An alternative biological synthesis is presented that conceptualizes evolutionary biology as an epiphenomenon of integrated self-referential information management. Since all biological information has inherent ambiguity, the systematic assessment of information is required by living organisms to maintain self-identity and homeostatic equipoise in confrontation with environmental challenges. Through their self-referential attachment to information space, cells are the cornerstone of biological action. That individualized assessment of information space permits self-referential, self-organizing niche construction. That deployment of information and its subsequent selection enacted the dominant stable unicellular informational architectures whose biological expressions are the prokaryotic, archaeal, and eukaryotic unicellular forms. Multicellularity represents the collective appraisal of equivocal environmental information through a shared information space. This concerted action can be viewed as systematized information management to improve information quality for the maintenance of preferred homeostatic boundaries among the varied participants. When reiterated in successive scales, this same collaborative exchange of information yields macroscopic organisms as obligatory multicellular holobionts. Cognition-Based Evolution (CBE) upholds that assessment of information precedes biological action, and the deployment of information through integrative self-referential niche construction and natural cellular engineering antecedes selection. Therefore, evolutionary biology can be framed as a complex reciprocating interactome that consists of the assessment, communication, deployment and management of information by self-referential organisms at multiple scales in continuous confrontation with environmental stresses.

Introduction

Developmental biology can be seen as the study of how information in the genome is translated into adult structure, and evolutionary biology of how the information came to be there in the first place Maynard Smith The traditional canonical Neodarwinian evolutionary narrative concentrates on the survival mechanisms of macroscopic organisms through random heritable variations and differential fitness (Bowler, 2003). The sources of those variations have been ascribed to random genetic mutations along fitness landscapes (Poelwijk et al., 2007). As a result, evolution has been typically framed as a direct product of changing gene frequencies (Koonin, 2009). Contemporary research has placed increasing emphasis on the evolutionary role of epigenetics which can further extend genetic expression from a flexible genome (Jablonka and Lamb, 2008; Laland et al., 2015). However, such alterations are typically considered within the framework of an already existing expansive genome upon which smaller modifications might act. An understanding of the mechanisms that permit the erasure of some epigenetic marks and the inheritance of others prior to arbitrating selection is still limited (Feng et al., 2010; Houri-Zeevi and Rechavi, 2016). The further mechanisms by which genomes accrete their widely variable sizes and ranges of biological expression and still retain effectiveness is not well understood (Eddy, 2012). Surprisingly, the question of why multicellular eukaryotes are obligatory holobionts or how that might affect levels of selection is little considered. (Miller, 2016a; Corning and Szathmary, 2015; Theis
et al., 2016). Most pertinently, although the mystery of cognition has been deeply weighed, there has been little regard for the role of universal basal cognition in biological development and a distinct disinclination to consider its evolutionary implications. To further evaluate these issues, an exploration of evolutionary development is presented that focuses on the nature of biological information content, and its transfer and management, within the context of cellular faculties and constraints. This perspective is offered as a substantiating complement to previous arguments affirming the central role of self-referential cognition in evolutionary development (Miller, 2016a; Torday and Miller, 2016a, 2016b, 2017a; Miller and Torday, 2017).