Welcome to the wonder of moving life!
MoveEvolve is my proposal for how moving evolves in its own right across all species. I use the word moving in a broad sense, to include moving awareness as well as bodily moving. Furthermore, moving implies continuous motion, in contrast to movements which suggest beginnings and ends.
I believe MoveEvolve offers a novel and useful scientific approach to understanding moving life. MoveEvolve emerges from my engineering and scientific background, common observations and discussions with many others. It combines general concepts which are largely unattributable to particular sources. I use everyday language as much as possible, to help make MoveEvolve widely accessible to the general public and to many disciplines of university students, academics, engineers and product designers.
MoveEvolve is based on a logical sequence of postulates, meaning a progression of ideas that I ask you to accept, at least initially, to see where they lead. I introduce these postulates below.
First, I postulate that fundamentally, moving evolves to improve survival for all species. Survival moving includes finding food, catching prey, avoiding predators, reaching safety, using resources, learning skills, mating, rearing offspring, interacting and communicating etc. Survival moving is an essential part of natural selection and the evolution of species. So MoveEvolve stems from the theory of evolution by natural selection, conceived by Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace.
Second, I postulate that moving evolves towards universal capabilities across species because this is how evolution improves survival moving. From life’s simple beginnings, species have evolved so many wonderful ways of moving to improve survival: slithering, crawling, walking, running, jumping, swimming, flying, vocalising etc. Many species move in multiple ways. Some species evolve increasingly complex body parts and nervous systems to improve their survival moving. For other species, evolving a nervous system is not necessary. Some species move without a nervous system (e.g. sponges). Other species move without a central nervous system (e.g. jellyfish). Surely some universal capabilities underpin the huge variety of lifeform moving that we see around us.
So survival and universal capabilities are the first two postulates in the logical sequence of Survival Postulates. The next eight postulates are the particular universal capabilities that moving evolves towards to improve survival, namely better: development, energy use, natural phenomena use, continuity, adaptivity, anticipation, coherence, flow creation and coordination. Whilst these universal capabilities relate to known concepts, other movement theories do not seem to fully encompass them.
Crucially, it seems that species have evolved without accurate calibration units, in particular for space or time. So the last three universal capabilities in the Survival Postulates address this constraint, namely that moving evolves: unitless, within unitless-spacetime, using unitless-change. I call these three universal capabilities the MoveEvolve Unitless Paradigm Shift. It has significant implications for how moving evolves. This is a paradigm shift away from all unit-based movement theories, which require lifeforms to have calibration units, typically for space (internal “rulers”) and/or time (internal “clocks”).
The Survival Postulates pose the key question: “How does moving evolve to embody the Survival Postulates?” This leads to the Embodiment Postulates, the further universal capabilities needed to embody all the Survival Postulates.
The Survival Postulates and Embodiment Postulates offer clarity for readers to consider MoveEvolve and decide whether to challenge or accept it. Please use MoveEvolve to benefit humankind, other species and the environment. Please also acknowledge this website as a source. Thank you.
MoveEvolve is evolving too. I welcome all feedback. If you would like to join this scientific exploration of how moving evolves, please contact me to discuss and collaborate. I look forward to hearing from you.
Marc Lee [email protected]