IS EVOLUTION PROGRESSIVE?
EVOLUTIONARY PROGRESS
John Stewart (http://www4.tpg.com.au/users/jes999
)
(A later version of this
paper was published in the Journal of Social and Evolutionary Systems, 20:335-362.
(1997). My book Evolution’s Arrow
builds on and extends the ideas developed in this paper. It is online at http://www4.tpg.com.au/users/jes999 )
Abstract: This article identifies evolutionary processes
which produce progressive change, outlines the sequences of events in the
evolution of life on earth which have resulted from these processes, and
predicts key future developments in the evolution of life. Progressive
evolution is driven by the potential benefits of cooperation amongst living
processes. These benefits are able to be exploited by the formation of
hierarchical organisations in which managing entities with the ability to
control other entities support cooperators and suppress cheats. Examples of
hierarchical organisations of this type include early cells in which RNA
manages molecular processes, and modern nation states in which governments
manage human organisation. However, the formation of hierarchical organisations
will not fully realise the potential benefits of cooperation and end the
progressive evolution which is driven by this potential: it is only within
these organisations that cooperation can be comprehensively exploited. The
widely recognised impediments to the evolution of cooperation will continue to
apply to interactions between organisations. The potential benefits of
cooperation between organisations will therefore drive the formation of
higher level organisations. The continued repetition of this process will
progressively extend cooperative organisation across greater scales of space
and time.
1. INTRODUCTION
In the first part of this
century, there was widespread support for the view that the evolution of life
is directional, that the direction is progressive, and that humans are the
culmination of this process (e.g. see Blitz, 1992; and
However, in recent years
this position has been vigorously criticised as being unsupported by theory or
evidence, and as being driven by anthropocentrism and wishful thinking (e.g.
see Williams, 1966;
More specifically, Maynard
Smith (1988) argues that a fundamental problem for the progressive view is that
current evolutionary theory does not predict a general increase in anything:
theory has been unable to demonstrate that adaptation to local circumstances
which is driven by natural selection will lead to indefinitely continuing
change, let alone to progress; some directional change can be expected, but it
will end as selective circumstances change or as opportunities for further
adaptive improvement are exhausted.
This article develops a
theoretical perspective which identifies evolutionary processes that produce
progressive change, outlines the sequences of events in the evolution of life
on earth which have resulted from these processes, and predicts key progressive
developments in the future evolution of life.
The article begins in
Section 2 by identifying the features of evolving living processes which drive
indefinitely continuing, progressive change. This is followed in Section 3 by
an examination of the specific types of evolutionary change which are driven by
these processes. Section 4 identifies key developments in the evolution of life
on earth which are part of this progressive change. This includes an
examination of the location of humanity in this evolutionary progression. The
article concludes in Section 5 by testing this new theoretical framework
against various criticisms that have been made against previous progressive
approaches.
2. THE SOURCE OF
CONTINUING PROGRESSIVE CHANGE
If a theory is to
convincingly demonstrate that evolution is progressive, it must identify a
potential for beneficial adaptation which continues indefinitely as living
processes evolve. To be indefinitely continuing, such a potential must exhibit
a number of characteristics. First, the potential must be insatiable: no matter
what adaptations are discovered in response to the potential, the potential
must continue to favour further adaptation; the potential must never be
exhausted, no matter how far adaptation proceeds. Second, the potential for
adaptation must apply generally to living processes through time, and not be
generated by contingencies which vary with local circumstances in space or
time.
I will argue here that the
potential advantages of cooperation amongst living processes across space and
through time provide such a continuing potential for beneficial adaptation.
In short, this is because
evolutionary processes such as natural selection are unable to exhaust the
potential for beneficial cooperation by simply establishing and optimising
cooperative arrangements amongst living entities. Natural selection is able to
comprehensively exploit the benefits of cooperation between living entities
only through the formation of complex organisations of entities which are of
limited scale in space and time (e.g. cooperative organisations of molecular
processes forming early cells, organisations of cells forming metazoans, and organisations
of humans forming human societies). However, the benefits of cooperation between
these complex organisations will not be able to be exploited by natural
selection except by the formation of yet higher level organisations. Indefinite
repetitions of this process will extend the scale in space and time of
organisations in which the benefits of cooperation are exploited, but will
leave unexhausted the potential for cooperation between organisations of the
largest scale.
I will now deal with these
issues in greater detail.
The potential benefits of
adaptations which establish cooperative arrangements amongst living entities
are well known, whether the entities are molecular processes, cells,
multicellular organisms, or human nation states. In particular, cooperation
between entities can avoid the costly consequences of the pursuit by
individuals of their individual interests at the expense of others, and can
provide the advantages of cooperative differentiation, specialisation, and
division of labour (e.g. as exemplified by molecular processes within cells,
cells within metazoans, and human activities within modern economies).
Cooperative organisation can also establish coordinated action across greater
scales of space and time, enabling adaptation to external events of greater
scale (e.g. metazoans can generally adapt successfully to larger scale threats
than can single celled organisms).
However, the impediments to
the ability of natural selection to take advantage of these benefits of
cooperation amongst organisms is equally well known. In most circumstances,
selection will favour individuals which use resources for their own benefit,
rather than for the benefit of others. Individuals which use resources in
cooperative activities which predominately benefit others are likely to be
selected against, no matter how beneficial the cooperative effects on others
may be, and irrespective of whether the resultant cooperative arrangement is
more competitive as a whole. These impediments apply whether the cooperation
immediately benefits others, or whether it benefits others in the future (e.g.
in subsequent generations). And in most circumstances, selection will favour Afree riders@ or Acheats@ which undermine cooperation by
taking any benefits provided by cooperators, without cooperating in return. In
most circumstances, beneficial cooperation will evolve only to the extent that
cooperators benefit from all the beneficial effects of their cooperation on
others.
A number of mechanisms have
been identified which enable cooperative adaptations to capture the benefits of
cooperation in some circumstances (e.g. mutualism, genetical kinship theory [
These impediments to the
evolution of cooperation between individuals also apply at all other levels of
biological organisation (e.g. in the evolution of cooperation between molecular
processes [Maynard Smith, 1979; Bresch et al., 1979; and Maynard Smith
and Szathmary, 1995], between cells [Buss, 1987], and in the evolution of
cooperation between humans [Olson, 1965; and Williamson, 1985] )
The existence of these
impediments to cooperation means that evolutionary processes such as natural
selection are not able to easily exhaust the potential for beneficial
cooperation by simply establishing and optimising cooperative arrangements.
However, where the evolutionary process is able to establish the complex,
hierarchical organisations of individuals identified by Stewart (1995 and
1997[a]), the benefits of cooperation will be able to be comprehensively
exploited amongst individuals within the organisations. As will be considered
in more detail in the next Section, the formation of these cooperative organisations
relies on the evolution of entities which are able to manage and control the
other entities in the organisation, supporting beneficial cooperation and
inhibiting free riding and cheating. These controlling entities may be external
to the entities they control, or internal to them. Examples of the formation of
cooperative higher level organisations which each constitute a higher level
entity include the organisation of molecular processes into cells, of cells
into metazoans, and of humans into human societies.
However, the formation of
organisations in this way is able to establish cooperation only between
individuals within each higher level entity. The impediments to the
ability of natural selection and other evolutionary processes to establish cooperative
arrangements between these higher level entities will apply as it does
to entities at any level. Again, these impediments will drive the formation of
cooperative organisations of the higher level entities. Again, however, this
will enable beneficial cooperation to be exploited only within the new
organisations, but not between them. Through the progressive formation
of higher and higher level organisations in this way, the benefits of
cooperation between living processes can be extended over greater scales of
space and time, but without exhausting the potential for further cooperative
benefits: the potential for even further beneficial cooperation will not be
exhausted until all living processes which could interact significantly are
permanently organised into a single entity, and there is no possibility of life
arising outside the entity which could interact significantly with it.
On this basis, the
potential advantages of cooperation amongst living processes qualify as an
indefinitely continuing potential for beneficial adaptation which will drive
progressive evolution: the potential will continue indefinitely, and the
potential applies generally to living processes through time. However, it
should be noted here that the general application of the potential does not
mean that all living processes will realise the potential by discovering
cooperative arrangements or by discovering the hierarchical forms of
organisation which enable cooperation to be more full explored. For example, as
we will consider in greater detail in Section 5, the fact that many populations
of bacteria do not yet participate in cooperative hierarchical organisations is
not a demonstration of the lack of general application of the potential for
beneficial cooperative adaptation.
3. THE NATURE OF
PROGRESSIVE EVOLUTIONARY CHANGE
In this Section we will
identify in greater detail the nature of the evolutionary changes which will be
driven by the potential advantages of cooperation. In doing so, we will focus
on the evolution of changes which allow cooperative possibilities to be
explored, rather than on the evolution of specific cooperative adaptations such
as anatomical, physiological, behavioural or technological adaptations. This is
because findings of the greatest generality are more likely to apply to the
evolution of the arrangements which establish and adapt the specific
cooperative adaptations; the specific cooperative adaptations themselves are
more likely to be contingent and vary with local circumstances.
3.1 Management
Stewart (1995 and 1997[a])
has begun the development of a theory of the evolution of organisational
arrangements which are able to comprehensively overcome the initial impediments
to the ability of evolutionary processes such as natural selection to discover,
perpetuate and adapt beneficial cooperative arrangements between living
processes. Here we will further develop those elements of the theory which are
relevant to progressive evolution, and use the theory to identify key
milestones in the evolutionary expansion of cooperative organisation over
greater scales of space and time.
Stewart suggests that the
critical evolutionary step in overcoming the impediments to cooperation at a
particular level of organisation is the emergence of entities which are able to
manage and control other entities. We will first consider the case where the
managing entities are external to the entities being controlled.
3.1.1 Upper level
management
When they first arise,
these managing entities can be expected to use their control over other
entities to unilaterally appropriate resources and services from them. For
example, managers may move between groups of entities, extracting as much as
possible from each group and destroying the group in the process. However, in
appropriate circumstances, selection would favour managers which discover ways
of intervening in groups of entities to increase the availability of resources
which are able to be harvested by the managers. Because of the impediments to
the evolution of cooperation, a manager can do this by intervening in a group
in ways which produce beneficial cooperative arrangements which would not
otherwise arise within the group. The manager will be able to harvest
additional benefits produced by these interventions. Such interventions could,
for example, support altruistic specialists which would otherwise be
out-competed within the group, and inhibit cheating which would otherwise
reduce the extent of cooperation between members of the group.
Selection can be expected
to favour enhancement of the management ability of managers. This will involve
the discovery of management controls which are more efficient at supporting
cooperation and which expand the range of cooperation which can be supported.
Importantly, this will also involve improvements in the adaptability of
management. The capacity of management to efficiently search the space of
possible management controls will be enhanced, facilitating the adaptation of
existing controls and the discovery of new controls which support better
cooperative arrangements. The evolution in this way of a comprehensive ability
to discover and adapt controls which support specialists and inhibit cheating
will enable the emergence of the extraordinary level of cooperative
differentiation and division of labour which characterises the key evolutionary
transitions to higher levels of organisation.
It is worth emphasising
here that the full exploration of cooperative possibilities requires management
which is capable not only of sustaining cooperation throughout the
organisation, but also of adapting and improving management controls. The
potential benefits of cooperation can therefore be expected to drive not only
the progressive formation of hierarchical organisations of wider and wider
scales, but also progressive improvements in the adaptive abilities of these
organisations.
Selection can also be
expected to favour improvements in the capacity of managers to capture the
benefits of their interventions. For example, managers might establish longer
term associations with a particular group, and might use their control over the
group to establish arrangements which prevent access to the group by other
managers or entities which might appropriate resources from the group. The
result of this evolutionary sequence will be the formation of new hierarchical
organisations which each comprise a group controlled by a manager. The new
organisations will constitute entities at a higher level of organisation.
Importantly, the evolution
of these cooperative organisations is favoured not only at the level of the
group, but also at the level of the individual entities involved: the sequence
will unfold if the entities do no more than follow their individual
evolutionary interests. The key to this is that the inability of natural
selection to exploit the benefits of cooperation amongst entities provides the
opportunity for managing entities to increase their individual fitness by
supporting and enhancing the success of the group rather than by simply
exploiting it. And the control applied by the manager ensures that the entities
in the group act cooperatively, consistent with the manager=s interests. To the extent that the
interests of the manager and the organisation coincide, the entities in the
group will be managed so that their interests are aligned with the interests of
the organisation. In the absence of this management, it would not be in the
interests of individual entities to cooperate.
Ideally, management will
ensure that individuals are adapted so as to take into account not only the
effects of their actions on themselves, but also the effects of their actions
on others in the organisation and on the organisation as a whole, no matter how
distant those effects may be in space or time. Ideally, the evolutionary interests
of the manager and of the organisation will fully coincide, and therefore the
adaptation of management will also take into account the effects of its actions
on all others in the organisation. The effects of actions on others will be
taken into account as if they are effects on the individual exhibiting the
action. When this ideal is met, individuals will act as if they treat the other
within the organisation as self. Until this ideal is met continuously within an
organisation, the potential for beneficial cooperation will not be fully
exhausted, and there will be a potential for further progressive evolution
toward the ideal.
Examples of cooperative,
hierarchical organisations which have evolved in this way are protein-based
autocatalytic sets managed by RNA to form early cells, and human groups managed
by rulers to form, for example, early kingdoms:
RNA has the ability to
control protein-based autocatalytic sets through its capacity to catalyse
particular proteins. For example, RNA may catalyse a protein which advances the
RNA=s interests by assisting the reproduction of the RNA. Because of the
impediments to cooperation within autocatalytic sets (e.g. see Bresch, et al.
1979; and Maynard Smith, 1979), RNA has the potential to use its catalytic
capacity to advance its interests by promoting cooperation within the set (e.g.
by the catalysis of altruistic proteins, or of proteins which inhibit the
reproduction of cheats). The resultant increased efficiency of the set can
benefit the RNA directly by providing more resources for its maintenance and
reproduction, and also by increasing the competitiveness of the organisation as
a whole.
Similarly, a human ruler
has the capacity to control its subjects through its capacity to apply
incentives and disincentives which motivate behaviour which may, for example,
advance the ruler=s interests. Again, the impediments to cooperation provide the ruler
with the potential to increase the efficiency of its kingdom and advance its
interests by interventions which enhance beneficial cooperation between its
subjects (e.g. though the promotion of cooperative economic exchange relations
between subjects by punishing individuals who cheat in exchanges, and by
redistributing appropriated resources to support defence of the kingdom).
As demonstrated in detail
by Stewart (1997[a]), life itself originates through the formation of
cooperative hierarchical organisations: a key step in the evolution of life is
the emergence of relatively large, stable molecules (or groups of molecules, as
in an autocatalytic set) which use their capacity to control and manage the
activities of smaller scale atoms and molecules to maintain themselves and to
produce replicas of themselves. Again, the essence of this evolution is the
discovery by managing entities of ways of controlling and coordinating other
entities so as to enhance the evolutionary interests of the managing entities
and the assemblage as a whole. The result is the formation of hierarchical
organisations such as the autocatalytic sets which manage proto metabolisms, as
described by Bagley and Farmer (1991).
3.1.2 Lower level
management
The discussion to this
point has focused on the evolution of cooperative hierarchical organisations in
which management is exercised by entities which are external to the entities
being managed. In the terminology of Salthe (1985), such managers control a
group of entities by providing upper level constraints or boundary conditions
for the entities. However, as detailed by Salthe (1985), control can also be exercised
by lower level constraints or initiating conditions. Typically, these lower
level constraints are established by intrinsic properties of the entities being
controlled. They are lower level entities in the nested hierarchies which
constitute the entities being managed, and they >hard wire= the entities to behave in
particular ways. For example, genes act as lower level constraints on cells and
metazoans, while both genes and inculcated norms of behaviour act as lower
level constraints on humans.
It is clear that the
behaviour of a group of humans is able to be controlled by an upper level
manager such as a ruler who provides an appropriate pattern of incentives and
disincentives to which members of the group adapt. Equally, the behaviour of
the group could also be controlled by a process which constitutes the group
with members which have particular intrinsic properties which constrain and
predispose them to behave in particular ways. For example, cooperation could be
promoted in a group either by the constitution of the group by individuals
which are internally constrained genetically or culturally to behave in a
trustworthy fashion in economic exchange relations, or by an external ruler who
punishes those who behave otherwise.
If a lower level constraint
is to manage a group of individuals, it must be able to exercise a degree of
control over each of the individuals in the group. This can be achieved, for
example, by the reproduction of the constraint in each of the individuals,
thereby ensuring that each individual is constrained by a replica of the
constraint. For example, an insect society can be controlled by a cluster of
genetic elements to the extent that the cluster is reproduced in each member of
the society, and a group of human hunter gatherers can be controlled by a
cluster of inculcated behaviour patterns to the extent the cluster in
reproduced in each member of the group.
Provided the lower level
manager is evolvable, selection can favour the establishment by the manager of
constraints which control the group in ways which enhance the success of the
manager. For example, a lower level manager reproduced across a group may
actuate individuals to behave in ways which directly enhance the reproduction
of the manager (e.g. the lower level manager may be a cluster of norms which
actuate the members of the group to inculcate others with the norms).
Furthermore, because of the
impediments to cooperation, lower level managers have the same potential as
upper level managers to enhance their interests by the promotion of cooperation
amongst the individuals which comprise the group. Selection can therefore
favour lower level managers which constrain the behaviour of individuals in a
group in ways which promote cooperation and which ensure that the management
which establishes the constraints captures the benefits of the cooperation. For
example, the lower level manager may actuate altruistic behaviour and constrain
the altruists to preferentially direct their altruism to those who are more
likely to include instances of the lower level manager (e.g. genetical kin
selection); and may actuate behaviour which punishes members of the group whose
cheating demonstrates that they do not include instances of the manager (e.g.
see Boyd and Richerson, 1992). In this way, lower level management can sustain
cooperative arrangements in a group by hard wiring members of the group to
behave in ways which may be inconsistent with their individual interests.
In summary, the potential
for beneficial cooperation amongst living entities at any level of organisation
can be realised to an extent by the formation of hierarchical organisations in
which the entities are managed by an upper or lower level manager. However, the
extent to which this will enable the benefits of cooperation to be explored
across space and time will still be limited; it will comprehensively explore
cooperation only amongst entities within an organisation. As a consequence, the
unrealised potential for beneficial cooperation across greater scales (e.g. between
organisations) will drive the repeated formation of hierarchical organisations
in this way, and will drive improvements in the ability of the organisations to
discover and perpetuate beneficial cooperative adaptations, extending
cooperation over greater scales of space and time.
4. THE EVOLUTION OF LIFE
ON EARTH
The application of this
analysis to the history of life on earth enables us to identify and interpret
key milestones of evolution on this planet. The first three major organisational
transitions in the evolution of life each involved the formation of cooperative
organisations in which entities were controlled by upper level management. The
first step saw the management of a proto metabolism of atoms and molecules by a
macro molecule or by an autocatalytic set of macro molecules to form a
reproducing assemblage. The second step saw the management by RNA of these
assemblages to form early cells, and the third saw the management of
associations of prokaryotic cells by DNA to form eukaryotic cells. These steps
were necessarily sequential in that the organisations formed by the first step
gave rise to the entities which were managed in groups to produce the
cooperative organisations formed in the second step, which in turn gave rise to
the entities which were managed in groups to produce the cooperative
organisations formed in the third step. The result has been organisms which are
organised as nested hierarchies.
The formation of groups of
entities managed by lower level rather than upper level managers could not
emerge immediately in the evolution of life. This had to await the evolution of
organisms which contained evolvable lower level constraints which had the
management ability to discover and produce complex cooperative interactions
between organisms. The evolutionary sequence outlined above eventually produced
organisms with lower level constraints of this type. This occurred firstly
because the progressive evolution discussed above tended to produce upper level
managers with improved management abilities to discover and perpetuate
beneficial adaptation, and secondly because these upper level managers also
were lower level constraints within the organisms which included them. They
therefore had the potential to form the lower level manager of a group of
organisms by being reproduced in each member of the group (e.g the genetic
arrangements of a cell are an upper level manager in relation to the molecular
processes which are managed by the genetic arrangements within the cell, but
also act as lower level constraints in relation to the cell as a whole. The
genetic arrangements can therefore act as a lower level manager of an
organisation of cells if the arrangements are reproduced in each of the cells
in the group). The improvement in management ability occurred not only as
evolution proceeded within each level of organisation, but also as new levels
of organisation were formed. This is because the entities which evolve at one
level participate in the organisations at the next, bringing to the new
organisations whatever adaptive capacities they have evolved. In this way, each
new level tends to build on the management capability developed at the previous
level.
The eventual result was
cells containing genetic arrangements which had the management ability to
produce a wide range of constraints which were able to establish complex
cooperative interactions between cells. Multi-cellular organisations were able
to be established by lower level genetic managers which were reproduced across
the cells in the organisation and which therefore were able to appropriately
constrain the reproduction and other behaviour of the group of cells. For
example, a genetic manager could establish control over a group of cells by
managing their reproduction to ensure that the manager was reproduced in each
cell, and by ensuring that any variant cells which were produced did not
contribute to the next generation (e.g. see Buss, 1987). The lower level
management of multi-cellular organisation which was established in this way
enabled the comprehensive exploration of the benefits of cooperative
arrangements between cells which permitted the extraordinary level of
cooperative differentiation and division of labour which arose in metazoans.
The evolution in this way
of organisations managed by gene-based lower level managers could be readily
repeated to form higher level organisations. This could occur once the
management ability of the lower level management of multicellular organisations
improved sufficiently to produce a wide range of constraints which could
establish complex cooperative interactions between multi-cellular
organisations. The result has been, for example, insect societies which are
managed with varying degrees of effectiveness by gene-based lower level
managers.
In this way, the fourth and
fifth major organisational transitions in the evolution of life on earth each
involved the formation of cooperative organisations in which entities were
controlled by gene-based lower level management.
4.1 The evolution of
organisational adaptability
The next significant
organisational transitions had to await further improvements in the adaptive
capacity of management. In particular, these further transitions depended on
the emergence of management with the capacity to adapt the organisation
continually during its life. As we shall see, organisations with this capacity
readily formed new, higher level cooperative organisations.
The capacity of the
organisations produced in the first five organisational transitions to adapt
and improve these cooperative arrangements during their lives was initially
limited. This is because the managing entities initially had little ability to
adapt their management controls during their live, and therefore little ability
to ensure that cooperative arrangements were adapted during the life of the
organisation. The managers had no capacity to adapt heritably through processes
internal to the manager (in contrast to, for example, human individuals who
have the potential to discover culturally heritable adaptations during their
life through processes which are internal to the individual). Instead,
management adapted through natural selection operating on genetic differences
in management ability between organisations i.e. through the differential
reproductive success of organisations which varied in their management
capacity.
This had important
consequences for the way organisations were optimally structured. It meant that
management could not adapt its controls to appropriately manage new variants
that might arise within the organisation (e.g. by suppressing new cheats and
free rider variants which, unless controlled, might undermine cooperation in
the organisation). As a result, selection favoured management which suppressed
the possibility of differential success amongst new heritable variation within
the organisation during its life (e.g. by preventing the production of any
heritable variation within the organisation, except in conjunction with the
reproduction of the organisation). This is achieved in cells and in
multicellular organisations by gene based management which permits the
production of heritable variation in the organisation only in conjunction with
variation in management. And any differential success amongst variation within
management is itself prevented within the organisation, ensuring that effective
management is not disrupted by competition between variants. As pointed out by
The emergence of
organisations managed by entities which were limited in their ability to adapt
their management during their life therefore did not exhaust the potential for
beneficial cooperation even within those organisations. Consequently, the
progressive evolution driven by the potential for beneficial cooperation did
not end within each level of organisation with the emergence of such
organisations. The unexhausted potential drove a further progressive
evolutionary sequence in which the management of organisations evolved the
ability to continuously adapt organisations cooperatively during their life.
This included the capacity to adapt cooperative arrangements to changing
circumstances, the ability to improve existing management arrangements, the
establishment of new forms of management (e.g. the endocrine and nervous
systems are new upper level systems of management established by the lower
level genetic management of multicellular organisms), and the ability to
transmit adaptations between organisations, i.e. heritability (here
heritability is used in the widest sense to include not only transmission of
adaptive information from parents to progeny, but also transmission between
other individuals).
I will examine in greater
detail the key milestones in the evolution of the adaptive capacity of
management.
4.1.1 Hard wired
adaptability
The simplest type of
arrangement which would adapt management to changed circumstances during the
life of an organisation is one in which the adaptation is pre-programmed or
hard wired. That is, the nature of the adaptation and the circumstances under
which it is invoked is determined by a fixed mechanism within the organisation:
there is no trial and error testing of alternative adaptations within the
organisation itself. The trial and error process which discovers these
adaptations and hard wires them in the organisation is natural selection which
operates at the between-organisation level (e.g. selection operating on genetic
variation between cells or multicellular organisms).
However, pre-programmed
adaptation is limited: it is unable to discover new adaptations during the life
of the organisation. This is particularly limiting where organisations often
encounter novel circumstances in which the optimal adaptation is also novel.
Where this is the case, pre-programmed adaptations favoured by selection in
past circumstances will be sub-optimal. As the adaptive capacities of
organisations improve, the extent to which there is advantage in novel adaptation
during the life of the organisation is likely to increase. This is because when
the environment encountered by each individual organisation is considered on a
scale which is fine enough, the environment will be continually novel. And, as
the adaptive capacities of organisations improve, they will tend to be able to
find advantage in adapting to finer and finer environmental differences
(Stewart, 1993; and Stewart, 1997[b]).
4.1.2 Internal testing
of possible adaptations against immediate effects
Selection will therefore
tend to favour the emergence within the organisation of mechanisms which are
able to test and discover new adaptations during the life of the organisation.
These mechanisms will select adaptations by testing variation against proxies for
organisational success. The simplest mechanisms of this type are the ultra
stable arrangements identified by Ashby (1960). Here the proxy for
organisational success is the state of an essential variable which will be
changed by environmental perturbations which are detrimental to the
organisation. Adaptation to the perturbation is achieved by varying relevant
parameters in the organisation through trial and error until the essential
variable is returned to its optimal range. Most homeostatic mechanisms are
instances of ultrastable arrangements.
It will be useful when
examining other adaptive mechanisms to translate the terminology used by Ashby
for ultrastable adaptation into a more general form: the preferred range of the
essential variable is the objective/value pursued by the adaptive
mechanism; the particular pattern of trial and error changes in relevant
parameters which are tested in the attempt to satisfy the objective/value is
the strategy (the better the strategy, the less trial and error needed
to achieve adaptation); and the value of the parameters which satisfies the
objective/value by returning the essential variable to its preferred range is
the adaptation. In the simplest arrangements of this type, the strategy
and the objective/value are established by natural selection operating at the
between-group level (they are themselves adaptations in these wider adaptive
systems). In more complex arrangements, the strategy and objective/value may
themselves be established by ultrastable processes within the organisation.
As organisations
differentiate, ultra stable arrangements will also differentiate, so that each
functional unit will tend to be adapted by ultra stable arrangements which
maintain essential variables associated with the unit. Because these
arrangements will adapt each unit only in relation to the interests of the
unit, they will in turn be managed by ultra stable arrangements which manage
the units to ensure that their adaptation takes appropriate account of wider
interests in the organisation. A group of units managed in this way will itself
form a functional unit of wider scale in the organisation. Repetition of this
form of organisation at wider scales in the organisation will result is
multi-level management hierarchies which adapt the internal environment of the
organisation to maintain homeostasis in the interests of the organisation as a
whole.
It is important to note
here that selection favours the establishment of hierarchical arrangements
which manage smaller scale adaptive units within the organisation for exactly
the same reasons that selection favours the formation of organisations of
organisms controlled by upper or lower level management: both the smaller scale
adaptive units and the organisms will tend to adapt in their own direct
interests, and therefore will be unable to take advantage of the benefits of
cooperative adaptation between units and between organisms; management enables
these impediments to be overcome.
Similar arrangements can
adapt the organisation in relation to its external, behavioural interactions
with the environment, including interactions with other organisations. In this
case, behavioural actions are tested against their capacity to result in
desired internal states within the organisation, e.g. an organism might move
actively throughout its environment until it encounters an area rich in food,
upon which it ceases movement. Again, these adaptive mechanisms can be
considered within the more general framework of objectives/values, strategies,
and adaptations.
Selection will favour the
establishment of adaptive arrangements which reduce the extent of trial and
error needed to achieve adaptation. Key milestones in this evolution are: the
capacity to learn, which enables organisations to implement without trial and
error an adaptation which has been discovered previously, when there is a
recurrence of the conditions in which the adaptation was beneficial (e.g the
operant conditioning of Skinner, 1953); and the transmission of adaptations
between organisations (e.g. through imitation, or by the parental inculcation
of behaviours in their offspring), which enables an organisation to adopt a
successful adaptation discovered by another organisation without having to
discover it itself by trial and error.
However, the types of
adaptive arrangements considered to this point are fundamentally limited:
because they discover adaptations only by testing actions against their
immediate effects within the organisation, they are limited in their ability to
discover adaptations which have beneficial effects only in the future. No
matter how beneficial the future effects are, they will not produce beneficial
effects within the organisation when the possible adaptation is trialed, and
therefore will not contribute to the adoption of the adaptation; as a
consequence, these types of adaptive mechanisms cannot apply anticipation or
foresight in their search for beneficial adaptation.
Arrangements which are hard
wired in the organisation by the between-organisation evolutionary process can,
however, overcome this limitation to some extent. This is because the
between-organisation process takes into account the effects of possible
adaptations on the reproductive success of organisations, irrespective of
whether the effects of an adaptation accrue at a different time during the life
of the organisation to the implementation of the adaptation. So the
between-organisation process can hard wire the internal adaptive mechanisms
within the organisation so that alternative adaptations are tested not only
against their immediate effects, but also against hard wired proxies for their
future effects. In this way, the organisation can be hard wired so that
possible adaptations are treated as if their future effects were immediately
felt by the organisation. This will ensure that when alternative adaptions are
trialed, future beneficial effects will count toward their immediate
competitive ability within the organisation.
For example, the
organisation may be hard wired by the between-organisation process so that: (a)
a particular behavioural act which has no immediate detrimental effect but
which would endanger the organisation in the future, will cause the
organisation to immediately experience fear (a proxy for future harmful
effects); and (b) behaviours which result in the reproduction of the
organisation but which provide no immediate benefits will cause the
organisation to immediately experience pleasure (a proxy for future beneficial
effects). In these examples, natural selection hard wires the organisation so
that when possible adaptations are being trialed, the organisation experiences
pleasure, pain or more complex emotional feelings which reflect the future
effects of the possible adaptations. This ensures that when possible
adaptations are tested, their future effects are taken into account.
However, to the extent that
these arrangements rely on the hard-wiring of the organisation by natural
selection, they share the limitation that applies to other hard-wired
arrangements: they cannot be adapted and improved during the life of the
organisation.
4.1.3 Internal testing
of possible adaptations against future effects
If this limitation is to be
overcome, the organisation must include arrangements which can test possible
adaptations against their future effects and which can themselves be adapted
and improved during the life of the organisation. This can be achieved by
arrangements within the organisation which evaluate the future effects of
possible adaptations by simulating or modelling their future consequences, and
which ensure that these consequences are taken into account when the
adaptations are trialed (Popper, 1972; Holland, 1992; and Stewart, 1995). The
models themselves can be tested and improved during the life of the
organisation on the basis of their ability to accurately predict how the world
unfolds. The evolution of these arrangements will be driven by the potential
benefits to be achieved by more effective cooperative management of the
organisation.
The effectiveness of the
management of an organisation which is guided by internal modelling will depend
on the comprehensiveness and accuracy of the models. As organisations
accumulate knowledge which can underpin more and more sophisticated modelling,
their ability to predict the consequences of alternative adaptations (including
technological adaptations) will be enhanced. Until the unfolding of a
particular phenomenon is able to be modelled by an organisation, the
organisation cannot understand the phenomenon, nor predict its unfolding.
Once the modelling capacity
is established, selection will strongly favour the establishment and
enhancement of the ability to transmit knowledge between organisations e.g.
through language. This will rapidly enhance the modelling capacity by enabling
the accumulation across generations of the knowledge which underpins modelling.
Where a society of organisations is cooperatively managed, a high level of
specialisation and division of labour in the acquisition and accumulation of
knowledge can be achieved (e.g. in a modern human society).
The progressive acquisition
and accumulation of knowledge will enable organisations to model the
consequences of possible adaptations (including technological adaptations)
across greater and greater scales of space and time. As modelling improves, it
is likely to identify alternative adaptations which are superior to existing
adaptations when longer term or wider scale consequences are taken into
account, or when more accurate predictions of consequences are utilised. If an
organisation is to take advantage of a capacity to model which improves
throughout its life, it therefore must include arrangements which enable the
findings of the improved models to be used to progressively modify its existing
adaptations, strategies and objectives/values. This in turn will entail the
modification of the operation of the adaptive processes which have established
and adapted these existing arrangements, and which are relatively limited in
their ability to take into account the consequences of possible adaptations.
These existing adaptive processes include smaller scale modelling, hard wired
adaptive processes, learning, and ultrastable arrangements.
As we have seen, a
recurring challenge throughout the evolution of life has been to establish
arrangements which modify adaptive processes or entities that adapt in relation
to limited interests so that they instead adapt in relation to a wider set of
interests and considerations. And, as we have seen in relation to the initial
formation of organisations and in relation to the establishment of hierarchies
of ultrastable arrangements within organisations, this can be most effectively
achieved by the establishment of new layers of control which can manage and
modify the operation of the pre-existing adaptive processes to ensure the wider
interests and considerations are taken into account. Consequently, as the
modelling capacity progressively improves in its ability to take into account
the more complex consequences of possible adaptations over wider scales of
space and time, new levels of management will be progressively added. Each of
these will modify the operation of the previous adaptive processes (including
lower levels of management) so that these wider consequences are appropriately
taken into account. This increasingly enables the organisation to transcend the
biological and social influences which have previously determined its actions,
and instead enables the organisation to adopt whatever behaviours are
identified by its modelling capacity as necessary to satisfy its longer term
objectives/values.
As pointed out by Wilber
(1997), the executive control of the organisation (which the organisation
experiences as the self) will tend to be associated with the highest level of
management. As a new level of management develops, the self will tend to
disembed from the level below, and increasingly develop capacities which will
enable it to stand outside and manage the lower level. Foremost amongst these capacities
is the ability to model the processes of the previous level, so that they can
be successfully modified to produce desired effects. The previous level will
progressively become an object of the self which is now identified with the
higher level, and the organisation will experience this as becoming
increasingly aware of the processes of the lower level i.e. the organisation
will develop self consciousness of increasing scope.
Once selection at the
between organisation level has established the organisational framework which
underpins the modelling capacity, this evolutionary progression in which new
levels of management are added will occur within organisations during their
life: it is a cultural and psychological evolutionary sequence, not a gene-based
one. The sequence will be driven by the potential for each step in the sequence
to provide organisations with an improved ability to satisfy their
objectives/values, which were initially established by the between organisation
process as proxies for organisational success.
When the modelling capacity
is sufficiently developed, it will make redundant the gene based adaptive
process operating at the between organisation level. This is because the
modelling process will preempt the genetic process: organisations will
generally be able to adapt to events through the modelling process before the
events produce the differential reproductive success between genetically
variant organisations which is necessary for the operation of the
between-organisation process (e.g. see Laland [1992] for a model). The result
is a new evolutionary mechanism which is able to discover new adaptations
during the life of the organism, and to accumulate and improve adaptations
across generations of organisms through cultural heritability.
As we shall see in greater
detail in the next section, improvements in the modelling capacity of
individual organisations in turn permits new and more effective ways of forming
the cooperative organisations of individuals which constitute new levels of
organisation. In particular, individuals with a sufficiently developed
modelling capacity are able to form organisations whose management is able to
adapt heritably during the life of the organisation from the outset, without
having first to repeat the full evolutionary sequence outlined in this section.
Here we will identify three distinct levels of modelling capacity which each
differ significantly in the type of organisation which they can found. These
levels differ primarily in the complexity and scale in space and time of the
events they can model: as we proceed through the levels, modelling is able to
take into account the more complex consequences of possible adaptations over
wider and wider scales. Each level is sufficiently distinct to necessitate a
distinct level of organisational management which manages lower levels of
adaptation to ensure its unique considerations are taken into account.
Therefore, as well as being associated with distinct types of social
organisation, each level will also tend to be associated with different
adaptations, strategies and values/objectives which will result in different
world views, senses of self and cultural systems:
(a) Linear modelling:
this is limited to the modelling of the simple and direct consequences of
possible actions, which are seen to be linked by linear chains of causation.
This level of modelling leads to the discovery and revision of adaptations with
short term future consequences, but is very limited in its capacity to model
the consequences of alternative strategies for discovering adaptations, or the
consequences of alternative values/objectives, particularly in social contexts.
Consequently, these adaptive needs continue to be met by arrangements which are
predominately hard wired (e.g. through the emotional system in the case of
adaptations with complex, longer term consequences). Alternatives to these
complex adaptations are not an object of awareness, and the organisation takes
adaptations founded on the hard wired arrangements as given, and not subject to
choice.
(b) Systemic modelling:
this allows the modelling of the wider social and other systems in which the
organisation participates. It includes modelling of the social and other
processes which have fixed many of the organisation=s particular adaptations,
strategies, and values/objectives, and which also determine the extent to which
these adaptations are successful. These adaptations, strategies and values are
therefore no longer experienced as fixed or given, and can be reviewed in the light
of the modelling. An individual with this level of modelling ability is able to
successfully manage a cooperative organisation of individuals, using its
modelling ability to discover controls which will promote beneficial
cooperative organisation, and adapting its management during the life of the
cooperative organisation.
(c) Evolutionary
modelling: this entails the modelling of the evolutionary processes which
have ultimately formed the organisation and its particular adaptations,
strategies and objectives/values, and which will ultimately determine the
future evolutionary success of the organisation and the success of the higher
level organisations in which the organisation participates. The organisation
will therefore be aware of the progressive evolutionary sequences identified in
this article, and of its place in those on-going processes. This allows the
organisation to review the adaptations, strategies, and values established by
earlier evolutionary mechanisms in the light of their appropriateness to the
future wider scale progressive evolutionary processes. In particular, it
enables the organisation to adaptively preempt the wider scale evolutionary
trends before they manifest as the differential reproductive success of
organisations. Organisations might do this by, for example, promoting the
formation of higher level organisations capable of successful cooperative
adaptation on wider and wider scales.
This progressive
improvement of the modelling capacity continues the trend that began with the evolution
of simple ultrastable arrangements which tested possible adaptations solely
against the ability of their immediate effects to usefully deal with changes as
they arise within the organisation: as the new levels of management associated
with these modelling capacities are progressively added, the organisation will
increasingly be managed so that its adaptation takes into account the effects
of possible adaptations over wider and wider scales of space and time. The
organisation will therefore progressively move closer to the ideal of ensuring
that entities within the organisation are adapted by appropriately taking into
account the effects of their actions on others in the organisation and on the
organisation as a whole, no matter how distant those effects may be in space or
time.
4.2 The evolution of
cooperative human organisation
4.2.1 Lower level
management
We have seen that genetic
arrangements which constrain the characteristics of individuals can control a
group of individuals where the arrangements are reproduced in each of the
members of the group. Lower level management of this kind has been responsible
for the initial evolution of cooperative multicellular organisation, and
cooperative non-human societies.
We have also seen that the
evolution of the ability of individuals to adapt during their life eventually
resulted in the capacity for individuals to acquire new internal constraints
and predispositions during their life (e.g. learned behaviours). Once these
learned constraints could be transmitted between individuals (e.g. through the
inculcation of behaviours in offspring by their parents), it became possible
for a group to be controlled by lower level management constituted not by
genetic constraints, but by learned behavioural constraints. A cluster of
behavioural constraints which include a predisposition to inculcate the cluster
in others could reproduce throughout a group, predisposing members of the group
to behave cooperatively.
These types of arrangements
are seen in their most highly developed form in human organisation. There is
strong evidence that early human hunter/gatherer groups were cooperative and
highly egalitarian within groups (e.g. see Knauft, 1991; Erdal and Whiten,
1994; and Wilson and Sober, 1994). This type of organisation could be achieved
within a genetically disparate group by a cluster of inculcated behavioural
norms which constrained individuals to behave in ways which remove any
disadvantage from behaving cooperatively e.g. by predisposing individuals to
share the benefits of cooperation and to refrain from cheating. The success of
such a manager within a group would be enhanced if the manager included
behavioural constraints which actuated individuals to punish or expel
individuals which failed to behave consistently with all the behavioural norms
(e.g. individuals in whom the cluster of constraints had not been reproduced).
Such a lower level manager could successfully compete with alternatives within
the group, as well as producing a group which could out-compete other groups
which were unable to exploit the benefits of cooperation.
Lower level managers are
also able to arise and persist within modern, large scale human organisation
where the predominant form of management is upper level: for example, an
appropriate cluster of inculcated behavioural constraints can reproduce across
a group to form organisations such as the Hutterite groups which are discussed
in detail by
However, groups which are
controlled by lower level management constituted by inculcated behaviour
patterns are fundamentally limited in their ability to adapt heritably during
the life of the group. This is because lower level management can sustain
cooperation within a group only to the extent that it successfully hard wires
individuals to behave in ways which may be contrary to their individual
interests, and maintains these constraints through time. Relaxation of the hard
wired constraints will result in a return to the pursuit of individual
interests at the expense of the group, with the collapse of cooperation.
Management could permit
variation and experimentation in the hard wired constraints only if it had the
capacity to distinguish between useful and harmful variants, and the capacity
to suppress any new variants which prove to be harmful (e.g. which involve a
new form of cheating, or involve any other pursuit of individual interests at
the expense of group interests). The lower level management of human groups
does not have this capacity. Except in the limited circumstances where other
arrangements can successfully control variation (e.g. see Stewart, 1997[a]),
management must therefore indiscriminately suppress all variation which could
possibly be harmful, including variation arising in management itself, even though
this will also suppress variation which could be beneficial. Variation which
could possibly be harmful can be permitted to arise only with the formation of
new groups, concentrating selection and adaptation at the between-group level
(Wilson and Sober, 1994). The result is the stifling of innovation and adaptive
ability during the life of the group. Rigid enforcement of norms and strict
adherence to traditional ways of doing things is a feature of this form of
human organisation. It is no accident that the technology used by Hutterite
groups is greatly out of date, and that traditional human groups showed little
change and innovation in their social and other practices over long periods.
4.2.2 The emergence of
upper level management
The development within humans
of a capacity for systemic modelling made possible the emergence of upper level
management which overcame these limitations of lower level management. Systemic
modelling improved the ability of humans to discover actions which produce
benefits that are significantly displaced in space or in time from the
immediate effects of the action, and where the causal connections between the
action and their benefits are complex. As a consequence, upper level management
informed by systemic modelling was no longer limited to discovering and
adapting only those interventions which produced largely immediate and direct
benefits. Because many of the interventions and actions needed to establish
cooperative arrangements and to harvest their benefits are complex, systemic
modelling greatly enhanced the ability of upper level managers (e.g. chiefs,
kings or other rulers) to produce cooperative human organisation.
Upper level managers
informed by systemic modelling therefore had a much superior ability to
continuously adapt the management of human organisation during its life. Such a
management has the ability to continually distinguish between beneficial and
harmful variation arising within the group during its life. And it can
continuously adapt its management to control variants as they arise. In
contrast to lower level management, upper level management informed by well
developed systemic modelling does not have to suppress all possibly harmful
variation during the life of the organisation. To the extent it can distinguish
harmful variation from beneficial, it can suppress only the harmful rather than
having to suppress all of the variation. As a consequence, organisations which
included this form of management were significantly superior in their ability
to adapt heritably during their life from the outset. They did not have to
evolve such a capacity by traversing the full evolutionary sequence outlined
above in which the ability to adapt during the life of the organisation emerged
for the first time.
The result has been the
forms of modern human organisation which have arisen progressively since the
latest ice age about 12,000 years ago, and which are managed largely by upper
level managers such as rulers, committees, and governments. These managers have
the capacity to continuously adapt their management within the organisation to
improve cooperative arrangements and to adapt them to changing circumstances,
and have enabled an extraordinary amount of cooperative division of labour and
specialisation.
Although upper level
management informed by systemic modelling has a much superior capacity to
continuously adapt the management of an organisation during its life, lower
level as well as upper level management has been significant in the evolution
of modern human organisation to date: initially, until upper level management
accumulated sufficient knowledge to provide effective management, strong lower
level management was essential for the maintenance of cooperative organisation.
The lower level management was necessary to constrain the actions of members of
the organisation in ways which assisted the prevention of the breakdown of the
group though competition, cheating and free riding.
Furthermore, even where the
systemic modelling capacity of upper level management was well developed, its
task of managing a complex human organisation could be assisted and simplified
by the existence of lower level management which promoted cooperation. For
example, as economic theorists such as North (1991) and Pelikan (1995) have
suggested, the reproduction across an organisation of behaviour patterns which
constrain individuals to be trustworthy and refrain from cheating in economic
exchange relations can reduce the need for upper level controls in which the
State punishes breaches of contract. For these reasons, upper level managers of
human organisations have often fostered the reproduction of lower level
constraints which complement the interests of the managers (e.g. the promotion
by the State of particular values and norms).
However, the limited
ability of lower level management to adapt as circumstances change has resulted
in its progressive displacement by upper level management. Where organisational
changes reduce the effectiveness of lower level management, or impair its
capacity to reproduce across the organisation, the greater adaptive ability of
upper level management has meant that it is likely to take over the management
functions previously performed by the lower level management. Furthermore,
improvement of the capacity in humans for systemic modelling has enabled the
revision of earlier adaptations, including the revision of inculcated behaviour
patterns which previously constrained behaviour. Consequently, the most recent
period of human evolution has seen the weakening of lower level management, the
rise of individualism in which humans use their modelling capacity to choose
between alternative adaptations rather than relying on inculcated responses,
and an enormous increase in the scope and differentiation of upper level management
as it has taken over more of the management burden from lower level management.
4.2.3 The future
evolution of human organisation
Since their first
emergence, human organisations managed by upper level management have increased
substantially in scale, exploiting the benefits of cooperative adaptation over
wider and wider scales of space and time. In the future, the potential for
benefits to be gained from the further expansion of cooperative organisation
should tend to drive the establishment of an upper level management which
manages an organisation on the scale of the planet. This level of management
would manage processes that arise within lower levels of organisation (e.g.
nation states) and that have effects which extend beyond the border of any one
state e.g. acts of aggression between states, and wide scale environmental
degradation. As for management at all other levels of organisation, this would
ensure that processes within the planetary organisation are not able to
successfully pursue their own interests at the expense of others, and are able
to benefit from their beneficial cooperative effects on others. The
establishment of this planetary organisation would be assisted by the further
development amongst humans of a capacity for systemic modelling. This would
eventually provide widespread recognition of the benefits of management on a
planetary scale. The development of a capacity for evolutionary modelling would
accelerate the establishment of the planetary organisation.
However, the emergence of
this planetary organisation would not exhaust the potential for cooperative
organisation on the scale of the planet. It would not fully achieve the ideal
of ensuring that within the organisation, the adaptation of individuals
(including managers) would appropriately take into account the effects of
possible adaptations on others in the organisation, treating effects on others
as effects on self. This is because the current systems of human government
(upper level management) are fundamentally limited in their management ability.
I will briefly discuss three of the main limitations:
(a) As pointed out in
relation to economic systems by Hayek (1948), central governments do not have
access to the information necessary to determine the ideal cooperative outcomes
in particular circumstances, and to devise the management interventions to
implement these. This Aplanning@ limitation can be circumvented somewhat if governments limit their
management as far as possible to establishing the governance which is necessary
to underpin the operation of systems of exchange relations within the
organisation (e.g. horizontal economic markets). Where these systems of
exchange relations are effective, the participants capture the beneficial
effects of their actions on others, and have access to the information that
governments lack. However, systems of exchange relations are also limited in
their ability to comprehensively explore cooperative possibilities: for
example, they do not allow participants to capture the benefits of their
effects on others where the effects cannot be contained to those involved in
the exchanges (e.g. public goods); and their effectiveness is ultimately
subject to the limitations which apply to central government, because the
effectiveness of systems of exchange relations in turn depends on the
effectiveness of the systems of governance which underpin them, such as the
institutions which enforce property rights and prevent cheating (e.g. see
Hodgson, 1988) .
(b) The coincidence of interests
between management and the organisation as a whole is not likely to be complete
(the analysis of McGuire and Olson [1996] demonstrate that the conditions under
which the coincidence is complete are not met by current systems of
governance). This is particularly the case where the success of a ruler or
government can be influenced by individuals and groups with non-representative
interests. It will be in the interests of these individuals and groups to use
their influence to have the management provide them with additional benefits at
the expense of the organisation. However, to the extent that any individual in
an organisation does not capture the net effects of its actions on others,
either by receiving more benefits or less, the organisation will fail to
optimally explore the benefits of cooperative organisation. And to the extent
that governance intervenes any further in the actions of individuals than is
necessary to ensure they experience the net effects of their actions on others,
it unnecessarily restricts their freedom as well as impairing the effectiveness
of the organisation as a whole. Many of the features of modern governance
(including the democratic process itself) can be interpreted as attempts to
overcome this >conflict of interest= limitation by constraining rulers and governments to act solely within
the interests of the organisation. The test of the success of such measures is
whether they result in government in which individuals driven solely by self
interest will always seek to govern only in the interests of the organisation
as a whole. Existing systems of governance clearly fail this test.
(c) Modern systems of
government have limited time horizons: they do not contain processes which
ensure that all the future effects of actions are taken into account in
determining adaptation. The effects of possible adaptations on future
generations generally count little in determining which adaptations are
adopted. A planetary organisation managed by human government which was limited
in this way would not invest the considerable resources needed to establish a
comprehensive capacity to adapt in relation to possible future events which
might arise outside the planetary organisation. As a result, the capacity of
such an organisation to adapt in relation to the outside/future (including in
interactions with other living systems of the same scale) would be more
comparable to the ability of a plant, rather than to the ability of a mammal.
Currently, our systems of
governance are devised and adapted by the same sort of processes that were so
ineffective at devising and adapting economic outcomes in Soviet-style planned
economies. The limitations of these processes mean that a system of planetary
management implemented and adapted by humans through existing systems of
governance would not exhaust the potential benefits of adaptive cooperative
organisation on the scale of the planet. To identify the nature of the
evolutionary trends that this unexhausted potential will tend to drive, it is
necessary to identify organisational arrangements which would overcome these
limitations. What sort of arrangements would produce governance which would
evolve optimally, searching for improvements, and adapting to new
circumstances?
Stewart (1995) outlines a
form of adaptive organisation (termed a system of competitive vertical exchange
relations) which would produce an upper level management that evolves
optimally. Key features of such an adaptive system of governance are: (a) the
management interventions which would be implemented would be determined by
competition between alternative interventions on the basis of their ability to
produce net benefits to the individuals and groups which they would affect
within the organisation; (b) the extent to which an intervention would provide
net benefits (and therefore its competitive ability) would be determined by the
extent of the resources which those affected by the intervention were prepared
to exchange for its implementation; (c) the development and offering of alternative
interventions would be open to entrepreneurial activity. Ultimately, all
management interventions, including those which establish the vertical system
itself, would be adaptable on this basis.
Such a system (a) involves
supra individual cognition in the sense that it discovers adaptations by trial
and error processes which operate across individuals rather than within
individuals; (b) operates through an invisible hand process in that it produces
its beneficial organisational effects though the pursuit by individuals
(including those in management) only of their own interests; (c) tends to
approach the ideal in which all individuals, including those in management,
capture the net effects on others of their actions; (d) therefore will tend to
approach the organisational ideal in which individuals adapt as if they treat
their effects on others as effects on self; and (e) therefore also tends to
approach the ideal in which the interventions of management are limited only to
what is essential to ensure individuals experience the net effects of their
actions on others i.e. maximises individual freedom.
Such a vertical system
which would manage and complement systems of horizontal exchange relations such
as economic markets could largely overcome the >planning= and >conflict of interest= limitations which impair the
effectiveness of current forms of government. The benefits that a vertical
system could deliver to the organisation and to the individuals and groups that
participate in the system could be recognised by individuals with a well
developed capacity for systemic modelling. A capacity for evolutionary
modelling would assist this recognition. It is feasible that such a system
could be adopted through the current democratic systems of government if and
when sufficient numbers of humans develop the capacity for systemic modelling.
However, the adoption of a vertical system would be likely to be resisted by
those who, under current systems of governance, do better than merely capture
the benefits of their effects on others. This resistance would include
promoting loyalty and respect for current systems of government, and promoting
the belief that any change would be risky.
However, an effective
vertical system would not of itself overcome the restrictions on the adaptive
capacity of current forms of government that result from limited time horizons.
It is only where the humans which participate in the organisation are informed
by evolutionary modelling that these restrictions would be fully overcome.
Evolutionary modellers would be aware of the future direction of the
evolutionary processes in which the human system is embedded and therefore
would be aware that the planetary organisation must develop the capacity to
adapt and act for the outside/future if it is to participate in the continued
expansion in space and time of living organisation which is able to adapt
cooperatively on wider and wider scales. Evolutionary modellers would therefore
support the establishment of arrangements which would result in the self actualisation
of the planetary organisation: this would mean that the planetary organisation
would develop its own objectives/values, plans, self-awareness, modelling
capacity and projects, and it would be capable of adapting coherently as a
whole. The development of evolutionary modelling would therefore enable
adaptive process within humans and within human organisation to preempt the
operation of natural selection which might otherwise operate at the
between-organisation level, producing a self actualised planetary organisation
without the operation of competition or differential reproductive success
between planetary organisations.
This does not mean that
evolutionary modellers would sacrifice their immediate interests to attempt to
take into account the longer term and wider scale evolutionary consequences of
their actions. Instead, evolutionary modellers would draw on their
understanding of the types of organisation which permit the successful
formation of larger scale cooperative organisation. They would therefore
support the implementation of management which ensures that individuals
experience the net effects on others in the organisation of their actions, no
matter how distant in space or time those effects may be. This management would
ensure that when individuals adapt to immediate circumstances, they also adapt
effectively in the light of the longer term consequences of their actions. An
appropriate vertical system would enable evolutionary modellers to establish a
system of management which would align the immediate interests of individuals
with their longer term interests in this way. This is because such a vertical
system tends to establish whatever management arrangements are necessary to
satisfy the objectives/values of the members of the organisation.
The development of a
capacity for evolutionary modelling could be expected to reduce resistance to
the implementation of an appropriate vertical system, even amongst individuals
and groups who are disproportionately advantaged under current systems of
governance. Individuals informed by evolutionary modelling would be less driven
to accumulate resources to satisfy the acquisitive objectives/values which
currently motivate many humans, and which are known by evolutionary modellers
to have been initially established in humans by flawed, limited and superseded
evolutionary mechanisms (e.g. natural selection operating on genetic
variation). This would particularly be the case where pursuit of these
objectives/values would be inconsistent with values/objectives which serve
longer term evolutionary interests. These considerations also suggest that the
task of successfully managing organisations of evolutionary modellers would be
less demanding.
With the full attainment of
evolutionary modelling, human cooperative organisation would have evolved from
a form of organisation in which humans were constrained by inculcated beliefs
and genetic predispositions to act cooperatively, though organisation in which
individuals were in large part coerced to act cooperatively, to organisation in
which humans utilise a modelling capacity to choose to be subject to a dynamic
and responsive management which aligns their interests with the organisational
interest.
Of course, whether human
organisation will successfully evolve in this way to further exploit the
potential benefits of cooperation is not certain: as we shall discuss in the
next section, the fact that there are potential benefits to be gained through
complex new forms of cooperative organisation does not mean that these will be
discovered and taken advantage of by a particular species under particular
circumstances where the species discovers adaptations through the operation of
limited evolutionary mechanisms. However, given sufficient time on any suitable
planet, the existence of these potential benefits will drive evolutionary
processes which are likely to eventually produce a species which manages a
living organisation on the scale of the planet.
5. CONCLUSION
The weight of opinion
amongst evolutionary biologists currently appears to be strongly against a
progressive view of evolution (e.g. see Niteckie, 1998).
In this section, I will
briefly outline a number of the main criticisms which have been directed
against previous approaches which suggest that evolution is progressive, and
indicate how they are overcome by the approach presented here.
As noted earlier, a central
argument raised by those who suggest that evolution cannot be progressive is
that natural selection provides adaptation only to changing local environments,
and that the tracking of these changes cannot produce sustained directional
evolution: some directional change can be expected, but it will end as
selective circumstances change or as opportunities for further adaptive
improvement are exhausted (e.g. Maynard Smith, (1988); and Gould 1996).
The weakness in this
argument is that adaptations which are able to improve fitness are not limited
to adaptations which track local environmental changes back and forth,
providing closer adaptation only to whatever local circumstances prevail at a
particular time (e.g. a sequence of adaptations which produce thicker fur as
mean temperatures decline, or thinner fur as temperatures increase again).
Fitness can also be improved by adaptations which are general in the sense that
they are capable of providing benefits across a wide range of local
environmental conditions (e.g. a single adaptation that improves the
physiological ability of an organism to adapt to changes in temperatures,
producing benefits whether mean temperatures increase or decrease). Such
general adaptations will remain beneficial despite wide changes in local
conditions, and can be progressively improved by further general adaptations.
Reversals in the direction of changes in local conditions will not bring these
sequences of progressive evolution to an end, as it will for local adaptations.
This article has argued
that there is an inexhaustible potential for general adaptations which can
produce benefits irrespective of changing environmental conditions by improving
the ability of living processes to exploit the advantages of cooperative
organisation on wider and wider scales. At any particular level of
organisation, these general adaptations may either improve the capacity for
beneficial cooperative arrangements to be exploited between organisms (e.g. by
the formation of hierarchical organisations of organisms); or may improve the
capacity for cooperative arrangements within individual organisms to be
optimised and adapted (e.g. by enabling the effects of possible adaptations
across wider and wider scales of space and time to be taken into account in
adapting the organism). Although the particular cooperative arrangements which
these general adaptations make possible in any particular environment may be
beneficial only locally, the general adaptations make such improved cooperative
arrangements achievable across a wide range of environmental conditions.
However, the view presented
here that there is a general potential for beneficial cooperation seems to
raise another difficulty: why haven=t all lineages of organisms progressed in these
ways? If improved cooperative management within and between organisms has the
potential to produce benefits generally across environments, why aren=t all species progressively
discovering improved general adaptations of this type? Bacteria are often cited
as an example of organisms which show no recent progressive evolution (Ayala,
1988; and Gould, 1996).
The first point to be made
from the perspective developed here is that progressive evolution has been much
more widespread than is generally recognised. For example, the participation by
bacteria in cooperative organisation is common, ranging from bacteria which are
included in symbiotic assemblages, to the descendants of bacteria which
participate in eukaryote cells which in turn participate in multicellular
organisms, which in turn participate in social systems (e.g. see
Cavalier-Smith, 1981). In this way, bacteria have been centrally involved in the
progressive expansion of cooperative organisation across space and time. This
involvement includes progress in the ability to cooperatively adapt in relation
to events of wider and wider scale: the descendants of bacteria which
participate in higher level organisations are adapted by the management of
those organisations in relation to events and considerations of wider scale.
For example, although bacteria have not themselves developed a capacity for
internal modelling, those that participate in larger scale organisations which
have this capacity will be adapted in relation to events of wider scale as if
their adaptation were itself directly guided by internal modelling.
Secondly, the extent to
which existing lineages of organisms are participating in the progressive
evolution of cooperative organisation is growing rapidly. In particular, an
increasingly wide range of organisms such as domestic animals, plants, pests,
and disease-causing organisms are being managed as participants in cooperative
organisations managed by humans. With the formation of a planetary
organisation, the extent of this management of other organisms would increase
substantially. This would particularly be the case as management improved its
ability to manage the planetary system in ways which will optimise its capacity
to successfully adapt for the outside/future: management would need to take
advantage of all the potential resources of the system to optimise its adaptive
capacity.
This management is likely
to include genetic engineering which is already being used by humans to produce
new forms of organism that can contribute greater benefits to human
organisation. The potential benefits of cooperation between organisms are
likely to encourage further management interventions along these lines to
produce new cooperative organisations of organisms. For example, these could
include cooperative assemblages of bacteria that provide particular benefits to
the planetary organisation. The potential to engineer new beneficial forms of
cooperative organisation which have not yet been fully exploited by natural
selection should be considerable: the trial and error process of natural
selection operating on genetic variation has a very limited capacity to explore
the space of all possible gene-based organisms and organisations of organisms,
and it can be expected that there will be considerable advantage in its further
exploration by upper levels of management informed by evolutionary modelling.
Increasingly as a planetary
organisation evolves, more and more of the living processes on the planet would
be managed so that they participate cooperatively in the organisation, and
would be managed so that they are adapted in relation to events of wider and
wider scales, including in relation to any participation in yet larger scale
living organisations.
Nevertheless, in the past,
many lineages have not shared in progressive trends for long periods. However,
the existence of a general potential for beneficial cooperation does not mean
that all lineages will realise this potential by improving cooperative
management within and between organisms. This is because the general benefits
of cooperation are comprehensively accessible only with the evolution of
complex hierarchical organisational arrangements, and an evolutionary mechanism
such as natural selection which searches for adaptations by trial and error is
limited in its ability to discover such arrangements. This is particularly the
case where there is no set of simpler adaptations which are each able to provide
general fitness benefits, and which are able to serve as intermediary steps in
the evolution of the complex organisational arrangements. If such general
intermediary adaptations were readily available, evolution could proceed toward
the complex organisational adaptations across lineages and environments.
However, without intermediary adaptations which are able to produce fitness
benefits in a variety of environments, evolution must rely on there being
particular local environmental conditions which select in favour of local
adaptations which fortuitously can also serve as intermediaries to the general
organisational adaptations.
Other factors will also
limit the extent to which lineages participate in progressive evolution: small,
simple organisms such as bacteria will be less likely to be able to
successfully include within them complex hierarchical organisational
arrangements, such as those necessary to establish a capacity for evolutionary
modelling; and lineages which first discover progressive and intermediary
adaptations are likely to exploit the circumstances which produce the greatest
benefits for the adaptations, reducing the availability of circumstances which
will produce sufficient selective advantages to drive similar evolution in
other lineages.
These considerations
suggest that it is therefore not surprising that many lineages fail to share
the progressive trends, even though improved cooperative management within and
between organisms have the potential to produce benefits generally across environments.
However, this pattern of intermittent progressive evolution is likely to
prevail only while the evolutionary mechanism is limited in its capacity to
search for beneficial adaptations. Progressive evolution is likely to be more
general and pronounced once evolution produces more effective evolutionary
processes such as a mechanism informed by evolutionary modelling.
However, these
considerations seem to raise another serious problem: if the general
adaptations which exploit the benefits of cooperation within or between
organisms are able to increase fitness across environments, why do lineages
which discover general adaptations often appear to have failed to out-compete
and replace the lineages that have not discovered general adaptations? Furthermore,
if the progressive lineages fail to displace the non-progressives, and the
non-progressives continue to persist, how can it be said that the progressive
lineages are >better= than the non-progressive lineages in any sense which is evolutionarily
meaningful? In particular, if bacteria which are not part of wider scale
cooperative organisation have flourished, aren=t they as evolutionarily successful
as, for example, humans?
If we are to adequately
assess the relative evolutionary success of various lineages, it is essential
to undertake the assessment over wide enough scales of space and time. This is
because over narrower scales, other factors may be more important in
determining the relative success of lineages, particularly where the
evolutionary mechanism is natural selection operating on genetic variation. For
example, a lineage which discovers a general adaptation which provides fitness
benefits across environments may nonetheless fail to out-compete other lineages
in other environments: this will be the case where the other lineages carry
various local adaptations to their environments which, in those environments,
outweigh the general benefits provided by the general adaptation. Similarly, a
progressive lineage could be ousted by a non-progressive lineage if the
benefits of the progressive=s general adaptations were outweighed by its inferior local adaptation
to its environment.
Furthermore, even though a
general adaptation provides fitness benefits across environments, the fitness
cost of realising the general adaptation may vary across lineages and
environments, and in some cases may not outweigh the fitness benefits provided
by the adaptation. In those cases, a progressive lineage may not prevail, until
a more cost/effective way of realising the general adaptation is discovered.
For example, in relation to a niche which strongly favours small size, the
establishment and maintenance of a highly complex organisational arrangement
will incur a relatively higher cost to fitness unless the arrangement can be
achieved just as effectively on a smaller scale at proportionate cost; lineages
occupying such niches would be resistant to being out-competed by progressive
lineages until the progressive lineages discovered ways of cost/effectively
implementing their general adaptations on smaller scales.
However, as general
adaptations accumulate over time, and as their accumulated contributions to
fitness become more significant, the ability of progressive lineages to
adaptively radiate by out-competing other lineages will increase. Nevertheless,
for any given level of superiority in relation to general adaptations, there
will be a corresponding level of disadvantage in relation to local adaptations
that will not be overcome. For these reasons, progressive evolution underpinned
by natural selection operating on genetic variation will proceed in fits and
starts, and the extent to which progressive lineages oust non-progressives will
be strongly influenced by historical contingencies.
Over much longer time scales,
the probability of survival of non-progressive lineages will greatly diminish.
As we have seen, the evolution of a planetary organisation would result in
lineages that were formerly non-progressive increasingly being managed and
adapted as part of the planetary organisation. And as the planetary
organisation develops, its human management would increasingly engineer
organisms and cooperative relationships between organisms to optimise their
contributions to the planetary organisation. Human management would use its
superior cognitive ability to adapt organisms so that they evolve progressively
in ways which would overcome the historical contingencies and other limitations
which restricted the evolutionary mechanism based on the more cognitively limited
natural selection operating on genetic variation. Furthermore, the planetary
management could be expected to further develop the practise of current human
organisation to utilise machines and other non-living processes instead of
organisms where their contributions to the planetary organisation are superior.
Increasingly,
non-progressive lineages would either begin to participate in progressive
evolution by being incorporated into wider scale cooperative organisation, or
would be directly suppressed by the planetary organisation, or would be
out-competed by members of the planetary organisation whose fitness is
increased by participation in cooperative arrangements.
However, the evolutionary
superiority of lineages which participate in cooperative organisation would be
most clearly seen in relation to the ability of the organisation to
successfully adapt to wider scale events, particularly in relation to other
living organisations of similar or greater scale. As it develops a capacity to
adapt for its outside/future, the planetary organisation would develop the
ability to adapt to external events of abiotic or biotic origin which might
otherwise threaten its continued existence on this planet. This adaptive
capacity might involve relocation to other planets, and may also involve the
further spread of human organisation and its technological and other
adaptations over greater scales of space and time.
The critical point here is
that non-human organisms which are part of the human organisation would be
adapted to these larger scale events along with the rest of the organisation,
and would, for example, participate in any relocation and in any spread of the
organisation. In contrast, lineages which do not participate in the planetary
organisation would not be successfully adapted to these wider scale events, and
would not participate in any future evolutionary success which necessitates the
ability to adapt coherently on larger scales. Gould (1996) acknowledges that
bacteria are unlikely to survive what currently appears to be the inevitable
eventual explosion of the sun. However, he fails to recognise that the likely
survival of such an event by a human organisation which is able to adapt on a
sufficiently large scale illustrates the superiority of such a human organisation
in strictly evolutionary terms.
Of course, it is impossible
to predict how successful a planetary organisation informed by evolutionary
modelling would be at adapting to the particular large scale events which
actually arise in the future. However, it is possible to state with certainty
that such an organisation would be able to successfully adapt to a much wider
range of large scale events than would non-progressive lineages, or than would
a planetary organisation which does not develop the ability to adapt for the
outside/future, and which is not informed by evolutionary modelling.
These considerations also
suggest that the future evolutionary success of humanity will depend heavily on
the acquisition of a well developed capacity for evolutionary modelling. A
comprehensive theory of evolutionary progress will be an essential component of
such a capacity. In the evolution of living processes on any planet, the
development of an adequate theory of evolutionary progress will therefore
itself be a critical milestone in the progress of evolution.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I gratefully acknowledge
the benefit of useful comments from Jeremy Evans, David Richards and Wilson
Kenell.
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