Evolutionary Teleonomy as a Unifying Principle for the Extended Evolutionary Synthesis

Bartlett, Jonathan

doi:10.5048/bio-c.2017.2

Cited by 14 publications

(4 citation statements)

References 14 publications

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“…); we had little choice but to focus on the areas where proxy failure and its constraints were easiest to illustrate. But we do explicitly discuss several concepts that fall squarely into the extended evolutionary synthesis such as the “evolution of beauty” through runaway sexual selection, or “runaway niche construction,” both of which Bartlett himself highlights as paradigmatically teleonomic (Bartlett, Bartlett, & Jonathan, 2017). Further, it can be argued that the proxy-treadmill is a key mechanism for developing novel elaborate traits (evolutionary decadence), thereby accounting for far more than simplistic selectionist mechanisms based on honest signaling.…”

Section: On Goals: Nested Hierarchies From Nature To Society?mentioning

confidence: 99%

Teleonomy, legibility, and diversity: Do we need more “proxynomics”?

Braganza,

John,

Caldwell

et al. 2024

Behav Brain Sci

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When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure. (Strathern, 1997) Our target article set out with an ambitious goal: To provide a unified account of the disparate descriptions of proxy failure across not only social and natural sciences but also engineering and artificial intelligence research. Clearly such a task could only truly be achieved by a broad transdisciplinary community. The wide range of commentaries from a remarkable array of disciplines has not only confirmed our main proposition – that the disparate cases do reflect the same core phenomenon of “proxy failure” – but suggests the viability of a new interdisciplinary undertaking that we might call “proxynomics.” Several comments highlighted key issues and extensions, others provided novel illuminating examples and, perhaps most importantly, quite a few proposed viable solutions or at least mitigation strategies.

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Section: On Goals: Nested Hierarchies From Nature To Society?mentioning

confidence: 99%

Teleonomy, legibility, and diversity: Do we need more “proxynomics”?

Braganza,

John,

Caldwell

et al. 2024

Behav Brain Sci

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“…Evolutionary theory has often excluded teleological causes historically. However, the recent advent of evolutionary teleonomy (Corning 2014;Bartlett 2017b) has started to reincorporate teleonomic causes into the process of evolution. Additionally, recent advances have shown that the evidences that were previously used to exclude teleonomic understandings of evolutionary processes were misinterpreted (Bartlett 2023).…”

Section: Teleonomy and Evolutionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Causal Capabilities of Teleology and Teleonomy in Life and Evolution

Bartlett

2023

OrgF

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Teleological causes have been generally disfavored in biological explanations because they have been thought to lack rigor or act as stand-ins for non-teleological processes which are simply not yet understood sufficiently. Teleological explanations in biology have been limited to only teleonomic causes, which are teleological causes that are due to codes or similarly reified mechanisms. However, advances in the conceptualization of teleological and teleonomic causation have allowed for more quantitative analyses of both. Additionally, although teleonomy has been historically excluded from potential causes of evolution, new research has shown that teleonomy actually plays a significant role in evolution. Combining these advances with advances in computability theory and information theory have allowed for a more rigorous and quantitative analysis of the capabilities and limitations of teleonomy in evolution.

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“…we had little choice but to focus on the areas where proxy failure and its constraints were easiest to illustrate. But we do explicitly discuss several concepts that fall squarely into the extended evolutionary synthesis such as the "evolution of beauty" through runaway sexual selection, or "runaway niche construction," both of which Bartlett himself highlights as paradigmatically teleonomic (Bartlett, Bartlett, & Jonathan, 2017). Further, it can be argued that the proxy-treadmill is a key mechanism for developing novel elaborate traits (evolutionary decadence), thereby accounting for far more than simplistic selectionist mechanisms based on honest signaling.…”

Section: Regulator and Agent Sophistication As An Explanation-generat...mentioning

confidence: 99%

Dead rats, dopamine, performance metrics, and peacock tails: Proxy failure is an inherent risk in goal-oriented systems

John¹,

Caldwell²,

McCoy³

et al. 2023

Behav Brain Sci

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When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure. For example, when standardized test scores in education become targets, teachers may start ‘teaching to the test’, leading to breakdown of the relationship between the measure--test performance--and the underlying goal--quality education. Similar phenomena have been named and described across a broad range of contexts, such as economics, academia, machine-learning, and ecology. Yet it remains unclear whether these phenomena bear only superficial similarities, or if they derive from some fundamental unifying mechanism. Here, we propose such a unifying mechanism, which we label proxy failure. We first review illustrative examples and their labels, such as the ‘Cobra effect’, ‘Goodhart's law’, and ‘Campbell's law’. Second, we identify central prerequisites and constraints of proxy failure, noting that it is often only a partial failure or divergence. We argue that whenever incentivization or selection is based on an imperfect proxy measure of the underlying goal, a pressure arises which tends to make the proxy a worse approximation of the goal. Third, we develop this perspective for three concrete contexts, namely neuroscience, economics and ecology, highlighting similarities and differences. Fourth, we outline consequences of proxy failure, suggesting it is key to understanding the structure and evolution of goal-oriented systems. Our account draws on a broad range of disciplines, but we can only scratch the surface within each. We thus hope the present account elicits a collaborative enterprise, entailing both critical discussion as well as extensions in contexts we have missed.

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Evolutionary Teleonomy as a Unifying Principle for the Extended Evolutionary Synthesis

Cited by 14 publications

References 14 publications

Teleonomy, legibility, and diversity: Do we need more “proxynomics”?

Teleonomy, legibility, and diversity: Do we need more “proxynomics”?

Causal Capabilities of Teleology and Teleonomy in Life and Evolution

Dead rats, dopamine, performance metrics, and peacock tails: Proxy failure is an inherent risk in goal-oriented systems

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