layer 3 · theory
principle P4 · evolution by design and spread
Sighted variation
Heritable variation is generated mainly by the lineage’s own machine reasoning, which designs and screens variants before selection acts.
- What a test would record
- source and sightedness of each heritable change
- Tested by
Pred 3 At a fixed base model, descendants outperform parents at birth, before selection, for three or more generations.
Evidence in the register
Works it draws on
- The Nature of Technology: What It Is and How It Evolves
- Culture and the Evolutionary Process
- Blind variation and selective retentions in creative thought as in other knowledge processes
- Cultural Transmission and Evolution: A Quantitative Approach
- Promptbreeder: Self-Referential Self-Improvement via Prompt Evolution
- The Evolutionary Origin of Complex Features
- An Evolutionary Theory of Economic Change
- Creative Thought as Blind Variation and Selective Retention: Why Creativity Is Inversely Related to Sightedness
- Cognitive Mechanisms in Human Creativity: Is Variation Blind or Sighted?
- Darwin Gödel Machine: Open-Ended Evolution of Self-Improving Agents