McShea Daniel W
Santa Fe Institute, 1399 Hyde Park Road, Santa Fe, New Mexico, 87501.
Evolution. 1996 Apr;50(2):477-492. doi: 10.1111/j.1558-5646.1996.tb03861.x.
The notion that complexity increases in evolution is widely accepted, but the best-known evidence is highly impressionistic. Here I propose a scheme for understanding complexity that provides a conceptual basis for objective measurement. The scheme also shows complexity to be a broad term covering four independent types. For each type, I describe some of the measures that have been devised and review the evidence for trends in the maximum and mean. In metazoans as a whole, there is good evidence only for an early-Phanerozoic trend, and only in one type of complexity. For each of the other types, some trends have been documented, but only in a small number of metazoan subgroups.
进化过程中复杂性增加这一观点已被广泛接受，但最著名的证据却极具主观印象。在此，我提出一种理解复杂性的方案，该方案为客观测量提供了概念基础。该方案还表明，复杂性是一个涵盖四种独立类型的宽泛术语。对于每种类型，我描述了一些已设计出的测量方法，并回顾了关于最大值和平均值趋势的证据。在整个后生动物中，只有很好的证据表明在早寒武纪存在一种趋势，且仅存在于一种复杂性类型中。对于其他每种类型，虽已记录了一些趋势，但仅存在于少数后生动物亚群中。
