CONCEPT
Fitness Landscapes (Kauffman)
High-dimensional surfaces where each point represents a possible organism and height represents fitness—rugged topologies where the path to any peak depends entirely on starting position.
A fitness landscape is a geometric representation of evolutionary possibility space where each point corresponds to a possible genotype and the surface height at that point represents that organism's fitness (capacity to survive and reproduce). Sewall Wright introduced the concept in 1932; Kauffman extended it through his NK model, demonstrating that realistic fitness landscapes are rugged—covered with multiple peaks (local optima) separated by valleys. The critical finding: the path to any given peak depends entirely on the starting position. An organism at position A may reach a particular peak through uphill steps; an organism at nearby position B may find the same peak unreachable because intervening valleys require fitness-reducing steps that selection cannot cross. Applied to creativity: Dylan's 'Like a Rolling Stone' was reachable from his specific configuration of influences; it was not reachable from other musicians' coordinates, not because they lacked talent but because their starting positions defined different adjacent possibles leading to different peaks.
In The You On AI Field Guide
Wright's original fitness landscape was