Bioevolution is
characterized by constant ecological interaction, which is selection,
under conditions of constant change of parameters, which is mutation.
Some of the parametric change is physical, such as changes in climate, ice
ages, soil erosion, mountain building, flooding tides, and so on. The basic
source of change in the biological parameters, however, is genetic mutation,
that is, change in the structure of the genetic instructions contained in DNA
with consequent change in the nature of the individuals of species which these
genetic instructions produce.
The record of the
rocks suggests something more than mere change, for we also detect a
directionality, a “time’s arrow.” The earliest forms of life seem to have been
something like viruses and then one-celled organisms like bacteria that did not
leave many durable traces, though these are beginning to be discovered.
The next great
step was the development of many-celled organisms, beginning with plants. These
begin to leave more traces, for even soft and perishable structures leave
imprints in mud, which then harden and thus are preserved. Then come animals in enormous variety, invertebrates, insects
with exoskeletons, then the vertebrates with internal skeletons, and so on.
We seem to be able
to trace several directionalities here. One is an increase in the size of the
individual organism from the minute viruses to the blue whale, which seems to
be the largest living thing that ever existed. This increase in size is the
result of an increase in certain kinds of complexity.
Complexity is a
difficult concept to reduce to any kind of linear scale, yet we have little
doubt that the human being is more complex than a virus or the amoeba. An
element of this complexity is the development of what might be called control
or cybernetics; the development of, for instance, improved perceptual
apparatus, from the slightly light-sensitive skin to the eye, from a vague
sensitivity to air waves to the ear.
We see control
developing also in warm-bloodedness and with the development of a large number
of cybernetic systems within the organism which sustain the stable internal
environment in the face of changing external environments. Pleasure and pain make
up another aspect of control, for this leads into behavior, which sustains the
internal environment of the organism and improves eating, drinking, breathing,
and avoiding predators.
The invention of
sex, which comes fairly early, is certainly part of the increasing complexity.
This leads to a speeding up of genetic change because in sexual reproduction
individuals share the genes of both parents; this leads to larger and more
complex gene pools in the species, greater variations in individual organisms,
more rapid spread of favorable mutations through the species, an increased
variability in behavior patters among species because of the ever-present
problem of getting the males and females together.
I must confess I
am still a little puzzled as to why sex turned out to be such a good idea, as
against asexual reproduction, but the answer is presumably that it permitted an
enormous increase in the complexity of the organism. It would certainly be hard
to see how asexual reproduction could work beyond the level of the cell, or at
least the worm. It is certainly hard to imagine the human being dividing into
two halves, and then each half growing into a complete person.
The last “time’s
arrow” in evolution is the development of awareness, consciousness, and
intelligence. It seems almost impossible to pinpoint the moment at which this
emerges, as it does so imperceptibly out of control and out of the pain and
pleasure elements in control.
Wordsworth may
just have been a romantic poet when he wrote: “and ‘tis my faith that every
flower enjoys the air it breathes.” But the only evidence for the existence of
pain in other organisms and in ourselves is the observation of behavior which
is similar to our own when we feel pain, as no one has ever felt the pain of another
directly. The same presumably goes for pleasure.
When an amoeba
rejects a stone and accepts food or a sunflower turns its face toward the sun
as it moves across the sky, we seem to run into a phenomenon of preference,
thou
There is nothing
impossible about an organism that could feel pain but could not express it.
Boiling a carrot alive certainly produces less empathy in us than boiling a
lobster, and mush less than boiling another person, because of differences in
expressiveness.
Two empirical processes
tend to confirm our image of the pattern of evolution. One is the importance of
negative evidence. We have never found the skeleton of a mammal in the Cambrian
rocks, or the remains of an automobile in any human deposit of more than a
hundred years ago.
Negative evidence
is always theoretically a little insecure, and if we found the remains of a
spaceship and an extraterrestrial being in some part of the world entombed in
ancient mud, it would radically change our image of the past. Still, until it
is contradicted, negative evidence has to be taken very seriously. And the
negative evidence for the evolutionary arrow is very strong: in fact, up to
now, indubitable.
A second empirical
clue is the parallel between the records and durable deposits which are made by
existing systems and the durable deposits of the past. The
fact that oysters exist in the present means that when we find an old oyster
shell we have a very strong suspicion that it was an oyster that produced it.
If we discovered a planet on which life was extinct but had left a fossil
record, we would find this record much harder to interpret than the one we find
on our own planet.
The question of
what it is in the system of evolution which gives us a directionality or a
“time’s arrow” in these various dimensions is a difficult question and by no
means fully answered. Why, for instance, did the process of mutation and
selection in biological organisms not produce a genetic equilibrium long ago in
which all mutations were adverse?
There may well
have been times in the evolutionary process when biological change was very
slow and something like a genetic equilibrium seems almost to have been
reached. A very interesting question here is the role of catastrophe in the
process of evolution. Certainly some kind of catastrophe is indicated when one
geological era gives place to the next. There are frequently extinctions of
large species and then a sudden burst of evolutionary development.
An important
concept here is that of the “empty niche” - that is, a species that would have
a positive population in an ecosystem if it existed. If an empty niche is
filled, of course, whether by mutation or by migration, this changes all the
other niches in the system, expanding some and contracting others, with perhaps
some odd populations going to zero and becoming extinct. It is clear, for
instance, that presettlement
The directionality
of the evolutionary process can be explained, in part at any rate, by the
hypothesis that there are more likely to be empty niches at the “top” – that
is, for species of greater complexity, control, or consciousness, than there
are at the bottom, where the niches for the simpler species are likely already
to have been filled. Once a mutation fills an empty niche at the top, however,
this may create empty niches for still more complex species, as the “top”
itself expands.
Once biological
evolution had produced the human race, a whole new pattern set in, though very
slowly at first. We can trace creations of evolutionary potential in the past,
such as the development of DNA and life itself, the transition of anaerobic to
aerobic organisms, transition to multicellular organisms,
the development of sex, the movement from sea to land,
the development of the vertebrate skeleton, and so on.
The coming of the
human race is undoubtedly one of these. With this, evolution went into a new
gear in terms of human artifacts, which are of three kinds. The first are
“things” - material objects, from the first eolith and chipped flint, through
clothing, houses, pottery, metal wares, and ships, to computers and space
probes. Second, going along with these and assisting in their production, we
have organizations, from the band and the tribe to the church, the corporation,
the nation state, and the United Nations. Finally, these help to produce by a learning process new categories of persons and
occupational specialists, from hunters and gatherers to farmers, to kings and
computer programmers.
Each of these
artifacts is a species, each of them has a population, each of them interacts
with many others and with biological artifacts, and the physical and chemical
environment. Human artifacts are as much a part of the world ecosystem as are
tuberculosis bacteria and rabbits. The same principles of ecological
interaction under constant change of parameters continue to apply. The same
principle that there are likely to be empty niches for artifacts of greater
complexity, control, and perhaps eventually consciousness, also applies.
There are, of
course, important differences between societal and biological evolution. Each
new phase of evolution introduces new elements into the overall system of change.
Thus, the genetic information which produces biological artifacts is contained
in the organisms themselves. The genetic information which produces human
artifacts is contained in human beings, human organizations, and material
artifacts which are different from the ones produced.
With the advent of
the human race something that might almost be called “super sex” came into
evolution, whereas biological evolution never got beyond two sexes. The
production of human artifacts is “multiparental,” in
the sense that the genetic information which organizes the production of human
artifacts is contained not just in two other artifacts, but in a very large
number of artifacts of great variety – human beings themselves, blue-prints,
libraries, computers, and so on.
This undoubtedly
is the main reason why the development of human artifacts enormously speeded up
the pace of evolution, just as the development of biological sex speeded it up,
simply because of the enormous increased potential not only for change and variety
but also for the spread of the genetic information which organizes the
production of artifacts. The “gene pool” of human artifacts is the whole sphere
of human knowledge in brains, books, and computers spread over the face of the
earth.
The development of
human consciousness also enormously changes the process of evolution.
Biological evolution proceeds on the whole by unconscious interaction and nondialectical processes. Two species, for instance, can be
ecologically competitive or cooperative without either of them being the
slightest degree aware of the other. There is little conscious interaction in
the biosphere, except in sexual selection, in predation, and the avoidance of
predation. This rises in importance with the higher animals, but it is still
fairly minor in its effects.
With the human
race, conscious interaction becomes of greater importance and the niches for
human artifacts are determined in part by consciousness, for instance by the
demand for them and by human images of the future.
Finally, we come
to economics, with which this book is mainly concerned. Economic life is
essentially a subset, and a fairly large one at that, of total human activity
in history. We should expect it, therefore, to follow the general principles
which govern the evolution of humans and human society, and we should also
expect it to have some peculiarities of its own.
Economics deals
with that portion of human activity, as we shall see, which deals with the
production, consumption, distribution, and exchange of economic goods. To this
old taxonomy, I would add storage and enjoyment of stocks of economic goods,
with production and consumption being merely the additions to and the
subtractions from these stocks. We can think of economic goods, therefore, as part
of the general ecosystem of the world.
Any good with an
existing stock clearly has a niche of some sort, although that may be very
temporary. Then the ecological interaction provides a selective mechanism. In
the case of economic goods, this is very powerfully affected by the attitudes
of human beings toward them.
Thus, an economic
good for which there is no demand will have no niche in the system. Mutation in
economic goods consists of the constant invention of new ones. This has gone on
from the beginning of the human race. Many of these new goods do not find a
niche and do not survive; others have a niche and expand into the system, with
consequent changes in all the other niches.
In the case of
economic goods the ecological interaction is mediated strongly though the price
system, as we shall see. It is also mediated by such things as populations of
financial instruments which exhibit interest rates, profit rates, and so on.
These have little or no counterpart in the biosphere. We also find phenomena
like unemployment, labor markets, inflation, and so on, which,
again, have no counterpart in the biosphere.
Nevertheless, we
shall find the evolutionary perspective extreme illuminating in explaining the
ongoing processes of economic life and its political and social environment.
Economics has rested too long in an essentially Newtonian paradigm of
mechanical equilibrium and mechanical dynamics.
Oddly enough, as
we shall see, economics had something to do with developing the evolutionary
perspective. In a very real sense, Adam Smith and Malthus were evolutionary
theorists, and so was Alfred Marshall. It was Walras
and his successors who mathematicized so successfully
the Newtonian system that the evolutionary perspective was lost.