Evolution Is Engineered: Self-Directed Evolution, Immortality, and the Move Beyond Darwinian Descent

Simulated Minds Series, Paper IV of IV. If a civilization ends aging it inherits a pro tanto renewal responsibility: the death dividend that generational turnover paid automatically must be replaced deliberately or knowingly forgone. This paper names the instrument. If evolution is a search (Paper I), its renewal function can in principle be performed within a persistent individual, by a directed, simulation-guided process that generates candidate improvements, evaluates them, and adopts the beneficial ones. I call this the Lamarckian turn: the passage of human evolution from the Darwinian mode to a directed mode in which improvements are chosen and incorporated within a single continuing life. It pays the individual half of the death dividend, continual improvement, but threatens a second: the exploratory variance on which open-ended search depends, so that a civilization of self-editing immortals risks a cognitive monoculture. I develop three further hazards (bootstrapping, continuity, access) and close the series: such a civilization acquires both the apparatus and one family of motives for the high-fidelity mind- simulations of Paper I, becoming the kind of Selector the series began by imagining above us. Companion papers (same series): “Evolution Is Too Slow” (Paper I), “Death Is a Feature” (Paper II), “The Immortality Question” (Paper III).