Existing evolutionary theories—from Darwinian natural selection to Prigogine’s dissipative structures—all presuppose temporal background, external driving forces or selection pressure as preconditions for evolution, and thus fail to answer the ontological question of why evolution itself exists. Based on the pure difference primitive of Gradient-Relational Ontology (Dust Theory), this paper takes four minimal axioms as the logical starting point, presupposes no entities, spacetime, energy or external rules, and rigorously proves that evolution is endogenous to difference itself through constructive derivation. The core conclusions are as follows: (1) Microscopic coupling operations are completely reversible, while macroscopic irreversibility emerges from combinatorial probability; time is not a background container but a macroscopic sequential index of state updates. (2) The long-term statistical expectation of global average imbalance decreases monotonically, and the direction of evolution is endogenously driven by the statistical difference in structure duration, without teleological presuppositions. (3) Repeated conduction paths condense into stable rule states through compression, and both probability and order are high-order constructs of statistical stability, serving as the core products of evolutionary self-organization. (4) Hierarchical transition is inevitably triggered after microscopic optimization reaches saturation, and recursive transitions generate a nested complexity ladder. This paper further presents three quantitative predictions verifiable by numerical simulation, clarifies falsifiability criteria, and constructs a fully endogenous evolutionary dynamics framework, providing underlying support at the relational ontology level for complex systems research.
Y Cao (Wed,) studied this question.