singularity

A fundamental ontological premise of any evolutionary analysis is the fact of singularity, that is, all the entities in the ontological domain have certain unique properties which distinguish them from any other entity. This premise is the necessary consequence of the assumption that selection works on different variants of individuals in a population, and not on their generic properties, such that these differences result into differential growth and spread of the respective variant in the domain. This is also called the"population thinking" in evolutionary analysis.
Formally speaking, singularity is pure chance that cannot be quantified in terms of a probability distribution. The >enformation contained in a complete description of the singularity cannot be compressed further to contain less enformation than the original description. Therefore, to identify singularity there is no other way as to set up a classification system based on similarities between members of classes, and to find some meaningful criteria of classes. This is the >taxonomic method in evolutionary analysis.
The concept of singularity is important in the mathematical context where it refers to unique points where functions change their solution behavior. To investigate into these points and to define classes of functions showing similar behavior is the topic of "catastrophe theory". Catastrophe theory is important to understand the consequences of singularity for the dynamic behavior of systems.
Many critics of evolutionary approaches as applied to the human sciences claim that human behavior is not "random". This is a major misunderstanding of the concept of variety resulting from the fundamental ontological premise of singularity. The fundamental consequence of singularity for EE is that there is no such thing as the "representative firm" or the "representative individual".

Basic References

The relation between singularity and chance has been elucidated in a famous theorem by Gregory Chaitin. Chaitin's work on chance is an important foundational contribution to EE.
Gregory Chaitin's Homepage
Lucien Dujardin's website

Semantic Field
singularity   impossibility theorems
taxonomy   population