What would it take to make a global theory of evolutionary biology?
At a “local level” there’s natural selection. And there are plenty of “chemical-reaction-equation-like” (and even “reaction-diffusion-equation-like”) models for relations between the “concentrations” of small numbers of species. And, yes, there are global “developmental constraints”, that I for example have studied quite extensively with the computational paradigm.
But somehow the Multicomputational Paradigm seems to have the potential to make global “structural” statements about things like the whole “space of species” (and even why there are lots of species at all) just on the basis of the pure “combinatorial structure” of biological processes. For example, one can imagine making a multicomputational model of “generalized evolutionary biology” in which the tokens are possible specific individual organisms, and the events are all their conceivable behaviors and interactions (e.g. two organisms mating in all possible ways to produce another). (An alternative approach would take the tokens to be genes.) The particular history of all life on Earth would correspond to sampling a particular path through this giant token-event graph of all possibilities. And in a sense the “fitness environment” would be encoded in the “reference frame” being used. The “biologist observer” might “coarse grain” the token-event graph by combining tokens that are considered to be the “same species”—potentially reducing the graph to some kind of phylogenetic tree. But the overall question is whether—much like in fundamental physics—the underlying multicomputational structure (as sampled by some class of observers) might inexorably imply certain “general emergent laws of biological evolution”. One might imagine that the layout of organisms in “evolutionary space” at a particular time could be defined from a slice of a causal graph. And perhaps there is an analog of general relativity that exists when the “fitness environment reference frames” are “computationally tame enough” relative to the computational process of evolution. And maybe there are even analogs of the singularity theorems of general relativity, that would generically lead to the formation of event horizons—so that in some sense the distribution of species is like the distribution of black holes in a late-stage universe.
(There is a certain analogy with Metamathematics here too: different organisms are like different mathematical statements, and finding a “paleontological connection” between them is like finding proofs in mathematics. Sometimes a particular evolutionary path might end in an “extinction singularity” but often—like in mathematics—the path can be infinite, representing an infinite future of “evolutionary innovations”.)