Chapter 37: Evolution: The PPAS Algorithm

Evolution is recast as the Perpetual Prime Approximation System (PPAS) from Book III, Part IX applied to biological fitness landscapes—an ongoing optimization that never terminates. Natural selection operates as the selection operator on the PPAS landscape, while genetic drift and neutral mutations provide the stochastic component. The P vs NP connection emerges: biological optimization is NP-hard in general, yet evolution finds good solutions in polynomial time through the PPAS heuristic.