Bio-onion

The bio-onion is the name given to the 'nested complexity layer' concept in biology. In overview, the concept says that biology can be seen as a nested set of interacting layers, each layer building on the last progressing towards ever greater complexity. Although the boundaries of each layer can be difficult to precicely define, the layers provide a framework for classifying and understanding biological informaion processing.

Once the general 'layered reality' framework has been seen established, the whole universe spanning sub-atomic interactions at one extreeme to human interaction at the other, can be encapsulated using the bio-onion concept.

Within this framework 'evolution' in the classical (darwinian) sense is not seen as "the survival of the fittest" (a chaotic world of dog-eat-dog interactions) but rather as the self-defining, self-sustaining "survival of the stable". In this sense, stable behaviour in one layer provides the substrate for evolution within the next layer. Thus what we define as 'stable' is a self-defining attribute, the stability of one layer in the context of the next.

In this way stable patterns of interaction at the sub-atomic level lead to the 'stability' of the atoms. Atoms are only defined as stable at the next layer, which is the layer of atomic interactions. Many of the