Text 169, 165 rader
Skriven 2004-09-25 21:57:00 av Michael Ragland (1:278/230)
Ärende: The uncertainty of evolut
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http://www.ryerson.ca/~woc/2002_ Conference/papers/newcombe.html


SELF-ORGANIZATION OF HUMAN SOCIETY Hanna Newcombe 
Peace Research Institute, Dundas Ontario 

The whole Universe evolves, so does life on Earth, and so does human
society. What is the aim of evolution, if there is one? It could be only
aimless change, chance fluc-tuations like Brownian motion, but it does
not seem to be. It has been evolution toward complexity. 

Evolution toward complexity is impossible in a closed system, because of
the law of entropy. Change should be toward disorder, down the slope of
free energy hills. But the Universe is an open system, because of its
continuing expansion since the Big Bang - even an accelerated
expan-sion, as discovered recently. 
Expansion continues to create free energy differences, which can be
exploited by self-organizing anti-entropic systems, tending toward
greater and greater complexity. Even a car without power can move
uphill, if it contains a rat-chet that cancels out downwards movement,
and a randomly fluctuating regime is applied. The fluctuations alone can
slowly propel it upwards. This can serve as a model of evolution, with
natural selection acting as the ratchet that tends to prevent downward
movement. 

Life, of course, is an anti-entropic system, increasing order inside
organisms while exporting entropy to the en-vironment, thus preserving
the validity of the entropy law. Most of the Universe is hostile to
life. Only a narrow sphe-rical shell around the centre of our Galaxy
(and probably other galaxies as well) can sustain life. Too close to the
centre there is too much radiation from the massive black hole and too
many collisions of particles, asteroids and comets. Too far from the
centre there are not enough ele-ments beyond hydrogen and helium, such
heavier elements being necessary for life. Our Sun is within this
life-friendly belt. 

Similarly, there is only a narrow shell around the Sun in our solar
system that can keep water in the liquid state, and thus support life.
Too close to the Sun a planet is too hot, like Mercury and Venus. Too
far away from the Sun, a planet is too cold, like the outer gaseous
planets; Mars may be in an ambiguous position. The Earth is situated in
this life-friendly shell. According to the Goldilocks principle, we are
not too hot nor too cold, but "just right". We are not in a region too
frenzied or too impoverished in the Galaxy. We occupy prime real estate,
rare in the Universe. Is it Providence or the anthropic principle? If we
tried to be anywhere else, we could not succeed, and could not
there-fore think about it. 

We also occupy a privileged position in time, the fourth dimension. The
very early Universe contained no galaxies, stars or planets, and no
elements beyond the original hydrogen, helium, and a little lithium. The
late Universe, to come after us, may contain only black holes, neutron
stars, white dwafs and other star remnants and debris, quickly moving
away from each other in a vast dark void of degraded energy. Life will
not be there, or any scientists to observe and discuss it. 

Evolution of life on Earth did occur, but this is nevertheless a
contingency, not a necessity; though not quite chance either. There is a
chemical tendency to form simple molecules like sugars and amino acids,
and plenty of free energy to polymerize them to macromolecules like
pro-teins and nucleic acids, especially because some of the latter can
act as enzymes to greatly accelerate the reac-tions, while others act as
templates to preseve information (which is the opposite of entropy) and
to facilitate accu-rate reproduction. However, actual events might have
gone otherwise. As Stephen Gould asserted, rewinding the tape of
evolution (both pre-biotic and subsequent) and starting again, would
most probably produce different results: either no stable life at all,
or vastly different species. 

Socia-cultural evolution in human societies (taking a huge leap forward)
is about a million times faster than biological evolution, because we
can deliberately direct it to suit our purposes and intentions, and
because we can transmit innovations across generations to our
descendents. In other words, social evolution is Lamarkian, no longer
Darwinian. 

Perhaps it is too fast; there is not enough time for consolidation, for
"sober second thought". We are becoming capable of controlling genetic
evolution itself, perhaps to our detriment; we need to slow down and
think. Even through-out human history and pre-history, there has been a
marked acceleration of change (to agricultural to industrial to
technological evolution), not all of it always beneficial, sometimes
harmful to the environment, our "prime real es-tate". (Even agriculture
has drawbacks compared to hunting and gathering culture, although it
allowed a great expansion of human population, again possibly too
great.) 

We now question the fragility of some of our new tech-nology, for
example interconnected computer systems. What would happen if the
Internet should crash? This could happen through hostile or terrorist
action (maybe through an elec-tromagnetic pulse from a nuclear
explosion), or through the playful activity of hackers, or simply
through information overload. Too much of our economy now depends on the
Inter-net - quite suddenly, in evolutionary terms. Could we start again
from scratch? Probably (we have not yet lost all our "primitive" skills,
like manual calculation and record-keeping) but it would be a huge
setback. In the future, when we may be "dumbed down" enough to have lost
the original skills, it could be much worse. We should always keep up
those skills as a fall-back position. 

Also, social-cultural evolution lags behind techno-logical evolution,
and our moral-ethical evolution is even more retarded. If human society
is to spontaneously self-organize as life on earth once did, and as
general chemical systems can sometimes do, these lags must be repaired.
This may involve slowing down the technology so that we can catch up. A
sober thought: perhaps any advanced technological civilizations that may
have once existed elsewhere in the Universe have already
self-destructed, which is why we have not been able to contact any. 

If we should be able to avoid self-destruction and achieve
self-organization of human society on Earth, what would the ideal new
world order look like? Ahead of that achievement, we can only speculate.
We need human unity, which does not yet exist in our fractured world. We
need unity with nature, to safeguard our environment. But along with
unity, we need diversity, not homogenization; diversity of species, of
cultures, of languages, of genetic make-up. 

As the human embryo grows, its cells differentiate to perform many local
functions; but the whole developing or-ganism remains integrated through
constant exchange of in-formation and mutual cooperation. This is a good
model for a future peaceful, just and cooperative worldwide human
socie-ty. We are at the embryo stage; may we bring it to full term, and
not abort it. 

The classical political model which preserves both unity and diversity
is a federation, or more specifically subsidiarity. (A federation
usually has two levels of go-vernment; subsidiarity can have more than
two.) We need to pay attention to both local and global levels of
organi-zation and problem-solving, and several levels in between. The
optimum number of levels from person to planet would be about 8:
individual, neighbourhood, town, local region, pro-vince, nation,
continent, world. Problems should be solved at the lowest level
possible, to be more democratic, but such that there are few outside
effects. (Since in a system everything is connected to everything, the
determination of "few external effects" will always be difficult, but
compro-mises can be made, as our experience in Canada has shown.) Each
unit in a subsidiarity order can self-organize accor-ding to its own
culture, but the levels must also create and maintain overall
integration and cooperation. 

Evolution proceeds through crisis stages, when fluctu-ations accumulate
and make the structure unstable; it can then flip either to a more
stable (usually more complex) configuration or collapse - go to
breakthrough or breakdown. We do live in a crisis, in "interesting
times", according to an old Chinese curse. But the Chinese symbol for
crisis also reminds us that a crisis is both a danger and an
opportunity. 

May we find the ratchet that will prevent us from sli-ding down into
breakdown. We may yet succeed in climbing the peak of fitness in our
rugged and changing landscape.

"It's uncertain whether intelligence has any long term survival value.
Bacteria do quite well without it."
 Stephen Hawking
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