The process continues when everything is perfect, but shocks undo it. If super-efficiency and super-specialization were optimal, the biosphere would have reached that point long ago.
Instead, everything is robust at the expense of efficiency at multiple levels, from individual cells to networks of ecological interactions. Super-optimized things do evolve, and sometimes spread explosively, but they are almost always shortlived and die out.
Fair point—I misstated. The optimization process is inevitable, but no particular optimization level is. Every equilibrium is subject to changes in the forces that underlie it. The balance of efficiency and robustness changes, as well as finding new areas of solution-space that trade off (or don’t!) different dimensions of these aggregates.
I should acknowledge as well that there’s enough path-dependence in the process that there’s no guarantee after a shock that the new equilibrium will be better on any dimension, let alone overall.
I disagree profoundly with the last sentence.
The process continues when everything is perfect, but shocks undo it. If super-efficiency and super-specialization were optimal, the biosphere would have reached that point long ago.
Instead, everything is robust at the expense of efficiency at multiple levels, from individual cells to networks of ecological interactions. Super-optimized things do evolve, and sometimes spread explosively, but they are almost always shortlived and die out.
Fair point—I misstated. The optimization process is inevitable, but no particular optimization level is.
Every equilibrium is subject to changes in the forces that underlie it. The balance of efficiency and robustness changes, as well as finding new areas of solution-space that trade off (or don’t!) different dimensions of these aggregates.
I should acknowledge as well that there’s enough path-dependence in the process that there’s no guarantee after a shock that the new equilibrium will be better on any dimension, let alone overall.