Figure 1.

Multi-scale competency architecture (MCA). (A) The MCA is implemented by biological systems in which every level of organization traverses various spaces toward preferred regions. Subcellular systems (molecular networks) navigate the transcriptional space (B), while collections of cells navigate the anatomical morphospace, such as planarian tissues that can be pushed into regions of the space corresponding to diverse species’ head shapes without genomic editing (C) (image by Alexis Pietak [31]). Higher-order systems distort the energy landscapes for their subsystems (via virtual “objects” in that space) to enable their components’ local homeostatic mechanisms to achieve goals that are adaptive at the higher level systems’ space. This links the intelligence (or competent navigation) of spaces to simple energy minimization dynamics. Panels (A,B) are courtesy of Jeremy Guay of Peregrine Creative.