Conjecture: evolutionary tension between individual and group interests arises from an expression–referent discrepancy

Establish whether the conflict between individual‑level and group‑level selection constitutes a principled inconsistency arising from a mismatch between the space of expressions (e.g., possible collective phenotypes or functions) and the space of referents (e.g., encodings/genotypes), and ascertain whether major evolutionary transitions in individuality exploit divergences between these phase‑spaces.

Background

Building on a computation‑theoretic perspective (diagonalisation and the expression–referent mismatch), the authors link biological level‑of‑selection tensions to a structural discrepancy between what can be encoded and what can exist as higher‑level expressions.

They conjecture that such mismatches underlie transitions in individuality, where selection favors reorganizations that access new regions of the expression space not spanned by existing encodings.