Table of Contents

Evolution: Model or metaphor?.- The role of natural selection theory in understanding evolutionary systems.- Darwinism and developmentalism: Prospects for convergence.- Towards high evolvability dynamics.- The beginning of the end: On the origin of final cause.- Emergence of life and biological selection from the perspective of complex systems dynamics.- Self-organization and self-construction of order.- Self-organization and optimization: Conflicting or complementary approaches?.- Pleiotropy and the evolution of adaptibility.- The unified theory and selection processes.- Information increase in biological systems: How does adaptation fit?.- Canonical ensembles, evolution of competing species, and the arrow of time.- Spontaneous order, evolution, and autocatakinetics: The nomological basis for the emergence of meaning.- Pragmatic information and the emergence of meaning.- Emergence of chaos in evolving Volterra ecosystems.- Immanent causality: A Spinozist viewpoint on evolution and theory of action.- Causality as constraint.- Evolutionary systems and the four causes: A real Aristotelian story?.- Evolution as its own cause and effect.- Dealing with complex systems or how to decipher language and organisms.- The unfolding semiosphere.- Competence of natural languages for describing the physical origin of life.- Towards a “meta-ethic” derived from evolutionary lineages.- On some relations between cognitive and organic evolution.- Selected self-organization and the semiotics of evolutionary systems.- Towards an evolutionary semiotics: The emergence of new sign-functions in organisms and devices.- The evolution of the symbolic domain in living systems and artificial life.- Embodiment of natural and artificial agents.- Are life and meaning coextensive ?.

Reviews

`...the book is a statement of exciting open problems at the interface of self-organization and selection, and of how multidisciplinary perspectives can help refine evolutionary theory. It should prove valuable to future work on the subject.'
The Quarterly Review of Biology, 76:3(2001)