Natural Selection vs. Self-Creation
The concept of evolution is often misapplied in discussions of social change. This is an obstacle to understanding and improvement. Although the process of evolutionary emergence articulated by Charles Darwin is continuous and ongoing, it is best understood as a “weak force” for change in the human circumstance. The “strong force” that propels change in human affairs is the interplay of socially constructed ideas about how the world works and how we can work our will upon the world.
Evolution refers to a process of random genetic variation, in which some genetically shaped phenotypes are “selected” in the context of a given environment. The characteristics that are “selected for” by an organism’s environmental circumstance, derive from a genetic pool of others who also vary, but in ways that are not quite as useful in terms of survival to reproductive maturity.The cornerstone of Darwin’s theory is that the process of evolution is devoid of intention.
When we seek an explanation for the emergence of the Homo sapiens as a phenotype, we are right to employ Darwin’s theory of natural selection. *Interestingly, I am currently reading a rather technical book entitled “The Superorganism”, in which the author’s put forth a Darwin-based explanation for the selection of altruistic genes over selfish genes in eusocial insects.) Although we should begin our explanation of the emergence of humans in terms of natural selection, the power of that explanatory framework for understanding socio-cultural change diminishes once humans have emerged as intentional beings. Darwin actually points the way in this regard in the first chapter of Origins, “Variation Under Domestication”, in which selection of animal phenotypes is determined by intentional human actors. In this case, randomness remains the engine of variation, but human intentionality becomes the selector. This might be called “unnatural selection”. Unnatural selection of phenotypes is ubiquitous in human affairs, and no more so than in the case of the selection of humans themselves. The selection criteria employed by intentional humans are culturally determined.
Understanding unnatural selection is useful, but even this understanding is insufficient for understanding the nature of change in human affairs. The most powerful change process at work in human society is the dialectical interplay of the ideas that shape our relations, our predictions, and our actions. This is the self-created symbolic world that uniquely defines what it is to be human. All to briefly, our consciousness emerges as a communal narrative which is generated in human interaction. The narrative must be communal because shared theory of the world is a necessary precondition for communication. But the communal narrative, like DNA, is never replicated exactly the same in every human actor. Each individual’s theory-based narrative (a predictive construction) varies on the basis of their individual experience as an actor in the world. In other words, we share the same symbolic/theoretical universe but we never share the exact same experience of that universe. We share a conception of the world but we are diverse in that conception. We vary.
As we act as predictive creatures in a theory-based reality, the efficacy of our actions is never perfect. As groups and as individuals, we observe that some of our ideas work better than others. It is the interplay of ideas, action, and observation that drives a conflictual/competitive process of knowledge creation in which anomalous outcomes force the revision of some ideas and overthrow of others. What is uniquely human is that we need not wait for random genetic variation to deliver solutions. Our collaborative intentionality drives a process of knowledge creation. (Interestingly, this interactive model of knowledge creation is mirrored in W. E. Deming’s PDSA, which is simply a rigorous application of the knowledge creating process.)
It should be clear that the process I describe above is idealized. Genetic evolution is messy and so too, is the dialectal process by which knowledge is created. The principle differences are:
— Evolution is driven by randomness and non-intentionality. The emergence of new characteristics in organisms is not a process of improvement but rather, an expression of what happens to work in a given time and place.
— Social change is driven by intentional actors who make theory based predictions., act on those predictions, and upon observing the efficacy of those actions, redefine, renew, and recreate their theory-based conception of reality.
The social change dynamic I describe here in idealized form, provides an answer to the question of WHY conscious social action was selected for in the process of evolution. As with all species, the process of selection is inherently inefficient. It produces very odd creatures who behave in very odd ways. The selection of social consciousness is part of a whole creature in which reside many paradoxes and contradictions. The contradictions produced by the reductive mind are emerging as particularly important in our time. Systems thinking represents one way of addressing the problems produced by the reductive mind. It is a product of the contradictions of reductionism that have arisen in our unique technological age in which the untempered technological power produced by our reduction threatens our survival as a species.
