Toward a theory of evolution as multilevel learning

Significance Modern evolutionary theory gives a detailed quantitative description of microevolutionary processes that occur within evolving populations of organisms, but evolutionary transitions and emergence of multiple levels of complexity remain poorly understood. Here, we establish the correspondence among the key features of evolution, learning dynamics, and renormalizability of physical theories to outline a theory of evolution that strives to incorporate all evolutionary processes within a unified mathematical framework of the theory of learning. According to this theory, for example, replication of genetic material and natural selection readily emerge from the learning dynamics, and in sufficiently complex systems, the same learning phenomena occur on multiple levels or on different scales, similar to the case of renormalizable physical theories.