Synergy Live

There Are No Tranches in the Trenches

2008-11-30T11:45:00.000-08:00

Our (late) financial bubble was a paper maché tree that bore a season of fruit, but it was rotten from its roots to its crown. Indeed, there was delusion or outright fraud, or both, at every level – from sub-prime mortgages that were issued without imposing any financial pre-qualifications whatsoever (i.e., the ability to pay the mortgage) to investment bank hustles that bought up these “terminator loans,” divided them into “tranches” (small pieces) and bundled them into “derivatives” where – in retrospect -- the sum of the underlying risks was greater than each of the parts. All of these toxic securities were in turn blessed by well-compensated ratings agencies whose shabby oversight made them parties to these ponzi schemes.

These and many other shady practices have taught us (we hope) once again that our financial system is too important to be left to the bankers. The rest of us who are down in the trenches of our economy and who are dependent upon our financial institutions have the collective right to impose stringent regulation and ultimate transparency – to protect the bankers from themselves. This, above all, is “the change we need.”

The Invasion of the Memes: Is it Science Fiction?

2008-11-13T11:24:00.000-08:00

There is much ado in evolutionary biology and some of the social sciences these days about an imperialistic paradigm known as "universal Darwinism," and the related concept of "memes." Memes, it seems, are the "new, new thing" (to quote the title of a best-selling book on the high technology boom and Silicon Valley). According to the promoters of universal Darwinism, any form of evolutionary change may be viewed as Darwinian in character if it exhibits three key properties: (1) a system of "replicators" (genes are the model, of course), (2) variations among the replicators, and (3) differential "selection" among the varying replicators in each generation via competition. Some adherents also espouse a fourth, sometimes implicit assumption, namely that the replicators have a degree of autonomy that allows them actively to pursue their selfish interests. On the other hand, the selection process is viewed as a purely impersonal, amorphous (mindless) process. Accordingly, in universal Darwinism the replicators are often touted as the primary actors. The fountainhead for this paradigm is, of course, Richard Dawkins' best-seller, The Selfish Gene.

Some universal Darwinists, Daniel Dennett, Gary Cziko and, most notably, psychologist Susan Blackmore in her book The Meme Machine (1999), see this reductionist evolutionary dynamic at work in human societies as well. In cultural evolution, Blackmore claims, the replicators are hypothetical entities called memes, a term coined by Dawkins as a cultural analogue for genes. Dawkins intended it as a metaphor, but Blackmore (and others) argue that memes are real physical entities, like genes (DNA). Moreover, memes have a mind of their own; they compete among themselves "for their own sake" [Blackmore's emphasis]. Just as Dawkins characterized organisms as "machines" for making more genes, so every human is "a machine for making more memes....We are meme machines," Blackmore tells us. Citing the dubious assertion by Stephen Pinker that humans have "surplus" mental abilities (especially imitative abilities) that cannot be accounted for as adaptations for survival and reproduction, Blackmore contends that the selfish interests of memes can explain the evolution of these otherwise inexplicable surplus abilities. Memes have taken control of our cultural evolution, she says. (In fact, Pinker's thesis contradicts evolutionary theory. Such costly anatomical characters would have been subject to stringent adverse selection if they had not been adaptive for evolving humans. See the discussion of this issue in my new book, Nature's Magic: Synergy in Evolution and the Fate of Humankind.)

The trouble is, memes don't really exist as a distinct causal agency in evolution, and saying they do won't make it so; I predict that they will prove to be more elusive than the Higgs boson. As a metaphor for various forms of learned cultural "information", the term might be quite useful. It has the advantage of being more generic than such familiar terms as "ideas", "inventions", "behaviors", "artifacts", etc., and it is certainly preferable to such clumsy neologisms as Edward Wilson's "culturgens". But as a shaper of cultural evolution independently of the motivations, goals, purposes, compulsions and judgments -- in short the minds -- of human actors, memes rank right up there with the fiery phogiston and the heavenly aether. Indeed, there is no way I can conceive of to demonstrate (or falsify) the assertion that memes exercise an autonomous influence in human societies. Genes, and the coils of DNA that comprise the germ plasm, have an independent physical existence and known causal influences. Memes are labels that have been given to whatever we learn from one another -- "stories, songs, habits, skills, inventions," according to Blackmore. We are told that anything we imitate -- hair styles, clothes, applauding, dances, cigarette smoking, superstitions, jokes, religion, and democracy, not to mention science and technology, is a meme.

The conceit that minds are "robots vehicles" -- passive receptacles for various external inputs -- vastly oversimplifies both the neurobiology and the psychology of human learning processes, not to mention the dynamics of cultural life. "Memetics", as its practitioners like to call their hopeful monster (to borrow term), is a curious throwback to the Behaviorist tabula rasa hypothesis -- the claim that human behavior is wholly determined by external inputs ("reinforcers"). To the contrary, memes are always embedded in minds (anything external is only a "latent" meme), and it is minds that do the selecting and use of memes. Humans do not slavishly imitate whatever they see, or hear. They are highly selective, and manipulative, both in terms of their personal choices and in what they may attempt to foist on others. Denial of the primacy of human actors in the selection and transmission of social behavior and cultural information is bad psychology -- and bad anthropology. I'm reminded of a whimsical old poem about ghosts that I will take the liberty of bowdlerizing: "Yesterday upon the stair, I met a meme who wasn't there. He wasn't there again today. I wish that he would go away."

But can't it also be said that ideas, ideologies, religions, books, music, technologies, etc., "compete" with one another? Yes, of course, but only metaphorically. To be precise, memes are differentially selected by prospective users, based on the users' preferences. Memes themselves are "powerless" despite the uncharacteristic "hype" of Scientific American, which recently featured a promotional article by Blackmore on "The Power of Memes". False analogies can do a lot of mischief, so it is important to keep the meme in its proper place as a term of convenience for a broad category of social phenomena and not as a distinct, self-serving causal agency. In so doing, we can also lend support to the null hypothesis: we call the shots on whether or not to imitate the purveyors of this particular meme.

Thought for the day: Is this scenario plausible? An convicted murderer stands up in a courtroom to plead for mercy: "Your honor, the reason I killed that person is that my memes were in competition with his memes. My memes made me do it."

A Seismic Shift

2008-11-13T11:22:00.000-08:00

In the 1936 election, Franklin Roosevelt consolidated a new political coalition and a new political “paradigm” that dominated American politics for more than a generation. Marching under the banner of the “New Deal,” this new paradigm involved a set of liberal political values and goals, and it energized a new “activist” role for our national government that ultimately re-shaped our society in many different ways.

Though it may be too soon to know for sure, the indications are that Barack Obama’s election as President may result in another such seismic shift in America’s politics, from an anti-government, business-oriented conservatism to a more centrist liberalism. The new political coalition that produced Obama’s victory includes minorities and young voters, who voted in much greater numbers and overwhelmingly favored the Democrats, blue-collar Democrats who had strayed into Ronald Reagan’s coalition but who have returned to the fold, suburban middle class voters who have lost ground economically over the past decade or so, and such traditional Democratic voters as urban liberals,and the Irish and Jewish Americans. Indeed, even the solid (Republican) southern and western states are in play for the first time in 40 years.

Whether or not this new coalition will endure depends ultimately on how Obama and the Democrats perform in the next four years. If the reforms and changes of direction that Obama has promised are indeed realized (or at least in progress) – from a rationalized healthcare system to education, energy independence, climate change and job creation – and if he can also chart a new course for this country in international politics, a second term for Obama might resemble 1936. The Democrats could cement a new pattern of party loyalties, and a new political consensus, that would favor the continuation of a centrist-progressive paradigm into the foreseeable future.

Thought for the day: Barack Obama likes to say that change happens from the bottom up, not from the top down. But the truth is that it often involves a two-way street. A leader emerges with a compelling new vision, and he/she inspires a political movement that provides the support, and the power, to achieve that vision.

The Lessons of the Titanic (and Iraq) Revisited

2008-06-15T10:16:00.000-07:00

The very name “Titanic” evokes the image of one of history’s great, avoidable tragedies. On its maiden voyage in 1912, this luxurious and supposedly “unsinkable” new ocean liner – featuring many watertight compartments – hit an iceberg and sank in about two and one-half hours. Some 1500 of the 2200 people on board perished, most of them by freezing to death in the icy North Atlantic waters.

Over the years many lessons have been drawn from the numerous “what ifs” that played a role in this disaster – lessons that are still relevant today. What if there had been enough lifeboats for everyone on board? Incredibly, this was not required of merchant vessels in those days. There were only 20 lifeboats on Titanic, enough for about half of the passengers and crew, and many of these boats abandoned the stricken ship with partial loads.

What if the ship’s highly experienced captain, Edward Smith, had heeded the ice warnings radioed from other ships and had slowed down? Instead, he had ordered an increase to full speed earlier in the day at the behest of Bruce Ismay, President of the White Star Line (the ship’s proud owner), who was aboard for the maiden voyage and wanted to set a new record for early arrival in New York harbor.

What if the ship’s lookouts had been provided with binoculars? These had mysteriously gone missing before the departure. Or what if the duty officer on the bridge that fateful night (William Murdoch), when he first spotted the iceberg, had not mistakenly ordered that the engines be thrown into reverse, which actually reduced the ability of the ship to turn and avoid a collision?

What makes this long-ago episode still timely is the recent finding by researchers (reported in The New York Times) that many of the Titanic’s rivets were of poor quality. It seems there was a great shortage of rivets when the Titanic and a sister ship were being built simultaneously at the Harland and Wolff shipyard in Northern Ireland – and many rivets were purchased indiscriminately from small, low-quality producers.

We now know, and this is confirmed by the sea floor investigations of Titanic’s broken hull by oceanographer Robert Ballard and his colleagues, that the iceberg did not penetrate the many steel plates that formed the ship’s outer skin. It popped the rivets that were holding them together and opened up a seam under the water line that was more than 200 feet long. Seawater immediately began to rush into six of the forward-most compartments. As these filled, water spilled over their open tops into compartments that were farther aft, enough water ultimately to sink the vessel.

So now another “what if” has been added to the list. What if the shipbuilder had been more scrupulous about using only the highest grade of rivets, even though it would have delayed the completion date for the much-heralded super-liner? If any one of these and other “what ifs” had been different, the Titanic’s fate might have been very different. Yet all of the particular causes obscure the most important factor. The thread that ties all of the “what ifs” together – call it the “ultimate cause” – resonates with many other historic disasters, including most recently the war in Iraq.

Underlying all of the many failures was an arrogant ambition – the single-minded pursuit of a grand objective by the key players that subverted their objectivity and prudence. They aspired to build “the ship of dreams” and trump an arch rival in the New York passenger trade, the Cunard Line. They were abetted by an over-weaning hubris (they apparently believed their own propaganda that the ship’s design made it practically unsinkable). And they were negligent in ignoring circumstances and facts on the ground that, if taken seriously and acted upon, would have obstructed or diminished their achievement. In short, it was the ego-driven pursuit of economic, political and personal goals in a context of supreme over confidence that created the fatal mix of “what ifs.”

Thus, most of the repeated ice warning signals from other ships were stuffed into the pockets of Bruce Ismay and Captain Smith rather than being posted on the bridge where the duty officer would see them. In fact, Captain Smith was not even on the bridge during the period of maximum danger, which was heightened by the rare combination of a dark, moonless night and a flat calm, making it extremely difficult to spot icebergs. Captain Smith was well aware of this condition (based on a documented conversation on the bridge earlier that night). Had he been on the bridge and fully alert to the threat that lay ahead, he might have proceeded more slowly. (At least one other ship in the area had actually stopped its engines). Perhaps, too, he might not have made the mistake of throwing the engines into reverse when the iceberg loomed.

As fate also had it, the person who was the chief designer of the ship and who had supervised its construction, Harland and Wolff’s managing director Robert Andrews, was also aboard for the maiden voyage and surely must have known about the rivets problem. The increased vulnerability of the ship’s hull and the extreme shortage of lifeboats created a serious risk and called for extra caution. (The original plan called for twice as many lifeboats, but many were ultimately omitted to allow more space for a passenger promenade.) However, none of the three principal actors aboard (Ismay, Smith and Andrews) seemed to have been concerned about the potential danger. The old expression “blind ambition” sums it up.

Our own modern-day Titanic disaster, the war in Iraq, shares with its namesake the same lethal combination of vaulting ambition, overconfidence and a failure to exercise due diligence. In the Iraq war as in the Titanic tragedy, passionate dedication to a cause, or an organization, or a leader can override objectivity and induce resistance or even a denial of contrary or conflicting information. As Mark Twain put it, history may not repeat itself, but it does tend to rhyme.

Letter to The New York Times Regarding Primary Reforms

2008-06-13T12:04:00.000-07:00

One option for reforming the primary system that I hope Senator Feinstein and the Congress will consider is a schedule with a sequence of (say) three Super-Tuesdays (or better yet, Super-Saturdays), where the states are clustered by size. Thus, a set of geographically-diverse small states (Iowa, New Hampshire and others) might lead off in February as initial “testing grounds,” followed by a group of mid-size states perhaps in March and by all of the large states in May. With such an arrangement, all states would have a voice, small states would play a significant part (and provide an opportunity for unknowns), but the outcome would not be definitively settled until the final inning. Such a system would also be more likely to arouse and sustain voter interest and participation. The problem, I know, is to get the states to cooperate. Maybe they could be persuaded (once again) to help form “a more perfect union.”

Toward an Ecological Way of Death

2008-05-04T09:44:00.000-07:00

If we are going to get serious about recycling, and about reducing our consumption of natural resources, why not recycle ourselves?

Traditional funeral practices are ecologically unsound. Both increasingly valuable prime land and precious resources are consumed in many millions of “bites” each year through the more or less elaborate funeral and burial rituals that occur in almost every country. Even cremation uses up fossil fuels and contributes to air pollution.

A better way would be to use our bodies to fertilize and nurture something that would be renewing and life-sustaining – like a tree. Think of it this way. If every currently-living human being – some 6.5 billion of us, and that’s a lot of biomass – were (in due course) to be buried under a newly planted tree as part of a vast, global reforestation effort, our rich endowment of painstakingly acquired organic and inorganic chemicals and minerals would greatly benefit the soil and the trees. In the bargain, the money we now spend on our various funeral practices could be re-directed to something more beneficial – namely, the reforestation of our fragile planet.

Here’s how it could work. Traditional funeral and memorial services could still be conducted as in the past, even to the point of using recyclable caskets, if deemed important. But instead of the traditional burial or cremation ritual, our bodies could be transported in biodegradable shrouds to designated “memorial forests,” where we would be ceremoniously “planted” together with a young tree of the appropriate kind. A small, durable memorial plaque might be placed near the tree, and the GPS coordinates would be recorded for the family and the public record. It might even be possible to arrange for a video recording, or even live (remote) coverage of the event if the family and friends desired it. And the fee that would be charged for the service would cover the transportation, planting, ceremonial and administrative costs, along with an “insurance” surcharge to provide for the possibility of needing to replant the tree during some “warranty period” (say 50-100 years).

Needless to say, this idea represents a radical change in our traditional burial customs, which have deep cultural and religious roots (if you’ll pardon the pun), but now is the time to begin thinking about changing these ultimately destructive practices in a way that would benefit future generations.

Thought for the day: For scientists, seeing is believing, but for religious fanatics (and paranoids) it’s the other way around.

The Altruism Puzzle

2008-03-15T15:39:00.000-07:00

Last Sunday’s New York Times magazine was devoted to illuminating altruism in its many contemporary forms. All the evidence presented in the Times’ articles supported the conclusion that the charitable spirit is still alive and well in our self-absorbed, greed-besotted society. Our deeper, more caring instincts have not been extinguished by our acquisitive culture.

And yet, in evolutionary terms human altruism remains a puzzle. In our willingness to sacrifice sometimes even our lives for our fellows, we resemble army ants, honey bees and a small number of other communal living species. How come?

In the lead-in article for the Times’ special issue, writer Jim Holt pondered this question and trotted out the reasoning of modern evolutionary psychology. Unfortunately, mainstream evolutionary psychologists are still dogmatically devoted to neo-Darwinism and the “selfish gene” paradigm, so their proposed explanation for human altruism is constricted and unconvincing. Neo-Darwinists recognize only sacrifices for close relatives (“kin selection”) and tit-for-tat reciprocities (“reciprocal altruism”), and maybe some social concern for one’s reputation and standing in the community. How the latter trait evolved is unclear and none of these supposed “mechanisms” can account for the soldiers who volunteer to die for their country or, for that matter, the suicide bombers who sacrifice their lives to kill “infidels.”

What’s missing from the evolutionary psychologists’ conventional wisdom is a perfectly logical explanation that is still taboo in some quarters – group selection. The reason is that evolutionary theorists have traditionally viewed the group selection hypothesis in a very restrictive way, so that it appears on its face to be very unlikely.

Without venturing too far into this theoretical thicket, suffice it to say that, for the most part, the issue of group selection has been debated without reference to the likely context in which humankind evolved. The accumulating evidence suggests that our ancestors evolved over several million years in small, closely cooperating groups of both kin and non-kin that formed interdependent “survival units.” They mostly inhabited highly dangerous and changeable environments where they were often in direct competition not only with other groups of their own kind but with an array of other group-living, pack-hunting predators – wild dogs, hyenas, lions and many others that are now extinct. So our ancestral hominid groups were not just abstract “gene pools” but multi-purpose survival units – “superorganisms” in the sociobiologists’ parlance. They collaborated most importantly in group defense against various threats, as well as in foraging, migrations, and in other ways, and the genes they were protecting and promoting were their own and those of their offspring, as well as close kin and some non-kin. Sacrifices for the good of the group could directly improve an altruist's fitness, because his/her offspring depended on the group. And the groups that were the most effective in promoting the interests of their groups (and minimizing cheating and “free-riders”) were differentially “selected”, as Darwin himself proposed in The Descent of Man.

An analogy can be found in each of our ten trillion or so cells. We now know that modern, eukaryotic (nucleated) cells are the product of a partnership that was formed between ancient bacterial ancestors of our mitochondria (the “energy factories” in each of our cells) and early one-celled protists. Over time, the partners became completely interdependent. They have a “shared fate.” And so, ultimately, do we and our progeny.

Thought for the day: There’s a good reason why, as the old saying goes, “it’s the squeaky wheel that gets the grease.” It’s not a matter of charity but a recognition that we depend on that wheel.

Electric Universe? Mea Culpa

2008-02-27T14:01:00.000-08:00

Like most other non-physicists in the scientific community, I have always assumed that the evidence for the Big Bang, black holes, dark energy, and the like was rock-solid, and I even promoted this cosmology in one of my recent books. Alas! Now I am convinced that modern astrophysics is a pseudo-science with overtones of a religious dogma that fabricates stories to prop up its reigning deity and treats contradictory evidence as a heresy.

These are strong words, I know, but they are well supported in a mind-opening, paradigm shattering book called The Electric Sky by the emeritus electrical engineer (University of Massachusetts) cum astronomer, Donald E. Scott. Our mainstream view of the cosmos has been shaped by an interpretation of the red shift phenomenon that is demonstrably wrong, by a misplaced reliance on gravity as the primary shaping force in the universe, and by plugging up the serious deficiencies in this model with imaginary (unverifiable) theories about black holes, dark matter, dark energy, and other creations.

Meanwhile, compelling evidence that electric plasmas, electromagnetic forces, ubiquitous electric current “filaments” and related phenomena represent a vastly greater cosmic influence and account for 99% of the matter/energy in the universe has been rejected with thinly veiled hostility. Consider this simple household experiment: It takes only a small toy magnet to induce a gravity-defying leap by, say, a nail or a ball bearing. Electromagnetism is vastly more powerful than gravity, and it can be used in a plasma laboratory to simulate such cosmic phenomena as galaxies without recourse to mysterious, unseen shaping influences. We can see evidence of these cosmic plasmas in our own ionosphere and in the brilliant auroras that can light up the night sky. We can see them also in our solar corona and the misnamed “solar wind.” And we can see them shaping whole galaxies, like our Milky Way.

Nevertheless, modern astrophysicists are in denial and posit a plethora of ever more fanciful hypothetical entities – WIMPS, MACHOS, MOND, SIDM, SADM, FDM and so on – to mask the inherent deficiencies of a gravitation-only universe. Of course, a lot is at stake for the astrophysics cult. Emperors do not like to be unclothed. But more important, they are on the wrong side of a scientific revolution the like of which we have not seen since Copernicus and Galileo. It seems clear that the Big Bang never happened, that there are no black holes, dark energy, dark matter, MACHOS, or any other invisible and unverifiable mysteries. Moreover, it seems that our sun is not a gravity-driven thermonuclear reactor but a plasma pinch-driven generator. Even Einstein has been knocked off his pedestal. No wonder the astrophysicists “do not go gentle into that good night” (to borrow a famous line from poet Dylan Thomas). But don’t take my word for all this. Read Donald Scott’s book (including the open letter now signed by more than 400 scientists), or go online and visit the website of the distinguished electrical engineer Anthony Peratt (http://plasmauniverse.info) or read his book, Physics of the Plasma Universe.

As I said, Mea Culpa.

Thought for the Day: Scott characterizes mainstream cosmology with the acronym: Fabricated Ad hoc Inventions Repeatedly Invoked in Efforts to Defend Untenable Scientific Theories (FAIRIE DUST). It is also a classic case of what can be called mathematical mysticism, an affliction that can be traced back to one of the founders of Western science, Pythagoras of Samos and his Pythagorean Brotherhood. It involves a conviction that the mathematical properties that can be found in the natural world are the underlying reality; if it’s logically tight it must be true. However, the map is not the territory, to quote a famous iconoclast, Alfred Korzybski.

Complexity is Just a Word!

2008-02-19T15:09:00.000-08:00

What is complexity, asks author-journalist George Johnson in the science section of The New York Times a few years back? Below the headline, "Researchers on Complexity Ponder What It's All About," Johnson reports that there is still no agreed-upon definition, much less a theoretically-rigorous formalization, despite the fact that complexity is currently a "hot" research topic. Many books and innumerable scholarly papers have been published on the subject in the past few years, and there is even a journal, Complexity, devoted to this nascent science. Johnson quotes Dan Stein, chairman of the physics department at the University of Arizona: "Everybody talks about it. [But] in the absence of a good definition, complexity is pretty much in the eye of the beholder."

This is not to say that the researchers in this area have not been trying to define it. In the 1970s, Gregory Chaitin and Alexei Kolmogorov (independently) pioneered a mathematical measuring-rod that Chaitin called "algorithmic complexity" -- that is, the length of the shortest "recipe" for the complete reproduction of a mathematical treatment. The problem with this definition, as Chaitin concedes, is that random sequences are invariably more complex because in each case the recipe is as long as the whole thing being specified; it cannot be "compressed".

More recently, Charles Bennett has focused on the concept of "logical depth" -- the computational requirements for converting a recipe into a finished product. Though useful, it seems to be limited to processes in which there is a logical structure of some sort. It would seem to exclude the "booming, buzzing confusion" of the real world, where the internal logic may be problematical or only partially knowable -- say the immense number of context-specific chaotic interactions that are responsible for producing global weather "patterns", or the imponderable forces that will determine the future course of the evolutionary process itself.

A number of researchers, especially some of those who are associated with the Santa Fe Institute, believe that the key lies in the so-called "phase transitions" between highly ordered and highly disordered physical systems. An often-cited analogy is water, whose complex physical properties lie between the highly ordered state of ice crystals and the highly disordered movements of steam molecules. While the "Santa Fe Paradigm" may be useful, it also sets strict limits on what can be termed "complex". For instance, it seems to exclude the extremes associated with highly ordered or strictly random phenomena, even though there can be more or less complex patterns of order and more or less complex forms of disorder -- degrees of complexity that are not associated with phase transitions. (Indeed, random phenomena seem to be excluded by fiat from some definitions of complexity.)

To confuse matters further, a distinction must be made between what could be labeled "objective complexity" -- the "embedded" properties of a physical phenomenon and "subjective complexity" -- its "meaning" to a human observer. As Timothy Perper has observed (on-line communication), the equation w = f(z) is structurally simple, but it might have a universe of meaning depending upon how its terms are defined. Indeed, information theory is notorious for its reliance on quantitative, statistical measures and its blindness to meaning -- where much can be made of very few words. The telephone directory for a large metropolitan area contains many more words than a Shakespeare play, but is it more complex? Furthermore, as Elisabet Sahtouris has pointed out (on-line communication), the degree of complexity that we might impute to a phenomenon can depend upon our frame of reference for viewing it. If we adopt a broad, "ecological" perspective we will see many more factors, and relationships, at work than if we adopt a "physiological" perspective. When Howard Bloom (on-line communication) quotes the line "To see the World in a Grain of Sand..." from William Blake's famous poem, "Auguries of Innocence", it reminds us that even a simple object can denote a vast pattern of relationships, if we choose to see it that way. Accordingly, subjective complexity is a highly variable property of the phenomenal world.

Perhaps we need to go back to the semantic drawing-board. Complexity is, after all, a word -- a verbal construct, a mental image. Like the words "electron" or "snow" or "blue" or "tree", complexity is a shorthand tool for thinking and communicating about various aspects of the phenomenal world. Some words may be very narrow in scope. (Presumably all electrons are alike in their basic properties, although their behavior can vary greatly.) However, many other words may hold a potful of meaning. We often use the word "snow" in conversation without taking the trouble to differentiate among the many different kinds of snow, as serious skiers (and Inuit Eskimos) routinely do. Similarly, the English word "blue" refers to a broad band of hues in the color spectrum, and we must drape the word with various qualifiers, from navy blue to royal blue to robin's egg blue (and many more), to denote the subtle differences among them. So it is also, I believe, with the word "complexity"; it is used in many different ways and encompasses a great variety of phenomena. (Indeed, it seems that many theorists, to suit their own purposes, prefer not to define complexity too precisely.)

The "utility" of any word, whether broad or narrow in scope, is always a function of how much information it imparts to the user(s). Take the word "tree", for example. It tells you about certain fundamental properties that all trees have in common. But it does not tell you whether or not a given tree is deciduous, whether it is tall or short, or even whether it is living or dead. The same shortcoming applies also to the concept of "complexity". Although there may be some commonalities between a complex personality, a complex wine, a complex piece of music and a complex machine, the similarities are not obvious. Each is complex in a different way, and their complexities cannot be reduced to an all-purpose algorithm. Moreover, the differences among them are at least as important as any common properties.

What in fact does the word "complexity" connote. One of the leaders in the complexity field, Seth Lloyd of MIT, took the trouble to compile a list of some three dozen different ways in which the term is used in scientific discourse. Yet this exercise produced no blinding insight. When asked to define complexity, Lloyd told Johnson: "I can't define it for you, but I know it when I see it."

Rather than trying to define what complexity is, perhaps it would be more useful to identify the properties that are commonly associated with the term. I would suggest that complexity often (not always) implies the following attributes: (1) a complex phenomenon consists of many parts (or items, or units, or individuals); (2) there are many relationships/interactions among the parts; and (3) the parts produce combined effects (synergies) that are not easily predicted and may often be novel, unexpected, even surprising.

At the risk of inviting the wrath of the researchers in this field, I would argue that complexity per se is one of the less interesting properties of complex phenomena. The differences, and the unique combined properties (synergies) that arise in each case, are vastly more important than the commonalities. If someone does develop a grand, unifying definition-description of complexity, I predict that it will add very little to the tree of knowledge (pardon the pun). But that shouldn't deter us from trying; the very effort to do so will surely enrich our understanding.

Thought for the day: Complexity is a qualitative property that we apply to both apples and oranges -- to borrow a cliché. They are both fruits and grow on trees but also differ from each other in important ways. Despite the many fruitless attempts (pardon the pun) to develop a general definition for the term, perhaps its only universal trait is that it taxes the human mind.

What is Natural Selection?

2008-02-13T21:05:00.000-08:00

The truth is there are a variety of definitions out there in the mountainous literature on evolution, and there is no consensus, even among biologists, about how Darwin’s central concept should be defined. One reason is that natural selection does not refer to a thing, or a discrete “mechanism.” It’s really a metaphor – what I call an “umbrella category” – that directs our attention to a fundamental aspect of the history of life on Earth.

Given the misunderstandings that are evident in various writings about evolution, it’s worth re-stating Darwin’s basic idea. In a nutshell, he posited that the history of life on Earth has involved a very long, trans-generational process characterized by both continuities and “progressive” (and sometimes regressive) functional developments over time. Moreover, both the continuities and the changes that have occurred in the course of evolution have been the ultimate result of a causal dynamic that is internal to the process itself. It was not imposed from outside.

In essence, this causal dynamic is a process in which the outcomes (in terms of survival and reproduction) in each generation of living organisms are determined in situ by the functional relationships and interactions that occur between organisms and their specific environments. Both the organism and its environment are important players in this dynamic, and it is absolutely wrong to say that inanimate environments do any “selecting”. Even as a metaphor, this is misleading. Likewise, it is onerous to say that something is “selected for.” It implies premeditation.

Darwin characterized this dynamic as “natural selection,” but he well understood (despite his sometimes flagrant rhetoric) that natural selection is not a concrete mechanism, and it does not actually do anything. In fact, it was based on an analogy with artificial selection by animal breeders. Nor did he claim that natural selection was the exclusive agency of evolutionary change; he was well aware of the complexities.

A crucial point about Darwin’s theory, which is often overlooked by his critics, is that it rests on the fundamental assumption that life is a contingent and often precarious process (a “struggle for existence” as Darwin put it) and that “earning a living” (and reproducing) in the “economy of nature” is the basic vocation for all life forms. In other words, in evolution there is no free lunch.

Given this premise, and given the well-documented fact that living systems can vary greatly in their functional capabilities – their ability to earn a living in a given environment – it follows that there will be differential success in surviving and reproducing. So natural selection refers to the survival/reproduction outcomes in each generation, including both the continuities and the changes -- the weeding in as well as the weeding out. (I’m partial to biologist Theodosius Dobzhansky’s distinction between “normalizing” or stabilizing selection, positive selection, and negative selection.) Darwin also adopted the Malthusian assumption of relentless population growth, which greatly intensifies competition for the means of subsistence, but this assumption is not essential to the theory and is not always the case in nature.

So why is there no “standard definition” of natural selection. In part, no doubt, the very subtlety of the idea challenges our efforts to provide a simple one-sentence definition. But partly too, I suspect the differences reflect varying degrees of bias among those who are strongly pro-natural selection and those who would wish to minimize or even reject Darwin’s theory. The pro-Darwinians often speak about natural selection as if it were an active, even omnipotent selecting agency. Thus, paleontologist George Gaylord Simpson asserted that "The mechanism of adaptation is natural selection....[It] usually operates in favor of maintained or increased adaptation to a given way of life." Similarly, biologist Ernst Mayr informed us that "Natural selection does its best to favor the production of programs guaranteeing behavior that increases fitness." And, in his discipline-defining volume Sociobiology, Edward O. Wilson assured us that "natural selection is the agent that molds virtually all of the characters of species."

On the other side of the fence are anti-Darwinian theorists like biologist Robert Reid, in his book Biological Emergences, who claims that natural selection is “irrelevant” to the explanation of complexity in the natural world. Evolution is an internally-driven, “emergent” process, he tells us, and natural selection is mostly “obstructionist”. At best it may play a minor, “fine-tuning” and “stabilizing” role by “weeding out” unfit variants. Likewise, biologist Lynn Margulis and her son and co-author, Dorion Sagan, while not hostile to natural selection, nevertheless downplay its role in making their case for “symbiogenesis” as a creative agency in evolution. In their book, Acquiring Genomes, they speak of natural selection as “a strictly subtractive process.”

In other words, some theorists see natural selection as the “creator” while others see it as the “executioner”. It’s analogous to a situation in which two critics, viewing an old-fashioned black and white photograph, get into an argument about the role of the negative. One critic asserts that, since the paper used for the print is white to begin with, only the black portions can be attributed to the influence of the negative. On the contrary, the other critic argues, the negative is only responsible for the white portion of the print, since that is where the negative acted to block the developer light from passing through to darken the print. In fact, the negative controls both the light and dark portions of the print by virtue of its ability either to block the light or allow it to pass through. And so it is also with natural selection. To repeat, natural selection both weeds in and weeds out evolutionary novelties, and gives a pass to prior developments that still work.

This formulation can be illustrated with a textbook example of evolutionary change -- "industrial melanism." Until the Industrial Revolution, a "cryptic" (light-colored) species of the peppered moth (Biston betularia) predominated in the English countryside over a darker "melanic" form (Biston carbonaria). The wing coloration of B. betularia provided camouflage from avian predators as the moths rested on the trunks of lichen-encrusted trees, an advantage that was not shared by the darker form. But as soot blackened the tree trunks in areas near growing industrial cities, in due course the relative frequency of the two forms was reversed; the birds began to prey more heavily on the now more visible cryptic species and overlooked the darker form.

The question is, where in this example was natural selection "located?" The short answer is that natural selection encompasses the entire configuration of factors that combined to influence differential survival and reproduction. In this case, an alteration in the relationship between the coloration of the trees and the wing pigmentation of the moths, as a consequence of industrial pollution, was an important proximate factor. But this factor was important only because of the inflexible resting behavior of the moths and the feeding habits and perceptual abilities of the birds. Had the moths been subject only to insect-eating bats that use "sonar" rather than a visual detection system to catch insects on the wing, the change in background coloration would not have been significant. Nor would it have been significant had there not been genetically based patterns of wing coloration in the two forms that were available for "selection" in the two forms. (Later studies concerning the additional influence of air pollution can be left out of the discussion for our purpose.)

Accordingly, one cannot properly speak of "mechanisms" or fix on a particular "selection pressure" in explaining the causes of evolutionary change via natural selection. One must focus on the interactions that occur within an organism and between the organism and its environment(s), inclusive of other organisms; natural selection is about adaptively significant changes in organism-environment relationships. But this begs the question: What factors are responsible for bringing about changes in organism-environment relationships? The answer, of course, is many things. It could be a functionally-significant mutation, a chromosomal transposition, a change in the physical environment, a change in one species that affects another species, or it could be a change in behavior that results in a new organism-environment relationship. In fact, a whole sequence of changes may ripple through a complex pattern of relationships. For instance, a climate change might alter the ecology, which might induce a behavioral shift to a new habitat, which might encourage an alteration in nutritional habits, which might precipitate changes in the interactions among different species, resulting ultimately in the differential survival and reproduction of alternative morphological characters and the genes that support them. (An excellent illustration of this causal dynamic can be found in the long-running research program in the Galápagos Islands among "Darwin's finches" by the husband and wife team, Peter and Rosemary Grant.)

The bottom line is this: It is the functional effects or consequences of various organism-environment pattern-changes, insofar as they may impact on differential survival, that constitute the "causes" of natural selection. Another way of putting it is that causation in evolution also runs backwards from our conventional view of things; in evolution, functional effects are also causes. It is an iterative process. To use Ernst Mayr's (1965) well-known distinction, it is the "proximate" functional effects which result from any change in the organism-environment relationship that are the causes of the "ultimate" (transgenerational) selective changes in the genotype, and the gene pool of a species.

Thought for the Day: “When the words are confused, the mind is also” -- Seneca

The Dawkins Delusion

2008-01-18T13:56:00.000-08:00

Though Richard Dawkins is viewed as an oracle in some quarters, and as an incarnation of the devil in others, neither view is justified, and it would be good for all of us if our various Dawkins delusions were deflated. There can certainly be no gainsaying his enormous talent and prodigious accomplishments. The problem is with the content – and with his calculated rhetoric – which has enriched him while, at the same time, misleading both his acolytes and his enemies.

Let’s start with the “selfish gene” – at once a cunningly clever metaphor and a serious distortion of the evolutionary process. Dawkins became famous for this inspired image (the title of his first book, in 1976), and for his assertion that we are all “robot vehicles” that are “blindly programmed to serve the selfish molecules known as genes.” This reductionist, simplistic view of evolution (which endows DNA with an all-powerful teleology) is, as Winston Churchill once said in a much different context, a “terminological inexactitude.”

In fact, Dawkins himself backpedaled from this provocative caricature even in the recesses of The Selfish Gene. On page 37 he concedes that, of course, the genes are not really free and independent agents: “They collaborate and interact in inextricably complex ways….Building a leg is a multi-gene cooperative enterprise.” To underscore the point, Dawkins employs a rowing metaphor: One oarsman on his own cannot win the Oxford and Cambridge boat race. He needs eight colleagues….Rowing the boat is a cooperative venture” (p.38).

Even more discordant is a remark Dawkins made in a subsequent book, The Blind Watchmaker, where he describes embryonic development and concludes: “We have a picture of teams of genes all evolving toward cooperative solutions to problems….It is the ‘team’ that evolves” (p171). Some would call this “group selection,” though Dawkins officially rejects the idea (more on this below). So Dawkins has always had a tendency to talk out of both sides of his mouth, with all the aplomb of an elected politician.

On one point, though, Dawkins has been consistent – and consistently wrong. On the subject of human nature and the nature of human societies, he remains a “head in the bag” neo-Darwinian (to borrow one of his own terms of opprobrium). He sees evolution as a being predominately a process of relentless, gladiatorial competition among individuals: “I think ‘nature red in tooth and claw’ sums up our modern understanding of natural selection admirably,” he wrote on page two of The Selfish Gene. This applies to human evolution as well. In his paradigm, competition has been the norm, and social life in human societies is derived from “kin selection” – altruism toward close kin that is ultimately self-serving genetically. From this narrow perspective, then, tribalism, nationalism and other group loyalties in humans are a distortion (a hypertrophy in biospeak) of the kin-based social bonds that were the basis of our evolution as a species.

Contrary to this sanguinary view of evolution, it has become increasingly clear during the past decade or so that symbiosis and cooperative relationships are widespread in nature and are also fundamental properties of the natural world. In effect, competition and cooperation share the credit for “progressive” evolutionary changes, at all levels. Dawkins could just as well have titled his famous book The Cooperative Gene (and in fact biologist Mark Ridley did just so in his 2001 book). Moreover, this model has been especially applicable to human evolution, and the shaping of human nature. There is growing support among human evolutionists (across several disciplines) for the view that humankind evolved, over several million years, in closely cooperating groups that included non-kin as well as close relatives and that “group selection” (the differential survival of competing groups) greatly encouraged our proclivities for group solidarity, morality and “coherence,” as Darwin himself put it in The Descent of Man. The flip side of this, of course, is our propensity for xenophobia. It seems the current generation of evolutionary theorists are rediscovering Darwin’s Darwinism.

So, in this light, let’s talk about Dawkins’ latest piece of in flagrante delicto prose -- The God Delusion. A full-scale rebuttal is not possible here, but it boils down to this key point: Blaming religion for the various travesties committed by human groups is like blaming the car for the behavior of the driver. The problem lies in our evolved human nature, not in the excesses that religions sometimes foster and commit. Nor are religious organizations the only culprits in perpetrating group conflicts. Consider the antagonisms that have, historically, swirled around tribalism, ethnic identities, nationalism, ideological cleavages (communists and capitalists), economic interests (e.g., the north and south in the American Civil War), and even soccer matches. Indeed, Dawkins’ all-out assault on religion is a reflection of yet another such cleavage -- the ongoing political conflict between a beleaguered scientific community and the “intelligent design” crowd. So let’s stop blaming the car.

Thought for the day: Personally, I see religion as being double-edged, like so much else in life. Organized religions have perpetrated a great many atrocities historically, but at their best they may also help the poor and afflicted, reinforce moral conduct, provide comfort and solace, and facilitate social relationships and social bonds. As Frank Sinatra put it: “I’m in favor of anything that will get you through the night.”

The Rise and Fall of the American Empire

2007-12-27T11:34:00.000-08:00

When it comes to empires these days, it’s “easy come, easy go.” Only a few years ago, around the time of our cake-walk invasion of Iraq (and before the “oops” part), our media was full of self-congratulatory and, as it turns out, delusive claims that America, for better or worse, was now an empire – like Rome and Great Britain in their heyday. (Our pundits tended to overlook the darker examples of the Japanese and Soviet empires in the 20th century, for some reason.) We were told that now the United States was the “hegemon” – meaning that it was undisputed as the dominant military power – and the keeper of a stable international order.

Of course, past empires occupied and controlled “colonies” that they blatantly exploited for their own advantage. Also, a few historical details were overlooked by the pundits: Rome was undisputed in its power only for a (relatively) brief period in the middle of its thousand-year history; it remained a republic during much of its ascendancy and fought an unending series of wars against the “barbarians” in its latter stages. And British power was never uncontested. Indeed, the 18th and 19th century race for colonies among the British, French, Germans, Austro-Hungarians, Russians, Spanish, Italians, and Americans, was intense and contributed to the cataclysm of World Wars One and Two. Moreover, the voluntary dismantling of their empires by both the British and the Americans after World War Two (and somewhat more reluctantly by the French and then the Soviets after the fall of the Berlin Wall) seemed to bring an end to the imperialist era. Self-determination became the new mantra of a more democratic world order, or so the optimists proclaimed.

To be sure, America still guards the gates in various places – Germany, South Korea and the Middle East. And our military machine is still formidable, despite the costly humbling we have suffered in Iraq. Our annual military budget is greater than those of all the rest of the industrialized nations combined (but watch out for China). Equally important, the economic order that we have sponsored and supported – most significantly through the World Bank and the World Trade Organization – have been instrumentalities for advancing American economic interests (namely, capitalism and “free” trade -- with a few obvious exceptions like farm products). Our cultural exports have also been influential in the global community.

But there the analogy ends, and the disanalogies are growing stronger by the day – it seems. In fact, free trade has been hollowing out the underlying source of our power –our industrial capacity and trade surpluses. At the end of World War Two, the United States produced 50% of the world’s total Gross Domestic Product and was undisputed leader in just about every industrial sector. We had a favorable balance of trade for more than half a century. Now 70% of our GDP consists of consumer spending, much of it with borrowed money and much of it spent on goods (and oil) imported from China and everywhere else. More important, we have gone from being the world’s banker after World War Two to being world’s biggest debtor nation. Control over our own fiscal and economic destiny is rapidly slipping from our hands, as even some of the biggest of Wall Street’s banking and investment houses are being auctioned off to recoup from the sub-prime mortgage calamity.

Equally significant, what was once the world’s highest standard of living and most modern infrastructure has slipped badly; we now rank closer to some developing countries. To maintain our humongous military machine, we have also been starving the underpinnings of our society – our educational system, our public works, and more. (And this is not just an ideological stance; just look at the comparative statistics.) And, where once we were leaders in the world community, now our representatives (at the recent Bali climate change conference) are booed and we are asked please to “get out of the way.” Finally, a resurgent Russia and an emergent China are subtly resisting and challenging our “leadership.”

So the truth is that our imperial period never existed. It amount to a passing whiff of hubris -- followed by nemesis, of course. Now we ache to be out of Iraq. And we watch with baited breath as our economy struggles with the latest wasteful and destructive “bubble” (the sub-prime mortgage debacle), and with all the other sins of a spendthrift society. We will be hard-pressed to prevent further economic decline and, indeed, poverty and hardship on a scale that we have not experienced in this country for many years. The reality isn’t pretty, but facing up to it honestly is the first step toward coping with it. I keep waiting for candid leadership from our present crop of Presidential candidates. So far, no good.

Thought for the day: Sic transit Gloria mundi (thus passes the glory of the world), or fame is fleeting. It’s a lesson that each new generation seems to re-learn the hard way. Among the many variations on this theme (some humorous) was this headline in the New York Daily News some years back about the hospitalization of the prominent New York heiress Gloria Vanderbilt: “Sick Gloria in Transit Monday.”

Emergence and Evolution

2007-12-23T11:51:00.000-08:00

“Emergence” seems to be the latest buzzword among a new generation of holistic/systems-oriented theorists. I say a “new” generation because emergence theory is not new. It can be traced back to a similar movement in the latter 19th century. (The history of this earlier movement is described in a recent article of mine in the journal Complexity called “The Re-emergence of Emergence: A Venerable Concept in Search of a Theory.”)

Among the many problems with the current reincarnation of emergence is the fact that there is no agreement on how to define the term in such a way that you can recognize emergence when you see it. One theorist who has done a creditable job, however, is biologist Robert Reid in his new book, Biological Emergences: Evolution by Natural Experiment (MIT Press 2007). Reid focuses on increases in biological complexity that produce qualitatively new functional properties, and he identifies three broad categories of emergent phenomena: (1) symbiosis and associations, (2) physiological and behavioral innovations, and (3) developmental and epigenetic influences. Reid also makes a compelling case for the thesis that emergence as he defines it has played a major creative role in evolution.

So far, so good. But Reid also attacks neo-Darwinism and claims that natural selection has had little to do with “progressive” evolution – meaning the evolution of complexity over time. Its role is primarily confined to “stabilizing” the innovations that have arisen autonomously, he asserts. Here, I’m afraid, we part company.

I certainly agree with Reid’s critique of the neo-Darwinists. And I certainly agree with his basic argument that emergence has played a fundamental creative role in evolution. How could I disagree. My own “Synergism Hypothesis” is really about emergent complexity -- though my theory emphasizes the functional (bioeconomic) effects – and their evolutionary consequences -- rather than the causes of emergence and embraces other, non-emergent forms of synergy as well. And yet, there remains a huge difference in our views about the role of natural selection, and I suspect it is traceable to differences in our "ground-zero" assumptions (as I call them) about the nature of life.

When all of Darwin's rhetorical flourishes, and his gradualism, and other problems with his theory are stripped away, the heart of his vision, I believe, is his assumption that life is at bottom a contingent, often precarious phenomenon (a "struggle for existence") and that "earning a living" in "the economy of nature" is the fundamental challenge for all life forms. I like to call it a "survival enterprise." In other words, failure is always an option. And, given the fact that life is predominately pursued in collectivities (emergent systems), the evolutionary process is -- at every level of complexity -- quintessentially a "collective survival enterprise." Moreover, economic criteria are crucially important; there are always costs for emergent novelties, and the benefits must outweigh the costs. (That is why the functional synergies associated with emergence are so significant.)

When this assumption is put together with Darwin's other basic assumption, that functionally important variability is a rule in the natural world, this means that natural selection (broadly defined) is inescapable. That is, the variants in every generation are subject to "differential survival and reproduction" based on their functional differences. It may be that some, or all, or none, of these variants can "make the cut" in any generation, but being subjected to the test of fitness is unavoidable. And this applies to any emergent novelty as well. Reid himself speaks of "natural experiments," and "adaptation," and "adaptability," and "functionality" (physiology is all about functions, he points out), and "workability," and "does it work?" The question is, adaptable/functional/workable for what? The answer, of course, is for ensuring/furthering/enhancing the "collective survival enterprise" in a given environmental context. I like biologist Theodosius Dobzhansky's characterization (or was it Julian Huxley's?) of evolution as a process of "trial-and-success."

So, while I wholeheartedly endorse Reid’s critique of the gene-centered, neo-Darwinian (mutation/competition/selection) paradigm, with its emphasis on ecological competition and its abstract "gene pool" model of the evolutionary process, and while I think emergence is of fundamental causal importance in evolution, I think natural selection (broadly defined) is also a party to the process at every step. I like evolutionary biologist Ernst Mayr's short-hand description of evolution as a "two-step tandem process" -- meaning (1) functional innovations, from whatever source, coupled with (2) differential success/failure over time. To assume otherwise is to assume away the basic survival problem, I believe. (Much of this is discussed further in my most recent book: Holistic Darwinism: Synergy, Cybernetics and the Bioeconomics of Evolution.)

Thought for the day: To quote again the great 20th century evolutionary biologist Theodosius Dobzhansky: "No theory of evolution that leaves the phenomenon of adaptation an unexplained mystery can be acceptable."

How Holistic Darwinism Trumps Neo-Conservatism

2007-12-10T14:21:00.000-08:00

In his book, The Great Transformation (1944), Karl Polanyi produced a classic critique of the liberal (conservative) ideal of free market capitalism that still resonates today.

According to liberal economic doctrine, if various impediments are removed so that a market economy can operate free of constraints and imperfections, it would not only be self-regulating and self-equilibrating but would lead to the most “efficient” utilization of capital, resources and labor. Indeed, for the most fervent of free market advocates, this ideal is an end in itself.

Polanyi’s argument was that this model is utopian. It can never work in the real world, and the history of the great 19th century “transformation” to industrial market capitalism (not to mention the history of the 20th century) proves it. As Polanyi put it, markets are “embedded” in human societies, and the needs and wants of a society and its members cannot in the long run be subordinated to market efficiency. This is not simply a normative statement, or a moral claim, moreover. It is an empirical reality. Ultimately, people will rebel and governments will either need to intervene or they will be replaced. Indeed, even capitalists do not, as a rule, want complete freedom from government interference. They want laws, and regulations, and property rights and, very often, government support in the form of protections and subsidies.

Economist Joseph Stiglitz, in a commentary on Polanyi’s book, also points out that advanced industrial economies like ours are even more constrained by the fact that the vast majority of the population depends on the marketplace for their livelihoods (see my blog entry on the “paradox of dependency”). So “labor” is not simply an “input” that can lie idle or find other uses if no jobs are available. Unemployment has inescapably destructive consequences.

What Holistic Darwinism adds to this critique is a theoretical foundation. From an evolutionary/biological perspective, our basic vocation as individuals and families is survival and reproduction – and specifically the meeting of some 14 domains of “basic needs” (according to the Survival Indicators Project). These are biological imperatives. We are all implicitly engaged in a “survival enterprise.” Moreover, in a modern market economy, our individual needs have been aggregated into an extraordinarily complex, interdependent system – a “collective survival enterprise.” We are joint participants in a “biological contract.” Accordingly, economic markets represent a system -- a strategy -- for meeting our basic biological needs. And if the markets fail to do so, for whatever reason, corrective actions are entirely justified. Markets exist to serve our needs, not the other way around.

Neo-Darwinians and social Darwinists might object that, to the contrary, capitalism is natural because it embodies our innately selfish and competitive natures – as Adam Smith himself suggested. The problem with this model is that it overlooks our fundamental dependence on cooperation and the fact that we evolved over several million years in closely cooperating social groups. Equally important, modern societies remain deeply dependent on cooperation; we live in highly interdependent economic systems. Competition may also be natural and inevitable, reflecting the duality of human nature, but it must also be subordinated to our collective needs. And if capitalist markets fail to meet our needs, we have every right to cooperate in an effort to redress our grievances – whether it be through labor unions, or governments, or political movements or even revolution if necessary. To borrow a phrase, revolutions are politics by other means.

Thought for the day: As the American Declaration of Independence puts it, governments are “instituted among men” to secure our “inalienable rights,” and derive their “just powers” from “the consent of the governed.” Furthermore, whenever any form of government “becomes destructive of those ends,” the people have the right “to alter or abolish it.”

The Paradox of Dependency

2007-12-09T10:33:00.000-08:00

What I call the “paradox of dependency” represents one of the great, often unanticipated traps in life, it seems. The more valuable is some resource (or person) – the greater its “utility” to use the economists’ jargon – the greater may be the cost of losing it. In other words, our vulnerability increases in direct proportion to its value.

An obvious example these days is the Internet. In just a few short years, a great many people, and businesses, have come to depend on it. And when Internet services occasionally go down, for various reasons, the consequences can be severe or even catastrophic. Indeed, complex technological societies are dependent upon an immensely intricate web of activities and processes, and we only become of aware of this, it seems, when something goes wrong – say a power outage, or a trucking strike, or a prolonged regional drought. And the same may be true with people. If there is only one really competent plumber in your community and he moves away, your pipes may no longer hold water.

Indeed, our vulnerability further increases when we do not have options or contingency plans -- in other words when our dependency is monogamous. Thus, if we prepare for a power outage with a backup generator and a wood stove, we effectively reduce our dependency. Or, if we have a mail-order business that uses both the Internet and phone orders, we might be able to continue taking orders if the Internet goes down.

On other other hand, some of the megatrends in our society have left us increasingly vulnerable. For instance, back in 1900, half of the American population still lived (mostly) on small farms. As a society our agricultural dependency was highly diversified. And when the dust bowl drought hit the American southwest in the 1920s and 30s, we were able to fallow one-quarter of our farmland and still feed our people. But in the past 80 years, our food production system has become highly concentrated, both regionally and in terms of ownership, even as the population has multiplied. Thus, today about one-quarter of all the fruits and vegetables produced in the United States are grown in California. Unfortunately, we now know that California has been subject to recurrent, severe “megadroughts” over the past 10,000 years or so. In other words, we have achieved much higher productivity and efficiency (and reduced food costs) while at the same time increasing our dependency on a system that is also highly vulnerable. Food for thought -- you might say!

Thought for the day: In a long-term study by biologist Kwang Jeon in the 1980s, a strain of Amoeba proteus was initially infected with bacterial parasites that were resistant to the hosts' digestive enzymes. But after 200 generations, or 18 months, a beneficial (mutualistic) relationship had become established, and after 10 years the symbionts had developed complete interdependence; they could no longer survive independently. So, if you are going to become a dependent, do it wisely.

A Reply to David Sloan Wilson

2007-12-05T16:13:00.000-08:00

After receiving uniformly favorable – even glowing – reviews of my 2003 book, Nature’s Magic: Synergy in Evolution and the Fate of Humankind (Cambridge University Press), including high praise for the underlying theory from one of the most outstanding evolutionary biologists of the 20th century (John Maynard Smith), I was surprised, to put it mildly, when biologist David Sloan Wilson gave me a nasty, dismissive review in the on-line journal Evolutionary Psychology.

Wilson assured his readers that he was my friend (you know the old saying, “with friends like these…”) and that he only wanted to rescue me from my misguided ambitions. Indeed, I had just recently published an enthusiastic review of Wilson’s own book, Darwin’s Cathedral, in the Skeptic magazine. So it was puzzling and inexplicable for someone of his caliber and accomplishments in evolutionary theory to so completely misunderstand and misrepresent my theory, whether he agreed with it or not. He warned everyone to “beware” of it as “a theory of everything” and belittled the ways in which I had suggested that the theory could be tested.

Of course, it is not a theory of everything. The “Synergism Hypothesis” is a theory specifically about the “progressive” evolution of complexity in nature, and in human societies, a theory first proposed in 1983 as an explicit, Darwinian (bioeconomic) alternative to the various proposed “laws” of evolution that have been advanced over the years by the so-called complexity school – from Herbert Spencer to Ilya Prigogine to Stuart Kauffman and beyond. The theory explains this important evolutionary trend in terms of a common underlying principle – the principle of functional synergy.

In fact this theory is very similar in character to Darwin’s theory. Natural selection, after all, is not a “mechanism” but an “umbrella term” that is used to characterize a certain distinctive property of the evolutionary process, namely the differential survival and reproduction (or “selection”) of different forms as a result of their functional interactions (adaptations) both internally and with their environments. It is really a theory about the trans-generational consequences of these functional interactions, though the precise causes are in every case situation-specific and infinitely varied.

In the same manner, the Synergism Hypothesis is an umbrella term that singles out a subset of the relationships that are ubiquitous in nature, namely those that produce functional synergies which have consequences for differential survival and reproduction. The thesis, then, is that synergies of various kinds have been the underlying causes of the “progressive” trend in evolution toward more complex systems, in the same sense that natural selection is a causal theory of evolution more generally. Moreover, this dynamic can also be applied to the uniquely “progressive” aspect of cultural evolution in humankind. (Needless to say, I define “progressive” in strictly functional, not normative terms.)

Among the various implications of this theory is a directive that we must focus our attention, not on genes pursuing their individual agendas in isolation from one another but on “wholes” (systems) and the relationships among them, which are inescapable features of the living world. The theory also sensitizes us to the interdependencies that are everywhere in evidence, and it helps us to identify the commonalities and differences, as well as the advantages and vulnerabilities, that are associated with these relationships. In various recent writings I have also discussed the many different kinds of synergy, as well as various qualitative aspects of synergistic phenomena, along with describing various ways of testing for synergy in any given relationship.

So, I can only hope that David Sloan Wilson will ultimately come to recognize that this theory has its uses. But then, I’m also mindful of the fact that, almost 150 years after the publication of The Origin of Species, Darwin’s theory is still hotly debated. Alas.

Thought for the day: “The tipping point;” the “perfect storm;” “the straw that broke the camel’s back;” the “bingo effect.” All are variations on the synergy theme – when more (or less) is radically different. In other words, the whole is very often not “greater than the sum of its parts,” just different.

“Corporate Goods”

2007-12-04T13:15:00.000-08:00

It is curious that both in economic theory and in classical neo-Darwinian evolutionary theory (both of which utilize game theory models), there has been little attention and even less theoretical work done on what I refer to as “corporate goods.” In the corporate goods model (which can include any number of players), the participants may contribute in many different ways to a joint product (say the capture of a large game animal or the manufacture and sale of an automobile). I like to call it a “combination of labor.” However, unlike “collective goods,” or “public goods” that are indivisible and must be equally shared (even possibly with non-participants and cheaters), corporate goods can be divided in accordance with various principles, or “rules” or “contracts”. The division of the spoils is thus not preordained, as is the case with the payoffs in most game theory models. In other words, the payoff matrix can be manipulated at will. Indeed, the question of how the goods are divided up may be crucially important in determining if the “game” will be played at all. If this sounds familiar, even commonplace, it is because corporate goods “games” are, in fact, ubiquitous in human societies, and are fairly common in nature as well. It is the predominant form of economic organization in a complex society.

Thought for the day: Back when America had a predominately middle-class society and one-income families were the rule (hard to believe today), the disparities in wealth were not so great. Nowadays, as a friend put it (with only a bit of hyperbole), either you have three houses or three jobs. There’s nothing in between.

“Synergistic Selection”

2007-11-30T12:17:00.000-08:00

The term was coined by biologist John Maynard Smith at about the time I was publishing my first book, The Synergism Hypothesis (1983), on the role of synergy as a causal explanation for the broad evolutionary trend over time toward increased complexity. The idea of synergistic selection was similar in character to David Sloan Wilson’s formulation of a “shared fate” among genes that might be jointly selected in the context of “group selection.”

Early on, both Maynard Smith and Wilson focused their efforts on explaining altruistic behaviors, in keeping with the then-common (but incorrect) assumption in evolutionary biology that cooperation implied (and necessitated) altruism. In contrast, I called it “functional group selection” in my 1983 book and emphasized that cooperation in nature (and, indeed, in human societies as well) is largely, but not always, dependent on the “bioeconomic” payoffs – the synergies that are produced, and that the degree of biological relatedness between the cooperators is not, for the most part, a decisive factor. To emphasize this point, I suggested that we should differentiate between “egoistic cooperation” and “altruistic cooperation.”

As time went on, this broader, non-altruistic understanding of cooperation came to prevail in evolutionary biology. (It was helped along by the important work in game theory, the emergence of symbiogenesis theory, and a growing body of field research on cooperative behaviors.) And so, today “synergistic selection” refers to any context in which two or more genes, or genomes (or individuals) are jointly selected as a result of the synergies that they jointly produce. In other words, there must be a functional interdependence between the cooperators, as distinct from the many so-called groups that are statistical artifacts, or are so-named because they share the same genes, or traits, and are subject to the same selection pressures.

There are innumerable examples, of course: The now obligate federation of once-independent organelles in each of our eukaryotic cells; the vitally important gut symbionts that go along for the ride in ruminant animals; the eight oarsmen that compete together in a varsity eight rowing shell. (Many more examples can be found in my recent books.) And it is now blindingly obvious that genetic relatedness may be a facilitator but is neither necessary nor sufficient for cooperation to occur in the natural world. Gerald Wilkinson’s classic study of blood sharing in unrelated vampire bats provides a stunning case in point.

The implications of the synergistic selection model for human evolution and contemporary human societies are profound. We evolved in closely cooperating groups in which, from a very early date, there was most likely a high degree of interdependence among both kin and non-kin. And the synergies that were produced by their various forms of cooperation were of decisive importance in our ancestors’ success over several million years (see the detailed scenario in my book, Nature’s Magic). Today, we continue to thrive by deploying an incredibly elaborate division of labor (though I prefer the term a “combination of labor”), even in competitive, capitalist markets, as Adam Smith and many other economists have stressed, that goes far beyond anything in nature. Indeed, we are quintessentially the synergistic ape. And our intense cooperative activities adhere to the same underlying principle of interdependent, synergistic selection. Where it will all lead remains to be seen.

Thought for the day: “In natural selection, genes are always selected for their capacity to flourish in the environment in which they find themselves….But from each gene’s point of view, perhaps the most important part of its environment is all the other genes that it encounters... Doing well in such environments will turn out to be equivalent to “collaborating’ with these other genes” [emphasis in the original]. Richard Dawkins (The Blind Watchmaker)

Re-thinking the Foundations of Sociobiology

2007-11-29T14:15:00.000-08:00

When biologist Edward O. Wilson published his landmark megabook, Sociobiology, in 1975, it was at once a catalyst for a new discipline focused on the study of social behavior, including human behavior, from an evolutionary perspective and a challenge (a thrown gauntlet) which sparked a raging debate among social scientists (and some other biologists).

The heart of the matter was Wilson’s claim that we should “biologize” the study of human behavior and recognize that “human nature” is tightly controlled by an “epigenetic leash” that, he implied, had a neo-Darwinian foundation. Humans, like all other species, are fundamentally driven by reproductive competition, and cooperation is an exception that arises only in contexts where there is genetic relatedness (and thus inclusive fitness, or “kin selection”), or where there are opportunities for “reciprocal altruism” (in Robert Trivers’ formulation).

Wilson was faithfully reflecting the state-of-the-art in evolutionary theory at that time, but as I and others soon pointed out, this theoretical formulation was seriously deficient. In fact, cooperative behaviors are widespread in the natural world and are not at all confined to genetically-related actors. To the contrary, the primary driver for cooperation – at all levels in living systems – is the functional synergies (the adaptive benefits) that are produced. It is the “bioeconomic” payoffs from cooperation which explain why unrelated birds nest jointly, or collectively mob potential predators, and why unrelated humans engage in a myriad of cooperative activities. (This crucial point is discussed at length in my recent books, Nature’s Magic and Holistic Darwinism.)

Among other implications, this shifts the locus of causation from the “ultimate” genetic level – and the machinations of selfish genes -- to the economic calculus of the phenotypes at the “proximate” level. It also makes what the social sciences have been learning about human behavior relevant to an understanding of our mode of adaptation as a species – our “survival strategy.” As I discuss in detail in various writings, close cooperation and synergies of various kinds have been of central importance in our evolutionary trajectory, perhaps for several million years. We are quintessentially “the synergistic ape.”

However, this important element of our human nature does not negate the competitive aspect that is inescapable in nature, and evolution. Rather, cooperation and competition form a complex duality in humankind. Both of these behavioral modalities have played a vitally important role in our evolutionary success as a species and in our ongoing survival enterprise. Often, in fact, they are inextricably linked. Call it competition via cooperation. (Indeed, our many team sports represent a microcosm of this distinctive, though hardly unique, behavioral pattern.)

So, rather than having sociobiology “reformulate the foundations of the social sciences,” as Wilson put it in the preface to his 1975 volume, it may well be that the social sciences will reformulate the foundations of sociobiology.

Thought for the day: I see that the loan sharks are back, only now they’re called credit card companies. And so are the pool hall hustlers, though we now refer to them as sub-prime mortgage lenders. Funny how words like “usury” and “fraud” have all-but vanished from our political dialogue.

Red States and Blue States? Come On

2007-11-29T09:30:00.000-08:00

Whoever came up with our 21st century political color code was obviously ignorant of history and our own political culture. Red has long been the color of revolution and left-wing politics, from the French Revolution in 1798 to the Russian and Chinese revolutions in the 20th century, while the color blue (as in “blue bloods”) has traditionally been associated with conservatism and right-wing politics. Red is also associated with anger and aggression (“seeing red”), or at least excitement and passion, while blue suggests coolness, calmness and reserve. Advertisers routinely play on these color associations. If that’s not enough, how can we forget that little girls are traditionally dressed in pink while boys are dressed in (manly) blue. (I can still hear in my mind the “red-baiting” Senator Joe McCarthy attacking “Commie pinkos.”)

So what to make of the Republican Party’s recent partiality for red. Maybe it isn’t the Republicans’ idea after all but a machination of the media, which needs a colorful way to display the election-night results on your television screen (not a concern before color television). The problem is, in the coming election year the results may be one-sided and the election-night map could be almost monochromatic, unless some media color-consultant comes up with a brainstorm like changing blue states to pale blue to suggest only a tentative, temporary change so that the remaining red states will stand out like beacons of hope to the red-eyed party faithful. Watch for it on the Fox news channel on election night!

Thought for the day: The “green” parties that champion environmental causes in various countries have certainly found their rightful place on the color chart. Green also suggests life, and fertility and the presence of water, so our partiality to it probably has very deep evolutionary roots. Unfortunately, in politics symbolism is important but not enough.

The Science of Human Nature

2007-11-28T16:20:00.000-08:00

“Human nature” is one of the most revered, and reviled, concepts in the history of Western social and political thought. From Plato to the latest generation of political ideologues, a variety of conflicting views of the human “essence” have been advanced as a way to justify radically different prescriptions for how a society should be organized and how its members should be treated. Thus, Thomas Hobbes posited that the state of nature is an unconstrained “war of every man against everyman,” and that peace is only possible within an authoritarian police state. On the other hand, Jean- Jacques Rousseau claimed that “man is born free but everywhere he is in chains” – in the thrall of corrupting, destructive, inequitable institutions, and that society must be reconstituted to conform with his naturally “noble” nature (though many theorists have noted that Rousseau’s concept of an overarching “general will” was an invitation to dictatorship).

To this day, the divisive issue of our true “nature” as a species remains unresolved, even as the modern social, economic, and even biological sciences have intruded into the debate. At one extreme are the Behaviorist psychologists of the mid-twentieth century, who championed a tabula rasa view of the human psyche that was (supposedly) confirmed by learning experiments in pigeons and rats, while recent generations of neo-conservative economists, backed by mathematical models and selected market economic data, have defined humankind as rational, calculating, and self-interested – an assumption that has been seconded by neo-Darwinism in evolutionary biology, where the “selfish gene” image says it all. In between are humanists like psychologist Abraham Maslow, who formulated a hierarchy of human “needs” culminating in an ill-defined psychological need for “self-actualization.”

Though the debate about human nature continues unabated among economic and political theorists to this day, there is also quietly emerging a more sophisticated (empirical) science of human nature, one that is grounded in (a) what we have learned about humans as products of a very long and rigorous evolutionary process, (b) what various human sciences have been learning about human behavior, and, not least (c) a dispassionate approach to the evidence all around us, from the beginnings of recorded history to the latest outrages in Bosnia, or Darfur, or Iraq.

The emerging science of human nature is still young, but there are a number of tentative guideposts and “place-holders” that can be singled out at this point. Here are just a few of them:

•The “core” of human nature is a set of some 14 “domains” of biologically-based needs (according to the Survival Indicators Project) – imperatives for survival and reproduction that are ongoing and inescapable and prime “motivators” for our behavior. And if these needs are not satisfied, there will be more or less serious, even life-threatening harm. These needs vary somewhat in relation to age, sex, physical differences and activity levels. Nevertheless, they define our fundamental “vocation” in life. Indeed, most of the world’s six billion plus people devote most of their lives to “earning a living” and reproducing. Whether we are aware of it, or care about it, or not, we are inescapably involved in a “survival enterprise,” and an organized (interdependent) society is, fundamentally, a collective survival enterprise.
•The age-old debate about whether humans are basically cooperative or competitive by nature can be answered definitively. We are both. The accumulating evidence about our evolution as a species indicates that we evolved in closely cooperative, interdependent small groups. And yet, both internal (interpersonal) competition and external competition (and zenophobia) between groups were also endemic. Like many other species, our ancestors, perhaps for several million years, exploited the survival strategy of competition via cooperation. (For a much more detailed, and documented discussion of this point, see my 2003 book Nature’s Magic, or my website: www.complexsystems.org)
•There is no single, uniform human personality-type. Variation is a fundamental characteristic of the natural world, as Darwin himself stressed, and the same is true of human personalities. In other words, human nature comes in many different colors. And the human sciences, from behavior genetics to developmental psychology to the highly-sophisticated personality profiles that are now used in the career development field, have shown that the variations we observe in our everyday experience are a function of both nature and nurture.
•Our behavior is labile and highly susceptible to the particular cultural environment we inhabit. But this is also a two-way street. Societies adapt to human nature(s) just as human nature can be channeled, shaped and constrained by cultural influences.
•We are also, by nature, ethical animals (by and large). We are much affected by social norms and expectations and by what Darwin referred to as “the praise and blame” of our fellows. However, in this as in every other respect, there are broad individual variations, and societies everywhere must take account of them and learn how to deal with the outliers. (Again, this subject is discussed in depth in my 2005 book, Holistic Darwinism.)

So what can we conclude? Radical, utopian schemes for re-engineering society in accordance with some one-dimensional caricature of human nature, often from the top down, are doomed to fail. Most likely they will never be tried, or if they are imposed by force will end in disappointment. As for anarchism, this option is terminally naïve. All but a very few remote societies are dependent upon highly organized, interdependent economic and political systems.

On the other hand, if our existing institutions and political systems lead to such distortions of wealth and well-being that large numbers of the citizens are seriously harmed in terms of meeting their “basic needs,” there will be large-scale “defections” (to borrow a term from game theory). We should always be mindful of Aristotle’s warning – based on his empirical study of 158 Greek city-states – that the greatest source of political turmoil and revolution is an extreme disparity of wealth between the rich and the poor. The guiding principle for a stable society, Aristotle argued must be “social justice” – equity, fairness (giving every person his or her due), and participation in the common life and the common problems of the community. Many contemporary societies could do a whole lot better job of it, but to quote a famous line from a classic “snafu” at Omaha Beach on D-Day, in World War Two, we’ll just have to start the war from here.

Thought for the day: Charlie Allnut: “What ya bein so mean for, miss? Man takes a drop too much once in a while, it’s only human nature.” Rose Sayer: “Nature, Mr. Allnut, is what we are put in this world to rise above.” (From The African Queen by C.S. Forester.)

Bundling in Animals

2007-11-28T16:16:00.000-08:00

Animals cooperate in various ways to condition their environments and thereby achieve jointly beneficial economies or efficiencies. One example is heat-sharing. As Ecclesiates noted (in the biblical quote that was cited in the introduction to this blog), humans are only one among many animals that huddle together in cold weather, thereby reducing each individual’s energy expenditures. One of the most famous examples is the emperor penguins (recently made famous in the movie “The March of the Penguins”). Many years ago a French scientist, Yvonne LeMaho, documented that, when these animals huddle together in large colonies (sometimes numbering in the tens of thousands) during the bitterly cold Antarctic winters, they are able to reduce their energy expenditures by 20-50 percent – literally a life-saving advantage. Likewise, humans have been sharing beds for warmth in cold weather for as long as records have been kept. In colonial America, for instance, “bundling beds” were a common practice. With a board down the middle, they were intended to protect the chastity of young females (at least in theory).

Of course, animals huddle together for other reasons as well. For instance, there is a species of Mexican desert spiders that huddle together during the summer heat to prevent dehydration. And honeybee workers cooperate either by sharing body heat in winter or engaging in fanning activities with their wings during the summer to maintain the internal temperature of their hives within about 2 degrees Fahrenheit.

What these and many other examples illustrate is the fact that cooperation in animals, as in humans, is commonplace but also highly situational; it is most likely to occur when there are mutual advantages. Thus, heat sharing in animals is generally avoided in warm weather; desert spiders disperse during the rainy winter season; and honeybee workers busy themselves with other tasks when the internal temperature of the hive is satisfactory. As always, synergy can be a good thing or a bad thing, depending on the context. (I’ll talk about negative synergy in a future blog entry.)

Thought for the day: If our teachers were paid as much as our lawyers, or professional athletes, we’d have the best school system in the world. Imagine the result.

“Bundling” in Political Fundraising

2007-11-27T09:06:00.000-08:00

We’ve heard quite a bit recently about the political fundraising practice referred to as “bundling”. The idea behind it is that the Federal law prohibiting large individual donations to any one candidate (the cap is set at $2300) can be skirted by aggregating many small donations into a large “bundle” – sometimes amounting to several hundred thousand dollars. As a result, enterprising fund-raisers and their like-minded contributors are able to gain collective political clout with the recipient. (The most notorious recent example is the indicted fund-raiser Norman Hsu.)

I call it a “synergy of scale” (when many things of the same kind are put together to produce an otherwise unattainable combined effect), and it happens that synergies of scale are a common occurrence in the natural world as well. For instance, many nesting birds congregate into large colonies where the individual birds are able to combine forces and drive off even much larger predators. The practice is known as mobbing. Likewise, small fish like the dwarf herring are able to reduce their joint risk of being eaten by a barracuda or a shark by traveling together in large “schools”.

In politics, bundling is only one of many different synergies of scale. In election processes, it is the aggregate number of individual votes that determines the outcome, and the same thing is true in legislative decision-making. The decisions that result from taking a vote and acting on the outcome can truly be called synergistic effects. Likewise, a politician (like the president) who can draw a large audience (whether in person or on TV) benefits from being able to communicate with many more citizens and attracts more media attention as well. And a lobbyist for a large organization that can raise a sizable war chest or influence a large number of voters (say a trade union) has a sizable advantage in influencing the behavior of legislators. (For more on synergies of scale, see my 2003 book, Nature’s Magic.)

Thought for the day: In politics as elsewhere, if you don’t play by the rules, pretty soon it will turn ugly. To invert the old saying, warfare is politics by other means.

So,What is Holistic Darwinism?

2007-11-26T19:43:00.000-08:00

It may sound like an oxymoron to anyone who associates “Darwinism” with biologist Richard Dawkins’ “selfish gene,” or with poet Alfred Lord Tennyson’s carnivorous image – “nature, red in tooth and claw.” Indeed, neo-Darwinism, the reigning paradigm in evolutionary biology for the past three decades, promotes an image of “ruthless” individual competition as the very essence of Darwinian evolution. (Neo-Darwinism was based most especially on the early theoretical work of George Williams and William Hamilton, who later modified their views, not on Dawkins’ popularizations.)

But Holistic Darwinism is not an oxymoron. It’s a candidate name for a major paradigm shift that has been going on in evolutionary biology (and related fields) during the past several years. It is a way of characterizing the evolutionary implications of several convergent theoretical developments, all of which are focused on, or related to, the evolution of organized complexity in living organisms (which is one of their most salient features, after all) as well as, equally important, our ever-broadening understanding of the multiple, and multi-leveled sources of causation in the natural world. In fact, the emerging new paradigm is closer to Darwin’s Darwinism (he’s often been slandered) than to the hard-edged, cutthroat, individualistic model that the neo-Darwinians have purveyed. Some of these recent developments, or trends, include the following:

•A growing respect for the fact that evolution, and natural selection, occurs at multiple levels, from genes to ecosystems.
•A revitalization of group selection theory, which implies a major role for cooperative phenomena.
•A realization that “symbiogenesis” (the emergence of symbiotic partnerships) has played an important role in the evolution of complexity (our eukaryotic cells being perhaps the most stunning example).
•Advances in game theory, which have provided the theoretical basis for a much more balanced view of evolution as a dualistic process in which cooperation shares the stage with competition.
•The rise of “genomics” and “systems biology” which are focused on the systemic properties, and processes, in living systems.
•An outpouring of research and theoretical work on the role of developmental dynamics, “phenotypic plasticity” and organism-environment interactions as shaping influences in evolutionary continuities and changes.
•A flood of publications on the role of behavior, social learning and cultural transmission as “pacemakers” of evolutionary change.
•And last, but not least, the broad, “bioeconomic” theory of complexity in evolution that I first proposed in The Synergism Hypothesis (McGraw-Hill, 1983), a theory that is fully consistent with Darwin’s theory (rather than positing some “law” of evolution), has finally gained some traction. (For details, see my website: www.complexsystems.org)

There’s more, but the combined effect of this explosion of exciting theoretical and research work is the growing need for a new way of viewing the evolutionary process. Some theorists have suggested replacing the selfish gene image with the “cooperative gene” (the title of a 1996 journal article of mine and a more recent book by biologist Mark Ridley). But this label is equally one-sided and downplays the undeniable importance of competition in nature, and human societies. But more important, the emerging new paradigm is focused on a different set of questions: How have “wholes” evolved over time? How do they work, and what is their significance in evolution? Indeed, the new paradigm is more about competition via cooperation than some conflict between them. Thus, I have proposed that we use the term “Holistic Darwinism.” (It’s also the title of my most recent book, Holistic Darwinism: Synergy, Cybernetics and the Bioeconomics of Evolution (University of Chicago Press, 2005.)

Thought for the day: “Embryos are put together by all the working genes in the developing organism, in collaboration with one another….We have a picture of teams of genes all evolving toward cooperative solutions to problems….It is the ‘team’ that evolves.” – Richard Dawkins (The Blind Watchmaker)

The Synergies at Synergy Farm

2007-11-26T15:49:00.000-08:00

In our family, we like to practice what we preach. My wife (she’s the semi-retired president of CorningWorks, a health care consulting firm in Palo Alto, California) and I have a long-standing interest in biointensive organic farming that goes back to the 1970s, when the guru of this highly productive method, John Jeavons, had his research gardens in Palo Alto (he’s now in Willits, CA). We also happen to believe that small organic farms are a key to long-term agricultural sustainability in this country, and elsewhere.

So when Susan and I began to think about the next phase of our lives (it’s hardly appropriate to call it retirement), we decided to see if the biointensive method, which is tailored for small subsistance farms and backyard vegetable gardens, could be scaled up to a small market farm. The chief advantages of biointensive farming are that it builds topsoil rather than depleting it, and it is very sparing in the use of land, water, energy and expensive technologies (it’s mostly done with hand tools). Not surprisingly, the biointensive method is extremely popular in land-and-resource-poor third world countries. Yields in biointensive agriculture typically average more than four times as much per acre as in conventional row agriculture.

So now we are in the San Juan Islands, Washington, where we are in the third year of developing Synergy Farm, a diversified year-round farm on the remaining 16-acre core of what was once a 100-acre dairy farm dating back to 1902. (Before we bought it, the farm had been a bed-and-breakfast for over 20 years.) We now have 168 planting beds (each measuring 100 sq. ft.), plus nine small mobile greenhouses (or high tunnels), 25 removable “low tunnels” made of plastic hoops and clear plastic covers that serve to protect our winter vegetable beds, some 50 compost piles (a key element of our growing strategy) and a variety of other activities – pastured broiler chickens, laying hens, a berry patch, a small orchard, and guest sheep in our pasture. So far, everything we produce is sold directly to local islands residents, first through the local farmers’ market and, more important, through our busy on-site farm store.

Of course, all modern farms benefit from various forms of synergy. For instance, there is the “symbiotic” relationship between human workers and their various tools and technologies. Or take the symbiosis between plants and various micro-organisms (such as nitrogen fixing bacteria and fungi). Or what is generally referred to as “companion planting” – pairing up plants that have mutually beneficial effects on one another (say, bush beans and strawberries, or borage flowers and tomato plants). Or consider the nutritional synergies in mixed greens, like our salad mix or braising/stir fry mix, with varying combinations of lettuces, kales, chard, mache, mizuna, tatsoi, arugula, beet greens and the like. According to USDA data, a salad or stir-fry of mixed greens may contain five times as much calcium, four times as much iron, 12 times as much vitamin A and six times as much vitamin C as an equivalent amount of head lettuce.

On our farm, there is also a synergistic “loop” in the relationship between our chickens and our vegetable gardens. Our chickens are fed greens from the gardens twice each day (which greatly enriches their eggs). The chicken bedding, laced with manure, is periodically cleaned out and put into our compost piles where, several months later, the finished compost is distributed in our planting beds to enrich the soil as we transplant our next vegetable crop succession.

Our chickens also benefit from a form of nutritional synergy in their feeding regime. It’s well known that, when corn and beans, or peas, are consumed together, they yield approximately one-third more useable protein than if the two are ingested alone. (The two kinds of vegetables have complementary amino acid constituents.) So we feed our chickens a mixture that we call “chicken granola” -- one-third each of cracked corn and cracked peas, plus a high-protein “starter” mix that is normally fed to baby chicks along with molasses and water. The chickens thrive on it, and so do the customers who consume our high-grade organic eggs.

A final example of synergy on our farm is our farm store. Many farmers have small on-site farm stands to sell their produce. We have gone a step further with a larger facility where we also offer a range of other local islands products: beef, lamb and pork, goat cheese, honey, herbs, syrups, ice cream and various orchard fruits in season. The result is a much higher volume of customers with a broader range of shopping needs and a greater opportunity for point of sale purchases. In marketing circles it’s called “co-location,” a variation on the synergy principle that is also utilized by modern supermarkets and department stores, as well as by the ever-growing number of shopping malls.

Thought for the day: It’s not true that old dogs can’t learn new tricks. For one thing, they have to learn how to be old dogs. And if you don’t think that’s a big deal, just wait.

Why the Truth (Almost) Always Lies in the Middle

2007-11-26T15:39:00.000-08:00

Or so it seems. I’ve often been puzzled, and bemused, when the extremists in some debate once again are found to be half right, and half wrong. What is it that seems to drive us to the go to the opposite poles and put us at loggerheads, whatever that may mean? (According to my dictionary, it means that all parties are being “block heads.”)

I suspect the reason is that most arguments are not, at heart, about finding the truth but about being proven “right”. In fact, all manner of selfish interests may be at stake – our personal prestige and the respect of others, political status and influence, material and financial benefits, and so forth. Also, our attitudes and perspectives are inevitably shaped by differences in our personalities and in our life experiences. And if somebody else opposes us, then a competitive psychology can take over the argument to the point that we will give no quarter even if it means saying things that we know are not true, or only partially true.

So the middle-ground between various verbal combatants is often where the truth lies undefended, and the onlookers may be asked to choose sides between two simplistic extremes. What our politics these days seems to lack is a “radical middle” – an open-minded, truth-seeking constituency that will aggressively attack the “Jacobins” of the left and right (the political terrorists) and reject their self-righteous prescriptions.

Thought for the day: I saw a bumper sticker recently that updated the famous line in Franklin Roosevelt’s inaugural address: “We have nothing to fear but fear itself.” The bumper stick read: “We have nothing to fear but the fear-mongers.”

Synergy Goes to War

2007-11-26T14:02:00.000-08:00

War is, of course, one of the most destructive of human activities. In the past century alone, it has been the cause of enormous human suffering and perhaps 100 million premature deaths. Nor is it a recent phenomenon. In one of my recent books (Nature’s Magic, 2003), I develop a “plausibility argument” for the thesis that various forms of collective violence very likely can be traced back to our earliest hominid ancestors, perhaps five million years ago. Indeed, collective violence is also a common behavioral pattern in the natural world, as I discuss in detail in a newly published article (“Synergy Goes to War: A Bioeconomic Theory of Collective Violence,” Journal of Bioeconomics, 2007). To borrow a line from a Cole Porter song, birds do it, bees do it, even educated chimpanzees do it.

The underlying cause of this distinctive form of behavioral cooperation, I assert, is the synergies that are produced – synergies that enable various animals collectively to achieve ends that would not otherwise be possible by acting alone. As I put it: Synergy is the cause of cooperation in nature, not the other way around.

Among the many forms of synergy that are found in collective violence are synergies of scale (often more is better), as well as the synergies achieved by a “division of labor” (though I prefer to call it a “combination of labor” – the subject for a future blog entry), and, not least, the symbiotic relationship between animals and their “weapons” (humans are not alone in using “technology” to augment their fighting abilities).

The sad conclusion of my article is that the potential for achieving synergies of various kinds serves as a major incentive for engaging in collective violence. If the perceived benefits outweigh the perceived costs/risks, the resort to collective violence (and war) is much more likely.

But perceptions can also be disastrously wrong. Thus, America invaded Iraq with the implicit goal (to tell the truth) of securing its vital oil reserves and, in the bargain, removing a political thorn and creating a friendly regime that could help in deterring other regional threats (read Iran). The American war planners believed that Iraq War Two would be brief and that the cost in lives and treasure would be low. The Americans would be greeted as liberators and would soon install a democratically-elected government that would be partial to U.S. interests. The actual result is the unforeseen reality – one of the great blunders of military history. One of Jane Austen’s most famous novels plays on the all-too-human tendency toward “pride and prejudice” – unfounded assumptions that lead to unintended and self-destructive consequences. (What could be called the “mind-trap” -- making false assumptions and leaping to conclusions -- will also be discussed in a future blog entry.)

Thought for the day: “To jaw-jaw is always better than to war-war” -- Winston Churchill (who knew what he was talking about).