Adapting the Process of Adaptation: Darwinian, Lamarckian, and Agent-Directed Evolution in AI

Abstract

Evolution has shaped intelligence for billions of years. Artificial intelligence (AI) now raises a striking possibility: intelligence may begin to direct its own evolution. As AI agents become capable of modifying and evaluating their own behavior, how quickly could they improve, and how can that improvement remain safe? We develop a theoretical framework comparing Darwinian, Lamarckian, and agent-directed evolution following environmental change. Darwinian evolution relies on natural selection, Lamarckian evolution adds inherited learning, and agent-directed evolution allows agents to generate and evaluate behavioral variants and choose how extensively to search. When learning is sufficiently effective, these mechanisms exhibit progressively faster adaptation. Generating more variants accelerates adaptation, while optimal search effort depends on learning ability, problem difficulty, and experimentation costs. However, an agent's ability to direct its improvement does not ensure that improvements are evaluated against the intended objective. When the evaluation target is misspecified, additional search accelerates convergence toward the wrong behavior, even as measured performance improves. In recursive self-improvement, such errors may persist across generations, posing challenges for AI safety. Independent evaluation and oversight must keep pace with autonomous AI development. The central challenge is not simply to accelerate the evolution of intelligence, but to preserve humanity's ability to guide its direction, limit its speed, and intervene when necessary.