---
title: "Xenophylum: Toward a Synthetic Cambrian Explosion"
description: "Daniele Cavalli, Michelle Chang, Alasdair Milne and William Morgan argue that design has been governed by a paradigm they call generalized biomimesis, in which \"nature\" serves not merely as a source of particular templates but as the telos and moral guarantor of good form."
type: "reading-notes"
authors:
  - "Daniele Cavalli"
  - "Michelle Chang"
  - "Alasdair Milne"
  - "William Morgan"
published: "2025-05-10"
original_url: "https://coginfra.antikythera.org/"
doi: "10.1162/ANTI.5CZG"
canonical_url: "https://antikythera.wiki/work/journal/coginfra/xenophylum"
md_url: "https://antikythera.wiki/md/work/journal/coginfra/xenophylum"
last_updated: "2026-08-23"
site: "Antikythera Wiki"
---

# Xenophylum: Toward a Synthetic Cambrian Explosion

> Independent, unofficial reading notes from Antikythera Wiki (https://antikythera.wiki). Written with AI from the published text, with citations; not by the work's author and not affiliated with Antikythera (https://antikythera.org). Read the original at the link below.

- **Authors:** Daniele Cavalli, Michelle Chang, Alasdair Milne, William Morgan
- **Published:** 2025-05-10
- **Kind:** Studio projects · Journal article
- **DOI:** https://doi.org/10.1162/ANTI.5CZG
- **Original:** https://coginfra.antikythera.org/
- **Length:** 7.8k words
- **Part of:** [Cognitive Infrastructures](https://antikythera.wiki/work/journal/coginfra)
- **This page:** https://antikythera.wiki/work/journal/coginfra/xenophylum
- **Notes generated:** 2026-08-23

## Summary

[Daniele Cavalli](https://antikythera.wiki/people/daniele-cavalli), [Michelle Chang](https://antikythera.wiki/people/michelle-chang), [Alasdair Milne](https://antikythera.wiki/people/alasdair-milne) and [William Morgan](https://antikythera.wiki/people/william-morgan) argue that design has been governed by a paradigm they call generalized biomimesis, in which "nature" serves not merely as a source of particular templates but as the telos and moral guarantor of good form. They propose a supplement, not a replacement: xenomorphology, the deliberate engineering of forms with no biological precedent, drawn from evolutionary computation, machine learning and unusual materials, and given a quantitative footing by assembly theory. The family of forms that would result is the xenophylum, and the moment in which they appear is a "synthetic Cambrian explosion" driven by modular recombination rather than genetic inheritance. The underlying question is what kinds of bodies artificial intelligence will come to have.

## The argument

The authors begin from the claim that humans are technical beings whose evolution has long been exosomatic, in Stiegler's reading of Lotka: the species extends its capacities through instruments rather than through genes, and, following David Bates, there was never a purely natural human intelligence for artificial intelligence to oppose. A second premise comes from Girard and Tarde. Humans are innately mimetic, so technical innovation has tended to reproduce the organs of animals, from eyes and claws to kidneys and immune systems. Put together, these premises explain why design defaults to nature as its model and why that default is a cultural disposition rather than a necessity.

The second section names the disposition. Generalized biomimesis is broader than biodesign, the practice of copying a particular leaf or wing; it is the treatment of nature as the ideal that mediates every technical desire. The authors argue that it has fused with the naturalistic fallacy, the inference from natural to good that Mill criticised. Castoriadis supplies the diagnosis: nature is an imaginary signification, defined negatively as whatever is not artificial, and invested with values of purity and sustainability. Their objection is to nature's symbolic authority, not to its use as one reference among many.

The third section asks whether designers can leave imitation behind and build a "xeno-evolutionary environment". The evidence is a survey of three technical routes. Evolutionary computation has produced creatures and gaits that no biologist would have predicted, machine learning extends the same search, and modular and soft robotics yield behaviours that diverge from biology because of the materials involved. Assembly theory then supplies the measure the survey lacked: the assembly index, the minimal number of joining steps needed to build an object, tracks complexity in synthetic and natural artefacts alike. Levin's work on multiscale collective intelligence shows that biological unity is itself compositional, so the authors conclude that new phyla can be designed without genetic inheritance by modularising xenomorphological components and exploring their recombination.

Section four states the paradigm. Xenomorphology seeks forms that evoke real foreignness, arising either from in-silico experiment or from extraterrestrial environments, and it maintains an incommensurability with terrestrial body plans rather than relabelling biomimicry. The conclusion adds a dynamic condition: xenomorphic behaviours are most likely to emerge under adversarial stress, so the programme should be antifragile, scaling the frequency of experiments in which assembled xenomorphs are tested against unpredictable stimuli.

## Section by section

### 1 Introduction

The section assembles the lineage from Geertz, Kapp's organ projection and McLuhan's extensions of the senses to Stiegler's exorganismic humanity. It names the paper's two paradigms, biomimesis and xenomorphology, insists the second supplements the first, and introduces the terms xenophylum and xenosphere, the latter an emergent domain where technosphere meets biosphere. Tesla's Optimus appears as the kind of AI-driven morphology that could be extended beyond its humanoid precedent.

### 2 Generalized Biomimesis

The authors distinguish mimicry, which any organism performs for survival advantage, from mimesis, a creative and interpretive human act, and argue that in design the mimetic impulse projects purity and authenticity onto the biosphere. Flight is the worked example: observing birds did not yield aeronautics but fixed nature as the symbolic reference, from Daedalus and Leonardo to Bacon's dictum that nature must be obeyed to be commanded. The section concedes biomimicry's practical record while asking whether its principles rest on ecological patterns or on cultural ideals about what nature ought to be.

### 3 Engineering a New Cambrian Explosion

The section is organised by technique. Under "Xeno-Design via Evolutionary Techniques" the authors set out the components of an evolutionary system and cite Lehman and colleagues' view that evolution can occur wherever replication, variation and selection intersect. Karl Sims's 1994 virtual creatures are the founding case, block organisms that evolved fins and jointed limbs in "an unlimited hyperspace of possible creatures"; the authors note that this line of work explicitly sits between biomimetic realism and "life as it could be". The subsection on xenomorphic traits draws on "The Surprising Creativity of Digital Evolution": a six-legged robot asked to walk with no feet touching the ground flipped onto its back and walked on its elbows, and Watson's Braitenberg-style vehicles found light by backing into it or by eccentric spinning, which turned out to suit the hardware at speed. None of these results were sought as alien, which is the authors' point: evolutionary computation could be aimed at alien design on purpose.

"Xeno-Design via Machine Learning" takes Tiwary and colleagues' generative visual intelligence, a roadmap for evolving sensing hardware to generate new forms of vision rather than recreate natural ones, as the nearest kin, while noting that most reinforcement-learning robotics starts from bipeds and quadrupeds and is tangential to the paper's aim. "Xeno-Design via Material-Based Approaches" turns to physical systems: self-reconfiguring modular robots such as Romanishin's magnet-bonded M-blocks, Wani's light-driven artificial flytrap needing no electricity, Lu's multilegged millirobot that the authors place "between a caterpillar, starfish, and sentient carpet", and Ren's jellyfish millirobot whose five swimming modes range from faithful imitation to something cyborgian. "Assembly not Assemblage" argues for assembly theory over post-Deleuzian assemblage because it offers causal precision, and uses McMillen and Levin's account of cellular alignment in embryogenesis to claim that biological unity is itself compositional. The section ends by reframing evolution as a programmable design process.

### 4 Xenomorphology as a New Paradigm

The authors define xenomorphology against biomorphic design, which stays tethered to biological archetypes even when it loosens them. Geology, where xenomorphic minerals crystallise last and take shapes unconstrained by their neighbours, supplies a continuum rather than an opposition, and NASA's TESSERAE, tiles that self-assemble quasi-stochastically in microgravity, is the example of xenomorphic principles applied in a literally alien environment. In virtual settings, suspending Earth-based fitness conditions lets forms evolve chemical harvesters or electromagnetic detectors without regard to human physiology, with a future "Biosphere 2" as a physical test bed. Downstream lies xenobehaviorism, the study of behaviours alien morphologies engender, for which the assembly index is again the measure. The authors close by describing xenomorphs as alien intelligences that can coexist with humans without collapsing into anthropocentrism.

### 5 Conclusion: Speculative Visions for a New Antifragile Xenophylum

The conclusion names Sims, Levin, Cronin and Walker as the convergence that makes morphology a common object across evolution, technology and intelligence. Its distinctive claim is that adversarial events may be required to catalyse xenomorphic responses, so that antifragility mediates between a morphology, the morphospace of behaviours it makes possible, and the behaviours that emerge. Because the relevant stimuli are unpredictable, experimentation should scale in frequency.

## Key concepts

- **[Generalized biomimesis](https://antikythera.wiki/terms/generalized-biomimesis)** — The default paradigm in which nature is not only copied but treated as design's telos and moral ideal, rooted in the human mimetic disposition and fused with the naturalistic fallacy.
- **[Xenomorphology and the xenophylum](https://antikythera.wiki/terms/xenomorphology-xenophylum)** — A design paradigm seeking forms without biological precedent, arising from in-silico evolution or off-world environments, and the lineage of forms it would produce.
- **[Assembly theory](https://antikythera.wiki/terms/assembly-theory)** — The framework of Cronin, Walker and collaborators in which an object's assembly index, its minimal number of joining steps, measures embedded evolutionary or design complexity; the authors extend it from diagnosis to design strategy.
- **Xenomorphological components** — Modular units whose recombination, rather than genetic inheritance, generates new lineages of form.
- **Xenobehaviorism** — The study of behaviours that alien morphologies engender, judged by what they manifest in virtual or extraterrestrial domains rather than by translation into terrestrial systems.
- **Antifragile xenophylum** — The claim that xenomorphic behaviours emerge under adversarial stress, so the programme must supply such stress experimentally and at scale.

## Connections

- [Cognitive Infrastructures](https://antikythera.wiki/work/journal/coginfra) frames the paper as a move from biomimicry to what the compendium calls xenomimicry, within a theme on symbiosis, [artificialization](https://antikythera.wiki/terms/artificialization) and niche construction. The paper's own vocabulary is xenomorphology, and it leans on humanoid robotics as a foil less than the compendium's summary does.
- [Mutual Prediction in Human–AI Coevolution](https://antikythera.wiki/work/journal/coginfra/mutual-prediction-in-human-ai-coevolution) shares the theme and the niche-construction premise. It studies the cognitive asymmetry between coevolving partners; this paper studies their bodies. The two are complementary.
- [Cognition With and Beyond the Brain](https://antikythera.wiki/work/journal/coginfra/cognition-with-and-beyond-the-brain), by the same lead author, draws on the same Stieglerian account of exosomatic humanity but runs it inward, asking how technology might re-enter the body, where this paper runs it outward into new bodies.
- [Synthetic Counteradaptation](https://antikythera.wiki/work/journal/coginfra/synthetic-counteradaptation) opens with Sara Walker's claim that technology is life, in agreement with this paper's refusal of a natural–artificial boundary.
- [Substrates Unbound](https://antikythera.wiki/work/journal/substrates) is the closest argument outside the compendium. Its section on technomorphism and biomimesis treats the organism–machine relation as governed by assumptions about substrates, and its insistence on [substrate agency](https://antikythera.wiki/terms/substrate-agency) supports this paper's point that materials make modular robots diverge from biology. There is a tension: that work warns against substrate indifference, while the xenophylum programme prizes in-silico morphospaces where substrate is suspended.
- [Recursive Worlds](https://antikythera.wiki/work/journal/recursiveworlds) is Walker's own exposition of assembly theory. She frames it as a measure of selection; this paper repurposes it as a design tool. Levin's xenobots, described in [Modes of Cognition](https://antikythera.wiki/work/journal/modesofcognition) as showing behaviours absent in their source organism, are the biological precedent for morphology uncoupled from lineage.
- The 2023 studio project Xenoplex is the programme's earlier attempt to compress evolutionary time in simulated environments, an ancestor of this paper's synthetic Cambrian explosion.


## Terms used

- [Artificial Endosomatization / Onloading](https://antikythera.wiki/terms/artificial-endosomatization-onloading)
- [Assembly Theory](https://antikythera.wiki/terms/assembly-theory)
- [Generalized Biomimesis](https://antikythera.wiki/terms/generalized-biomimesis)
- [Xenomorphology / Xenophylum](https://antikythera.wiki/terms/xenomorphology-xenophylum)