Evolution as Anamnesis: When Biology Remembers Itself

Faith & Science Conversation
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Here’s a short list of well-documented atavistic traits:

Vestigial tails

Webbed fingers or toes

Supernumerary nipples

Excess body hair

Cervical ribs

Reversion of dentition patterns

Palmar grasp reflex in infants

Great question. DNA is just one place traits are stored. They are stored in communities as behaviors (humans: stories), structure (epigenetics), and even the environment.

Traits are stored environmentally through feedback loops where organisms shape their surroundings and those surroundings in turn constrain and guide subsequent generations. Beavers inherit dammed rivers; corals inherit reef geometries. The environment retains form and function: a kind of ecological memory parallel to genetic inheritance, and influences future behavior and perpetuates phenotype expression.

Ex. 1: Beavers and Ecosystem Inheritance:

Odling-Smee, Laland & Feldman (2003). Niche Construction: The Neglected Process in Evolution.

Environmental modifications (dams) persist for decades or centuries, shaping hydrology, vegetation, and food availability. Even if a local population disappears, future generations of beavers (or recolonizing species) “inherit” this pre-structured environment that reinforces dam-building behavior and associated morphologies (teeth, tails, musculature). The environment retains and reimposes selective pressures: a literal ecological memory.

Ex. 2: Coral Reefs and Environmental Template Feedback

Graham et al. (2014). Coral reef resilience: climate change and coral bleaching. Trends in Ecology & Evolution.

Reef architecture, built by corals and other calcifying organisms, creates stable temperature, light, and nutrient microenvironments. These environmental conditions in turn select for coral species and symbiotic creatures optimized for that physical structure. Even after bleaching events, the reef’s skeletons act as a morphological memory, guiding recolonization patterns and maintaining similar community forms.

Endless examples exist.

[Edit for clarity.]

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Then you don’t have a model because it isn’t based on any data.

For example, what data is this based on?

“Rather, it proposes that developmental architectures (body plans, regulatory patterns, morphogenetic fields, etc.) retain as potentials that can be reactivated under similar ecological pressures.”

Or this?

“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.”

Or this?

“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.).”

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I don’t agree with that because it’s not clear exactly what you mean by it.

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Heritable traits are not stored in structure or the environment. They are stored in DNA. Memetic inheritance could be a thing, but it’s not going to directly shape morphological change.

Associated morphologies are based on DNA, and are selected for. Those morphologies are not inherited from the environment.

Again, it is the environment selecting for DNA based traits.

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I appreciate the challenge. You’re right that scientific models ultimately depend on data. What I’ve proposed here is a conceptual synthesis developed through years of research, field observation, and working with biological and physical data. It’s a framework for interpreting how developmental architectures might retain latent potential and respond coherently to environmental geometry. Really, all one really needs to understand the phylogenetic tree and how it emerged, is to watch a tree grow. How does it bud? What happens when the shoots turn red or green? How does it take root? When happens when branches are broken off by the wind. How do fruits differ from leaves? What are flowers? Where do new shoots emerge in a branch? What is a fruit? How does it get energy? What holds it in place? How does it reproduce? Once you do that, you’ll easily see the process of evolution in action.

It’s all about pattern recognition and hypothesis formation and identifying where conventional explanations might be missing something. From there, testable predictions can emerge. If you read the paper, you’ll see various levels of falsification and testable hypotheses. If interested, here’s the related paper in draft form. It’s the same story but at the ecosystem level rather than the phylogenic tree level: http://interactive-earth.com/downloads/Threading_Ecology.pdf

Zoom in and out and you see the same processes. It’s beautiful! Wow.

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Were you selected by the environment?

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OK. Sorry. I thought we were tracking. Look at your hands, the wrinkles, the lines. The lines in your knees, the placement of your eyes, the two nostrils, the ear shape, hair on your head, pads of your feet, toe nails. All those are records of your evolutionary history. Your belly button! What stories do they tell? They tell stories going way, way back. And each species has those stories. Not only that, but your emergence as an egg to an embryo to a fetus, all record your evolutionary history and WAY back even further. Wow.

[Edit for clarity: These are phenotypic expressions of the genotype encoded in the genome.]

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What data???

I understand phylogenetic trees, and none of this makes sense, nor does it explain a phylogenetic tree. For example, if there is fruit on some branches but not others and the fruited branches don’t collapse to a single node, then you have a serious violation of a phylogenetic tree. The fruit and leaves on one branch will be different from each other, but the leaves on two distant branches will be the same. That’s a violation of a phylogenetic tree. Your analogy actually leads to serious misunderstandings of phylogenetic trees.

You don’t have a hypothesis. Hypotheses can actually be tested, and they are based on background data.

I challenge you to describe the experiments we can run to test them. For example:

“H1 – Threading-Disturbance Cycles: Healthy ecosystems exhibit predictable cycles in which memory accumulation (Mactive + Mlatent) is followed by redistribution events driven by disturbance agency (Adisturbance).”

What the heck is that??? How do you test it?

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Most certainly. All living organisms were. Our genomes bear the marks of this selection as shown by differing amounts of sequence conservation across our genome. The most striking examples are found in genes with introns where there is much higher sequence conservation in exons as compared to introns:

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If you look at the “100 Vert. Cons” about 2/3 down the picture you will see that it spikes up and down. Those spikes represent regions of sequence conservation when comparing to 100 other vertebrate species, and the correlate strongly with exons in the top track. That’s due to selection.

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Easy: I actually helped conduct field research on the forest regeneration at the Mount St. Helens blast zone, following the 1980 eruption. In some plots, we found seedlings barely an inch tall that were already a decade old, germinated early but stalled for years due to the absence of mycorrhizal networks, soil structure, and viable other resources and related species seedbanks. The ecosystem was rebuilding itself almost from scratch, with pumice as the only substrate. Yet within a decade, comparable forests in the Pacific Northwest recovering, from say fire, where latent soil and microbial memory persist, were well on their way back to their prior conditions. That contrast illustrates the same principle: when ecological “memory” is erased, recovery slows dramatically. Similar comparative studies could systematically test how latent biological and environmental memory influence resilience and trajectory after disturbance.

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What??? How are you measuring “latent soil and microbial memory”???

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I guess you didn’t get the point. Yo mom and dad were the instigators! :wink:

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Then you should have asked who instigated it. Also, my parents’ ability to have children is a product of selection.

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Do you ever find one thing to comment on that’s interesting, or do you just find the tiniest hole?

I’m applying the fabric terms. M_latent (in ecology) are seedbanks, soils, chemistry, organics, microbes, behaviors, conditions, microclimates, etc. Some or all remain under certain disturbance scenarios. They provide the physical, chemical, and biological structure in order to allow recovery after a disturbance. AND same goes for the evolution process (think about that!). That’s the story of evolution and island biogeography.

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So it’s just semantics? Why not use the words the rest of science is using? When you are teaching, do you change all the words in the textbooks to some other set of words you invented? That would seem to be a really bad idea, if you ask me. Instead of multiplication tables, do you have your students do cosmic rubberband entanglements?

What allows for recovery in species is if they have the DNA based traits to survive and thrive in a given environment.

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Statistics do show that if your parents didn’t have children, then you are not likely to have them either.

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Why not use the most precise word which can apply across domains?

It’s so much more than DNA. Broaden your understanding of what a species is. A broader species is a tribe, an ecosystem, a biome, a system. Each of those levels of systems evolve and not only via DNA, and certainly not in isolation. Which is why “memory” fits the bill as a generic term far better than DNA.

“Memory” isn’t vague—it’s more precise than restricting to ‘genetic information’ because it accurately describes information storage and retrieval across substrates. Physics uses ‘memory’ for hysteresis in materials, computer science for data storage, immunology for T-cell memory. I’m actually using established cross-domain terminology, not inventing jargon.

If evolution were only DNA, transplanting genetically identical organisms to new environments would always succeed. It doesn’t. Species need their context, the learned behaviors, the ecological partners, the landscape features, the community relationships. That’s system-level memory, and ‘genetic information’ can’t capture it.

Wallace didn’t have DNA, yet he explained evolution through biogeography. I’m not replacing genetics. I’m recognizing that information relevant to survival exists in multiple substrates simultaneously. Memory is the umbrella term for all of them, and even for matter :wink: , remember our lovely discussion about E = Mc² (energy as memory density) and g = k∇M (gravity flows toward memory density)?

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Oh, the irony! One more domain that I forgot!: the mind. This is exactly what Piaget was getting at with his schema idea: Just as species don’t randomly mutate solutions, they activate latent developmental potential along coherence gradients, children don’t randomly generate ideas. They activate latent cognitive structures (M_latent) through interaction with environment (A), optimizing toward increasingly coherent mental models (high Beauty, high Resonance with reality). Can’t learn without agency!

“I love it when a plan comes together.”

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So evolution will give the same result on every planet? That is difficult to believe.

Otherwise what you are proposing sounds like empty semantics.

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There wasn’t any “memory” erased, there were all the components of an ecosystem erased.

So far your words sound lofty but are meaningless.