AI Research & Frontier Labs · August 2026

“…Now, we might think that natural selection crafted a functioning swim bladder because it was a benefit to the fish. But natural selection did not craft a functioning swim bladder so a worm could come to live in it…” — Stuart Kauffman, The Trajectory

Kauffman is arguing that biological uses cannot be deduced in advance: lens crystallins from ordinary enzymes, thermoregulatory bumps on dinosaurs into flight feathers. The swim bladder is his standing example, because once a fish has a sac of air and water it is also, unintentionally, somewhere a worm can live. He uses it against the idea that evolution's openness can be specified ahead of time, which is where he says machines get stuck.

Transcript

The Trajectory Around 29:02 into the episode
Stuart Kauffman

is my, they're all over the place.

Daniel Faggella

Of course.

Stuart Kauffman

They can't be deduced. They are just new uses that come into existence. So the lens crystallines in your eye evolve from, I guess, normally colored enzymes. There were thermoregulatory bumps on dinosaurs that evolved into flight feathers. They keep getting co-opted for different uses. So I wanted to say two things about my beloved swim bladder. So some fish have a swim bladder. The ratio of air and water tunes neutral buoyancy in the water column. Paleontologists think that there are fish with lungs called lung fish. The idea is water got into some lungs. Now there's a structure with air and water in it. And it was poised to evolve into a swim bladder where the ratio of air and water detects neutral buoyancy. Well, fantastic. The same thing. A lung got repurposed. And you can't deduce it. That is why evolution is open-ended and cannot be deduced. It's non-deducible, and it's a construction. There's another step that's really worth pausing over, Daniel. So here's this fish with the swim bladder, and they're all over the place. Once there's a swim bladder, could a worm evolve to live only in swim bladders? Sure. Now, we might think that natural selection crafted a functioning swim bladder because it was a benefit to the fish. But natural selection did not craft a functioning swim bladder so a worm could come to live in it. Wow. That means evolution is crafting structures that enable new niches, but selection did not craft the new niches.

Daniel Faggella

Yeah.

Stuart Kauffman

Is the open evolution of the bias? The biosphere keeps creating new pathways of flowering becoming.

Daniel Faggella

Yes.

Speaker names from our own diarization · position estimated from where the line sits in the episode