Synergistic Selection

How Cooperation Has Shaped Evolution and the Rise of Humankind

Peter Corning

• Publisher: WSPC
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9789813230958
• Topic: Ciencias biológicas
• Subtopic: Evolución

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"Nothing about the evolution of biological complexity makes sense except in the light of synergy." Peter Corning's new book is being hailed as a major contribution to what is perhaps the greatest shift in our understanding of evolution since The Origin of Species. It's a tour de force that takes us on a synergy-guided tour of the history of life. As Corning puts it, "life on Earth has been a synergistic phenomenon from the get go." Corning also shows how synergy has been a key to human evolution, including the rise of complex modern societies. "Cooperation may have been the vehicle, but synergy was the driver." As we now face a tipping point and another major transition in evolution, Corning offers us a synergy-based road-map to the future. "One of the great take-home lessons from the epic of evolution is that cooperation produces synergy, and synergy is the way forward. The arc of evolution bends toward synergy."

--> Contents:

• Explaining Complexity
• A New View of Evolution
• How Cooperation Trumps Competition
• Evolution as a "Combination of Labor"
• A Tale of Two Theories
• The Major Transitions in Evolution
• The Self-Made Man I: Australopithecine Entrepreneurs
• The Self-Made Man II: From erectus to Homo sapiens
• The Rise of Complex Societies
• The Next Major Transition

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--> Readership: Undergraduate, graduate students and the general public interested in general science, general life sciences, evolutionary biology, human biology/anthropology/primatology, and public policy. -->
Keywords:Synergy;Cooperation;Complexity;Evolution;Natural Selection;Human Evolution;Major Transitions in Evolution;Cultural Evolution;Multi-Level SelectionReview:

"This magnificent book reveals the critical role of synergy in evolution and in all of biology, including especially in humankind. Synergy is fundamental in so many areas of science and knowledge. And in his final chapter, on how to change our current dysfunctional course as a species and avoid the destruction of our planet, Peter Corning offers us a unique and hopeful new vision."

Anthony Trewavas, FRS
Emeritus Professor, Institute of Molecular Plant Science, University of Edinburgh and
author of Plant Behaviour and Intelligence

"Peter Corning's approach is wise and he is astonishingly well read. The scope of his excellent book is broad and ambitious, running from the origins of life to modern economics in human societies. Many of his examples are described in clear and fascinating detail... He writes extremely well and I read every word with great pleasure and interest... I am full of admiration and strongly recommend it."

Sir Patrick Bateson, FRS
Emeritus Professor of Biology, Cambridge University
president of the Zoological Society of London and
the author of (among others) Behaviour, Development and Evolution

"This is an important book. It offers a solution to a problem that has been central to evolutionary biology for half a century, with implications that reach down to the foundations of evolutionary theory. Corning argues that the huge and disproportionate advantages that arise when labor is combined could account for the rise of ever higher levels of organization in the history of life. The book is also well written, a pleasure to read."

Daniel W McShea
Professor of Biology, Duke University and
co-author of Biology's First Law

"Peter Corning's book is a marvelous addition to the growing literature about the emerging alternative to gene-centric neo-Darwinism in evolutionary biology. We would not exist were it not for the cooperative behaviour of living organisms, from microorganisms to the largest mammals and trees. The progressive evolution of multiple levels of organisation in living systems has harnessed blind chance. This book tells you how (and why) this occurred."

Denis Noble, CBE, FRS, FRCP, FMedSci
Burden Sanderson Chair of Cardiovascular Physiology, Oxford University, Emeritus, and
author of (among others) The Music of Life

"Evolution is the story of the development of complex organic and social systems. The key to understanding this complexity, Peter Corning shows, is synergy — fitness-enhancing cooperation among heterogeneous parts. Synergistic Selection draws on the broad history of evolutionary thinking and is buttressed by contemporary empirical evidence. It is an eloquent refutation of the standard story of 'selfish genes.' While abounding in biological detail, Synergistic Selection is easily accessible to a lay audience."

Herbert Gintis
External Professor, Santa Fe Institute and
co-author of (among others) A Cooperative Species

"Peter Corning's new book presents a grand view of evolution and highlights the role of synergy in the accelerating complexity of our modern world. From this vantage point, he is able to cast new light on some of the major challenges of our century — from economic inequality and political governance to climate change."

Geoffrey Hodgson
Research Professor of Business Studies, University of Hertfordshire
editor-in-chief of the Journal of Institutional Economics and
author of (among others) Conceptualizing Capitalism

"Peter Corning has once again given us a book that not only expertly summarizes the current state of the art in evolutionary biology, it also points the way to a compelling new understanding of how we arrived at our place in the natural world."

John M Gowdy
Professor of Economics and Professor of Science and Technology Studies, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and
co-author of Paradise for Sale

" Synergistic Selection is an important contribution to our understanding of evolution... An essential read at the intersection of science, inspiration, and sustainability."

Michael Dowd
author of Thank God for Evolution and
host of "The Future Is Calling Us to Greatness"

"A brilliant, timely, and much needed contribution."

David Korten
co-founder & Board Chair of YES! Magazine and
author of When Corporations Rule the World

"In his new book Synergistic Selection, Peter Corning explains in an elegant and detailed way the rise of complexity in living systems over time and the major transitions in evolution. The book moves beyond neo-Darwinism and challenges the traditional selectionist approach, focusing on the role of additional evolutionary mechanisms associated with functional synergies and the emergence of evolutionary novelties."

Professor Francisco Carrapiço
University of Lisbon, Portugal

"In this wide-ranging and intelligent book, Peter Corning presents a grand view of the evolution of complexity, eloquently arguing that it is based on the cumulative combination of the effects of cooperation — on synergies among systems. He provides an inclusive synthesis of evolutionary theory, re-interpreting classical views of Darwinian and Lamarckian evolution in terms of evolving synergetic interactions, and offers a new way of thinking about the major transitions in evolution and about human evolution. Brave, well-written, and based on more than thirty years of deep reflection, Corning's vision stretches onto the future of our planet and our species and suggests new ways of anticipating and facing them."

Professor Eva Jablonka
Tel-Aviv University and
co-author of (among others) Evolution in Four Dimensions
Key Features:

• It is an in-depth treatment of a still little-known Darwinian theory of complexity in living systems that is focused on the causal role of synergy in evolution
• The book also highlights the important causal role of behavior in evolution, and it offers a new theory about human evolution called the Self-Made Man Scenario

Chapter 1

Explaining Complexity

If nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution – to paraphrase the pioneering twentieth century biologist Theodosius Dobzhansky – it’s equally true that nothing about the evolution of biological complexity makes sense except in the light of synergy.¹

Natural selection is a clever and immensely useful concept. It has provided us with a general theoretical framework for understanding how life has evolved over the past 3.8 billion years or so, and it is probably one of the best-known ideas in all of science (although it’s often misunderstood – more on this later on).

However, Darwin’s theory does not provide an explanation for the rise of biological complexity – one of the most consequential trends in the history of life on Earth. The trajectory of biological “complexification” – from primitive one-celled life forms to intricate eukaryotes, elaborate multicellular organisms, and, finally, a highly intelligent, tool using, sociable, loquacious biped – requires an additional explanatory principle.

Over the years there have been countless non-Darwinian theories about this important evolutionary trend. Perhaps the earliest “modern” theorist to advance the idea that there is an inherent tendency in nature toward increased complexity was the eighteenth to nineteenth century naturalist Jean-Baptiste de Lamarck.² (I will have much more to say about Lamarck in Chapter 5.) A half century later, the renowned English polymath Herbert Spencer elevated the idea into a “universal law of evolution” that encompassed everything from physics to ethics.³

Darwin was strongly opposed to such deterministic theories, needless to say. In The Origin of Species he wrote “I believe in no fixed law of development.”⁴ And again, “I believe…in no necessary law of development.”⁵ However, Darwin never specifically addressed the evolution of complexity as such, nor even – more notoriously – the origin of species. (Of course, he was fascinated by complex organs, such as the human eye, and suggested how these might have emerged over time from simpler forms.)

Many generations of biology students have learned that Darwin was a convinced gradualist who frequently quoted the popular canon of his day, natura non facit saltum – nature does not make leaps. The phrase appears no less than five times in The Origin of Species.⁶ Although Darwin provided us with many insights about the evolutionary process, he left it to future generations to explain biological complexity.

For this reason, many post-Darwin scholars viewed his theory as insufficient, or at least incomplete, and in the early twentieth century the so-called theory of emergent evolution was advanced as a way of reconciling Darwin’s gradualism with the appearance of “qualitative novelties” and, equally important, with the long-term trend in evolution toward new levels of organization and complexity.

Emergent evolution theory had several prominent advocates, but the leading figure in this movement was the comparative psychologist and prolific writer, Conwy Lloyd Morgan.⁷ Unfortunately, Lloyd Morgan portrayed the evolutionary process as an unfolding of inherent tendencies, which he ascribed to divine creation. His vision was, of course, rejected by the biologists of his day.

A Minor Dark Age

But far more damaging to the emergent evolution theory was the rise of the science of genetics in the 1920s and 1930s, along with the seminal theoretical work of Ronald Fisher, J.B.S. Haldane, Sewall Wright and others, and the triumph of an analytical, experimental method in biology. During what, in retrospect, was a minor dark age for complexity theory that spanned much of the twentieth century, a reductionist, gene-centered, incremental approach to evolution prevailed. Biologists mainly treated complexity as a non-problem, or an epiphenomenon. It did not require any special explanation. Evolution was all about the machinations of “selfish genes,” according the biologist/popularizer Richard Dawkins. (What is commonly known as neo-Darwinism will be discussed in Chapter 5.)

To be sure, there were a few “points of light” during this era. Most notable was the discussion of complexity by J.B.S. Haldane and Julian Huxley in their pioneering 1927 textbook Animal Biology.⁸ Also significant was the early work on the evolution of complexity by biologists G. Evelyn Hutchinson and John Tyler Bonner.⁹ In the latter part of the twentieth century, the biologist Lynn Margulis became a champion for the role of “symbiogenesis” in evolution – especially in relation to the origin of eukaryotic cells but also more broadly.¹⁰ Margulis viewed symbiosis as a major cause of increased complexity in living systems over time.¹¹

The Re-emergence of Emergence

The rise of the complexity theory movement toward the end of the twentieth century, inspired by new mathematical modeling tools, gave rise to a new generation of non-Darwinian evolutionary theorists, mainly outside of biology. For instance, the computer scientist and algorithm pioneer John Holland, in his 1998 book Emergence, asked: “How do living systems emerge from the laws of physics and chemistry…Can we explain consciousness as an emergent property of certain kinds of physical systems?”¹²

Elsewhere in the book Holland proposed what amounted to the antithesis of the entropy law (the Second Law of Thermodynamics), namely, an inherent tendency of matter to organize itself. Holland illustrated with a metaphor. Chess, he said, is a game in which “a small number of rules or laws can generate surprising complexity.”¹³ Biological complexity arises from similar (still hidden) rules, he suggested.

The well-known theoretical biologist Stuart Kauffman in his early writings also aspired to discover the underlying laws of evolution, although he too could only offer us a promissory note. In his popular 1995 book, At Home in the Universe, Kauffman asserted that “order is not accidental, that vast veins of order lie at hand. Laws of complexity spontaneously generate much of the order of the natural world…. Order, vast and generative, arises naturally.”¹⁴ He called it “order for free.” In a later book, Kauffman also speculated about a possible “fourth law of thermodynamics,” an inherent, energy-driven tendency in nature toward greater diversity and complexity.¹⁵

There have been innumerable variations on this theme in recent years, with various self-organizing principles being proposed as the engine of complexity.¹⁶ These theories could all be called reductionist in the sense that they posit some underlying force, agency, tendency, or “law” that is said to determine the course of evolution, or at least the evolution of greater complexity, independently of natural selection.

The problem is that these theories explain away the very thing that needs to be explained – namely, the contingent nature of living systems and their fundamentally functional, adaptive properties. The purveyors of these theories often seem oblivious to the inescapable challenges associated with what Darwin called the “struggle for existence” in the natural world, and they discount the economics – the costs and benefits of complexity. Nor can they explain the fact that some 99 percent of all the species that have ever evolved are now extinct. They are re-inventing a wheel that has no spokes.

“A Grand Unified Theory”

Over the course of the past two decades, however, the subject of complexity has finally emerged as a major theme within mainstream evolutionary biology, and a search has been underway for “a Grand Unified Theory” – as biologist Daniel McShea characterizes it – that is consistent with Darwin’s great vision.¹⁷

As it happens, such a theory already exists. It was first proposed in The Synergism Hypothesis: A Theory of Progressive Evolution in 1983, and it involves an economic (or perhaps bioeconomic) theory of complexity.¹⁸ Simply stated, cooperative interactions of various kinds, however they may occur, can produce novel combined effects – synergies – with functional advantages that may, in turn, become direct causes of natural selection. The focus of the Synergism Hypothesis is on the favorable selection of synergistic “wholes” and the combinations of genes that produce these wholes. The parts (and their genes) that create these synergies may, in effect, become interdependent units of evolutionary change.¹⁹

In other words, the Synergism Hypothesis is a theory about the unique combined effects produced by the relationships between things. I refer to it as Holistic Darwinism because it’s entirely consistent with the natural selection theory, properly understood (see Chapter 2).²⁰

Accordingly, it’s the functional (economic) benefits associated with various kinds of synergistic effects in any given context that are the underlying cause of cooperative relationships – and of complex organization – in the natural world. The synergy produced by the whole provides the proximate functional payoffs that may differentially favor the survival and reproduction of the parts (and their genes).

Biologist Patrick Bateson illustrates this idea with an analogy. The recipe for a biscuit/cookie is rather like the genome in living systems. It represents a set of instructions for how to make an end-product. A shopper who buys a biscuit/cookie selects the “phenotype” – the end-product, not the recipe. If the recipe survives and the number of cookies multiply over time, it’s only because shoppers like the end-product and are willing to purchase more of them.²¹

Although it may seem like backwards logic, the thesis is that functional synergy is the cause of cooperation and complexity in living systems, not the other way around. To repeat, the Synergism Hypothesis is basically an economic theory of emergent complexity, and it applies equally to biological and cultural evolution – most notably in humankind.²² Indeed, in Chapters 7 and 8 I will propose that social cooperation has been a key to our evolution as a species, and that synergy is the reason why we cooperate. In a very real sense, we invented ourselves.²³

Synergistic Selection

Biologists John Maynard Smith and Eörs Szathmáry, in their pathbreak...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedicaton
• Foreword
• Contents
• 1. Explaining Complexity
• 2. A New View of Evolution
• 3. How Cooperation Trumps Competition
• 4. Evolution as a “Combination of Labor”
• 5. A Tale of Two Theories
• 6. The Major Transitions in Evolution
• 7. The Self-Made Man I: Australopithecine Entrepreneurs
• 8. The Self-Made Man II: From erectus to Homo sapiens
• 9. The Rise of Complex Societies
• 10. The Next Major Transition
• References
• Index