The Adaptive Niche Bias: An Adaptive Dynamics Perspective on the Anthropic Principle

This work proposes a novel, observer- and substrate-neutral explanation for why advanced adaptive systems tend to perceive the universe as ordered and stable. Drawing on principles from adaptive dynamics and information theory, we argue that this perception emerges not from external fine-tuning or anthropic necessity in the global environment/universe, but as a statistical consequence of the system’s own adaptive trajectory and informational growth. Specifically, systems that successfully develop complex internal in-formation models necessarily do so in environments whose local probabilistic structure permits persistent adaptation and incremental informational accumulation. In contrast, systems that face chaotic or terminally disruptive environments fail to develop such ordered worldviews, as their adaptive trajectories are suppressed or curtailed before complex modeling can emerge. This perspective shifts the explanatory burden from global assumptions about the universe’s structure to local statistical and probabilistic properties that enable the emergence and long-term persistence of advanced observers. We briefly discuss the broader implications of this argument for the philosophy of science, adaptive systems research, and debates about the anthropic principle.