Individuals, Interactions and Environments: Observations, Speculations and Open Questions

Waddington's work provides us with a promising framework within which to study open-ended evolution, but, as we have seen, it also raises many questions. In this section I will briefly pull together a number of observations and further open questions relating to the practical implementation of an system capable of supporting open-ended evolution. I have attempted to categorise the following points into those relating to individuals, to interactions and to environments, although this is necessarily imperfect as the categories are all interrelated at some level. As I have mainly concentrated on analysing individual reproducers up to this point, the issues raised in the latter two categories will be of a somewhat more speculative nature.