Development and Evolution: Complexity and Change in Biology

368 Pages·1993·2.14 MB·English

by  Stanley N. Salthe

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Development and Evolution
Complexity and Change in Biology
Stanley W. Salthe
Preface
Chapter 1 Introduction
Observing and Making Complexity
Infodynamics
Aristotelian Complex Causality
Peircean Semiotics
Infodynamics in Biology
December 1993
The Problem of Change
ISBN 0-262-19335-3
368 pp., 33 illus. The Construction of Development and Evolution
$65.00/£41.95 (CLOTH)
A Preliminary Glance at Dialectic
ADD TO CART Summary
Series Chapter 2 Hierarchy Theory
Bradford Books The Scalar Hierarchy (Hsc)
Being Provoked by Extensional Complexity
Scalar Levels
General Rules of the Scalar Hierarchy (abstracted from
Salthe 1985)
Modeling Structure: Reflexivity, Autonomy, Agency
The Specification Hierarchy
General Rules of the Specification Hierarchy
Integrative Levels and Intensional Complexity
Integrative Levels as Developmental Stages
Forms of Zeno's Paradox in Hierarchy Theory
The Language Tree
Summary
Chapter 3 Nonequilibrium Thermodynamics
The Classical, Externalist Formulation
Nonequilibrium Thermodynamics
Dissipative Structures
Four Phenomenological Rules of Open Systems
Development as a Nonequilibrium Process
Macroscopic Information as Entropic
The Internalist Perspective of Expanding Phase Space
Paired Infodynamical Perspectives
Toward an Infodynamics
Self-Organization
Agency
Development of Agency
Self-Organization as Modeling the Environment
Self-Organization and the Collecting/Cascading Cycle
The Honing of Selfness
Some New Theoretical Entities
The Ontogenetic Trajectory
The Infodynamics of Development
Morphological Trajectories
Summary
Chapter 5 The Search for a Theory of Change
What Is Newness?
Newtonian "Change"--No Output without Input
Chance and Creativity
Natural Selection
Emergence
Evolutionary (Historical) Emergence
Developmental Emergence
Emergence as a Mode of Development
Senescence as the Enablement of Emergence
Change in Hegelian Systems
Historical Dialectics
Contradictions and the Dialectics of Nature
Dialectics and Development
Notes toward Modeling Change
Summary
Chapter 6 Immature, Mature, Senescent
Darwinian Cosmology
Shortcomings of Darwinian Cosmology
Developmental Cosmology
Developmental Trajectories
Senescence
Organism and Organicism
Final Causality and Teleology
Some Applications and Implications
The Infodynamical View of the Origin and Evolution of
Living Systems
Coevolution
Set of Principles for a General Theory of ESs
The Link between Principles
Combining the Three Principles: A General Law of
Evolution
A Topic in Hierarchy Theory from an ESF Perspective:
Emergence
Conclusions
Addendum
Glossary
References
Name Index
Subject Index
Preface
The present work could be considered an extension of my 1985 book
Evolving Hierarchical Systems. That book was centered on the structure
of scalar hierarchies, working from Darwinian theory and beginning
with a canonical image—genes at a lower scalar level, organisms at a
level above them, and populations at the next higher level. It had been
triggered by discussions of levels of selection and punctuated equilib
rium; however, it departed from biology into systems science, and so
it could not be taken as a technical discussion of (say) levels of selec
tion. It became a general essay about hierarchical structuralism, using
materials from evolutionary biology and also from many other sources.
In the making, that work departed radically from the reductionism,
characteristic of Darwinism, that had been so pronounced in my 1972
textbook Evolutionary Biology. It became clear that natural selection
could not be responsible for everything in the world impinging upon
biological populations or organisms. Complexity had been broached,
and there was no return. Even selection at different scalar levels was
soon revealed to be too thin a view of biological hierarchies. Work on
the 1985 book carried me away from Darwinian abstractions into the
messy material world—despite its location in systems science, which
can be the most abstract of all sciences. The reason was that constraints
(boundary conditions, initial conditions, and initiating conditions) be
came as important to an analysis as are processes and impinging
laws—indeed, they are what characterize scalar levels. Laws and proc
esses often transcend such levels, and this is partly why science has
had little need for hierarchy theory in most of its constructions—before
the advent of complexity, that is (and complexity has been slow in
arriving in evolutionary theory, captive as it is to the elaborate sim
plicities of Darwinism).
Contact with Marxists soon revealed that they were the only group
(other than systems scientists, of course) that showed enough interest
in the 1985 work to criticize it. And their criticism revealed an impor
tant deficiency in that book: There was no attempt in it to deal with
change. Process was there, as was the transcendence of any local
process at higher scalar levels, where an entire trajectory becomes itself
x Preface
an individual (and the process is accomplished virtually as soon as it
starts, if you chose a high enough level within which to embed it).
In the meantime, the controversy over nonequilibrium thermody
namics had erupted. People were talking about what drove systems
to change, with change characterized through information theory. The
controversy, in large part, involved the problem of whether informa
tion carrying capadty is an entropy—that is, whether information had
to increase in a material system, as did physical entropy. Only a small
group centered around Dan Brooks and Ed Wiley, which came to
include me, was prepared to try and demonstrate that it did.
In the meantime, the influence of thermodynamics had made its
appearance in many other areas. In ecology, developmental aspects of
ecosystems were characterized by Bob Ulanowicz in the language of
entropies and information (what is coming to be called infodynamics).
Ulanowicz's work appeared even as development was making a come
back (from mere developmental genetics) in biology as a whole. On
togeny concerned transformations that surely involved change of some
kind. My interest in the field in which I had obtained my degree—de
velopmental biology—was rekindled. During this period there
emerged into cybernetics and systems sdence a Continental, Hegelian
perspective that goes under the label self-organization. It has had little
influence on established sdence in the United States except in a few
nonacademic institutions, but the problems it engages are such that
one could foresee that developmental biology would one day become
one of its subdiscourses. I could not avoid struggling with these mat
ters in this book.
At the same time, my trajectory through the 1985 book, which
carried me into theoretical biology (not what is usually called that,
which is mere mathematization) and systems philosophy, continued. I
discovered a major discourse in Western sdence and philosophy that
I had not appredated. That discourse, which I now call developmental
discourse, included Herbert Spencer, Charles Sanders Peirce, the Natur-
philosophen, and the transcendental morphologists, all of whom had (to
one degree or another) been concerned with characterizing change.
Here Marx's origins could be discerned as well, and the Marxists'
interest in my 1985 book found another connection leading away from
it. It became clear to me that developmental discourse had been wait
ing for something like infodynamics to give it a new lease on life. The
present work can be viewed as a lately eroded text in a developmental
discursive formation that first appeared with the andent Greeks.
Marxists, along with feminists, were criticizing the incursions of
neo-Danvinism into their domain (sodal sdence), and it became dear
that my roots through scalar hierarchies were at stake here too. Not
Pref^ie xi
only were scalar hierarchies not involved with change, they cpuld also
be viewed as just as mechanistic (even though so complex as to defy
explicit modeling) as was Darwinism (see Birke 1986). And u|is philo
sophical mechanism appears to have triggered (at least the disinter
ested end of the spectrum of) the opposition to Darwinian ambitions
in social science (i.e., sociobiology). This led to my own critique of
Darwinism, which goes a bit farther in this text.
This book may be viewed as a kind of reaction—not against the
principles of scalar hierarchies discussed in Evolving Hierarchical Sys
tems—but against the implicit philosophical mechanidsm of much of
that work. I now discovered that a number of informed persons had
been uneasy with the mechanistic materialism of modern science.
Indeed, no sooner had I discovered this than mechanidsm lost its
power in my thinking altogether. This came about by my discovery,
through feminism, of postmodernism and the social construction
movement in the sodology of sdence. It was dear that philosophical
mechanidsm was the local attitude of a culture that was bent primarily
on dominating nature in every way (not only through totalitarian
governments) and which gave little time to trying to understand the
world. Mechanidsm could be repudiated simply by realizing that it
had never been my own game, and that there were counterdiscourses
out there.
Fortunately, I had by then, through my interest in Peirce, become
acquainted with some semiotidans, and through semiotics I have been
able to recognize that the play of signs, induding the modeling of
systems, is exactly what discourses are. Scalar hierarchies had already
taught me that the position of the observer was necessarily implicated
in modeling nature. With semiotics the observer could be brought right
into the models. Furthermore, this now allows the meaning of informa
tion to be modeled as well as the information itself, as is done in
information theory. Indeed, as I conceive it now, information theory
must become embedded in semiotics. This work could be viewed as a
preliminary essay on semiotics of (or in) sdence.
So, while I have returned to biology for most of my subjert matter
(not all, because the origin of life is too important, and, as Darwinians
have implied, must involve subject matter outside biology), my contact
with many more fields of interest has moved this work even further
from biology as a separate disdpline than was the 1985 book. Readers
with no tolerance for references outside their narrow specialization
will find little to engage them here. Sdentists who believe that sdence
ought to be (or even is) sealed off from other discourses will find little
comfort here. This book foresees not only a unity of the sdences but
a unity that connects to nonsdentific discourses.
xii Preface
What the book is about may fairly be suggested by paraphrasing
quotes from five critics of the first draft: an alternative view of evolu
tion; an integration of ideas from philosophy science, and systems
theory into an ontology of nature (here ontology ought to mean what
one believes needs to be represented in nature); an attempt at a grand
theory of nature encompassing complexity and change; an attempt to
demonstrate the mutual relevance of several fields; an attempt to
construct a basis for models of material systems in general—a synthetic
work. Emphasis must be put upon the word "attempt" here, of course;
obviously this text is only the continuation of a beginning, if these
imputations really are its goals. I will add another attempt here: an
attempt to show that developmental discourse represents a viable
alternative to Darwinism as the fundamental theoretical orientation of
biology.
I hope it will become clear that, while there seems to be an unusually
large number of new departures here for a single book, none of them
could be made without the others. I believe all these approaches
support each other in this attempt to form a basis for reconstructing
developmental discourse, and so they must be taken together, however
challenging that may be. This, of course, necessarily means that this
text is going to be sketchy and suggestive rather than an accomplished
work.
Myrdene Anderson, Bob Artigiani, Dan Brooks, John Collier, David
Dean, David Millett, Ron Pilette, Jeffrey Sutton, Rod Swenson, Bob
Ulanowicz, and several anonymous referees critically reviewed the
manuscript, in whole or in part. It has been exciting being a peripheral
member of a number of discourses, and I thank all involved for
tolerating my sometime presence in their affairs. The gentlemanly
furtherance of this work by my chairman at Brooklyn College, Ray
Gavin, is also acknowledged.
Readers may be interested in knowing how Stuart Kauffman's book
The Origins of. Order (Oxford University Press, 1993), which appeared
after the manuscript of this book was finished, relates to the present
text. While my book tries to distance itself from Darwinism, Kauff
man's tries to incorporate the discourse of self-organization into Dar
winism. Noting that selection could not be the sole cause of order in
organisms (because of the spontaneous self-organizing tendencies of
any complex system), Kauffman calls for a marriage of selection and
self-organization. My overall impression of his text, however, is that
its selected tail tends to wag the evolving dog.
Kauffman shows that selection must have worked, not just on traits,
but on whole systems with properties allowing increases in complexity
beyond that achievable by most abiotic systems, where complexity
Preface xiii
increase eventually becomes limited by overconnectivity In order to
evolve greater complexity in randomly structured environments, sys
tems must have parts that strongly interact with only a few others—
that is, they must have specificity, and therefore they must have had
some minimum configurational complexity to begin with. The present
text views environments and the systems evolving within them as
more closely integrated from the start, suggesting that environments
have structures and that organisms realize some of these structures
materially, as parts. In my view this explains why form organizes itself
in natural systems to begin with.
Kauffman feels that he has discovered why cell types differentiate
along a tree pattern from an initially undifferentiated cell—a matter
central to the present text. In this way connectivity is kept low, because
each cell type becomes specialized to deal with only a few others.
Kauffman's reasoning is essentially historical; the earliest cell types
were those that found means of survival in the generic properties of
the kind of material system they were. Any further complexity must
have been built upon these primal structures, because subsequent
selected change would have been restricted to small jumps achievable
without disrupting an already functioning system—Kauffman's "evo
lution on correlated landscapes." Here he essentially gives a (not new)
explanation for Baer's law, also central to the present text. In this way
the more plesiomorphic traits of organisms are viewed as closer to the
generic properties of the types of material systems of which they are
members—and therefore not as having been engendered by selection,
which only continues to modulate what was (and is) generated spon
taneously during the origin of life (and ontogeny).
In the present text the types of material systems to which organisms
belong are taken to be dissipative structures, and this brings up an
uneasiness I have with the basis of Kauffman's work: simulations using
matrices of Boolean automata. While such systems do self-organize,
develop, and individuate (see chapter 1 below), they fail to mimic
natural systems in an important way: they do not have an immature
stage in their development during which they grow in some way
(Salthe 1990d). Basically, in the terminology of the present text, these
matrices simply senesce during a run. It is not clear to me what
difference more natural simulations would make to Kauffman's con
structions—perhaps none.
Kauffman engages the present text in another way when he asks
how low connectivity actually arises. He finds it to be basically the
result of molecular specificity, the property of discrimination that can
be shown by complex configurations. Selection for increased specificity
(driven by intertype competition for efficiency) becomes at the same
xiv Preface
time selection for low connectivity, allowing complexity to self-orga
nize during organic evolution. In the present text the idea of specificity
is dealt with in the broader context of semiotics—specificity implies a
viewpoint, which implies a capacity for holding meaning, which is the
object of the study of semiosis. As this example shows, Kauffman's
text is generally more narrowly focused than the present one, not only
in the direction of Darwinism but also in the direction of specific theory
rather than metatheory.