Jack Roycroft-Sherry The Hidden Intelligence within Evolution, Matter & The Universe | Dr. Richard Watson
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Jan 20, 2026 
Dr. Richard Watson, biologist and computer scientist exploring cognition in life and matter. He debates limits of standard natural selection and why major transitions like multicellularity are puzzling. He describes learning and memory outside brains, how networks and ecosystems can encode information, and how cognition might predate life and shape evolution.
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Natural Selection's Explanatory Limits
- Evolution by natural selection explains change in populations but cannot by itself explain why the axioms of selection (variation, inheritance, individuals) arose.
- A theory cannot explain its own axioms, so we need additional mechanisms to explain evolutionary transitions.
Transitions Change The Unit Of Selection
- Major transitions (e.g., single cells to multicellularity) change what counts as an individual and create conflicts of interest between parts and wholes.
- You cannot explain such transitions by appealing to selection at the later level because that level doesn't yet exist.
Genes Aren't The Whole Explanation
- Gene-frequency change laws are true but do not by themselves explain how complex biological organization arises.
- Like electricity enabling computation, gene frequency dynamics are substrate-level facts, not theories of biological function.