Anh-Quân Nguyen

Though much attention is given to UN climate institutions, the perspective of participants from the climate movement in UN climate spaces is under-explored. This paper argues that grassroots groups and communities, such as climate activists, indigenous communities, and climate scientists, face vast epistemic costs at UN climate institutions such as COPs. These activists and groups are subject to epistemic exploitation, elite capture, and undermining propaganda. These costs are obscured by the hermeneutic injustice making it difficult for activists to understand their own experiences, and are sometimes so high that they outweigh any potential benefits of participating UN climate spaces, and should be carefully weighed by any group considering to engage with UN climate institutions.

Biological evolution provides a creative fount of complex and subtle adaptations, often surprising the scientists who discover them. However, because evolution is an algorithmic process that transcends the substrate in which it occurs, evolution’s creativity is not limited to nature. Indeed, many researchers in the field of digital evolution have observed their evolving algorithms and organisms subverting their intentions, exposing unrecognized bugs in their code, producing unexpected adaptations, or exhibiting outcomes uncannily convergent with ones in nature. Such stories routinely reveal creativity by evolution in these digital worlds, but they rarely fit into the standard scientific narrative. Instead they are often treated as mere obstacles to be overcome, rather than results that warrant study in their own right. The stories themselves are traded among researchers through oral tradition, but that mode of information transmission is inefficient and prone to error and outright loss. Moreover, the fact that these stories tend to be shared only among practitioners means that many natural scientists do not realize how interesting and lifelike digital organisms are and how natural their evolution can be. To our knowledge, no collection of such anecdotes has been published before. This paper is the crowd-sourced product of researchers in the fields of artificial life and evolutionary computation who have provided first-hand accounts of such cases. It thus serves as a written, fact-checked collection of scientifically important and even entertaining stories. In doing so we also present here substantial evidence that the existence and importance of evolutionary surprises extends beyond the natural world, and may indeed be a universal property of all complex evolving systems.