We submit that evolution has itself evolved from ‘Darwinian’ atemporal randomness towards anticipative awareness, auto-catalyzed by Anticipative Capability (AC), which both drives the evolution and bounds it. We consequently argue that the evolutions of survivability, anticipation, intelligence, wisdom, evolution itself, and indeed consciousness are broadly equivalent. We reject the anthropomorphically convenient categorical separation of entities into ‘living’ and ‘non-living’, and note that the manifestation of ‘life’ indicates a continuity of evolvability and AC between blind inanimate dependence on Newton’s Laws and human technological control. Overt anticipatory behavior depends on just those hyperscalar properties of neuronal networks which are responsible for the evolution of consciousness through self-observation. We explain how AC in the absence of self-observation is unlikely; that self-observation in the absence of scalar development is impossible; that emergence of scale corresponds to the emergence of a ‘theory of self’ in infants; and that the attainment of ‘wisdom’ in humans is associated with the development of cervical hyperscalarity. We conclude that both the historical development of consciousness and its ongoing evolutionary nature can be best characterized by: ‘survival of the adequately anticipative’.

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