The Genetic Information Space

The basic fact that a population $P$ can have success in an environment and another population $P'$ not presupposes two important properties of life on this planet: (1) The planet earth is continuously changing, it is not stationary, and (2) all biological system have to be capable to change their structures to be able to adapt to the changing environments.

All known biological structures solve this challenge by providing two basic dimensions of life: (1) They are based on genetic structures which can be changed and (2) the bodily structures which have some solidity and continuity. But the solidity of the bodies is not a complete one: a body consists of billions of dynamic cells which can be aggregated and as aggregated cells they show some shape and solidity. And the plan how the billions of cells shall be aggregated is encoded in the genetic structures. In this sense represent the genetic structures informations about possible bodily structures including typical dynamics. Thus biological systems can basically adapt to changing environmental conditions by exploiting the variations of their genetic structures.

But one has to keep an eye on the fact that there is no explicit 'genetic master' which tells the genes how to arrange best. This means that the mechanisms of variations have to follow some fixed random mechanism which exploits the unknown space of possible structures. Basically we have the following mechanisms:

• Survivors: All modifications are generated based on the survivors of a population at a certain point of time. Thus survival is a basic criterion for success (although, as we have discussed above, this criterion can be made more complex). It is a selection criterion. The selected survivors are possible sources for a new offspring. And the point where variations can happen is the genetic structure.
• Modifiers: During mating and processing of the new genetic structures can different modifications occur. Most popular are operations called cross over and mutation

Thus, success depends on the ability to coexists with a given environment by combining genetic structures out of a space of possible combinations. Thus we have here a kind of search in an unknown space with only partial knowledge about good models of coexistence.