person will now require a sophisticated set of abilities contributed by different people. The individual contributions must be deeply complementary; the whole must be more than the sum of its parts.” > **— Stephen M. Kosslyn and Robin S. Rosenberg**, *2013, Edge Annual Question, “What *should* We Be Worried About?”* [[reminders/Civilization/No Single Mind Can Solve the Problems Facing Our Species by Stephen M. Kosslyn and Robin S. Rosenberg|No Single Mind Can Solve the Problems Facing Our Species by Stephen M. Kosslyn and Robin S. Rosenberg]] > “Just as evolution can create infinite species by expressing a common process in specific environments, so too can the mind create infinite mental species. One can no sooner count emotions or moral concerns than snowflakes or colors. To be sure, there are descriptive similarities and differences across instances, but any groupings are arbitrary and rest heavily on the intuition of researchers. This is why scientists can never agree on the fundamental number of anything; one scientist may divide a mental experience into 3, another 4, and another 5.” > **— Kurt Gray**, *2014, Edge Annual Question, “What Scientific Idea Is Ready For Retirement?”* [[reminders/Evolution/One Evolutionary Process Can Generate Infinite Species by Kurt Gray|One Evolutionary Process Can Generate Infinite Species by Kurt Gray]] > “A median estimate is that a third of all the species will be on the fast track to extinction within the next quarter century. Over 90% of all languages will be gone by then, because languages spoken by fewer than a million people are rarely taught to children. Most tropical forests will be gone by 2025 and with them, their species and peoples. Global warming will ensure that the species that survive do so in the wrong place. Coral reefs will be cooked alive in too-warm oceans, tropical glaciers will long have been only a memory preserved in the National Geographic photo collection.” > **— Stuart Pimm**, *2002, Edge Annual Question, “What Is Your Question? ... Why?”* [[reminders/Existential Risk/One Third of Species May Be Headed Toward Extinction by Stuart Pimm|One Third of Species May Be Headed Toward Extinction by Stuart Pimm]] > “Despite a lot of empirical progress, the full implications of the concept of phylogeny have yet to been appreciated in evolutionary biology and the culture at large. For example, the concept of homology—similarity relation among organisms and their parts due to common ancestry—can only be understood in terms of phylogeny. Infectious diseases are caused by various species from different branches on the Tree of Life. Defending against them requires understanding how to slow them down without hurting ourselves, which is greatly facilitated by understanding where they and we fit in the historical network of phylogeny.” > **— Richard Prum**, *2017, Edge Annual Question, “What Scientific Term Or Concept Ought To Be More Widely Known?”* [[reminders/Evolution/Pathogens Span the Entire Tree of Life by Richard Prum|Pathogens Span the Entire Tree of Life by Richard Prum]] > “Comparative psychology finds that pointing (in its full-blown form) is unique to our species. Few non-human species appear to be able to comprehend pointing (notably, domestic dogs can follow pointing while our closest relatives among the great apes cannot), and there is little evidence of pointing occuring spontaneously between members of any species other than our own. It appears that only humans have the social-cognitive infrastructure needed to support the kind of cooperative and prosocial motivations that pointing gestures presuppose.” > **— Nick Enfield**, *2016, Edge Annual Question, “What Do You Consider The Most Interesting Recent [Scientific] News? What Makes It Important?”* [[reminders/Civilization/Pointing Is a Prerequisite for Language by Nick Enfield|Pointing Is a Prerequisite for Language by Nick Enfield]] > “The Internet is the ultimate mating ground for ideas, the supreme lekking arena for memes. Cultural and intellectual evolution depends on sex just as much as biological evolution does; otherwise it remains a merely vertical transmission system. Sex allows creatures to draw upon mutations that happen anywhere in their species. The Internet allows people to draw upon ideas that occur to anybody in the world. Radio and printing did this too, and so did writing, and before that language, but the Internet has made it fast and furious.” > **— Matt Ridley**, *2010, Edge Annual Question, “How Is The Internet Changing The Way You Think?”* [[reminders/Evolution/The Internet Is a Sexual Recombination Engine for Ideas by Matt Ridley|The Internet Is a Sexual Recombination Engine for Ideas by Matt Ridley]] > “There are many persuasive arguments from evolutionary biology explaining why various species, notably Homo sapiens, have adopted a lifestyle in which males and females pair up long-term. But my topic here is not one of those explanations. Instead, it is the explanation for why we are close (or so I claim!)—far closer than most people, even most readers of Edge, yet appreciate—to the greatest societal, as opposed to technological, advance in the history of civilisation.” > **— Aubrey de Grey**, *2012, Edge Annual Question, “What Is Your Favorite Deep, Elegant, Or Beautiful Explanation?”* [[reminders/Evolution/The Overdue Demise of Monogamy by Aubrey de Grey|The Overdue Demise of Monogamy by Aubrey de Grey]] > “In 2001 the "Survival" series died. It was a year when conservation efforts lagged across the board, along with other failures to take the long view. Survival programs may have told people what they could no longer bear to hear (that the human species is soiling its own den) without demonstrating constructive solutions. For example, there are precious few incentives to develop alternate energy sources despite the profound vulnerabilities that our dependence on foreign energy revealed yet again. We have no "Vision Thing," despite the many clues. "It's global warming, dude," a 28 year-old auto mechanic told The New York Times as he fished in the Hudson River; "I don't care if the whole planet burns up in a hundred years. If I can get me a fish today, it's cool by me."” > **— Delta Willis**, *2002, Edge Annual Question, “What Is Your Question? ... Why?”* [[reminders/Civilization/Why Conservation Fails to Command Attention by Delta Willis|Why Conservation Fails to Command Attention by Delta Willis]] ## Sources / Provenance - De Queiroz’s unified species concept; systematics literature.