Evolution as Anamnesis: When Biology Remembers Itself

Faith & Science Conversation
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My light-first discussion went so well, that I thought I should do a dive deep into evolution. As a former national park ranger and natural resource field science teacher, I’ve been developing this conceptually for over 25 years. Essentially, it contains the same equations as light-first cosmology described in my previous thread here, but at the biological scale.

So, what if evolution is simply about organisms biologically “remembering” forms that already exist as latent potential? Under this model, biological change (individual and collective) occurs through “anamnesis,” the progressive unforgetting of dormant possibilities encoded across multiple scales of life, and “amnesia” as developing forms of constraint. The central insight is deceptively simple: organisms carry vast libraries of unexpressed potential. Think of genes silenced, developmental pathways suppressed but never deleted, behavioral regimes passed down culturally rather than genetically. These constitute what I’ve call M_latent (latent memory). Evolution happens when environmental pressures, ecological opportunities, or even aesthetic resonance reactivate this dormant information, crystallizing it into active form (M_active). The mathematical framework describes this as gradient descent through “morphospace”—configurations flowing toward memory density wells like water finding its level (i.e. biological gravity).

Consider the most dramatic example: whales. Fifty million years ago, terrestrial ungulate mammals returned to the ocean and became cetaceans. The Fabric perspective suggests they didn’t randomly mutate into fish-shaped creatures—they reactivated ancient aquatic morphology memory that had been dormant in mammalian genomes since the Devonian, 350 million years prior. The water itself acted as a sculpting agency, threading coherence through their bodies. This explains why multiple independent lineages (seals, manatees, whales) converged on similar solutions: they were all descending the same memory gradient toward optimal aquatic configurations.

The framework introduces several quantifiable concepts. Beauty (B_morph) isn’t just pretty and decoration, it’s a measure of function-to-complexity ratio, serving as an evolutionary compass. High-beauty forms achieve maximum performance with minimum structure. This explains why the golden ratio appears in nautilus shells, why feline predators maintain nearly identical body plans from your cat to tigers, and why orchids evolve toward geometric perfection. Evolution follows beauty gradients because resonant forms represent stable attractors in morphospace.

Ecological resonance (R_eco) treats species not as isolated competitors but as phase-coupled participants in coherent networks. Communities evolve together. Biomes evolve with climate. High-resonance ecosystems like rainforests or coral reefs achieve such optimization that entire biomes become "living fossils,” stable for hundreds of millions of years despite species turnover.

Suppose evolution activates latent memory rather than creating novelty, then where did that memory originate? There are distinct possibilities without requiring commitment to any:

  1. Physical constraint: forms emerge necessarily from thermodynamic laws

  2. Cosmic bootstrapping: the universe recursively generates its own complexity

  3. Eternal Platonic forms: geometric attractors exist pre-temporally in mathematical space

  4. Intelligent design: transcendent intentionality embedding potential into creation.

As a Christian, I feel as though all 4 certainly could apply (with #4 as the ultimate driver).

However, I must add a speculative fifth option: quantum-holographic memory, where all possible forms exist in superposition within light fields, with evolution serving as the “measurement” that collapses potential into actuality. (Break a hologram and what does every shard contain? Could light contain all forms?)

While selection through mutation remain a possibility, it now operates within a broader variety of species sculpting processes: memory gradients, beauty optimization, and ecological resonance.

In the paper linked to below, I provide a case study of the middle ear ossicles which exemplifies the general process: reptilian jaw bones didn’t randomly become mammalian ear bones—they were architecturally repurposed through environmental threading when a new jaw joint freed them to specialize for hearing.

What’s particularly fascinating is the implications extend beyond biology.

- Regenerative medicine might work, not by building tissues, but by reopening access to dormant developmental programs.

- Conservation biology must recognize ancient ecosystems as irreplaceable memory structures, not just collections of replaceable species.

- Human cultural evolution (story, myth, tradition) represents memory accumulation at generational rather than millennial timescales.

- Perhaps most provocatively, the framework introduces agency and intentionality. Organisms aren’t passive victims of blind selection. They’re active participants threading their own coherence through choice, attention, and innovation. Beauty recognition, behavioral creativity, and consciousness itself shape evolutionary trajectories.

This hyper-reframe of evolution opens space for theological interpretations while maintaining complete empirical testability. Evolution is not blind watchmaking but coherence crystallization, it is the cosmos progressively remembering itself through living forms.

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  • An immediate inquiry: Your idea that organisms “remember” latent forms across scales has me wondering about the directionality of that memory. Are you suggesting that some lineages might advance toward higher levels of coherence that could, in principle, include what we call human consciousness—so that some animals could one day evolve into beings like us (or even some people we know)? Or conversely, does your model imply that the “memory gradient” could run the other way too—that what we think of as individual human identity might, in a future cycle, re-express itself as something like a pet or another species?

    In short, is this memory purely biological and impersonal, or are you hinting at a continuity of personal memory—some kind of trans-species anamnesis?

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While I do think that organisms remember AND that larger groups like biomes and even planets have some sort of awareness and go through that process, that is a really interesting a side topic which I’m certainly willing to have. I’m using “memory” as broad idea. The acorn is high M_latent. The oak tree is high M_active. The just burned forest is M_latent. The old growth forest is high M_active, where M is memory. I’m using memory rather than “mass” which was one of many points that tended to derail the previous thread about light-first cosmology. Although I think it applies in full to cosmology.

Memory describes what mass is far better than just a blob of matter. Everything is truly a memory of what was (and even will be in a sense). Your face is a memory of your ancestors. The lines in your hands tell a gripping story. And in an evolutionary sense, memory better describes what DNA and behaviors do. They hold stories and some stories ARE potential energy (hidden from sight in the present). This is also true within culture.

All the leaves and branches on a tree are a memory of what happened to that tree since it was a seedling (AND its ancestor trees), whether or not we can tell that story in full or not.

Epigenetics is a strong example of how M_latent can emerge during the lifetime of a creature.

Understanding evolution as “memory dynamics” unlocks a myriad of paths new insight.

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I think the best way to describe evolution in future cycles is to say what I would expect on other planets. I expect other planets similar to ours would be similar to ours. Planetary-scale convergent evolution. Creatures would look very similar with subtle variation. The B (beauty) gradient shows that forms tend to take on the morphology of what works simply, with mathematical elegance. Most Star Wars-type creatures, sad to say, won’t work and won’t exist.

That’s not to say there aren’t other types of intelligent and relational creatures that may be within a different schema.

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Your hypothesis of biological forms (populations) carrying vast libraries of unexpressed potential and ‘remembering’ forms that already exist as latent potential suggests that individuals have in their genes unused portions that are similar to those species that we might classify as ‘more advanced’. If there were such unused DNA ‘libraries’ that are similar in all species within an evolutionary chain, DNA analyses would have revealed them.

If the latent potential is stored in some other form than DNA, what could it be?

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First problem: This only applies to a few evolutionary developments. Most do not involve returning to environments or forms similar to those of ancestors.

For example:
Bats. Umpty million years ago, terrestrial insectivore mammals returned to the sky and became chiropterans. The Fabric perspective suggests they didn’t randomly mutate into pterodactyl-shaped creatures — they reactivated ancient flight-capable morphology memory that had been dormant in mammalian genomes since … when?

Also, how did the ancestors of whales become terrestrial in the first place? They didn’t have any terrestrial ancestors, so no ancient terrestrial morphological ‘memory’. If whales were reactivating morphological memory, why are their tails horizontal? Why didn’t they also re-evolve gills?

While some evolutionary changes might involve reactivating suppressed genes or pathways, most don’t, and most long-term morphological changes don’t revisit ancestral morphology.

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The problem is neutral drift. If a gene no longer functions or no longer impacts fitness then it accumulates mutations that do away with its prior function. The human pseudogene responsible for the synthesis of vitamin C is a good example.

So what is the evidence backing this?

What are these similar solutions?

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I’m not claim that genetic information remains perfectly preserved over hundreds of millions of years. Rather, it proposes that developmental architectures (body plans, regulatory patterns, morphogenetic fields, etc.) retain as potentials that can be reactivated under similar ecological pressures. These patterns are not only specific to genes, but relational configurations of form and function embedded in both species, groups, and broader ecological networks. Species are related as communities. They aren’t only individuals.

Neutral drift and mutation can erase fine-grained details, but higher-order constraints (such as limb positioning, skeletal segmentation, and sensory layout) are remarkably conserved across vertebrates. When mammals returned to aquatic environments, “natural selection” (need a better term) acted not on random morphology, but on a pre-existing developmental landscape biased toward viable, hydrodynamic solutions.

The “similar solutions” seen in whales, seals, and manatees (streamlined bodies, modified forelimbs for propulsion, nostril migration, thickened blubber, and sensory adaptations for underwater perception) reflect convergence toward these deep structural attractors. From a Fabric perspective, this convergence is not coincidence, but resonance: the re-expression of latent architectural memory shaped by shared ancestry and environmental geometry (genetic, epigenetics, behavior, collective dynames, etc.).