Some Thoughts about Evolution and Direction

We've seen a few candidates for "progress" or trends in evolution. Most of the ones that we have read about can be framed in terms of some feature of organisms growing more prevalent or otherwise "increasing." A list of candidates we've seen includes:

• Succession of dominant types.
• Entropy 1: gene space gets explored, even through drift
• Entropy 2: more and more energy diffusion is being utilized
• Increase in energy use by organisms; increase flow of energy into and through organism
• Increasing complexity (e.g., morphological)
• Increased developmental depth
• Increased nested complexity, structural depth
• Increase in overall biomass for lineage
• Increasing intelligence (unclear whether we mean greater intelligence in lineages, or more intelligent lineages, or etc.)
• "Cope's Law" -- increasing body size
• Increased versatility (can mean more versatile organism, or more versatility in the evolution of a lineage -- e.g., through modularity)
• Increasing adaptedness (perhaps indicated by reduced extinction rates)