Douglas H. Erwin starts with that premise in an essay in the New York Times Science Times section today. Focusing on the hot topic of evolutionary and developmental biology, his title is "Darwin Still Rules, But Some Biologists Dream of a Paradigm Shift."
Of course, I can't help but notice that he uses the word "some" in the title to soften that premise.
And, in reality, paradigm shifts are initially very strongly resisted. Thomas Kuhn documented this so well in his famous Structure of Scientific Revolutions. It is in fact a crisis of a fundamental kind to challenge the prevailing, comfortable, organizing world-view. This is the large scale version of the resistance within an organization to Karl Weick's "mindfulness" and surfacing problems that seem to imply the whole mental model is wrong, instead of suppressing them. In that way, this is the key to "The Toyota Way", as well, which is obsessive about forcing a process that leaves problems no place to hide.
John Gall discusses this delightfully in his half-humorous, half-profound view of how systems fail and his invented field of "systemantics". See Failure is perhaps our most taboo subject.
My readers know this subject is near and dear to me right now, as I'm caught up in the paradigm shift within public health, which is transitioning from a local, biomedically-oriented view of causality to a global, context-oriented, multileveled "distal" or "ecological" view of what determines who we are, how we act, and whether we are healthy or not. The older view was historically very successful and proponents of it are not about to give it up without a fight. Entire careers and departments have sprung up around it, giving it staying power.
My readers also know how I tend to view all this commotion through the lens of what I'm calling "s-loops", and what I see (modestly) as even more basic than DNA as the building block of all life at all scales. This is my invented term for Self-aware, Self-sustaining, Self-repairing, Self-protective regulatory feedback control loops -- which is why a shorter term is helpful.
These loops don't really care what substrate or medium they are based in, and can happily cross from DNA to water-levels to photons to whatever and back. Importantly, they don't care what scale of life they operate in, and are as happily at work at in a "genetic circuit" as in the Tobacco industry, following exactly the same rules and principles.
Erwin gets so close to this in his essay, talking about how researchers in artificial life labs and the whole Santa Fe Institute crowd have shown that eyespots can evolve into our current eyeball models through evolution. I have to note on the side that "cross-over" is probably the more accurate term for what he's calling "mutation".
His point supports my point, which is that s-loops quickly develop "eyes" of one kind or another. Erwin says:
Natural selection, driven by competition for resources, allows the best-adapted individuals to produce the most surviving offspring... It is the primary agent in shaping new adaptations. Computer simulations have shown how selection can produce a complex eye from a simple eyespot in just a few hundred thousand years.Well, any adaptive cybernetic thingie, whether made of silicon or carbon or virutal electrons, needs to be able to detect the outside world that it is supposed to be adapting to, duh. Why is this rocket-science? And silent detection (eyes) is a lot safer in a predator-rich environment than active detection (touch.) I'd rather see the snake than reach in the hole and find it by feeling around. Again, duh.
In my book, the whole evolutionary biology crowd is too close to the beast to be able to see the simple outline, even though they draw "feedback" loops and Krebs Cycles and genetic circuits all day long. Systems Dynamics people draw "causal loops" and that's great as far as it goes, but fails to focus as well on that very special class of regulatory feedback loops that become self-aware and undergo a sort of phase-shift in nature.
Once a goal-seeking control loop has been established, with any learning capacity at all, the goal ends up including self-survival -- at least, of the ones that survive! Those not interested in or good at survival, bless their hearts, are not generally with us any more - but make a great snack.
So, the persisting ones care about survival, and care about internal quality-control. They have to be able to repair damage and overcome noise. Once they get more complex, they need to be able to distinguish "me" from "not me" - ie, develop a rudimentary immune system. They need to learn how to fight back.
Then, the very clever ones, with even more propensity to survive, discover that they have some influence over the world around them. They can move to a new location and get out of the rain, which is one way to locally control the local world. They become terra-formers.
It doesn't take long to run into the fact that part of the world one is terraforming (or about to eat) already "belongs to" another S-loop. Uh oh. The dumb ones take up fighting even more, and the bright ones learn about alliances and stable ecological cross-supportive worlds.
But it still all comes down to an s-loop at the core, despite the fancy clothes. We still have a Self-aware, Self-sustaining, Self-repairing, Self-protective regulatory feedback control loop at work, bound by all the principles that control-system engineering has discovered and made into textbooks for those who have eyes to read.
My prior posts show that such a core loop will have a "blue gozinta", my somewhat tongue in cheek term for a "controller" that must have a few key parts, and always has them:
- A sensor for the world
- A sense-maker of the raw sensory input
- A mental-model (paradigm, world-view) of what's outside.
- A goal.
- A way to measure difference between the goal state and the current state.
- A mental-model of how things work and what parts it has that it can move.
- A way to take historical data stream of sensory input of what it's done and where it is and what seems to affect what and use it to generate the next second's push, pull, or other way of impacting the world.
So, any S-loop will have a strong survival pressure to defend its own internal mental models and paradigm, countered by a learning system that has to come to grips with the fact that sometimes, yes, the "cheese moves."
If I call anything with a functioning S-loop "alive", then not only are all "Living things" alive, but so are corporations, nation-states, religions, cultures, social norms, prejudices, stereotypes, and evolutionary biologists' collective paradigm of how things work.
So, yes, by this model, of course they will fight back, and fiercely, if their paradigm is challenged. And, yes it makes sense that all the supportive control structures terraform around themselves locally supportive smaller s-loops, which are built or entrained to be part of the larger empire. In this case, researchers, and collections of researchers, have all organized around this older paradigm as part of their "given" world and shared assumption, and in acting to defend their own s-loop identity and world-view, give life to the defense of the entire field's identity and world-view - that is, the field's core s-loop. It is natural that the field, a meta-living thing, will then support supportive opinions and try to stamp out or squash contrary or challenging opinions and dissent. All s-loops will tend to do that, at all scales: genes, bosses, departments, corporations, religions, nation states -- all will tend to squash and suppress dissent.
But two things can happen. The old guard can die off and yield that way to the "young Turks" who have a different paradigm, or the old guard can learn and adapat - a traumatic crisis of paradigm shift.
But it can be successful, and go from everyone knowing that the new paradigm is "obviously wrong" to everyone adopting it and effectively changing the past to affirm now that "they've always believed that."
In the short run, failure of news to update the paradigm has been identified as the killer of high-reliable operation of pretty much any complex adapative system, whether it's a nuclear reactor control room or the US Army or an aircraft cockpit or a hospital's surgery suite. When the old paradigm suppresses too much dissent, it misses the news that the cheese has moved, the old model of the cooling system must be broken, the enemy has moved locations from where headquarters was sure they were, etc. Actions no longer are based on reality, and tend to no longer support survival.
This appears to be the core issue about which we, as a society, are pretty ignorant right now -- what's an efficient way to make a "learning organization" that can collect input from its sensors and figure out when the internal mental model and paradigm need to be updated.
And, in the military, or hospitals, or any high-stakes operation, how do you keep the "control" system functioning, right in the middle of a mission, while ripping out the old paradigm and implementing a new one. For example, how do you transition from McGreggor's "Theory X" management to "Theory Y" management without losing the whole ballgame during the transition? The middle state seems ugly and totally out of control, even if the far side "future state" looks way better than where we are now. Is there a way to skip the middle state and just wake up and find ourselves in the new paradigm?
This is effectively a phase-transition -- the same stuff is still in almost the same place, but now the way it is structured has changed, with possibly a lot of stray energy involved going in or coming out.
The benefits of an s-loop model of evolution is that, in addition to our genes and selves and species, it includes all those departments and corporations and cultures and nation-states around us that are visible daily trying to assert control and dominance of the world and paradigms around themselves.
And, the s-loop model has another really strong benefit over pure Darwin at one level -- namely, there is an alternative to "kill or be killed" known as "cooperate in an ecology" or "acquire and merge." Diverse ecologies are way stabler than homogeneous empires (the Borg) and have proven so far to be able to survive massive context and climate changes that even huge individual models (dinosaurs) couldn't survive.
S-loops are all around us. Two people in a strong relationship or marriage may succeed in forming a bond that is so real it takes on a life of its own - and becomes another s-loop that is self-aware, self-healing, and terraforming the space around it in order to survive better.
My main point is that the behavior of complex regulatory feedback control loops is not something I discovered yesterday -- this field has been studied over 100 years and has a great depth of literature, analysis tools, theory, principles, visualization tools, and ways to simulate situations and do "what if" analyses.
If pretty much everything we care about is in the grips of one or more s-loops, then wouldn't it make sense to get the Santa Fe Institute, or somegroup like that, to educate us on what kind of behaviors you can get out of a swarm of such things interacting with each other - especially if you allow for consciousness and efforts to terra-form, make alliances, and learn how to overcome the "sticky paradigm" problem with some sort of dynamically stable solution.
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