Francis Paul Heylighen (born 27 September 1960) is a Belgian cyberneticist investigating the emergence and evolution of intelligent organization.

[1][2] He is best known for his work on the Principia Cybernetica Project, his model of the Internet as a global brain, and his contributions to the theories of memetics and self-organization.

Thanks to a grant from a private sponsor, in 2012 he additionally founded the Global Brain Institute at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel, becoming its first director.

In 1989 Valentin Turchin and Cliff Joslyn founded the Principia Cybernetica Project, and Heylighen joined a year later.

[11] In 2015, he received an "Outstanding Technology Contribution Award" from the Web Intelligence Consortium,[12] for his research on the Global Brain.

Applications include the origin of life, the development of multicellular organisms, knowledge, culture, and societies, and the impact of information and communication technologies on present and future social evolution.

This principle is a direct application of Universal Darwinism, the idea that Darwinian mechanisms can be extended to virtually all disciplines and problem domains.

Together with Cliff Joslyn and the late Valentin Turchin, Heylighen is a founding editor of the Principia Cybernetica Project, which is devoted to the collaborative development of an evolutionary-systemic philosophy.

[5] Together with his PhD student Johan Bollen, Heylighen was the first to propose algorithms that could turn the world-wide web into a self-organizing, learning network that exhibits collective intelligence, i.e. a Global brain.