Mega-Evolution
Description
1. Akop P. Nazaretyan:
"Mega-evolution is the chain of transformations that have taken place in the Universe over a period of 13.7 billion years. As we study this subject, we can find how more and more complex forms of organization, mechanisms of activity, and systems of reflection have been arising, and perhaps will continue to rise. This highly intricate subject requires new interdisciplinary paradigms and methodologies for us to integrate all the data about the physical Universe, the Earth, the biosphere, society, culture and mind into a single model. From the 1970s into the 1990s, an assemblage of such holistic knowledge was developed by scholars from various academic backgrounds in North and South America, Australia, Western Europe and Russia.
Initially, these scholars worked independently and without much contact, but new networks developed by the end of the 20th century, as work on mega-evolution gained acceptance in the world's academic community.
Indeed, in November 2005, an international conference in Dubna (Russia) paraphrased the slogan from the Communist Manifesto: ‘The Specter of Big History is Roaming the Earth’.1 Big History is one of the names for the study of mega-evolution. It is a research program aimed at the synthesis of Natural Sciences, Social Sciences, and the Humanities. Through Big History, we try to identify megatrends, mechanisms and regularities in evolution, the specific character of processes at each stage of development, and the peculiarities in phase transitions."
(http://www.socionauki.ru/almanac/issues/evolution_2_en/full_text_nazaretyan.pdf)
Source: Evolution: A Big History Perspective 2011 82–100 8
2. Alexander Panov et al. :
“To place the accelerating trend of complexity in the context of Big History, we need to distinguish the two forms (arms) of mega-evolution so far in the Universe.
The first arm of megaevolution is the decelerating development of physical matter and energy into galaxies, stars, and planets from the initial Big Bang (see Fig. 1).
The second arm of megaevolution is the accelerating rate of complexity evolution in the form of life, humans, and civilizations. This increasing complexity requires additional information to overcome the second law of thermodynamics tendency towards thermal equilibrium (death). Instead it marches further from this natural equilibrium towards a stable disequilibrium (Nazaretyan 2001, 2005) maintained by a constant flow of energy under information control. This concept of complexity correlates with various definitions of complexity in mathematics, such as the minimum length of the text describing its structure. Of course, the scheme of megaevolution can be presented in different versions and projections.
Both arms proceed from combining two existing structures to form a new emergent structure. This process is known as aromorphosis (Galimov 2001; Grinin et al. 2009, 2011). Between these jumps of structure, there is a rather smooth evolutionary process. A complex system cannot arise ‘from scratch’; such a system is always the result of combinations of systems of the previous level of evolution. Evolution is not engaged in strategic planning and preliminary calculation of its aromorphoses, it works only with the material that it already has at hand and can immediately use.”
(https://www.sociostudies.org/almanac/articles/introduction-_evolution_and_singularity/)