natural selection is often touted as a force of almost arbitrary power, I have increasingly come to believe that in fact its power is remarkably limited. And indeed, what I suspect is that in the end natural selection can only operate in a meaningful way on systems or parts of systems whose behavior is in some sense quite simple.

If a particular part of an organism always grows, say, in a simple straight line, then it is fairly easy to imagine that natural selection could succeed in picking out the optimal length for any given environment. But what if an organism can grow in a more complex way, say like in the pictures on the previous page? My strong suspicion is that in such a case natural selection will normally be able to achieve very little.

There are several reasons for this, all somewhat related.

First, with more complex behavior, there are typically a huge number of possible variations, and in a realistic population of organisms it becomes infeasible for any significant fraction of these variations to be explored.

Second, complex behavior inevitably involves many elaborate details, and since different ones of these details may happen to be the deciding factors in the fates of individual organisms, it becomes very difficult for natural selection to act in a consistent and definitive way.

Third, whenever the overall behavior of a system is more complex than its underlying program, almost any mutation in the program will lead to a whole collection of detailed changes in the behavior, so that natural selection has no opportunity to pick out changes which are beneficial from those which are not.

Fourth, if random mutations can only, say, increase or decrease a length, then even if one mutation goes in the wrong direction, it is easy for another mutation to recover by going in the opposite direction. But if there are in effect many possible directions, it becomes much more difficult to recover from missteps, and to exhibit any form of systematic convergence.

And finally, as the results in Chapter 7 suggest, for anything beyond the very simplest forms of behavior, iterative random searches rapidly tend to get stuck, and make at best excruciatingly slow progress towards any kind of global optimum.