Watson, Richard, Rob Mills, Christopher L. Buckley, Alexandra Penn, Adam Davies, Jason Noble, and Seth Bullock. “Adaptation without natural selection.” (2010): 80-81.
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How can a system become better adapted over time without natural selection? Although some argue for ‘organismic’ properties such as robustness and self-sustaining regulation in non-evolved systems [1,5,11], others insist that natural selection is the only source of true adaptation [3]. We suggest that understanding how adaptation can occur without natural selection remains a fundamental open question for the Artificial Life community. For example, the origin of life, the origin of evolution, and the origin of new units of selection in the major evolutionary transitions/biological dynamical hierarchies, all seem to imply an adaptive process, or at least a non-arbitrary organisational process, that precedes the onset of natural
selection proper (at each level of organisation).