Metaptation

I recently read a well-thought-out and elegantly written (though rather dense) article, Metaptation: The Product of Selection at the Second Tier, by David King. The concept is not a particularly new one; King riffs on the evolution of evolvability, learning how to learn, and Hofstadter's metaphor of knob-twiddling vs. knob-creation. The article is worth reading for King's eloquence and careful reasoning even if you're already familiar with all of the material (I'd estimate about 2/3rds familiarity myself).

Briefly, metaptations are adaptations which are selected for in an evolutionary system not because of their direct effects on fitness, but because they tend to lead to the appearance of meaningful adaptations. An example would be a reorganization of an organism's genome that had no effect on it's phenotype, but made deleterious mutations less common and/or "helpful" mutations more common (e.g., varying the size of an entire organism is more likely to succeed than varying the size of an individual organ). This kind of second-tier organization is particular dear to me because it forms the intellectual grounding for my current research efforts, designing evolutionary-probabilistic learning algorithms that incorporate explicit metaptive mechanisms for on-the-fly creation of meaningful varaibles (i.e., Hofstadterian knobs).

Note that this is a kind of group-level selection effect (which I am generally leery of), but carefully reasoned and circumscribed. The selfish gene paradigm is not negated but extended to recognize a hierarchy of selective levels. I could go on, but if you're still interested at this point, just go read the article :).