From a physicist's point of view this talk gives an excellent presentation of some
ofwhat is known about important aspects of the global development of the universe. I
would be very interested to hear what he thinks about the local changes that make it
possible for a purely physical system (e.g. a lifeless cloud of dust) to produce the
vast collection of increasingly complex physical changes  that support a huge variety
of forms of life with many very different forms of embodiment, different modes of
interaction with the environment, different forms of reproduction, and in some cases
also languages, mathematical discoveries, music, painting, philosophy, story telling,
war, murder, religious belief, religious intolerance and much else.

The standard answer is that, given enough matter, energy, time and space, natural
selection allows a small subset of heritable random variations to survive and provide
a basis for further developments. But in order to support the increasing variety,
increasing complexity, and in many cases increasing strength, resilience,
intelligence, cooperation, communcation, social organisation, competition, warfare,
etc. there must have been in the INITIAL physical and chemical matter the potential
to support not only the huge variety of materials produced by evolution (cell
membranes, butterfly wings, bones, muscle fibres, sensory transducers, many types of
outer covering including skin, fur, scales, shells), but above all the increasingly
complex and powerful forms of information processing, both for purposes of successful
reproduction, growth, digestion, and control of many bodily functions, but also,
especially later on, production of rich and varied forms of internal representation
for sensory information, perceptions of states and processes in the environment,
motives, questions, theories,  predictions, reasoning, mathematical discovery, and
many forms of culture.

Inspired by  reading Turing's 1952 paper on Chemical Morphogenesis I recently began
to wonder what he would have done had he lived on -- and conjectured that he might
have combined his ideas about discrete computation (e.g. in Turing machines) with
ideas about mixtures of continuous and discrete mechanisms for information
processing, to explore possible trajectories from a cloud of dust, or a planet with
chemical soups and many forms of matter.

A theory of Meta-Morphogenesis might be needed to explain morphogenesis of physical
forms and behaviours along with forms of information processing, where some of the
new forms could extend the mechanisms of morphogenesis, continually supporting new,
more complex life forms, using ever more complex and varied forms of information
processing. Part of this process is repeated use of morphogenesis to produce new
mechanisms of morphogenesis, including new mechanisms of reproduction. (Hence the
'meta-' in 'meta-morphogenesis'.)

I've begun to speculate about the sort of theory of meta-morphogenesis Turing might
have developed but am certain more sophisticate theories are needed. A key aspect,
not often discussed in connection with evolution, seems to me to be he evolution of
the sorts of geometrical mathematical competences that led to the discoveries and
proofs summarised in Euclid's elements. Some of these must be very different from the
logical, arithmetical and algebraic forms of reassoning developed fairly recently.
Many of the discoveries must have been made before there were any mathematics
teachers. How?
A collection of conjectures and problems about Meta-Morphogenesis is available here,
and in other online web pages referenced here, and others referenced in these:

http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/research/projects/cogaff/misc/meta-morphogenesis.html

http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/research/projects/cogaff/misc/toddler-theorems.html

http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/research/projects/cogaff/misc/triangle-theorem.html

http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/research/projects/cogaff/misc/vm-functionalism.html

http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/research/projects/cogaff/misc/evolution-info-transitions.html

http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/research/projects/cogaff/talks#glang

and others referred to in those. I don't know whether modern physics has anything
significant to say about these topics -- e.g. anything that could enable us to
replicate the processes.

Aaron Sloman
http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/~axs#



====================================================================================