Self-organising natural selection from replicating molecules to multicellular sexually reproducing organisms

Lars Witting

During their evolution from molecular replicators over unicellular prokaryotes and eukaryotes to multicellular sexually reproducing organisms, biological lifeforms increased in size with heritable codes increasingly embedded in more organised slower replicating units. This evolutionary unfolding is traditionally seen as a remarkable coincidence of a directionless natural selection following long sequences of improbable events. I describe how this contingent paradigm of unpredictable evolution was consolidated by the life history theory of the population genetic synthesis, that uses a selection---towards fitness peaks by an increase in average fitness---that is structurally insufficient for the Darwinian paradigm where the naturally selected life history of a species is naturally selected from the naturally selected life history of its ancestor. 

To resolve this major evolutionary paradox, where life history evolution is controlled by other factors than the identified natural selection itself, I propose a population ecological synthesis from the demographic selection of the interactive competition in the population. These interactions self-organise a deterministic natural selection force from mass, energy, and replication at the origin of replicating molecules, and selects---not an increase in average fitness but---an energy-driven change in relative fitness that is necessary and sufficient to select the evolutionary succession of the major lifeforms from a common ancestor.

The proposed selection of net energy for replication generates population growth that generates a frequency-dependent interactive competition that reallocation-selects the increase in replication-energy into larger, more cooperatively organised slower replicating units. This is shown to predict an essentially inevitable evolution of large multicellular organisms with inter-specific allometries and sexual reproduction by a diploid genome with fair meiosis.