In organic systems, a process of evolutionary development ("evo-devo") guides the production of intelligent, organized and complex structures. In living systems, we can distinguish genetically-linked evolutionary processes that are stochastic, creative, and divergent, and opposing, gene-linked developmental processes that produce robust, statistically predictable, conservative, and convergent structures and trajectories. New hypotheses in cosmology are allowing us to begin to model our universe as an evolutionary and developmental system. The evo-devo framework can help us reconcile a large set of apparently stochastic, unpredictable, and evolutionary features of universal emergence with a special subset of potentially statistically predictable and developmental universal trends and emergences. One apparent trend is an ever-increasing spatial and temporal locality of universal complexity development. Another is the apparent hierarchical emergence of increasingly space, time, energy, and matter ("STEM") dense and efficient substrates for adaptation and computation. Another is the increasing complexity, interiority, empathy, ethics, and integration of mind. The latter trend has been discussed most notably in the noosphere hypothesis, and its prediction of the increasing interconnectedness, integration, ethics, and consciousness in complex minds. Fortuitously, the evo-devo framework, and some of its hypotheses, offer us several concrete and testable ideas on how the noosphere, and a coming cosmosphere, may develop, in a suitably supportive environment. It offers us a vision of particularly adaptive patterns of emergence, communication, and behavior, the beginnings of a purpose-driven view of nature.
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