Abstract Shifts from bottom–up to top–down influences are considered a hallmark of major evolutionary transitions, including the origin of life. We explore how such directional information flow can arise without direct interactions among the system components using a minimal model of uncoupled logistic maps subject to a shared, time-varying constraint. Transfer entropy reveals a consistent macro-to-micro bias across diverse modulation profiles, along with increased inter-unit predictability and confinement of macroscopic dynamics to low-dimensional manifolds. Conditional transfer entropy, conditioning on the environmental signal, reveals that a macro-to-micro asymmetry remains even after the influence of the shared driver is accounted for. This persistence suggests that nonlinear aggregation of uncoupled chaotic units generates predictive structure beyond the common environmental forcing. These results show that structured environmental variation alone is sufficient to generate an asymmetric top–down directional information flow, suggesting that dynamic external constraints may serve as an early scaffold for coordination before the evolution of internal coupling mechanisms.
Celia Blanco (Wed,) studied this question.