Resonance Theory of Evolution: A New Optics for Evolutionary Biology

Contemporary evolutionary biology is in a state of protracted structural crisis. Proponents of the Modern Synthesis (MS) and the Extended Evolutionary Synthesis (EES) have been unable to reach consensus for decades, describing different levels of reality in mutually incommensurable languages. The paleontological record exhibits prolonged periods of stasis punctuated by explosive radiations, and hypotheses about the origin of first life remain fundamentally weak despite seventy years of progress in chemistry and molecular biology. The authors argue that the root of the problem lies not in a shortage of data but in the systemic incompleteness of existing optics, which fragments a unified evolutionary process into isolated levels and fails to perceive what connects them. As a way out of the crisis, we propose the Resonance Theory of Evolution (RTE)—a new conceptual framework grounded in the physics of oscillations and coherence. Its central thesis: evolution is the history of changing resonant configurations in the distributed system «organisms–environment». Living systems possess a spectrum of measurable frequencies (from metabolic oscillations to cultural rhythms), and evolutionary change occurs when these frequencies enter coherence with one another and with the external cycles of the environment. We introduce a hierarchy of levels of resonant memory—from fast neural and epigenetic to slow genetic and ultra-fast cultural—describe concrete molecular mechanisms of resonance recording (stress-induced mutagenesis, cascades «neural → epigenetic → genetic → cultural»), and establish the key concept of bidirectional resonance («Popov Prism»), in which organism and environment are not opposed but form a single oscillatory circuit. RTE does not discard the achievements of MS and EES but integrates them as descriptions of different time-scales within a single resonance cycle. It resolves classical aporias (teleology, gradualism vs. saltation, agency, information) and offers a concrete experimental programme with falsification conditions, including the search for traces of the Carbon Shadow Tier (CST) in the oldest terrestrial rocks. The theory is not speculation but a well-developed hypothesis ready for empirical testing.