6.4.5 Branches in Time: Morphological Data & Evolutionary Hardware

“Ecophysiological processes are the foundation of acclimation and evolutionary adaption to climate change”. Chmura et al, 2011.

The palaeological record constitutes a database extending across multiple Earth systems including atmospheric conditions; wildfire, drought, flooding, and eruption frequencies together with the spatiotemporal dimensions thereof; as well as an incomplete, but nonetheless comprehensive record of the evolution of life, and of the symbiosis of species with their environment. Unlike present-day digitized technologies, the materiality of that record is relatively robust [i.e. unlike a USB drive an adpression fossil will not rust, therein endures for epochs not years, or at most decades], and is unbiased in its presentation of the facts [i.e. it the data can be misinterpreted, but not corrupted]. Likewise, living specimens tend be more resilient to their environment than the ilk of personal computers. For example, whereupon a mobile was exposed to a low-severity fire its innards would melt, thus erase any such data as had been stored on its ‘memory’. On the other hand, not merely would a species of which said regime-type fell in their phylogenetic range survive the fire, but whether via the parent plant or off-spring thereof, all such ‘data’ as was significant [i.e. DNA] would survive. Hence, one might conceive of the palaeological record as akin to evolutionary ‘hardware’, the concept thereof complimentary to that of a species’ genotype and phenotype as ‘software’, the latter of which has been explored by multiple authors within the domain of cybernetics and related fields including John Holland (1992, 1998, 2014), Melanie Mitchell (1998), and Peter Bentley and David Corne (2002).

In perceiving of both extinct and extant floral and faunal specimens as hardware that can accurately record Earth systems data over epochs, another boundary becomes blurred, that being the division between ‘material’ and ‘information’ as can be expressed by the Circle of Variability. Thus, another alignment with the wider evolutionary-inspired architecture school, as exemplified by Skylar Tibbets’ programmable materials (MIT, 2018). However, though the latter’s works are endowed with several ‘life-like’ features [i.e. a rudimentary capacity to ‘learn’ about their environment, and to respond to changes therein, such as increased moisture levels], ‘as is’ the application thereof has been extended not to wildfire or to natural hazards more generally. However, within the paradigm of Panarchistic Architecture, material-informatic hybrids need be appropriate within an Earth systems context, more specifically, to the particular parameters of fire regimes, and to the ecological and other environmental legacies thereof.