Limitations Of Evolutionary Psychology

Evolutionary Psychology
This paper addresses a fundamental limitation in most attempts to apply the findings of evolutionary psychology to the human condition. Most attempts focus on how our biological past constrains and limits our behavioural options (including our cognitive abilities). They generally fail to look at whether these constraints can be overcome in our future evolution. To date, evolutionary psychology has not satisfactorily addressed a key question: are we beings forever constrained by our biological past, or can we acquire new psychological software that will enable us to become self-evolving organisms - beings that are able to adapt in whatever ways are necessary for future evolutionary success, largely unfettered by our biological and social past? This paper is directed squarely at addressing this issue.
The answer to this issue is highly relevant to the nature/nurture debate. This debate will eventually dissolve to the extent that humans are capable of acquiring psychological skills that enable them to modify and overcome their genetic and cultural predispositions. To the extent that individuals acquire and apply these skills, neither nature nor nurture will control their behaviour and cognition.

In my view, a comprehensive
approach to psychological evolution will not be restricted to examining only our biological past. It cannot ignore the fact that we are evolutionary work-in-progress. It must also look at our present and future psychological evolution. Only when it does so will evolutionary psychology fully qualify as scientific by being predictive in the widest sense.

FUTURE PSYCHOLOGICAL EVOLUTION
John Stewart

ABSTRACT: Humans are able to construct mental representations and models of possible interactions with their environment. They can use these mental models to identify actions that will enable them to achieve their adaptive goals. But humans do not use this capacity to identify and implement the actions that would contribute most to the evolutionary success of humanity. In general, humans do not find motivation or satisfaction in doing so, no matter how effective the actions might be in evolutionary terms. From an evolutionary perspective, this is a significant limitation in the psychological adaptability of humans. This paper sets out to identify the new psychological capacity that would be needed to overcome this limitation and how the new capacity might be acquired.
1. INTRODUCTION
Is the psychological evolution of humanity at an endpoint? Or are there limitations and deficiencies in our psychological capacities that could drive further evolution? Are there, for example, new forms of psychological software that humans could acquire to improve our ability to adapt to whatever challenges face us in the future?
One way we can begin to answer this question is to ask whether there are blind spots in our current psychological capacities. Are our existing abilities to discover and implement useful adaptive behaviours seriously limited? Are we unable to explore areas of the space of adaptive possibilities?
If we discover that there are limitations in our current psychological capacities, we can then ask whether these can be overcome by changes to our psychological software. Can our psychological adaptability be improved by, for example, the acquisition of new psychological skills and capacities? Can these be developed through learning and appropriate experiences?
If we find that there are limitations, and if these can only be overcome by changes to our psychological software, we can then ask whether humans are likely to make these changes. Will we do what is required to develop the software? Will we be motivated to make whatever effort is necessary to evolve our psychology? Or are humans caught in an evolutionary predicament—are we unable to make these psychological improvements because of the limitations in our psychological adaptability?
We begin in section 2 by identifying significant limitations in our current psychological capacities. Section 3 of the paper examines how these could be overcome by the acquisition of new psychological abilities, and section 4 assesses the likelihood that humans will develop these capacities.
2. CURRENT PSYCHOLOGICAL LIMITATIONS
What are the strengths and weaknesses of our current psychological adaptive capacities?
Our main strength compared with other organisms is our ability to use mental models to discover and implement useful adaptations (see, for example, Popper, 1972 and Dennett, 1995). Instead of having to try out alternative actions in practice, humans can use mental models to predict the effects of the alternatives. Using representations of ourselves and of our environment, we can try out possible adaptations mentally. This significantly reduces the need for costly trial and error, and enables us to take account of the (predicted) future consequences of our actions.
Our ability to test alternative behaviours mentally is the basis of our capacity to plan ahead, imagine alternatives, invent and adapt technology, build structures such as houses and roads, radically modify our external environment for our adaptive goals, establish long-term objectives, imagine how we might change the world, develop strategic plans, design projects and undertake activities that pay off only in the future, such as plant crops and feed animals.
The acquisition of language greatly enhanced our capacity for mental modelling. Language and associated forms of communication enabled humans to share the knowledge that is used to construct useful models of reality. All members of a society could eventually acquire and use the knowledge discovered by any individual. This enabled knowledge to be accumulated across the generations. The progressive accumulation of knowledge has enabled humans to model more accurately a greater range of interactions with our environment, and to predict the consequences of our actions over wider scales of space and time (Stewart, 1995). This has enabled us to discover more effective ways of achieving our adaptive goals.
Our ability to construct and manipulate models has also improved as we have learnt to augment our mental abilities with external artefacts such as pen and paper, books, recording devices, computers and other forms of artificial intelligence.
Our mental adaptability can be expected to continue to improve as humanity accumulates more knowledge about how the external world responds to our interventions and as artificial intelligence is developed further.
In principle, we could use mental modelling to greatly enhance our evolutionary adaptability. We could use mental modelling to discover and implement adaptations that are best for humanity in evolutionary terms. We could do this by using modelling to identify the future consequences of alternative actions, including their evolutionary effects. This would enable us to determine which actions would contribute best to the evolutionary success of humanity. We would be as effective at discovering the best adaptations as our models allowed. As our modelling capacity improved, humanity would be able to adapt successfully to a wider range of evolutionary challenges.
The use of mental modelling for evolutionary adaptation would easily outperform gene-based natural selection. Genetic evolution is largely blind and operates by trial and error. It has no capacity to predict the future effects of alternative adaptations and to use these predictions to identify the best adaptation. Furthermore, genetic evolution cannot learn and accumulate knowledge throughout the life of the individual. And it is unable to establish adaptations that benefit only future generations and not the organism itself [and its genes] (see for example, Stewart, 1997a). Once a species has accumulated sufficient knowledge, the use of mental modelling for evolutionary adaptation would enable it to adapt to a much wider range of events than a similar species that evolves genetically.
However we do not use our mental modelling in this way. We do not use it to discover and implement the adaptations that will deliver evolutionary success to humanity. Most humans are unconcerned about the evolutionary consequences of their actions. Instead we use the enormous power of mental modelling to see how we can act on the world to produce desirable psychological states and avoid unpleasant ones. For most this means using modelling to pursue sex, wealth, satisfying relationships, social status, fame and so on.
An evolutionary perspective helps explain this state of affairs. As we have seen, evolution would favour species that use mental modelling for evolutionary adaptation. Once such a species emerged, it would flourish. But evolution was not able to produce this capacity immediately in the evolution of life on Earth. A brain that is capable of mental modelling took a very long time to evolve by the blind trial-and-error of genetic evolution.
Until mental modelling evolved, gene-based natural selection had to find simpler arrangements to adapt organisms during their life. The simplest way to achieve this was to fit out the organism with arrangements that discovered adaptations by trial and error. These arrangements would make changes in the organism until a change is made that is found to be adaptive in evolutionary terms. But what arrangements within the organism could ‘know’ whether a particular change is adaptive? The answer is easy to see when the event to which the organism must adapt disrupts the effective functioning of the organism—changes can be tested on the basis of their ability to restore effective functioning (Ashby, 1960). For example, an organism trying to outrun a predator might deplete the oxygen in its leg muscles below the level needed for peak performance. Increases in the organism’s heart rate could be tried out until oxygen levels are restored and the leg muscles are able to perform effectively again. But this method will not work when an adaptive change produces only future benefits to the organism, and does not produce any immediate improvement within the organism (Beer, 1972). Examples include actions that organize sexual reproduction, and much of the behaviour that protects social status within a group. Neither of these generates any immediate benefits to the organism that could be used as indicators of the usefulness of the behaviour.
How could gene-based natural selection organise an organism so that changes that produce no immediate benefit to the organism, but produce evolutionary benefits in the longer term, would be selected as adaptations?
How could possible adaptations be tested within the organism to identify those that produced benefits only in the longer term? The simplest way is to test them against proxies for future evolutionary success. Natural selection could fit out organisms with a system of internal goals and rewards whose satisfaction is correlated with evolutionary success. Possible adaptations would be tested within the organism against their ability to achieve the internal goals or rewards (Frank, 1988. See also Stewart,
1997b).
Such an organism would spend its life pursuing these internal rewards and goals. This would be experienced by the organism as responding to motivations and to emotional states and impulses. The genetic evolutionary mechanism would tune these so that when the organism pursued its internal rewards, it would act in a way consistent with evolutionary success. For example, actions that organise sexual reproduction could be rewarded with pleasurable feelings, and behaviour that could destroy an individual’s reputation within its social group could be deterred by unpleasant feelings of guilt.
Until they acquire a capacity for mental modelling, organisms have to be organised in this way to pursue proxies for evolutionary success. But even when mental modelling finally emerges, organisms would still have to be organised to pursue the goals established by their internal reward system. This is because mental modelling will be grafted on to an organism whose adaptation is already organised by an internal motivation and reward system. Gene-based natural selection can only build on whatever is already available. Furthermore, mental modelling will not have the capability to immediately take over the adaptation of the organism. The organisms would not have accumulated the detailed knowledge and information needed for their models to be able to predict the future consequences of a wide range of alternative actions—modelling will be less effective than the pre-existing motivation and reward systems at discovering the best adaptations (Stewart, 2000).
But mental modelling will still provide immediate advantages. It enables the organism to find better ways of achieving its internal rewards and motivations. The organism can use mental models to identify the behaviours that will be best at achieving outcomes that produce desirable internal states. Initially mental modelling will not establish the adaptive goals of the organism—it begins as a servant of the pre-existing motivation and reward systems.
However, clashes and contradictions will begin to emerge as the superior adaptive potential of mental modelling begins to be realised (Stewart, 2000). As the organisms accumulate knowledge they will be able to predict the consequences of alternative behaviours more accurately and further into the future. The modelling capacity will begin to suggest different adaptations to those supported by the pre-existing internal reward system. The superior adaptive ability of mental modelling will enable the organism to see that particular behaviours are in its interests, but the behaviours are not motivated or rewarded by its pre-existing systems. In some circumstances, its pre-existing systems may strongly motivate behaviours that the organism now sees are against its interests. Increasingly as knowledge accumulates, what the organism wants to do (as motivated by its pre-existing systems) will clash with what it sees mentally is in its interests, particularly in the longer term.
Eventually the organisms are likely to accumulate sufficient knowledge to model and understand the evolutionary processes that have produced them. They will begin to understand that the clashes they are experiencing between their adaptive systems are symptoms of their participation in a major evolutionary transition. They will see that they are located in a sequence that has the potential to move from an organism that is organised by evolution to pursue proxies for evolutionary success, to an organism that uses mental modelling to consciously identify and implement whatever actions will contribute most to the evolutionary success of the species.
It is possible to locate humanity within this sequence. As we have already noted, humans are not yet an organism that uses mental modelling to adapt in whatever ways are needed for evolutionary success. We are not motivated to do so—the evolutionary consequences of our actions are largely irrelevant to us. Instead we use our mental modelling to work out how to achieve the goals set by our internal reward and motivation system—goals that humans have been fitted out with by natural selection and that are modified to a limited extent by conditioning during their upbringing.
We spend our lives pursuing desirable psychological states such as those associated with popularity, self-esteem, sex, feelings of uniqueness, power, food, and social status, and we try to avoid undesirable psychological states such as those associated with stress, guilt, depression, loneliness, hunger, and shame. It is of little or no concern to us whether these proxies for evolutionary success in fact encourage behaviour that will bring evolutionary success. When our evolutionary interests clash with our motivations and emotional responses, our evolutionary interests lose out. In this way, our motivation and reward system severely constrains how we are able to adapt and what we can choose to do.
But humans are increasingly encountering situations where our mental models suggest different adaptations to those motivated by our pre-existing internal reward systems. Our mental models are becoming sophisticated enough to out-perform our internal reward system in many situations. For example, many find that we are motivated to eat larger quantities of high-fat food than we know is in our longer–term health interests. Many find that rather than do the study that we see is needed to enhance our career prospects, we are more strongly motivated to spend our time doing other things. We cannot easily change personality traits and habits that we see are against our interests. Few of us can effortlessly ‘turn the other cheek’ even when we can see mentally that it is in our interests to do so. We find it very hard to do things we are not motivated to do.
However, humanity in general has not yet developed a comprehensive capacity to resolve these conflicts. When we see that our motivations and emotional responses are causing us to behave contrary to our interests, we cannot just change our motivations or override them. In general, humans have a very limited ability to consciously change their motivations and emotional responses to align them with the findings of their mental models. Increasingly humans are discovering that although a particular course of action provides immediate emotional rewards, it is not in their longer-term interests. However, the fact that we can see this does not automatically empower us to change the way we will respond emotionally, or enable us to choose to be more highly motivated to pursue our longer-term interests. Humans have no comprehensive capacity to align their internal reward and motivation system with whatever goals they may set using their mental models (Stewart, 2000).
If we could align our motivations with our mental goals, it would mean that once we used our mental modelling to identify a long-term goal, we would be able to find motivation and satisfaction in whatever we had to do to pursue the goal. Behaviour that was normally highly motivated and rewarding would no longer be so if we saw that it conflicted with our central goal. We would be able to effortlessly defer immediate gratification whenever it was in our longer-term interests to do so. We would be able to change the emotional responses and motivations that entrench any personality traits and cognitive patterns that stand in the way of achieving our goals.
Far from being able to consciously change our likes, dislikes, motivations and emotional responses, we are barely aware of them and their effects on our behaviour. We tend to look out the world and see how we can change it to achieve desired emotional states, rather than look inwardly and see how we can change our emotional states. We tend to take our emotional responses and motivations as fixed and given, rather than as things we can control consciously (Stewart, 1997b). Instead of seeing our motivations, values, likes, dislikes and personality traits as limiting our adaptability, we see them as defining who we are.
The burgeoning self-help and human potential literature is evidence that humans are experiencing these conflicts, and that we do not yet have a comprehensive ability to resolve them in our interests. This is underlined by the findings of a comprehensive survey of self-help literature undertaken by Covey (1989): much of the literature is directed at techniques to enable individuals to reduce the power of motivations and emotional responses that clash with their longer-term interests (e.g. techniques for deferring immediate gratification), and is directed at techniques to enable individuals to find satisfaction and motivation in the pursuit of longer-term objectives. He also found that many religious practices (hymns, mediation, prayer etc) serve these functions.
In summary, humans do not have the ability to align their internal reward and motivation system with goals of their choosing. They are unable to choose to find satisfaction and motivation in whatever adaptations will serve these goals. If humans had such a capacity, they could choose to implement whatever actions would advance the evolutionary success of humanity, and they would find satisfaction and motivation in this. Without such a capacity, we are not able to implement many adaptations that are in the evolutionary interests of humanity. We continue to spend our lives pursuing internal rewards and motivations established by our evolutionary and social past, even though we now are equipped with a capacity for mental modelling that is increasingly superior in adaptive terms. The immensely powerful technologies humanity is developing such as genetic engineering and artificial intelligence are being harnessed to serve our internal reward and motivation systems, not to advance our evolutionary potential.
For these reasons, our psychological adaptability is fundamentally limited in evolutionary terms. Adaptations exist that are superior in evolutionary terms, we can see that they are superior, but we do not implement them. Our motivations and emotional responses severely constrain what we can do. Because of this psychological limitation, humanity is not yet able to take advantage of the superior ability of mental modelling to discover and implement the most effective adaptations. We can see that it is potentially far superior to gene-based natural selection, but are unable to exploit this potential. 3. CAN THESE PSYCHOLOGICAL LIMITATIONS BE OVERCOME?
Can humanity overcome its current psychological limitations? Rather than continue to pursue only internal proxies for evolutionary success, can humanity develop the capacity to use mental models to identify and implement whatever adaptations are best in evolutionary terms? Can we, for example, develop new psychological software that will enable us to align our internal rewards and motivations with whatever actions are identified by our mental modelling as being in our evolutionary interests?
The theory of metasystem transitions developed by Turchin (1977) points to the type of psychological reorganisation that might overcome these limitations. Turchin’s theory deals in large part with the evolution of new adaptive capabilities in organisms. He suggests that these typically emerge when a new level of control arises that manages a collection of pre-existing adaptive processes. The new level of control might, for example, manage the pre-existing processes so that they henceforth serve a new adaptive objective. The new controller would align the goals and operation of the pre-existing processes with the new adaptive requirement. The result would be a new metasystem S’ in which sub systems Si (the pre-existing adaptive processes) are integrated by a new mechanism ‘C’ that controls the Si. The emergence of the new system S’ is a metasystem transition (MST). Turchin demonstrates that the emergence of learning, association and other key milestones in the evolution of adaptability in organisms can be usefully interpreted within this framework.
This framework suggests how the current psychological limitations of humanity might be overcome. Humans would need to develop a new psychological structure (‘C’ within the above framework) that is able to manage and control their internal reward and motivation system. The new structure would use mental modelling to identify the actions that would contribute best to the evolutionary success of humanity, and it would manage the pre-existing adaptive processes so they motivate and reward those actions.
We can draw on the work of Conant and Ashby (1970) to identify one of the key capacities that the new psychological structure must have if it is to manage the pre-existing adaptive processes effectively. Conant and Ashby demonstrated that if a regulator is to regulate a complex system effectively, it must include a model of the system. So the new psychological structure would have to develop models of the operation of the pre-existing adaptive processes themselves. To develop these models, the new structure would have to acquire knowledge about the pre-existing adaptive processes, how they operate, what effects they have on behaviour, and how their operation could be modified, influenced and managed. Emotional states, motivations and other elements of the pre-existing adaptive processes would have to become the objects of consciousness.
This suggests that the emergence of the new psychological structure would have to involve the turning of attention inwards—individuals would have to develop the capacity to direct their attention inside themselves and become aware of their mental, emotional and physical states. What evidence is there that humans can develop such an ability, and what might it lead to? We can begin to answer this question by examining the experiences of individuals who carry out the practice of introspective meditation. A significant part of this practice involves individuals directing their awareness and attention at their internal mental and other states. Meditators report that they can enter a state in which there is a clear distinction between the flow of thought and feelings on the one hand, and the "I" that observes these on the other—the meditator is aware of herself as an observing "I" that is separate from her emotional states, thoughts and sensations—they arise and pass (see, for example, Deikman, 1996). This state contrasts with much of normal experience in which the "I’ tends to be absorbed in emotional reactions and thoughts and is not aware of itself as separate to them.
Foreman (1998) provides evidence that extended meditation can, at least in some cases, produce this separation between the observing "I" and mental contents during normal life activities. The individual experiences the separation even when not meditating. In this state, thoughts, emotions and sensations as well as things in the external environment are experienced continually as objects of consciousness.
This emergence and strengthening of a self-aware, observing "I" is an important step toward the formation of the new psychological structure that is an essential part of the MST we are interested in. Because the new "I" is separate from mental contents, it can observe the pre-existing adaptive processes in action and accumulate the knowledge needed to model and understand their operation. However, this is only a first step. The observing "I" reported by introspective meditators is largely passive. It does not develop a comprehensive capacity to modify and manage the operation of the pre-existing adapting processes in the pursuit of evolutionary or other objectives. Techniques in addition to meditation are needed to develop a new "I" that has the will and power to do this.
A system of techniques that are specifically claimed to produce such a new "I" has been outlined by Nicol (1980a). Nicol was originally trained in this system by G. I. Gurdjieff and P. D. Ouspensky, but its historical origin is not clear (Moore, 1999). The practices have been taught in various forms in many countries since the 1920’s by a number of groups, some organised internationally (Needham, 1995). However, the system has not been studied and tested systematically by academic psychologists, although a number of the specific practices and insights of the system are very similar to some that have been adopted and developed for use in clinical psychology, cognitive therapy and Neuro-Linguistic Programming (see, for example, Tart, 1986).
The techniques are explicitly directed at developing a new "I" that manages the pre-existing psychological processes of the individual in the service of whatever aims are adopted by the new "I" (Nicol, 1980b). The new "I" or master is produced by a number of practices that begin by functionally separating the individual’s psychology into an observing part and an observed part (Nicol, 1980c). The observing part is the precursor of the new "I" or master. But initially it is a passive and non-judgemental witness of the observed part, broadly equivalent to the observing "I" that is developed through introspective meditation. From the outset, however, the observing "I" produced by Nicol’s techniques is developed during the normal activities of life, rather than through a separate practice such as meditation.
The observed part includes the physical sensations, emotions, motivations, mental images and thoughts that arise as the individual goes about her daily activities and interactions—the observed part is the pre-existing adaptive processes in operation. A key objective of the system is to develop the ability of the observing "I" to stand outside and not be absorbed in the stream of mental contents that comprise the observed part. Separation between the precursor to the new "I" or master and the pre-existing adaptive processes is essential for the eventual development of a master that is functionally independent of the pre-existing processes and that can therefore manage and modify them.
As the new "I" develops, the techniques utilised by the system enable the "I" to accumulate knowledge about the operation of the physical, emotional and mental adaptive processes, the effects they have on behaviour, and how their operation can be modified and influenced to bring their goals into line with the central aims of the new "I". This enables the "I" to develop mental models of the pre-existing processes and how they can be managed. The "I" develops these capacities in much the same way that the individual earlier developed the ability to manage her external environment—the individual first became aware of her external environment and of objects within it, then gradually accumulated knowledge about how the environment responded to her interventions, and used this to develop the capacity to manage external circumstances to achieve her adaptive goals. Now the individual turns her attention inwards and develops the capacity to manage and modify elements of her internal environment.
The new "I" or master that finally emerges is free of the adaptive goals of the pre-existing adaptive processes. It is able to modify these goals to align them with its own goals and objectives. The pre-existing processes no longer operate as constraints or restrictions on what the individual can decide to do. She can now find motivation and emotional satisfaction in whatever activities serve her central aim.
Key techniques and practices that are used by the system to develop the new "I" or master are self-observation, dis-identification, self-remembering, and divided attention.
Self-observation is the lynchpin of the system (Nicol, 1980c). It begins the functional separation of the individual’s psychology into an observing part and an observed part. Self-observation requires the individual to turn her attention inwards and observe the physical sensations, emotional states and thoughts that arise during the normal activities and interactions of every-day life. This process has nothing in common with an individual cataloguing her personality attributes and traits. Instead it involves the individual standing outside and passively observing the actual sensations and states as they arise, in real time.
Self-observation must be passive and non-judgemental to develop full separation between the observing "I" and the operation of the pre-existing adaptive processes. Without this separation, the individual’s "I" will be identified with the thoughts, emotional states and sensations that arise—it will be absorbed in and participate in them; it will not stand outside, observe and ultimately be able to manage them; the individual will continue to be her thoughts and emotional responses. Passive and non-judgemental self-observation helps to ensure that the observing "I" dis-identifies with mental contents.
At first an individual finds it difficult to maintain dis-identified self-observation for any length of time—she will tend to slip back into identification with thoughts or emotional states, and will fail to be able to stand outside or observe them for extended periods.
Self-remembering is an important technique for overcoming this difficulty. It strengthens the developing "I" or master, and renews its functional separation from the pre-existing adaptive processes. In self-remembering the individual simultaneously is aware that she is present and has the aim of developing a new "I" while also being aware of her physical, emotional and mental states. This act of self-remembering enables the individual to dis-identify and separate from the pre-existing processes, and to renew and strengthen self-observation. With practice an individual can enter a state of self-remembering whenever she experiences a strong emotional state that would otherwise control her behaviour. This provides the individual with the opportunity to choose consciously how to act in response to the emotional state.
Divided attention is a practice related to self-remembering in which the individual remains aware that she is aware while observing physical, emotional and mental states and going about normal daily activities.
Self-remembering and divided attention are very important for developing the power of the new "I" to manage the pre-existing processes. Once the emerging new "I" can remain functionally separate from motivations and emotional impulses, and once it can remain aware that it is separate from them and can act independently of them, it can decide whether or not to be influenced by them. Instead of ‘going with’ these impulses as they arise, it can decide not to act on them. Importantly, this functional separation also enables the new "I" to control the disposition of attention. This enables the "I" to direct attention and energy only at activities that serve the aims of the "I". In these ways, the emerging new "I" can begin to consciously free the individual from control by the internal reward system.
But this form of management is limited to working with existing motivations and emotional impulses. To gain full control over its internal reward system, the new "I" must be able to develop motivations and emotional responses appropriate to its goals in circumstances that would not have previously evoked those responses. It must be able to find motivation and satisfaction in all the behaviours and actions needed to achieve its objectives.
The key techniques described by Nicol for the development of this capacity are based on the use of visualisation and the imagination. For example, if the individual wishes to develop new responses and motivations for particular circumstances and activities, the individual would imagine and visualise themselves in the circumstances in ways that evoke the desired responses. The system’s approach is based on the view that individuals cannot control the operation of their emotional and motivational systems by thoughts or by self-talk alone. This view is consistent with the fact that the motivation and emotional system of humans evolved long before humans acquired a capability for language, and before our mental capacities were highly developed. So our emotional responses and motivations are not controlled and evoked by our thinking and by our self-talk. Rather they are evoked by the patterns we perceive in the circumstances we encounter (particularly patterns in social situations). For this reason, the new "I" must learn to communicate with the individual’s motivation and emotional system primarily through images and imagined experiences rather than thoughts alone.
The use of visualisation and imagination in this way is consistent with the ‘re-scripting’ techniques that are identified by Covey (1989) as a common element in many systems of personal development. It is also consistent with the conclusions reached by Cosmides and Tooby (2000) about the evolutionary function of imagined experience in re-weighting emotional responses to particular circumstances.
Through experimentation and self-observation, the emerging "I" builds up a repertoire of skills and techniques for managing the pre-existing adaptive processes. Many of the skills it develops have counterparts in therapeutic systems such as clinical psychology, psychotherapy, hypnotherapy, cognitive therapy and psychoanalysis. However, the essential difference is that in this system, the ‘therapist’ is the new "I" or master—the therapist is internalised as a new psychological structure within the individual.
It is worth emphasising here that the new "I" would not manage the pre-existing emotional and motivational systems by overriding and repressing them. The most effective way it can manage is by letting the pre-existing processes continue to solve the adaptive problems that they have evolved to handle, as far as possible. The new "I" is not in a position to take over their functions entirely. Instead the new "I" will do better if it limits its interventions to adjusting the goals of the pre-existing systems to align them with its own goals and aims. Just as the new "I" would continue to rely on the operation of the adaptive systems that control the individual’s internal physiology, it would also continue to rely on the pre-existing motivation and emotional system. It takes them along with it in pursuit of new objectives. For example, it would continue to use the ability of the emotional system to quickly recognise significant patterns in social situations and in other circumstances. And it would integrate these abilities into the new metasystem for use in other cognitive functions.
In fact, an individual who has developed a new "I" will have more varied and diverse emotional responses than one who has not. This is because the existence of an "I" that can unite the pre-existing processes behind a central aim allows the pre-existing processes to differentiate and diversify where this is beneficial to the central aim—the processes can be more diverse without threatening the coherence of the individual’s psychology. Such a differentiation and diversification of managed sub-systems is a characteristic of all MSTs (Turchin, 1977 and Stewart, 1997c)).
What evidence exists about the effectiveness of the system of techniques and practices outlined by Nicol? As indicated above, there are no systematic third person studies of the use of the practices and of their effects. However, there is an extensive and growing literature of first person reports (for an annotated bibliography see Driscoll, 1985 and 1999). In general, these reports suggest that the use of the practices for only a short period can provide an individual with some experience of what it would be like to develop a new "I" or master—it is relatively easy for an individual to get a "taste" of what it would be like to consciously manage her the pre-existing physical, emotional and mental processes. In particular, it is not difficult for the individual to achieve a state in which she experiences the "I" as standing outside the pre-existing processes, and is able to modify their impact on her behaviour when she chooses. However, to achieve the state on a more or less permanent basis is more difficult: very few report that they have been able to do so, and then only after persistent use of the practices over many years.
The literature does not include any reports of individuals using the system to pursue the goal of future evolutionary success. The original proponents of the system did not promote its use for evolutionary objectives in the sense used in this paper. However the system is obviously capable of being used to enable individuals to adopt and pursue evolutionary ends, or any other aim for that matter. It could be used to produce a psychological transformation that would enable individuals to implement whatever actions would contribute most to the future evolutionary success of humanity. Such a MST would overcome the psychological limitations that currently restrict our evolutionary adaptability. The system of techniques and practices would produce a new "I" or master that could manage the pre-existing physical, emotional and mental adaptive processes so that they will serve the evolutionary ends identified by the new "I". Assisted by mental modelling, the new "I" would use mental modelling to identify the actions that would contribute most to the future evolutionary success of humanity, and would manage the pre-existing processes to ensure that the individual found motivation and satisfaction in taking those actions. Pre-existing motivations, emotional responses, inculcated behaviours, beliefs and habits of thinking would no longer prevent the individual doing what is best in evolutionary terms. The new "I" would be capable of revising any personality traits or behavioural predispositions that would otherwise stand in the way of achieving evolutionary objectives.
The new "I" would also use mental modelling of the individual’s mental processes to search for ways to improve their operation. It would eliminate unproductive and negative habits of thinking, and use mental models of the modelling process itself to improve and adapt the modelling capacity (see, for example, Heylighen, 1991).
In general, the new "I" would be able to revise and recreate the individual’s pre-existing adaptive processes continually through time to meet whatever evolutionary challenges may arise. Humans who successfully worked on themselves to undergo this metasystem transition would become self-evolving beings—organisms that are able to adapt in whatever ways are necessary for future evolutionary success, relatively unfettered by their biological past or by their previous life experiences (Stewart, 2000).

4. WILL HUMANITY OVERCOME ITS PSYCHOLOGICAL LIMITATIONS?
Will humans make the transition to become self-evolving beings? Will we develop the capacity to consciously modify our pre-existing adaptive processes so that we can take whatever actions are best for future evolutionary success?
The key impediment to making this transition it that it is not easy. In the present circumstances with current techniques and practices, significant personal effort, commitment and perseverance is necessary if an individual is to make the transition. For many, the prospect of being able to make a greater contribution to the evolutionary success of humanity is unlikely to provide sufficient motivation for the considerable investment required.
Nevertheless, increasing numbers of individuals are likely to develop the ability to manage their pre-existing adaptive processes, although not initially for evolutionary purposes. This is because the acquisition of this ability can provide immediate benefits to individuals. Individuals will be far more effective at achieving their key goals if they have the ability to align their pre-existing adaptive processes with those goals. They will be able to find satisfaction and motivation in all the actions needed to achieve their goals. In contrast, individuals who do not develop this psychological capacity are far less effective at pursing their goals. They are not able to implement actions that are not motivated and rewarded by their pre-existing processes, even though the actions may be essential for achieving their goals. They are not be able to revise personality traits or habits of thought that stand in the way of achieving their goals.
The advantages accruing to individuals who can manage their pre-existing processes will increase progressively as humans get better at using mental models to foresee the consequences of their actions. As knowledge accumulates, humans will increasingly see situations in which the actions motivated by their internal reward system are inconsistent with their goals. Increasingly their mental modelling will be superior to their pre-existing adaptive systems at identifying the best actions for achieving their goals.
The advantages of self-management will manifest most clearly where humans strongly compete with each other, such as in economic markets. Competition creates winners and losers. Individuals who can use self-management to achieve their competitive goals will have a significant competitive advantage. They will tend to out-compete those who are unable to do so. And the gap will widen as knowledge accumulates and modelling improves. The incentives for the development of self-management will increase.
This is exactly what is occurring in market-based economies. Economic success is increasingly going to those who have some ability to self-manage. It is no accident there is a rapidly growing demand from business for personal development training and literature. Many corporations now train their executives in practices such as Neuro-Linguistic Programming, meditation, techniques designed to improve emotional intelligence and other self-development practices.
The spread of self-management skills is self-reinforcing. As well as the demonstration effect, the higher the proportion of individuals who are able to self-manage, the more those without the skills will be disadvantaged. Furthermore, as self-management spreads, individuals will increasingly encounter situations in which they will be called upon to behave as if they are self-managers. This effect can be expected to be particularly strong within families. Children brought up by self-managers will be continually subject to different demands and expectations to those who are not. Increasingly humans will grow up and operate in a social environment that demands and encourages a capacity for self-management. Eventually, a psychological transformation that once required enormous personal effort will occur routinely to many as they grow up amongst others who have already undergone the transformation.
Once an individual has undergone the psychological MST that enables self-management, it is a very small step to use self-management for evolutionary objectives. The individual will be able to adopt the aim of pursuing evolutionary success for humanity without having to be a psychological altruist. This is because she will be able to use the capacity for self-management to find psychological satisfaction and motivation in whatever it takes to pursue evolutionary success.
An individual will be more likely to adopt evolutionary objectives once she can mentally model (and therefore understand) the past psychological evolution of humanity, and the future possibilities. This understanding will tend to undermine the possibility that the individual could continue to find meaning in a life spent pursuing only the satisfactions provided by their pre-existing internal reward and motivation systems. The individual will see that these have no absolute validity or value. They are past evolution’s best attempt to get us to behave in ways that will bring evolutionary success. But they are a flawed attempt that is inferior to what can be achieved when we supplement our adaptive ability with mental modelling. The individual will see that she does not have a choice about whether to pursue evolutionary objectives. The only choice is whether to do so guided by incompetent and outdated means, or to do so consciously, using the superior capacity of mental modelling. The individual will see that humans who continue to be guided only by their pre-existing reward and motivation systems are as absurd as a wind-up toy soldier that has run into a wall and fallen onto its back, but continues to march, on and on.
In summary, there are a number of factors and processes that can be expected to encourage the emergence of a new psychological MST amongst humans. But whether these influences will be sufficient to establish the transition widely amongst humanity is not yet clear. 5. CONCLUSION
Humanity is on the threshold of a major evolutionary transition.
Before the transition humans are organisms whose behavioural goals are set ultimately by their internal reward and motivation system. The internal rewards have been established and tuned by natural selection and conditioning processes. As a result, humans spend their lives pursuing proxies for evolutionary success. Humans have the capacity to use mental models to predict the effects of alternative actions on their environment. But they are largely limited to using this capacity to discover the actions that are best for achieving internal rewards. Humans do not use it for identifying and implementing adaptations that are best in evolutionary terms. Before the transition, humans are largely incapable of implementing behaviours that are inconsistent with their pre-existing reward and motivation system, even where their mental modelling reveals that the behaviours are far more adaptive in evolutionary terms. They are unable to use the much superior potential of mental modelling to discover the best adaptations.
If humans make the evolutionary transition, they will no longer blindly pursue internal rewards and motivations as ends in themselves. They will use their mental models to identify and implement the actions that will contribute most to the evolutionary success of humanity. By consciously managing their pre-existing adaptive systems, they will ensure that they find satisfaction and motivation in pursuing evolutionary objectives. They will no longer be incapable of using the superior adaptive capability of mental modelling to adapt their behavioural goals.
Humans are currently part way through the transition. As our ability to model the consequences of our behaviour improves, we are increasingly encountering situations in which our mental modelling is superior to our internal reward system at organising adaptive behaviour. We are beginning to develop the new psychological software needed for us to implement the behaviour identified by our mental models in these circumstances. But to develop a comprehensive ability to do this, humans will need to undergo a psychological MST. We will need to develop a new "I" or master that can manage our physical, emotional, and mental adaptive systems to align their goals with evolutionary objectives. This would enable us to revise the operation of these pre-existing processes so that we could adapt in whatever ways are needed for evolutionary success. Humans would become self-evolving beings, able to consciously choose to change our adaptive goals, relatively unfettered by our biological past or by our conditioning.
It is too early to say with certainty that humanity will negotiate this transition successfully. But it is clear that the unfolding of the transition will be given impetus as humans become aware of the nature of the transition, its significance in evolutionary terms, and their possible role in it.

EVOLUTIONARY TRANSITIONS AND ARTIFICIAL LIFE

John Stewart ([e-mail])
(A later version of this paper was published in the journal Artificial Life [1997] 3: 101-120.) Abstract
A major challenge for artificial life is to synthesize the evolutionary transitions that have repeatedly formed differentiated higher-level entities from cooperative organizations of lower-level entities, producing the nested hierarchical structure of living processes.
This article identifies the key elements and relationships that must be incorporated or synthesized in an artificial life system if these transitions are to emerge. The processes currently included in artificial life systems are unable to provide an adequate basis for the emergence of the complex cooperative organization that is essential to the transitions.
A new theory of the evolution of cooperative organization is developed that points to the additional processes that must be included in artificial life systems to underpin the emergence of the transitions.

I Introduction

A distinctive feature of living entities is that they are organized as nested hierarchies: entities are composed of smaller units that are in turn composed of still smaller units, and so on. For example, human social systems are constituted by organisms that are in turn made up of cells that in turn comprise molecular processes.

From an evolutionary perspective, this familiar structure appears to result from the repeated formation of higher-level entities through the evolution of differentiated cooperative organizations of lower-level entities, for example, the formation of early cells from organizations of molecular processes, the eukaryote cell from complex symbiotic communities, multicellular organisms from organizations of cells, and social systems from organizations of metazoans. This evolution has been characterized by the establishment of an extensive cooperative division of labor within the organizations of lower-level entities that is associated with a high degree of cooperative differentiation and cooperative specialization. A central objective of the artificial life approach is to synthesize from artificial components key biological phenomena. If this objective is to be met, it will be necessary to synthesize entities that are organized as nested hierarchies, and to synthesize entities that undergo the critical evolutionary transitions to form differentiated higher-level entities. The importance of this challenge is widely recognized among artificial life researchers (e.g., see [17, 28, 32]).

In this article I set out (a) to demonstrate that the processes that are currently explicitly included in artificial life will not meet this challenge; and (b) to identify the specific features that need to be incorporated in an artificial life (alife) system to encourage the emergence of the transitions to higher levels of organization.

I begin in Section 2 by demonstrating that the processes that are currently proposed by theory to explain the evolution of cooperation are limited in their capacity to account for the formation of higher-level entities through the evolution of differentiated cooperative organizations of lower-level entities. Section 3 identifies a form of hierarchical organization that can comprehensively overcome these limitations and that has underpinned the transitions from molecular processes to cells, from cells to metazoans, and from metazoans to human societies. This is followed by consideration of the extent to which this form of organization has also been significant in the emergence of living from nonliving processes. Section 4 notes that this form of hierarchical organization has not been synthesized in alife systems to date. To assist in identifying how this synthesis could be achieved, I analyze two illustrative examples of the evolution of hierarchical organization at different levels of organization. The article concludes in Section 5 by abstracting from the examples the key structures and relationships that would need to be incorporated or synthesized in an alife system for the hierarchical organization and transitions to emerge.

2 Horizontal Self-Organization

2.1 Cooperative Horizontal Organization

Under what circumstances will cooperative organizations arise within a population of living entities (e.g., a population of molecular processes, or cells, or multicellular organisms)? I will first consider the evolution of what will be referred to here as horizontal cooperative organization.
This is organization in which entities are at the same level of organization and therefore do not have any capacity to control other entities within the organization--entities mutually influence each other in interactions and are unable to influence other entities unilaterally
[29]. This contrasts with what I will refer to as vertical organization, in which a horizontal organization is controlled by one or more entities that are in hierarchical relationship to the horizontal organization. The hierarchical relationship means that the entities are able to influence the horizontal organization without being influenced by it--this capacity to influence unilaterally constitutes the ability of the entities to control the horizontal organization [29]. The controlling entities collectively comprise what will be referred to in this article as the manager of the organization.

An organization of entities is constituted by a set of relationships between the entities. The relationships are in turn constituted by adaptations of entities. A cooperative organization will arise in a population where the cooperative adaptations that constitute the organization are selected and reproduced through time.

Adaptations that establish cooperative relationships between living entities at the same level of organization can be reproduced through time where the adaptations provide net advantage to the cooperators themselves.
The advantage may accrue as a direct result of involvement in the cooperation itself (e.g., mutualism) or may depend on the initial cooperator gaining the benefit of a further cooperative act that is initiated by one or more other entities. In the case of reciprocal altruism, the further cooperative act is initiated by the beneficiary of the initial cooperation (e.g., see [3, 34]), and in the case of an autocatalytic set, by some other member(s) of the organization who may not have benefited directly from the initial cooperative act (e.g., see [11,
14]). At first glance, it may seem that kin selection and related mechanisms should also be treated as processes of horizontal self-organization. In general, these operate where the cooperation and its benefits are disproportionately directed to entities whose propensity to cooperate is similar to that of the initiator of the cooperation (e.g., due to relatedness, as in the genetic kinship theory of Hamilton [15]).
However, on closer examination it is evident that these mechanisms involve vertical organization; as will be demonstrated in Section 3, kin selection operates where the horizontal organization of individuals is constrained and controlled by a lower-level manager comprising the genetic elements that are common across individuals due to relatedness.

Where the conditions necessary for the operation of these horizontal processes are appropriately met, cooperative organization will arise and persist in the population; the entities that comprise the cooperative organization and the organization itself are able to outcompete individuals within the population. Where the conditions are met, organizations can arise that exploit circumstances in which cooperation provides net benefits, for example, where individuals can provide benefits to others more efficiently than the others can produce the benefits themselves (e.g., specialization and cooperative division of labor); and where individuals refrain from actions that would otherwise benefit the individual but harm others in the organization (e.g., restraint of competition that would otherwise degrade resources [16] or that would reduce overall profitability in an industry [25]).

Taken together with genetic kin selection, these horizontal processes may appear able to account for the evolution of relatively simple cooperative organizations such as most of those found among nonhuman metazoans.

2.2 Limitations of Horizontal Self-Organization

However, these processes alone are limited in their capacity to establish organizations that fully exploit the potential benefits of cooperation:
The processes are unable to overcome fully the widely recognized impediments to the evolution of cooperation. These impediments arise because in most circumstances where selection operates at the level of individual entities, adaptations must compete primarily on the basis of their effects on the entity exhibiting the adaptation; the effects of an adaptation on other entities will not usually contribute to the success of the adaptation, no matter how beneficial its cooperative effects on others may be, and irrespective of whether the resultant cooperative arrangement is more competitive as a whole; and in most circumstances, selection will favor "free riders" or "cheats" that undermine cooperation by taking any benefits provided by other entities in the organization, without cooperating in return.

These impediments are not restricted to the gene-based evolution of cooperation between multicellular organisms. They also manifest at all other levels of living processes: In relation to molecular processes see
Maynard Smith [23] and Bresch et al. [71; in relation to the cellular level, see Buss [8]; and in relation to the human social level, see Olson
[25] and Williamson [35].

The processes relied upon by reciprocity theory and by genetic kinship theory can overcome these impediments only to the extent that they can ensure that the effects of a cooperative adaptation on others are taken into account in determining the success of the adaptation: For example, kin selection is effective only to the extent that the effects of a cooperative adaptation benefit other individuals that also exhibit and reproduce the adaptation (e.g., related individuals), and reciprocity is effective only to the extent that the beneficial effects of a cooperative adaptation on others are returned through reciprocation to the individual exhibiting the adaptation. To the extent that the processes fail to ensure that the effects of an adaptation on others are not captured by the adaptation, cooperative arrangements that are more beneficial as a whole will nonetheless fail to evolve.

Of these processes, reciprocity might appear to have the greatest potential to account for the evolution of cooperation across the various levels of biological organization: Unlike genetic kin selection, reciprocity is not limited to circumstances of genetic similarity, and unlike mutualism, it is not limited to cooperation that is intrinsically advantageous to all participants. However, reciprocity is susceptible to undermining by "cheats" (e.g., see [3]). This is particularly the case where cheats cannot be identified and excluded from the benefits of future exchanges. Cheating is especially undermining of reciprocal cooperation where the benefits of a cooperative act are not localized to a few identified recipients but instead spread to many others in the organization, making the identification and exclusion of cheats extremely difficult (e.g., "public goods" in the context of human systems of exchange relations). This difficulty severely limits the capacity of reciprocity to exploit fully the benefits of cooperation: Particularly in complex differentiated organizations, cooperation that benefits many other entities within the organization could be expected to play a significant role; and processes that are unable to establish cooperation of this type will be unable to achieve the evolution of such organizations.

Selection operating at the level of the group where each group is a horizontal organization is also limited in its capacity to overcome these impediments; within each group, the evolution of beneficial cooperation will be impeded as it is in all other horizontal organizations.

In summary, these horizontal processes clearly fall far short of the ideal of ensuring that all the effects of an adaptation on others (and ultimately on the organization as a whole) are appropriately and universally taken into account in determining the success of the adaptation. Horizontal processes are therefore unable to exploit fully the potential benefits of cooperative organization and are poor candidates to account for the evolution of the more complex forms of differentiated cooperative organizations that have characterized the major evolutionary transitions that have given rise to new levels of biological organization.

3 Vertical Self-Organization

3.1 The Governance of Living Processes

3.1.1 Management

What arrangements could arise that would overcome the limitations of horizontal organization and enable organizations to evolve the complex cooperative relationships that underpin the formation of new levels of biological organization?

From the analysis outlined above, it is evident that these limitations would be overcome by new arrangements within the organization that ensure that the success of cooperative adaptations is determined by the net effects of the adaptations on others in the organization (and ultimately their effects on the organization as a whole). To the extent that this condition is met, cooperative arrangements that provide the greatest benefit to the organization would prevail.

Stewart [31] has suggested that this could be achieved by the inclusion within the organization of one or more entities that

· are in hierarchical relationship with the entities that comprise the original horizontal organization and have the capacity to intervene in the organization to promote cooperation, for instance, by intervening to sustain or inhibit entities in the horizontal organization according to the extent to which their net effect on others either benefits or harms the organization; and

· are capable of evolving, and whose evolutionary success is dependent on the success of the organization as a whole. This coincidence of evolutionary interests between the intervening entities and the organization as a whole would ensure that the entities evolve interventions that realize their potential to promote beneficial cooperation. These entities that are in hierarchical relationship to the original horizontal organization collectively constitute the manager of the organization. In principle, the manager could intervene in a horizontal organization to support co-operators who provide benefits to others without benefit to themselves, and who would otherwise be outcompeted in the horizontal organization. Interventions of this kind could underpin the evolution of division of labor between entities in the organization, allowing the extensive cooperative specialization and differentiation that characterizes the major evolutionary transitions under consideration here.
Interventions could also inhibit free riders who would otherwise undermine cooperation arising among other entities. The manager could also produce net benefits for the organization as a whole by supporting adaptations that produce only longer-term benefits and that would otherwise be outcompeted in the short term within the organization.

The manager could vary in the extent to which it overrides the adaptive capacity of entities in the horizontal organization. At one extreme, the manager would tightly control the horizontal organization, with all heritable adaptation originated by the manager (e.g., the genome's management of molecular processes within the eukaryote cell, and extreme examples of top-down management in human hierarchical organization). At the other, the manager would feed back general rewards and punishment to entities in the horizontal organization to reflect the effects of their adaptations on the organization as a whole, with the entities taking account of this feedback as they adapt (e.g., some modern, flexible forms of human organization). An ideal manager of this kind would cause entities to adapt as if their effects on others were effects on self, enabling cooperative possibilities to be explored fully.

Significantly, this vertical organization would not have to rely on fortuitous synergy between the interests of the organization and the interests of its constituent entities for the interests of the organization to be maximized: Instead, an ideal manager would be able to construct whatever synergy of interests is needed to overcome any initial conflict between the interests of constituents and the interests of the organization to enable the organization to adapt optimally as a whole; the manager would do this by intervening to ensure that whatever adaptations of entities are needed to meet the interests of the organization are also in the interests of the entities. Under ideal arrangements, this would ensure that entities that are pursuing their own interests are also pursuing the interests of the organization. Once this synergy is achieved, cooperative relationships that maximize the interests of the organization would emerge as a consequence merely of the pursuit by entities of their own interests.

In this way, vertical organization could comprehensively overcome the limitation in the capacity of group selection to evolve cooperative arrangements within groups that are each a horizontal organization: An ideal manager could, in principle, intervene in a horizontal organization to construct any possible set of relationships between entities and support any possible types of entities. Group selection operating on a population of ideal vertical organizations would therefore be unlimited in its capacity to search the space of possible organizations. It would not be restricted to searching that subset of the space of organizational types that contains only organizations limited to the restricted forms of cooperation that can arise and persist in horizontal organization.

3.1.2 The Hierarchical Relationship

The requirement that the intervenor(s) be in hierarchical relationship to the original horizontal organization is essential. It is not sufficient that there be entities within the horizontal organization that have the capacity to intervene in the way outlined to promote cooperation: An entity that is a typical member of the horizontal organization and that uses resources to sustain or inhibit other members of the organization without any benefit to itself is itself likely to be outcompeted in the organization (this is the "second-order problem" of Axelrod [1]).

How does the hierarchical relationship overcome the second-order problem?
As we have seen, a hierarchical relationship exists between two sets of entities or processes when one set influences or constrains the other without being influenced by it [29]. This capacity to modify without in turn being modified constitutes the essence of the ability of one set of processes to regulate or manage another, by, for example, causing the other set of processes to act or adapt in ways it would not in the absence of the regulation. The hierarchical relationship that constitutes vertical organization is fundamentally asymmetrical. This contrasts with purely horizontal organization in which entities interact dynamically, mutually influencing each other without dominance or control. n and manage a horizontal organization without in turn being influenced by it enables the manager to unilaterally appropriate for its own reproduction and maintenance resources and services from the horizontal organization. And it is able to obtain these benefits without having to participate in the competitive interactions and cooperative exchanges of the horizontal organization. This enables the manager to stand outside and act across the dynamical interactions of the horizontal organization, managing them for its own benefit.

This capacity to obtain resources and services unilaterally is critical because the capacity assists in ensuring that the evolutionary success of the manager is advanced by its ability to produce beneficial cooperative arrangements in the horizontal organization. The capacity to appropriate resources does this because it enables the manager to benefit from any beneficial cooperative arrangements supported by its interventions: It can harvest benefits and have them utilized for its own purposes. The coincidence of interests established in this way between the manager and the organization as a whole will be complete when the manager is fully dependent on the reproduction of the organization for its own reproduction and when the only way in which the manager can pursue its success is by enhancing the success of the organization as a whole.

This contrasts with the situation of a member of the horizontal organization that encounters the second-order problem: The member can sustainably engage in interactions that promote cooperation only to the extent that it benefits from these interactions; if the interactions themselves provide insufficient benefit to the member, then, unlike the manager, it has no capacity to sustain its involvement in the interactions by unilaterally harvesting from across the organization some of the wider benefits that may flow to the organization as a whole from its promotion of beneficial cooperation.

The manager that constrains the horizontal organization to produce beneficial cooperative arrangements may be either an upper-level manager that is external to the controlled entities, or a lower-level manager that is internal to the controlled entities.

3.1.3 Upper-Level Management

The constraints provided by an upper-level manager are termed boundary conditions by Salthe [29]. Key examples of an upper-level manager that manages a horizontal organization by producing boundary conditions that promote cooperation are an early cell that includes an RNA manager that establishes beneficial cooperative arrangements in a protein-based autocatalytic set (the horizontal organization). It can do this by, for example, intervening to catalyze the formation of a protein that is beneficial to the autocatalytic set but that would not otherwise be reproduced within the set; and a human manager comprising a chieftain, ruler, government, or committee that promotes cooperation in a horizontal organization of humans by, for example, punishing individuals who undermine cooperation within the organization because they steal the products of cooperative arrangements or because they fail to reciprocate in exchange relations.

The evolution of these instances of upper-level management will be considered in detail in Section 4 to assist in identifying how the evolution of these forms of organization can be encouraged in artificial life systems.

3.1.4 Lower-Level Management

A lower-level manager comprises evolvable entities that are at lower levels in the nested hierarchies that constitute each of the entities of the horizontal organization; that is, a lower-level manager is composed of internal constituents of the entities of the horizontal organization, in contrast to an upper-level manager whose entities are external to the entities of the horizontal organization. Examples of these evolvable lower-level internal constituents include the genome in relation to a cell or a multicellular organism, and both the genome and clusters of socialized behavior patterns (e.g., norms) in relation to a human. These internal constituents influence the entities and organizations of which they are a part through lower-level constraints (termed initiating conditions by Salthe [29]). The constraints manifest in the entities of the horizontal organization as intrinsic properties of the entities that predispose them toward particular behaviors and other characteristics. It is worth noting here that genetic arrangements can comprise both an upper-level manager of molecular processes within a cell (the genetic elements are external to the processes being managed) and a lower-level manager of, for example, a society of organisms (in this case the genetic arrangements are internal constituents of the organisms being managed).

Identifying examples of lower-level managers, and understanding how they can control and constrain horizontal organization in ways that promote cooperation, is not so clear cut and intuitively obvious as it is for upper-level managers. It will be necessary to present a number of specific examples. The nature of lower-level management is probably best illustrated by the consideration of examples of human organization in which a horizontal organization can be controlled and constrained by both upper-level and lower-level management.

First, consider a level of organization in a hierarchical company or firm: the behavior of individuals at this level can be controlled and managed both (a) by the establishment by a higher level in the hierarchy of an appropriate pattern of rewards and punishments (i.e., boundary conditions) for individuals; and (b) by assuring that these individuals have particular intrinsic properties, such as diligence, honesty, and conscientiousness. These intrinsic properties arise from lower-level constituents of the individual such as genes or socialized behavior patterns. Second, consider a human family: The behavior of children can be constrained and managed by both (a) the establishment by parents (the upper-level manager) of appropriate patterns of rewards and punishments; and (b) by the inculcation in the children of particular behavior patterns
(e.g., norms) that will form intrinsic, lower-level constituents of the children that constrain their behavior even in the absence of upper-level constraints such as the possibility of rewards and punishment.

Finally, consider a human social group such as a tribe: The group could be controlled to produce egalitarian behavior either (a) by a powerful ruler who rewards egalitarian behavior and punishes alternative behavior; or (b) by assuring that the group of individuals are constrained genetically to interact in an egalitarian way or are inculcated with behavior patterns that also constrain them to behave in this way.

The capacity of a lower-level manager to constrain and manage a horizontal organization gives it the potential to, for example, establish cooperative arrangements by constraining individuals to provide resources to specialists who would not otherwise be sustainable in the horizontal organization. And a lower-level manager has the same capacity as an upper-level manager to use its control of the horizontal organization to have the benefits of cooperation deployed to enhance the success of the manager, for instance, by directing resources to the reproduction of the genetic elements or behavioral patterns that collectively make up the manager. As is the case for an upper-level manager, if a lower-level manager is to realize fully its potential to promote cooperation, it must be evolvable, and its evolutionary success must be dependent on the success of the organization as a whole. If these conditions are met, the lower-level manager will evolve constraints that will produce beneficial cooperation in the horizontal organization.

Examples of organizations that are managed in this way by a lower-level manager composed of evolvable internal constituents of the entities in the horizontal organization are (a) a multicellular organism that is a horizontal organization of cells, with each cell constrained by a lower-level constituent, the genome. The genome is identical in all cells, and collectively these genomes across all cells constitute the lower-level manager that controls the organization of cells; (b) an insect society that is a horizontal organization of organisms managed by a genome that is reproduced across the society as lower-level constituents of the organisms. Collectively the genomes constitute the lower-level manager; and (c) egalitarian groups of human hunter-gatherers that are composed of a horizontal organization of humans constrained by a cluster of socialized behavior patterns (e.g., norms) and probably also by some common genetic elements. The cluster of socialized behavior patterns is a lower-level constituent reproduced in individuals across the organization, which collectively constitute a lower-level manager. The cluster of behavior patterns can control the group to advance the interests of the manager by, for example, including behavior patterns that actuate individuals to reproduce the cluster by inculcating it in others, including in their progeny, and by actuating them to punish individuals (including by expulsion) in whom the cluster has not been reproduced.

3.1.5 Management Constituted by a Horizontal Organization

It has been implicit in the discussion to this point that the manager
(whether upper or lower level) reproduces and responds to selection as a coherent unit. If this is the case, and if the success of the manager depends on the success of the organization as a whole, the management instituted by the manager will be in the interests of the organization.
However, if the manager itself is composed of a number of entities, and is therefore itself a horizontal organization, competition among the entities will impede the ability of the manager to adapt optimally as a cooperative whole, in the same way that competition limits any other horizontal organization; and to the extent that the manager is unable to adapt optimally as a whole, it will fail to manage optimally the original horizontal organization in which it intervenes. Thus, for example, a management entity may establish hierarchical controls that serve its competitive interests at the expense of the interests of the manager as a whole, and a management entity that can establish a beneficial intervention in the initial horizontal organization may be outcompeted within the managing horizontal organization.

This is particularly a problem for lower-level management: A lower-level manager is necessarily composed of internal constituents within each of the entities of the original horizontal organization--the potential for competition among these numerous constituents is considerable. If the competition is not constrained in any way, a lower-level manager will not be constituted: The lower-level constituents will not reproduce or respond to selection as a coherent unit, and there will not be any capacity to modify outcomes across the horizontal organization at all. It will be an unmanaged horizontal organization. The establishment of arrangements that prevent differential success among its constituent entities have therefore been critical to the evolution of organizations managed by a lower-level manager. This impediment to the evolution of the manager as a unit can be overcome in the same way that it is for the original horizontal organization, that is, by the emergence of a new level of management that intervenes in the original managing horizontal organization to promote beneficial cooperation. In this way, multi-level management may evolve. However, if the new level of management is itself a horizontal organization, this is not a final solution: The impediment is simply exported to the new level.

Of course, the impediment will not arise when the manager is composed of a single entity, for instance, by a single RNA structure in the case of the molecular example of upper-level hierarchical control considered above, or by a chieftain in the example of human organization managed by an upper-level manager. This suggests that the impediment can also be overcome in relation to multi-level management by heading the management with a single entity that successfully controls lower levels of management. Many modern human hierarchical organizations are managed in this way.

However, arrangements of this sort can overcome the impediment only when the manager is composed of or headed by a single entity. The difficulty will resurface whenever the potential for competition among a number of entities arises, for instance, when a chieftain is to be replaced, or when the single RNA structure reproduces.

This problem is particularly significant when the manager is composed of an entity such as an RNA structure that discovers adaptations through a process that involves differential reproductive success between entities:
In these circumstances, reproduction of the entity may result in competition between its progeny. This is less a problem in the case of a human ruler who tests alternative adaptations against internal models and against internal proxies for differential reproductive success, rather than by actual differential reproductive success among rulers.

3.1.6 Recursive Management of Competition

The difficulties that arise because of competition between entities that constitute the manager can, however, be overcome recursively without the emergence of new levels of management. These arrangements are recursive in the sense that they are established by adaptations of entities within the managing horizontal organization itself. Ideally, the arrangements will operate to suppress only competition that does not result in the success of heritable variation that maximizes the success of the organization
("heritable variation" is used broadly in this article to refer to all variation, genetic or otherwise, that can provide a basis for evolutionary change. It includes, for example, variation in ideas and beliefs that are transmittable between human individuals). Examples of organizations that can internally select heritable variation on the basis of its benefit to the organization (e.g., by testing the effects of alternatives on internal proxies for organizational success) are humans, and modern hierarchical organizations of humans. The advantage of internal testing is that it enables the organization to discover adaptations during its life, rather than having to rely on differential reproductive success between organizations to test variation [31].

However, all competition involving heritable variation must be suppressed within organizations that do not have internal arrangements that can differentiate between variation that is likely to benefit the organization and variation that is not. These organizations must rely on a between-group selection process involving the differential reproductive success of organizations to select variation that maximizes the fitness of organizations. If selection operating at the level of the group is to be fully effective, competition between entities within the organization must be suppressed, thereby concentrating competition and natural selection at the between-organization level [36]. This ensures that there is no heritable differential success within the organisation, and that the only way in which entities can achieve heritable relative success is through their contribution to the differential success of organisations. At first it may seem that a manager which is a horizontal organisation could have no greater capacity to recursively overcome internal competition than could the original horizontal organisation. Alternatively, it may be suggested that if the manager is able to recursively suppress competition, why couldn't the original horizontal organisation also do so, rendering the manager redundant and unnecessary?

The reason why the original horizontal organization and the manager have fundamentally different capacities in this respect is that the manager controls a horizontal organization, and it can use this control to construct structures and processes that can act across the organization to suppress competition. Only a manager has the capacity to control and constrain the organization on a sufficient scale to suppress competition across the organization.

However, this raises a further issue: How can adaptations that suppress competition become established within the manager so that they can achieve the necessary hierarchical control across the organization? how will they overcome competition from alternatives within the manager that don't invest resources in the suppression of competition? This further instance of the second-order problem can be overcome in the following way:
Suppressors will not be outcompeted if the competition they suppress within the organization also includes the competition they would otherwise encounter from alternatives. That is, successful suppressors must also suppress competition from alternatives who do not suppress.

A series of examples will illustrate how a manager is able to suppress competition by using its capacity to control a horizontal organization and how the controls can escape the second-order problem and avoid being outcompeted within the manager. Consider a horizontal organization of organisms that is managed by a lower-level manager that is composed of genetic arrangements: Genetic elements that arise in the manager may actuate individuals to direct their cooperation preferentially toward closer relatives who are more likely to include and to reproduce the manager, and who are also more likely to include and reproduce these particular genetic elements (i.e, the kin selection processes of Hamilton
[15]); genetic elements that arise in such a manager also may actuate individuals to punish other individuals who do not exhibit the actions of individuals controlled by the manager as well as individuals who do not act as if they include the particular genetic elements that actuate punishers; that is, nonpunishers are also punished (this example is explored in detail by Boyd and Richerson [6], but without the hierarchical perspective developed here); and finally, genetic elements may arise that actuate individuals to direct their cooperation toward supporting the reproduction of only a single individual within the horizontal organization, thereby preventing the reproduction of individuals that might not include the manager and that also might not include these particular genetic elements (e.g., some eusocial insect colonies).

Arrangements that suppress competition at various levels of organization and that have been studied in some detail are surveyed by Jablonka [19].
Additional examples to those already considered above, described from the hierarchical perspective, include the organization of genes on single chromosomes, which reduces competition among genes within the upper-level manager that manages molecular processes within cells [9]; meiosis, which also limits competition among genes and chromosomes within the upper-level manager of cells [13, 24]; and sequestration of the germ line together with reproduction through a single cell, which reduces competition between the genomes that constitute the lower-level manager controlling organizations of cells [8].

3.1.7 The Significance of Vertical Organization

However, the successful suppression of competition within the organization and its concentration at the between-group level is not sufficient in itself to ensure that group selection will be able to establish the extensive level of cooperative differentiation that characterizes the key evolutionary transitions. For this to be achieved, the variation that arises between organizations must include the production of organizations within which the necessary division of labor is able to be sustained--selection will be unable to select these forms of organization if the variation presented for selection does not include them. The vertical arrangements discussed here are therefore essential to the key evolutionary transitions not only because they allow the comprehensive management of competition, but also because, as we have seen, they can control horizontal organization to produce a wide range of alternative organizations that would not otherwise be available for selection. For instance, a manager can underpin comprehensive differentiation by intervening to redirect resources to support specialists that could not otherwise reproduce or even persist in a horizontal organization.

The significance of vertical organization is somewhat obscured in the instances of the evolution of cooperative organization commonly studied by biologists. This is because these instances involve organizations of entities that already include evolvable lower-level constituents (i.e., genetic arrangements), and a manager can be readily constituted merely through the suppression of competition between these preexisting lower-level constituents across the organization. The significant role of vertical organization is more clearly seen by studying evolutionary sequences in which the evolvable lower-or higher-level entities are initially absent or poorly developed, as in the sequences discussed in
Section 4.

In summary, the process of vertical self-organization described here is essential for the evolutionary transitions in which higher-level entities have been formed through the evolution of highly differentiated cooperative organizations of lower-level entities. The familiar nested hierarchies of living processes arise through the repeated formation of organizations of entities that are managed by hierarchical arrangements that ensure the entities adapt and act to serve the interests of the organization as a whole.

3.2 The Governance of Matter

3.2.1 The Hierarchical Perspective

To what extent can the concepts and processes that underpin this account of horizontal and vertical self-organization in living processes also provide an understanding of the emergence of living processes from inanimate matter?

Horizontal organization among nonliving entities is widespread: It is evident that interactions among entities at the same level of organization can give rise to organizations of entities. Such organizations form and persist to the extent that the relationships between entities that constitute the organizations are reproduced to some extent through time, because, for instance, the relationships represent stable or dynamic equilibria. However, in contrast to horizontal organization among living processes, mere physical persistence is a sufficient condition for nonliving processes: In the case of living processes, the adaptations that underpin relationships must be not only physically realizable, but also competitive, for instance, by maximizing the fitness of participants. As for vertical organization in living processes, hierarchical relationships among nonliving entities will be constituted where one set of processes or entities is able to influence another set without in turn being influenced. It is evident from consideration of the material world that the asymmetrical functional relationships that characterize hierarchical separation can arise when there is a difference in scale between interacting entities or processes: For example, where entities differ sufficiently in scale, a larger-scale entity may influence the dynamical behavior of a set of smaller-scale entities without itself being influenced by the interactions; because of its larger scale, the hierarchical entity does not participate in the lower-level processes dynamically: It stands outside and acts across the dynamic of smaller-scale entities.

The difference in scale is often reflected in the duration of time of phenomena (longer for higher-scale entities) or of the length of periods between events (longer for events coming out of processes of larger scale). When an asymmetrical functional relationship is constituted in this way, processes that constitute boundary conditions would operate on a much slower time scale than the dynamical interactions of the level below; from the perspective of an entity participating in the lower-level dynamic, boundary conditions of this type are typically seen as relatively unchanging features that are not influenced by the individual entity and the interactions in which it is involved [29].

Because the nonliving world is separated into components and processes that differ widely in scale and that often are also organized as nested hierarchies (e.g., quarks, protons, atoms, molecules, oceans, planets, galaxies, etc.), hierarchical interactions are pervasive. As a consequence, the provision of an adequate account of processes at any particular focal level of nonliving processes will usually require the inclusion of relevant processes at both lower and higher levels of hierarchy that influence and constrain the focal level but do not participate in the interactions of the focal level dynamic [29]. For example, chemical systems with identical initiating conditions and identical focal-level processes can unfold into entirely different systems under different boundary conditions (e.g., under differences in temperature, pressure, and the location and form of any structures of greater scale and stability that interact with the system, such as any structure that contains the system); and processes at the quantum level may unfold as waves or particles depending on the boundary conditions they encounter. The hierarchical perspective is essential to provide an adequate account of the evolution of physical systems in the material world where boundary conditions vary in space and time.

3.2.2 Management that Produces New Organizations

This capacity for boundary conditions to influence the nature of the organizations of entities that will form and persist in an interacting dynamic of entities is critical to our discussion here: Just as living entities that are in a hierarchical relationship with a dynamic of interacting living entities may produce forms of organization that would not have arisen otherwise, nonliving entities may similarly constrain a material dynamic.

Thus at a given focal level of nonliving organization, an interacting dynamic of entities may give rise to horizontal organizations of entities that themselves form entities of larger scale. These larger-scale entities may interact in hierarchical fashion with the parent dynamic of smaller-scale entities, providing new boundary conditions that constrain the dynamic to produce new forms of organizations of entities that would not have arisen otherwise in the dynamic.

For example, at the molecular level, an interacting dynamic of smaller-scale atoms and molecules may give rise to molecules of larger scale (formed as horizontal organizations of smaller-scale atoms and molecules) that in turn provide new boundary conditions for the dynamic of smaller-scale entities; the larger scale enables the molecules to stand outside and act across the dynamical interactions of the smaller-scale entities to produce outcomes that would be improbable in the unconstrained dynamic. Thus a larger-scale molecule could cause the formation of molecules that are unlikely to arise in the unconstrained dynamic because their formation requires, for example, a coming together and particular positioning of a number of smaller-scale molecules that is highly unlikely to occur spontaneously in the interactions of the dynamic: The capacity of the larger-scale molecule to stand outside and act across the dynamic in both space and time enables it to collect together over time the outcomes of a number of different events that are highly unlikely to occur simultaneously but that are likely to occur sequentially over time, and to put together particular spatial arrangements and positionings of smaller-scale entities that would otherwise be improbable. This process is, of course, from another perspective, chemical catalysis. The new organizations formed in this way may themselves constitute higher-scale entities that in turn provide new boundary conditions for the dynamic, resulting in the formation of further organizations that would not arise spontaneously in the unconstrained dynamic, and so on.

In this way, a new space of possible arrangements of matter can be opened up for exploration. Organization is no longer limited to what can come together fortuitously through the unconstrained interactions of entities in a horizontal dynamic; vertical organization opens the way to the formation of more complex organizations by a process of construction.

However, the search of this new space will generally be undirected: There will not necessarily be any pattern to the organizations produced. On the basis outlined, vertical organization can manage matter to form organizations that would not otherwise arise, but this management would not necessarily have any particular objective or direction; it does not include any overriding mechanism that, for example, would ensure that only management that achieved particular outcomes would persist.

3.2.3 Self-Replicating Management

Such an overriding mechanism may arise, however, if and when these processes of horizontal and vertical self-organization produce self-replicating management, for instance, through the production of larger-scale entities that manage the parental dynamic to produce copies of themselves. These entities may be self-replicating as individuals, or as a collection of entities (e.g., the autocatalytic sets of Eigen and
Schuster [11]; and Farmer et al. [14]).

A key feature of self-replicating management is that away from equilibrium it produces a larger-scale organization (the population) whose growth, until it is otherwise limited, is subject to positive feedback--every increase in population size in turn increases the capacity of the population to grow. When the population encounters resource limits, the result is competition between members of the population, which drives the familiar process of natural selection. Natural selection in turn gives the management of matter direction and pattern--only the most competitive management will persist. In contrast, the population growth of managing entities that are produced by other types of managing entities is not driven in this way by positive feedback: An increase in the population of one type of manager does not in turn have any effect on the extent to which additional managers of that type are produced.

Although populations of self-replicating managers may achieve substantially higher scales than individual managing entities, initially this does not mean that management will be organized or that matter will be managed on these larger scales--as we have seen, without vertical organization there is limited capacity to evolve large-scale cooperative adaptations that coordinate the activities of individuals across the greater scales: Selection founded on competition precludes the less fit, irrespective of whether they are participating in a beneficial cooperative arrangement that is more competitive as a whole.

3.2.4 Management of Management

As we have also seen, this limitation can be overcome through the formation of horizontal organizations of self-replicating managers that are in turn managed by arrangements in hierarchical relationship to the managers. Repetition of this process will produce living processes organized as nested hierarchies and will progressively extend the management of living processes across space and time. In this way, as managed living processes increase in scale, they gain the capacity to manage the material world at greater and greater scales to reproduce themselves. Whatever level of nonliving organization living processes originate in, life will tend to become organized at, and manage matter at, increasingly larger scales.

When applied at the molecular level of organization, this account parallels in many respects the standard theories of the origin of life through the evolution of self-replicating molecular systems (e.g., see
[21]). However, these accounts have not identified the essential hierarchical relationship between the self-replicating entities and the dynamic they manage, and they have not recognized that this vertical organization arises for similar reasons to the emergence of vertical organization in living processes: The capacity to influence without in turn being influenced enables a manager to govern the level below to produce advantageous forms of organization that would not arise spontaneously in that level.

4 The Emergence of Evolutionary Transitions in Artificial Life

4.1 Cooperation in Artificial Life

It will be necessary for artificial life to include the processes of horizontal and vertical self-organization if it is to synthesize living processes that are organized as nested hierarchies, and if it is to synthesize the evolutionary transitions that give rise to them. There are numerous examples of alife systems that have successfully included instances of the processes of horizontal self-organization dealt with in
Section 2, such as mutualism and reciprocity (e.g., [2, 17, 18, 22, 27,
33]). Not only have these alife systems evolved cooperation when cooperative adaptations are initially incorporated in the system and set in competition with non-cooperators, but some systems have also discovered cooperative adaptations not explicit in the initial system (e.g. Ray [27]; and Lindgren and Nordahl [22]) However, if artificial life is to synthesise the evolutionary transitions that give rise to new levels of organisation, the processes of horizontal self-organisation need to be complemented by vertical self-organisation. To date, artificial life has not been synthesised explicitly to encourage the emergence of vertical organisation, and the synthesis of entities that undergo an evolutionary transition to form higher level entities is seen as an important challenge for the future (e.g., see [28, 32]). Furthermore, when alife practitioners have recognized the importance of the synthesis of evolutionary transitions they have tended to focus on the transition from the cellular to the multicellular level where the vertical system is initially constituted by lower-level management, rather than the transition to cells and to modern human social systems where the vertical system constituted by upper-level management is more significant. To point the way to how this synthesis can be initiated, it is necessary to develop and to operationalize the concept of hierarchical relationship, identifying the critical features of the relationship so that they can be incorporated in alife systems.

I will begin by briefly examining a range of illustrative examples of the evolution of management at various levels of organization to develop a more concrete understanding of the evolution of essential elements of the hierarchical relationship in living processes. I will conclude by abstracting from the examples the relationships and processes that are common to the various instances of the evolution of vertical self-organization and that need to be included or synthesized in an alife system if vertical organization is to emerge.

4.2 Evolution of Modern Human Organization

I will commence with an illustrative example of the evolution of human organization. However, it should be noted that this example concerns the evolution of modern, hierarchical human organizations, which have arisen during the 12,000 years to the present, and which have largely replaced the more egalitarian hunter-gatherer societies that preceded them (the evolution of the hunter-gatherer phase is dealt with by, for example,
Knauft [20], Boehm [5], and Wilson and Sober [37]). It also should be noted that, as aptly pointed out by Erdal and Whiten [12], these modern human hierarchical organizations "are not merely reborn ape hierarchies, but uniquely human in both their behavioural detail and their cultural recognition" (p. 178). It is this form of organization that is responsible for the extraordinary level of cooperative differentiation in modern human societies, which matches that found in the other major evolutionary transitions that are the focus of this article.

Consider a small, stand-alone horizontal organization--a tribe or an agricultural community. An individual or alliance of individuals that has the ability to coerce other members of the organization (due to physical strength or superior weapons) may be able to extract a disproportionate share of the resources and services produced in the organization (e.g., food and reproductive opportunities). Critically, these hierarchical individuals do not have to participate in the competitive interactions or mutually advantageous exchange relations of the horizontal organization to obtain these resources. This manager may emerge from within the human group or may itself be a free-living band that moves from group to group plundering resources.

A distinction can be drawn between interventions made by the manager in the horizontal organization that simply appropriate resources, and those that actually cause the production of benefits that provide direct and immediate benefits to the manager (e.g., the coercion of individuals to make weapons or grow food for the manager). The latter class of intervention is a short step away from interventions that increase the resources available to the manager by promoting the efficiency of the organization as a whole. For example, the manager may punish cheats who would otherwise undermine beneficial cooperation in the horizontal organization by not reciprocating in exchanges of goods; and it may provide resources to individuals to promote the performance of actions that are beneficial to the organization but that would otherwise not be sustained because they would not produce sufficient direct benefit for the individual (e.g., group defense).

These distinctions suggest an evolutionary sequence that begins with a manager whose relationship with the group is largely limited to appropriating benefits, moves through a phase in which the manager also intervenes in the group to cause the production of benefits that directly benefit the manager (but without improving the overall productive capacity of the group), and then moves to a relationship where the manager manages the group to increase its overall capacity to produce benefits, some of which are appropriated by the manager for its maintenance (e.g., taxation). The end result of this evolutionary sequence is a manager that has the capacity to improve substantially the competitive capacity of the organization at the intergroup level, whose success and continued existence is dependent on the organization of which it is an obligate part, and whose interests lie to a significant extent in using this capacity to promote the success of the organization as a whole, particularly when the group is in competition with other groups.

To the extent that the interests of the organization and the interests of a ruler who heads the manager coincide, the ruler's adaptation of its management of the organization will tend to maximize the success of both the organization and the ruler--through the adaptation of the ruler, the organization is able to adapt continually to changing internal and external events. In these circumstances, heritable adaptation at the level of the group does not have to rely on a between-group selection process, and all heritable variation is not suppressed within the manager or within the horizontal organization.

This contrasts with forms of organization in which the human group is primarily managed by a lower-level manager composed of genetic elements and/or of clusters of socialized behavior patterns--in these organizations the potential for competition within the manager is considerable, and it must be tightly controlled. Consequently, adaptation of the manager has to rely on differential success between groups, except in the limited circumstances when some variation within the lower-level manager can be successfully managed. (Rappaport [26] and Boehm [5] identify some arrangements within small human groups that could maintain the necessary control over competition while allowing some flexibility during the life of a group.) This difference in adaptive capacity is likely to have been a significant factor in the competitive superiority of human organization managed by an upper-level manager [29].

In this illustrative example, the hierarchical relationship is founded upon the capacity of the manager to use coercion to influence and constrain the horizontal organization without in turn being influenced by it. This hierarchical relationship is advantageous to the manager because it gives the manager the capacity to appropriate resources and services unilaterally that would otherwise be available to the horizontal organization. Significantly, this capacity to appropriate benefits also creates the potential for the manager to benefit from advantageous cooperative arrangements, which it establishes by appropriate interventions: The capacity enables the manager to harvest benefits flowing from the cooperative arrangements. However, this potential will not be realized until interventions are discovered that enable the manager to promote cooperation, and unless the manager's association with the horizontal organization is sufficiently prolonged to enable it to harvest the benefits produced. The capacity of the manager to influence the horizontal organization unilaterally forms a basis for the development of these interventions that may, for example, entail selective punishment and the differential redistribution of appropriated resources.

As is necessary if this proposed evolutionary sequence is to be considered plausible and is to avoid the second-order problem, the individuals that participate in the sequence are not required to act other than in their direct individual interests at any phase of the sequence. In particular, the sequence envisages that the manager intervenes in the horizontal organization to promote cooperation only when the interventions produce net benefits to the manager. The second-order problem is avoided through the capacity of the manager to appropriate the wider benefits that flow to the organization from the cooperation that its interventions promote--unlike members of the horizontal organization that are limited by the second-order problem, the manager is not dependent on having to obtain net benefits from the interventions themselves.

Consideration of other forms of hierarchical human organization indicates that the required capacity of the manager to influence the horizontal organization can be initially established other than by coercion: Examples can be readily found where it is established by informed consent arising from common interests within the relevant horizontal organization (e.g., voluntary associations), or by manipulated consent of the horizontal organization (e.g., religious cults), or by combinations of informed consent, manipulation, and force. However, irrespective of its initial basis, if the manager is to be capable of optimally managing the horizontal organization in the interests of the organization as a whole, the manager must have sufficient power, scale, and scope to act across the organization to influence the interests of its members in the domain covered by the organization: To the extent that it is unable to deter cheating across the organization (e.g., by fines, imprisonment, or execution) or to promote beneficial cooperation across the organization
(e.g., by paying employees, providing awards, or conferring status), the interests of the organization will not be maximized. Beneficial management will also be impaired to the extent that the access of the manager to benefits is not dependent on the manager managing in the interests of the organization as a whole: For example, policing will tend to fail to the extent that police can obtain benefits (e.g., bribes) from the horizontal organization they manage; an executive may get too close to his or her staff (i.e., may value the esteem of staff more than some incentives offered by the organization); and a bureaucrat may be able to avoid accountability to the organization as a whole.

It should also be noted that in modern huma organization, lower-level management as well as upper-level management is often operative in creating the conditions for the emergence of cooperative organization: For example, it has long been recognized that socialized behavior patterns
(lower-level management) that produce trust and honesty in individuals participating in economic exchange relations can reduce the incidence of cheating and lessen the need for its control by upper-level management
(e.g., see [35]).

4.3 The Evolution of RNA Management of Molecular Processes

As a further illustrative example, consider a horizontal organization at the molecular level that comprises an autocatalytic set of proteins.
Single self-replicating RNA molecules or small groups of RNA molecules that are autocatalytic in combination may be able to manage (appropriate) some of the metabolic constituents of the protein-based autocatalytic set to maintain themselves and reproduce. The RNA may also discover the capacity to catalyze particular processes within the autocatalytic set that directly assist the maintenance or reproduction of the RNA. In this way, an RNA upper-level manager of sufficient size and stability would stand outside the competitive interactions and exchange relations of the horizontal organization, managing them for its own benefit. The RNA could move from organization to organization, draining them of resources and services. As for the example of human organization, the capacity of the RNA upper-level manager to manage the horizontal organization also creates the potential for it to intervene in a way that promotes beneficial cooperative arrangements and to harvest the benefit of any cooperative arrangements that are promoted in this way. For example, the RNA might catalyze a protein that provides benefits to other members of the autocatalytic set, but which itself receives no benefits in return, and which would be an altruist in the absence of support from the RNA; and the
RNA might catalyze a process that inhibits the reproduction within the autocatalytic set of a cheat or freeloader that takes benefits from the set without providing any benefits in return (the capacity for cheating and competition to prevent optimal cooperation in autocatalytic organization in the same way as in other horizontal organization is dealt with in detail by Maynard Smith [23], Bresch et al. [7], and Bagley and
Farmer [4]). Once this potential is realized, the RNA manager would find advantage not only in harvesting the horizontal organization, but also in managing and intervening in the horizontal organization to make available greater benefits for harvesting. The discovery of such arrangements is more likely when the manager and horizontal organization live in close association: The manager is more likely to be able to capture the benefits of any cooperation promoted by it the more prolonged its association with the horizontal organization.

Again, the end result of this evolutionary sequence is a manager that has the capacity to enhance the competitive ability of the organization at the intergroup level, whose success and continued existence is dependent on the organization of which it is an obligate part, and whose evolutionary interests lie to a significant extent in using this capacity to promote the success of the organization as a whole. Once again we have an evolutionary sequence in which selection operating on the manager is progressively brought into alignment with selection operating at the level of the organization. However, in contrast to modern human organization,
RNA does not have any internal capacity to adapt heritably, variation must be suppressed within the organization, and heritable adaptation must rely on between-group selection. Dyson [10] has proposed a similar evolutionary sequence for early cells, but without the general and unifying hierarchical perspective developed here.

5 Conclusion

If artificial life is to meet its central objective of synthesizing key biological phenomena, it must be able to synthesize entities that are organized as nested hierarchies and synthesize evolutionary transitions in which differentiated higher-level entities are formed from cooperative organizations of lower-level entities. This will necessitate the inclusion in alife systems of the processes of vertical self-organization to complement the processes of horizontal self-organization that have already been synthesized in some systems.

The particular way in which vertical organization is actually constituted in any specific case differs both within and between the various levels of organization, depending in each instance on contingencies such as what it is that determines the success of entities, and how entities can influence each other's success.

However, at a higher level of abstraction it is possible to identify the key structures and relationships that are common to the various instances of vertical organization that have been discussed above, and which would need to be incorporated or synthesized in an alife system for vertical organization to emerge. These are

1. Horizontal organizations of adaptive agents (i.e., evolvable entities), with each organization constituted by relationships that arise and persist due to the capacity of the adaptive agents to engage in cooperative interactions within the organization in which the success of each agent participating in the interaction is increased (e.g., cooperation that is mutually or reciprocally beneficial);

2. Within each horizontal organization, the possibility of adaptive agents arising that have the capacity either to

(a) engage in interactions with other adaptive agents within the organization in which the success of the other agents is increased, but their own success is decreased (e.g., altruists); or

(b) engage in cooperative interactions with other adaptive agents within the organization without making any contribution to the interactions
(e.g., cheats that do not reciprocate or do not contribute to mutualistic cooperation); 3. Managing adaptive agents associated with each horizontal organization, with each agent having the capacity to

(a) engage in interactions with the agents of the horizontal organization in which the success of the managing agents is increased and the success of the agents of the horizontal organization is decreased (e.g., the unilateral appropriation of resources by the manager from across the horizontal organization); and

(b) engage in interactions differentially with agents of the horizontal organization in which the success of the agents of the horizontal organization is either increased or decreased, and the success of the managing agents is decreased (e.g., the capacity of the manager to intervene across the organization to support altruists or inhibit cheats); and (c) exhibit adaptations that suppress differential success among the managing adaptive agents within the organization (e.g., recursive suppression of competition within the manager).

EVOLUTIONARY PROGRESS
John Stewart (http://www4.tpg.com.au/users/jes999 )
(A later version of this paper was published in the Journal of Social and Evolutionary Systems, 20:335-362. (1997). My book Evolution’s Arrow builds on and extends the ideas developed in this paper. It is online at http://www4.tpg.com.au/users/jes999 )
Abstract: This article identifies evolutionary processes which produce progressive change, outlines the sequences of events in the evolution of life on earth which have resulted from these processes, and predicts key future developments in the evolution of life. Progressive evolution is driven by the potential benefits of cooperation amongst living processes. These benefits are able to be exploited by the formation of hierarchical organisations in which managing entities with the ability to control other entities support cooperators and suppress cheats. Examples of hierarchical organisations of this type include early cells in which RNA manages molecular processes, and modern nation states in which governments manage human organisation. However, the formation of hierarchical organisations will not fully realise the potential benefits of cooperation and end the progressive evolution which is driven by this potential: it is only within these organisations that cooperation can be comprehensively exploited. The widely recognised impediments to the evolution of cooperation will continue to apply to interactions between organisations. The potential benefits of cooperation between organisations will therefore drive the formation of higher level organisations. The continued repetition of this process will progressively extend cooperative organisation across greater scales of space and time.
1. INTRODUCTION
In the first part of this century, there was widespread support for the view that the evolution of life is directional, that the direction is progressive, and that humans are the culmination of this process (e.g. see Blitz, 1992; and Ruse, 1996).
However, in recent years this position has been vigorously criticised as being unsupported by theory or evidence, and as being driven by anthropocentrism and wishful thinking (e.g. see Williams, 1966; Hull, 1988; and Gould, 1996).
More specifically, Maynard Smith (1988) argues that a fundamental problem for the progressive view is that current evolutionary theory does not predict a general increase in anything: theory has been unable to demonstrate that adaptation to local circumstances which is driven by natural selection will lead to indefinitely continuing change, let alone to progress; some directional change can be expected, but it will end as selective circumstances change or as opportunities for further adaptive improvement are exhausted.
This article develops a theoretical perspective which identifies evolutionary processes that produce progressive change, outlines the sequences of events in the evolution of life on earth which have resulted from these processes, and predicts key progressive developments in the future evolution of life.
The article begins in Section 2 by identifying the features of evolving living processes which drive indefinitely continuing, progressive change. This is followed in Section 3 by an examination of the specific types of evolutionary change which are driven by these processes. Section 4 identifies key developments in the evolution of life on earth which are part of this progressive change. This includes an examination of the location of humanity in this evolutionary progression. The article concludes in Section 5 by testing this new theoretical framework against various criticisms that have been made against previous progressive approaches.
2. THE SOURCE OF CONTINUING PROGRESSIVE CHANGE
If a theory is to convincingly demonstrate that evolution is progressive, it must identify a potential for beneficial adaptation which continues indefinitely as living processes evolve. To be indefinitely continuing, such a potential must exhibit a number of characteristics. First, the potential must be insatiable: no matter what adaptations are discovered in response to the potential, the potential must continue to favour further adaptation; the potential must never be exhausted, no matter how far adaptation proceeds. Second, the potential for adaptation must apply generally to living processes through time, and not be generated by contingencies which vary with local circumstances in space or time.
I will argue here that the potential advantages of cooperation amongst living processes across space and through time provide such a continuing potential for beneficial adaptation.
In short, this is because evolutionary processes such as natural selection are unable to exhaust the potential for beneficial cooperation by simply establishing and optimising cooperative arrangements amongst living entities. Natural selection is able to comprehensively exploit the benefits of cooperation between living entities only through the formation of complex organisations of entities which are of limited scale in space and time (e.g. cooperative organisations of molecular processes forming early cells, organisations of cells forming metazoans, and organisations of humans forming human societies). However, the benefits of cooperation between these complex organisations will not be able to be exploited by natural selection except by the formation of yet higher level organisations. Indefinite repetitions of this process will extend the scale in space and time of organisations in which the benefits of cooperation are exploited, but will leave unexhausted the potential for cooperation between organisations of the largest scale.
I will now deal with these issues in greater detail.
The potential benefits of adaptations which establish cooperative arrangements amongst living entities are well known, whether the entities are molecular processes, cells, multicellular organisms, or human nation states. In particular, cooperation between entities can avoid the costly consequences of the pursuit by individuals of their individual interests at the expense of others, and can provide the advantages of cooperative differentiation, specialisation, and division of labour (e.g. as exemplified by molecular processes within cells, cells within metazoans, and human activities within modern economies). Cooperative organisation can also establish coordinated action across greater scales of space and time, enabling adaptation to external events of greater scale (e.g. metazoans can generally adapt successfully to larger scale threats than can single celled organisms).
However, the impediments to the ability of natural selection to take advantage of these benefits of cooperation amongst organisms is equally well known. In most circumstances, selection will favour individuals which use resources for their own benefit, rather than for the benefit of others. Individuals which use resources in cooperative activities which predominately benefit others are likely to be selected against, no matter how beneficial the cooperative effects on others may be, and irrespective of whether the resultant cooperative arrangement is more competitive as a whole. These impediments apply whether the cooperation immediately benefits others, or whether it benefits others in the future (e.g. in subsequent generations). And in most circumstances, selection will favour Afree riders@ or Acheats@ which undermine cooperation by taking any benefits provided by cooperators, without cooperating in return. In most circumstances, beneficial cooperation will evolve only to the extent that cooperators benefit from all the beneficial effects of their cooperation on others.
A number of mechanisms have been identified which enable cooperative adaptations to capture the benefits of cooperation in some circumstances (e.g. mutualism, genetical kinship theory [Hamilton, 1964], and reciprocity theory [Trivers, 1972; and Axelrod and Dion, 1989]). However, these operate only under restricted conditions, and have been able to produce only limited cooperation in non-human metazoans (compared with the extraordinary level of beneficial cooperation found within cells, within multicellular organisms, and within human societies).
These impediments to the evolution of cooperation between individuals also apply at all other levels of biological organisation (e.g. in the evolution of cooperation between molecular processes [Maynard Smith, 1979; Bresch et al., 1979; and Maynard Smith and Szathmary, 1995], between cells [Buss, 1987], and in the evolution of cooperation between humans [Olson, 1965; and Williamson, 1985] )
The existence of these impediments to cooperation means that evolutionary processes such as natural selection are not able to easily exhaust the potential for beneficial cooperation by simply establishing and optimising cooperative arrangements. However, where the evolutionary process is able to establish the complex, hierarchical organisations of individuals identified by Stewart (1995 and 1997[a]), the benefits of cooperation will be able to be comprehensively exploited amongst individuals within the organisations. As will be considered in more detail in the next Section, the formation of these cooperative organisations relies on the evolution of entities which are able to manage and control the other entities in the organisation, supporting beneficial cooperation and inhibiting free riding and cheating. These controlling entities may be external to the entities they control, or internal to them. Examples of the formation of cooperative higher level organisations which each constitute a higher level entity include the organisation of molecular processes into cells, of cells into metazoans, and of humans into human societies.
However, the formation of organisations in this way is able to establish cooperation only between individuals within each higher level entity. The impediments to the ability of natural selection and other evolutionary processes to establish cooperative arrangements between these higher level entities will apply as it does to entities at any level. Again, these impediments will drive the formation of cooperative organisations of the higher level entities. Again, however, this will enable beneficial cooperation to be exploited only within the new organisations, but not between them. Through the progressive formation of higher and higher level organisations in this way, the benefits of cooperation between living processes can be extended over greater scales of space and time, but without exhausting the potential for further cooperative benefits: the potential for even further beneficial cooperation will not be exhausted until all living processes which could interact significantly are permanently organised into a single entity, and there is no possibility of life arising outside the entity which could interact significantly with it.
On this basis, the potential advantages of cooperation amongst living processes qualify as an indefinitely continuing potential for beneficial adaptation which will drive progressive evolution: the potential will continue indefinitely, and the potential applies generally to living processes through time. However, it should be noted here that the general application of the potential does not mean that all living processes will realise the potential by discovering cooperative arrangements or by discovering the hierarchical forms of organisation which enable cooperation to be more full explored. For example, as we will consider in greater detail in Section 5, the fact that many populations of bacteria do not yet participate in cooperative hierarchical organisations is not a demonstration of the lack of general application of the potential for beneficial cooperative adaptation.
3. THE NATURE OF PROGRESSIVE EVOLUTIONARY CHANGE
In this Section we will identify in greater detail the nature of the evolutionary changes which will be driven by the potential advantages of cooperation. In doing so, we will focus on the evolution of changes which allow cooperative possibilities to be explored, rather than on the evolution of specific cooperative adaptations such as anatomical, physiological, behavioural or technological adaptations. This is because findings of the greatest generality are more likely to apply to the evolution of the arrangements which establish and adapt the specific cooperative adaptations; the specific cooperative adaptations themselves are more likely to be contingent and vary with local circumstances.
3.1 Management
Stewart (1995 and 1997[a]) has begun the development of a theory of the evolution of organisational arrangements which are able to comprehensively overcome the initial impediments to the ability of evolutionary processes such as natural selection to discover, perpetuate and adapt beneficial cooperative arrangements between living processes. Here we will further develop those elements of the theory which are relevant to progressive evolution, and use the theory to identify key milestones in the evolutionary expansion of cooperative organisation over greater scales of space and time.
Stewart suggests that the critical evolutionary step in overcoming the impediments to cooperation at a particular level of organisation is the emergence of entities which are able to manage and control other entities. We will first consider the case where the managing entities are external to the entities being controlled.
3.1.1 Upper level management
When they first arise, these managing entities can be expected to use their control over other entities to unilaterally appropriate resources and services from them. For example, managers may move between groups of entities, extracting as much as possible from each group and destroying the group in the process. However, in appropriate circumstances, selection would favour managers which discover ways of intervening in groups of entities to increase the availability of resources which are able to be harvested by the managers. Because of the impediments to the evolution of cooperation, a manager can do this by intervening in a group in ways which produce beneficial cooperative arrangements which would not otherwise arise within the group. The manager will be able to harvest additional benefits produced by these interventions. Such interventions could, for example, support altruistic specialists which would otherwise be out-competed within the group, and inhibit cheating which would otherwise reduce the extent of cooperation between members of the group.
Selection can be expected to favour enhancement of the management ability of managers. This will involve the discovery of management controls which are more efficient at supporting cooperation and which expand the range of cooperation which can be supported. Importantly, this will also involve improvements in the adaptability of management. The capacity of management to efficiently search the space of possible management controls will be enhanced, facilitating the adaptation of existing controls and the discovery of new controls which support better cooperative arrangements. The evolution in this way of a comprehensive ability to discover and adapt controls which support specialists and inhibit cheating will enable the emergence of the extraordinary level of cooperative differentiation and division of labour which characterises the key evolutionary transitions to higher levels of organisation.
It is worth emphasising here that the full exploration of cooperative possibilities requires management which is capable not only of sustaining cooperation throughout the organisation, but also of adapting and improving management controls. The potential benefits of cooperation can therefore be expected to drive not only the progressive formation of hierarchical organisations of wider and wider scales, but also progressive improvements in the adaptive abilities of these organisations.
Selection can also be expected to favour improvements in the capacity of managers to capture the benefits of their interventions. For example, managers might establish longer term associations with a particular group, and might use their control over the group to establish arrangements which prevent access to the group by other managers or entities which might appropriate resources from the group. The result of this evolutionary sequence will be the formation of new hierarchical organisations which each comprise a group controlled by a manager. The new organisations will constitute entities at a higher level of organisation.
Importantly, the evolution of these cooperative organisations is favoured not only at the level of the group, but also at the level of the individual entities involved: the sequence will unfold if the entities do no more than follow their individual evolutionary interests. The key to this is that the inability of natural selection to exploit the benefits of cooperation amongst entities provides the opportunity for managing entities to increase their individual fitness by supporting and enhancing the success of the group rather than by simply exploiting it. And the control applied by the manager ensures that the entities in the group act cooperatively, consistent with the manager=s interests. To the extent that the interests of the manager and the organisation coincide, the entities in the group will be managed so that their interests are aligned with the interests of the organisation. In the absence of this management, it would not be in the interests of individual entities to cooperate.
Ideally, management will ensure that individuals are adapted so as to take into account not only the effects of their actions on themselves, but also the effects of their actions on others in the organisation and on the organisation as a whole, no matter how distant those effects may be in space or time. Ideally, the evolutionary interests of the manager and of the organisation will fully coincide, and therefore the adaptation of management will also take into account the effects of its actions on all others in the organisation. The effects of actions on others will be taken into account as if they are effects on the individual exhibiting the action. When this ideal is met, individuals will act as if they treat the other within the organisation as self. Until this ideal is met continuously within an organisation, the potential for beneficial cooperation will not be fully exhausted, and there will be a potential for further progressive evolution toward the ideal.
Examples of cooperative, hierarchical organisations which have evolved in this way are protein-based autocatalytic sets managed by RNA to form early cells, and human groups managed by rulers to form, for example, early kingdoms:
RNA has the ability to control protein-based autocatalytic sets through its capacity to catalyse particular proteins. For example, RNA may catalyse a protein which advances the RNA=s interests by assisting the reproduction of the RNA. Because of the impediments to cooperation within autocatalytic sets (e.g. see Bresch, et al. 1979; and Maynard Smith, 1979), RNA has the potential to use its catalytic capacity to advance its interests by promoting cooperation within the set (e.g. by the catalysis of altruistic proteins, or of proteins which inhibit the reproduction of cheats). The resultant increased efficiency of the set can benefit the RNA directly by providing more resources for its maintenance and reproduction, and also by increasing the competitiveness of the organisation as a whole.
Similarly, a human ruler has the capacity to control its subjects through its capacity to apply incentives and disincentives which motivate behaviour which may, for example, advance the ruler=s interests. Again, the impediments to cooperation provide the ruler with the potential to increase the efficiency of its kingdom and advance its interests by interventions which enhance beneficial cooperation between its subjects (e.g. though the promotion of cooperative economic exchange relations between subjects by punishing individuals who cheat in exchanges, and by redistributing appropriated resources to support defence of the kingdom).
As demonstrated in detail by Stewart (1997[a]), life itself originates through the formation of cooperative hierarchical organisations: a key step in the evolution of life is the emergence of relatively large, stable molecules (or groups of molecules, as in an autocatalytic set) which use their capacity to control and manage the activities of smaller scale atoms and molecules to maintain themselves and to produce replicas of themselves. Again, the essence of this evolution is the discovery by managing entities of ways of controlling and coordinating other entities so as to enhance the evolutionary interests of the managing entities and the assemblage as a whole. The result is the formation of hierarchical organisations such as the autocatalytic sets which manage proto metabolisms, as described by Bagley and Farmer (1991).
3.1.2 Lower level management
The discussion to this point has focused on the evolution of cooperative hierarchical organisations in which management is exercised by entities which are external to the entities being managed. In the terminology of Salthe (1985), such managers control a group of entities by providing upper level constraints or boundary conditions for the entities. However, as detailed by Salthe (1985), control can also be exercised by lower level constraints or initiating conditions. Typically, these lower level constraints are established by intrinsic properties of the entities being controlled. They are lower level entities in the nested hierarchies which constitute the entities being managed, and they >hard wire= the entities to behave in particular ways. For example, genes act as lower level constraints on cells and metazoans, while both genes and inculcated norms of behaviour act as lower level constraints on humans.
It is clear that the behaviour of a group of humans is able to be controlled by an upper level manager such as a ruler who provides an appropriate pattern of incentives and disincentives to which members of the group adapt. Equally, the behaviour of the group could also be controlled by a process which constitutes the group with members which have particular intrinsic properties which constrain and predispose them to behave in particular ways. For example, cooperation could be promoted in a group either by the constitution of the group by individuals which are internally constrained genetically or culturally to behave in a trustworthy fashion in economic exchange relations, or by an external ruler who punishes those who behave otherwise.
If a lower level constraint is to manage a group of individuals, it must be able to exercise a degree of control over each of the individuals in the group. This can be achieved, for example, by the reproduction of the constraint in each of the individuals, thereby ensuring that each individual is constrained by a replica of the constraint. For example, an insect society can be controlled by a cluster of genetic elements to the extent that the cluster is reproduced in each member of the society, and a group of human hunter gatherers can be controlled by a cluster of inculcated behaviour patterns to the extent the cluster in reproduced in each member of the group.
Provided the lower level manager is evolvable, selection can favour the establishment by the manager of constraints which control the group in ways which enhance the success of the manager. For example, a lower level manager reproduced across a group may actuate individuals to behave in ways which directly enhance the reproduction of the manager (e.g. the lower level manager may be a cluster of norms which actuate the members of the group to inculcate others with the norms).
Furthermore, because of the impediments to cooperation, lower level managers have the same potential as upper level managers to enhance their interests by the promotion of cooperation amongst the individuals which comprise the group. Selection can therefore favour lower level managers which constrain the behaviour of individuals in a group in ways which promote cooperation and which ensure that the management which establishes the constraints captures the benefits of the cooperation. For example, the lower level manager may actuate altruistic behaviour and constrain the altruists to preferentially direct their altruism to those who are more likely to include instances of the lower level manager (e.g. genetical kin selection); and may actuate behaviour which punishes members of the group whose cheating demonstrates that they do not include instances of the manager (e.g. see Boyd and Richerson, 1992). In this way, lower level management can sustain cooperative arrangements in a group by hard wiring members of the group to behave in ways which may be inconsistent with their individual interests.
In summary, the potential for beneficial cooperation amongst living entities at any level of organisation can be realised to an extent by the formation of hierarchical organisations in which the entities are managed by an upper or lower level manager. However, the extent to which this will enable the benefits of cooperation to be explored across space and time will still be limited; it will comprehensively explore cooperation only amongst entities within an organisation. As a consequence, the unrealised potential for beneficial cooperation across greater scales (e.g. between organisations) will drive the repeated formation of hierarchical organisations in this way, and will drive improvements in the ability of the organisations to discover and perpetuate beneficial cooperative adaptations, extending cooperation over greater scales of space and time.
4. THE EVOLUTION OF LIFE ON EARTH
The application of this analysis to the history of life on earth enables us to identify and interpret key milestones of evolution on this planet. The first three major organisational transitions in the evolution of life each involved the formation of cooperative organisations in which entities were controlled by upper level management. The first step saw the management of a proto metabolism of atoms and molecules by a macro molecule or by an autocatalytic set of macro molecules to form a reproducing assemblage. The second step saw the management by RNA of these assemblages to form early cells, and the third saw the management of associations of prokaryotic cells by DNA to form eukaryotic cells. These steps were necessarily sequential in that the organisations formed by the first step gave rise to the entities which were managed in groups to produce the cooperative organisations formed in the second step, which in turn gave rise to the entities which were managed in groups to produce the cooperative organisations formed in the third step. The result has been organisms which are organised as nested hierarchies.
The formation of groups of entities managed by lower level rather than upper level managers could not emerge immediately in the evolution of life. This had to await the evolution of organisms which contained evolvable lower level constraints which had the management ability to discover and produce complex cooperative interactions between organisms. The evolutionary sequence outlined above eventually produced organisms with lower level constraints of this type. This occurred firstly because the progressive evolution discussed above tended to produce upper level managers with improved management abilities to discover and perpetuate beneficial adaptation, and secondly because these upper level managers also were lower level constraints within the organisms which included them. They therefore had the potential to form the lower level manager of a group of organisms by being reproduced in each member of the group (e.g the genetic arrangements of a cell are an upper level manager in relation to the molecular processes which are managed by the genetic arrangements within the cell, but also act as lower level constraints in relation to the cell as a whole. The genetic arrangements can therefore act as a lower level manager of an organisation of cells if the arrangements are reproduced in each of the cells in the group). The improvement in management ability occurred not only as evolution proceeded within each level of organisation, but also as new levels of organisation were formed. This is because the entities which evolve at one level participate in the organisations at the next, bringing to the new organisations whatever adaptive capacities they have evolved. In this way, each new level tends to build on the management capability developed at the previous level.
The eventual result was cells containing genetic arrangements which had the management ability to produce a wide range of constraints which were able to establish complex cooperative interactions between cells. Multi-cellular organisations were able to be established by lower level genetic managers which were reproduced across the cells in the organisation and which therefore were able to appropriately constrain the reproduction and other behaviour of the group of cells. For example, a genetic manager could establish control over a group of cells by managing their reproduction to ensure that the manager was reproduced in each cell, and by ensuring that any variant cells which were produced did not contribute to the next generation (e.g. see Buss, 1987). The lower level management of multi-cellular organisation which was established in this way enabled the comprehensive exploration of the benefits of cooperative arrangements between cells which permitted the extraordinary level of cooperative differentiation and division of labour which arose in metazoans.
The evolution in this way of organisations managed by gene-based lower level managers could be readily repeated to form higher level organisations. This could occur once the management ability of the lower level management of multicellular organisations improved sufficiently to produce a wide range of constraints which could establish complex cooperative interactions between multi-cellular organisations. The result has been, for example, insect societies which are managed with varying degrees of effectiveness by gene-based lower level managers.
In this way, the fourth and fifth major organisational transitions in the evolution of life on earth each involved the formation of cooperative organisations in which entities were controlled by gene-based lower level management.
4.1 The evolution of organisational adaptability
The next significant organisational transitions had to await further improvements in the adaptive capacity of management. In particular, these further transitions depended on the emergence of management with the capacity to adapt the organisation continually during its life. As we shall see, organisations with this capacity readily formed new, higher level cooperative organisations.
The capacity of the organisations produced in the first five organisational transitions to adapt and improve these cooperative arrangements during their lives was initially limited. This is because the managing entities initially had little ability to adapt their management controls during their live, and therefore little ability to ensure that cooperative arrangements were adapted during the life of the organisation. The managers had no capacity to adapt heritably through processes internal to the manager (in contrast to, for example, human individuals who have the potential to discover culturally heritable adaptations during their life through processes which are internal to the individual). Instead, management adapted through natural selection operating on genetic differences in management ability between organisations i.e. through the differential reproductive success of organisations which varied in their management capacity.
This had important consequences for the way organisations were optimally structured. It meant that management could not adapt its controls to appropriately manage new variants that might arise within the organisation (e.g. by suppressing new cheats and free rider variants which, unless controlled, might undermine cooperation in the organisation). As a result, selection favoured management which suppressed the possibility of differential success amongst new heritable variation within the organisation during its life (e.g. by preventing the production of any heritable variation within the organisation, except in conjunction with the reproduction of the organisation). This is achieved in cells and in multicellular organisations by gene based management which permits the production of heritable variation in the organisation only in conjunction with variation in management. And any differential success amongst variation within management is itself prevented within the organisation, ensuring that effective management is not disrupted by competition between variants. As pointed out by Wilson and Sober (1989), the result is the suppression of differential success amongst heritable variation within the organisation during its life, concentrating variation and selection at the between-organisation level. (Stewart [1997(a)] deals in greater detail with the evolution of arrangements which suppress competition within management and within the organisation).
The emergence of organisations managed by entities which were limited in their ability to adapt their management during their life therefore did not exhaust the potential for beneficial cooperation even within those organisations. Consequently, the progressive evolution driven by the potential for beneficial cooperation did not end within each level of organisation with the emergence of such organisations. The unexhausted potential drove a further progressive evolutionary sequence in which the management of organisations evolved the ability to continuously adapt organisations cooperatively during their life. This included the capacity to adapt cooperative arrangements to changing circumstances, the ability to improve existing management arrangements, the establishment of new forms of management (e.g. the endocrine and nervous systems are new upper level systems of management established by the lower level genetic management of multicellular organisms), and the ability to transmit adaptations between organisations, i.e. heritability (here heritability is used in the widest sense to include not only transmission of adaptive information from parents to progeny, but also transmission between other individuals).
I will examine in greater detail the key milestones in the evolution of the adaptive capacity of management.
4.1.1 Hard wired adaptability
The simplest type of arrangement which would adapt management to changed circumstances during the life of an organisation is one in which the adaptation is pre-programmed or hard wired. That is, the nature of the adaptation and the circumstances under which it is invoked is determined by a fixed mechanism within the organisation: there is no trial and error testing of alternative adaptations within the organisation itself. The trial and error process which discovers these adaptations and hard wires them in the organisation is natural selection which operates at the between-organisation level (e.g. selection operating on genetic variation between cells or multicellular organisms).
However, pre-programmed adaptation is limited: it is unable to discover new adaptations during the life of the organisation. This is particularly limiting where organisations often encounter novel circumstances in which the optimal adaptation is also novel. Where this is the case, pre-programmed adaptations favoured by selection in past circumstances will be sub-optimal. As the adaptive capacities of organisations improve, the extent to which there is advantage in novel adaptation during the life of the organisation is likely to increase. This is because when the environment encountered by each individual organisation is considered on a scale which is fine enough, the environment will be continually novel. And, as the adaptive capacities of organisations improve, they will tend to be able to find advantage in adapting to finer and finer environmental differences (Stewart, 1993; and Stewart, 1997[b]).
4.1.2 Internal testing of possible adaptations against immediate effects
Selection will therefore tend to favour the emergence within the organisation of mechanisms which are able to test and discover new adaptations during the life of the organisation. These mechanisms will select adaptations by testing variation against proxies for organisational success. The simplest mechanisms of this type are the ultra stable arrangements identified by Ashby (1960). Here the proxy for organisational success is the state of an essential variable which will be changed by environmental perturbations which are detrimental to the organisation. Adaptation to the perturbation is achieved by varying relevant parameters in the organisation through trial and error until the essential variable is returned to its optimal range. Most homeostatic mechanisms are instances of ultrastable arrangements.
It will be useful when examining other adaptive mechanisms to translate the terminology used by Ashby for ultrastable adaptation into a more general form: the preferred range of the essential variable is the objective/value pursued by the adaptive mechanism; the particular pattern of trial and error changes in relevant parameters which are tested in the attempt to satisfy the objective/value is the strategy (the better the strategy, the less trial and error needed to achieve adaptation); and the value of the parameters which satisfies the objective/value by returning the essential variable to its preferred range is the adaptation. In the simplest arrangements of this type, the strategy and the objective/value are established by natural selection operating at the between-group level (they are themselves adaptations in these wider adaptive systems). In more complex arrangements, the strategy and objective/value may themselves be established by ultrastable processes within the organisation.
As organisations differentiate, ultra stable arrangements will also differentiate, so that each functional unit will tend to be adapted by ultra stable arrangements which maintain essential variables associated with the unit. Because these arrangements will adapt each unit only in relation to the interests of the unit, they will in turn be managed by ultra stable arrangements which manage the units to ensure that their adaptation takes appropriate account of wider interests in the organisation. A group of units managed in this way will itself form a functional unit of wider scale in the organisation. Repetition of this form of organisation at wider scales in the organisation will result is multi-level management hierarchies which adapt the internal environment of the organisation to maintain homeostasis in the interests of the organisation as a whole.
It is important to note here that selection favours the establishment of hierarchical arrangements which manage smaller scale adaptive units within the organisation for exactly the same reasons that selection favours the formation of organisations of organisms controlled by upper or lower level management: both the smaller scale adaptive units and the organisms will tend to adapt in their own direct interests, and therefore will be unable to take advantage of the benefits of cooperative adaptation between units and between organisms; management enables these impediments to be overcome.
Similar arrangements can adapt the organisation in relation to its external, behavioural interactions with the environment, including interactions with other organisations. In this case, behavioural actions are tested against their capacity to result in desired internal states within the organisation, e.g. an organism might move actively throughout its environment until it encounters an area rich in food, upon which it ceases movement. Again, these adaptive mechanisms can be considered within the more general framework of objectives/values, strategies, and adaptations.
Selection will favour the establishment of adaptive arrangements which reduce the extent of trial and error needed to achieve adaptation. Key milestones in this evolution are: the capacity to learn, which enables organisations to implement without trial and error an adaptation which has been discovered previously, when there is a recurrence of the conditions in which the adaptation was beneficial (e.g the operant conditioning of Skinner, 1953); and the transmission of adaptations between organisations (e.g. through imitation, or by the parental inculcation of behaviours in their offspring), which enables an organisation to adopt a successful adaptation discovered by another organisation without having to discover it itself by trial and error.
However, the types of adaptive arrangements considered to this point are fundamentally limited: because they discover adaptations only by testing actions against their immediate effects within the organisation, they are limited in their ability to discover adaptations which have beneficial effects only in the future. No matter how beneficial the future effects are, they will not produce beneficial effects within the organisation when the possible adaptation is trialed, and therefore will not contribute to the adoption of the adaptation; as a consequence, these types of adaptive mechanisms cannot apply anticipation or foresight in their search for beneficial adaptation.
Arrangements which are hard wired in the organisation by the between-organisation evolutionary process can, however, overcome this limitation to some extent. This is because the between-organisation process takes into account the effects of possible adaptations on the reproductive success of organisations, irrespective of whether the effects of an adaptation accrue at a different time during the life of the organisation to the implementation of the adaptation. So the between-organisation process can hard wire the internal adaptive mechanisms within the organisation so that alternative adaptations are tested not only against their immediate effects, but also against hard wired proxies for their future effects. In this way, the organisation can be hard wired so that possible adaptations are treated as if their future effects were immediately felt by the organisation. This will ensure that when alternative adaptions are trialed, future beneficial effects will count toward their immediate competitive ability within the organisation.
For example, the organisation may be hard wired by the between-organisation process so that: (a) a particular behavioural act which has no immediate detrimental effect but which would endanger the organisation in the future, will cause the organisation to immediately experience fear (a proxy for future harmful effects); and (b) behaviours which result in the reproduction of the organisation but which provide no immediate benefits will cause the organisation to immediately experience pleasure (a proxy for future beneficial effects). In these examples, natural selection hard wires the organisation so that when possible adaptations are being trialed, the organisation experiences pleasure, pain or more complex emotional feelings which reflect the future effects of the possible adaptations. This ensures that when possible adaptations are tested, their future effects are taken into account.
However, to the extent that these arrangements rely on the hard-wiring of the organisation by natural selection, they share the limitation that applies to other hard-wired arrangements: they cannot be adapted and improved during the life of the organisation.
4.1.3 Internal testing of possible adaptations against future effects
If this limitation is to be overcome, the organisation must include arrangements which can test possible adaptations against their future effects and which can themselves be adapted and improved during the life of the organisation. This can be achieved by arrangements within the organisation which evaluate the future effects of possible adaptations by simulating or modelling their future consequences, and which ensure that these consequences are taken into account when the adaptations are trialed (Popper, 1972; Holland, 1992; and Stewart, 1995). The models themselves can be tested and improved during the life of the organisation on the basis of their ability to accurately predict how the world unfolds. The evolution of these arrangements will be driven by the potential benefits to be achieved by more effective cooperative management of the organisation.
The effectiveness of the management of an organisation which is guided by internal modelling will depend on the comprehensiveness and accuracy of the models. As organisations accumulate knowledge which can underpin more and more sophisticated modelling, their ability to predict the consequences of alternative adaptations (including technological adaptations) will be enhanced. Until the unfolding of a particular phenomenon is able to be modelled by an organisation, the organisation cannot understand the phenomenon, nor predict its unfolding.
Once the modelling capacity is established, selection will strongly favour the establishment and enhancement of the ability to transmit knowledge between organisations e.g. through language. This will rapidly enhance the modelling capacity by enabling the accumulation across generations of the knowledge which underpins modelling. Where a society of organisations is cooperatively managed, a high level of specialisation and division of labour in the acquisition and accumulation of knowledge can be achieved (e.g. in a modern human society).
The progressive acquisition and accumulation of knowledge will enable organisations to model the consequences of possible adaptations (including technological adaptations) across greater and greater scales of space and time. As modelling improves, it is likely to identify alternative adaptations which are superior to existing adaptations when longer term or wider scale consequences are taken into account, or when more accurate predictions of consequences are utilised. If an organisation is to take advantage of a capacity to model which improves throughout its life, it therefore must include arrangements which enable the findings of the improved models to be used to progressively modify its existing adaptations, strategies and objectives/values. This in turn will entail the modification of the operation of the adaptive processes which have established and adapted these existing arrangements, and which are relatively limited in their ability to take into account the consequences of possible adaptations. These existing adaptive processes include smaller scale modelling, hard wired adaptive processes, learning, and ultrastable arrangements.
As we have seen, a recurring challenge throughout the evolution of life has been to establish arrangements which modify adaptive processes or entities that adapt in relation to limited interests so that they instead adapt in relation to a wider set of interests and considerations. And, as we have seen in relation to the initial formation of organisations and in relation to the establishment of hierarchies of ultrastable arrangements within organisations, this can be most effectively achieved by the establishment of new layers of control which can manage and modify the operation of the pre-existing adaptive processes to ensure the wider interests and considerations are taken into account. Consequently, as the modelling capacity progressively improves in its ability to take into account the more complex consequences of possible adaptations over wider scales of space and time, new levels of management will be progressively added. Each of these will modify the operation of the previous adaptive processes (including lower levels of management) so that these wider consequences are appropriately taken into account. This increasingly enables the organisation to transcend the biological and social influences which have previously determined its actions, and instead enables the organisation to adopt whatever behaviours are identified by its modelling capacity as necessary to satisfy its longer term objectives/values.
As pointed out by Wilber (1997), the executive control of the organisation (which the organisation experiences as the self) will tend to be associated with the highest level of management. As a new level of management develops, the self will tend to disembed from the level below, and increasingly develop capacities which will enable it to stand outside and manage the lower level. Foremost amongst these capacities is the ability to model the processes of the previous level, so that they can be successfully modified to produce desired effects. The previous level will progressively become an object of the self which is now identified with the higher level, and the organisation will experience this as becoming increasingly aware of the processes of the lower level i.e. the organisation will develop self consciousness of increasing scope.
Once selection at the between organisation level has established the organisational framework which underpins the modelling capacity, this evolutionary progression in which new levels of management are added will occur within organisations during their life: it is a cultural and psychological evolutionary sequence, not a gene-based one. The sequence will be driven by the potential for each step in the sequence to provide organisations with an improved ability to satisfy their objectives/values, which were initially established by the between organisation process as proxies for organisational success.
When the modelling capacity is sufficiently developed, it will make redundant the gene based adaptive process operating at the between organisation level. This is because the modelling process will preempt the genetic process: organisations will generally be able to adapt to events through the modelling process before the events produce the differential reproductive success between genetically variant organisations which is necessary for the operation of the between-organisation process (e.g. see Laland [1992] for a model). The result is a new evolutionary mechanism which is able to discover new adaptations during the life of the organism, and to accumulate and improve adaptations across generations of organisms through cultural heritability.
As we shall see in greater detail in the next section, improvements in the modelling capacity of individual organisations in turn permits new and more effective ways of forming the cooperative organisations of individuals which constitute new levels of organisation. In particular, individuals with a sufficiently developed modelling capacity are able to form organisations whose management is able to adapt heritably during the life of the organisation from the outset, without having first to repeat the full evolutionary sequence outlined in this section. Here we will identify three distinct levels of modelling capacity which each differ significantly in the type of organisation which they can found. These levels differ primarily in the complexity and scale in space and time of the events they can model: as we proceed through the levels, modelling is able to take into account the more complex consequences of possible adaptations over wider and wider scales. Each level is sufficiently distinct to necessitate a distinct level of organisational management which manages lower levels of adaptation to ensure its unique considerations are taken into account. Therefore, as well as being associated with distinct types of social organisation, each level will also tend to be associated with different adaptations, strategies and values/objectives which will result in different world views, senses of self and cultural systems:
(a) Linear modelling: this is limited to the modelling of the simple and direct consequences of possible actions, which are seen to be linked by linear chains of causation. This level of modelling leads to the discovery and revision of adaptations with short term future consequences, but is very limited in its capacity to model the consequences of alternative strategies for discovering adaptations, or the consequences of alternative values/objectives, particularly in social contexts. Consequently, these adaptive needs continue to be met by arrangements which are predominately hard wired (e.g. through the emotional system in the case of adaptations with complex, longer term consequences). Alternatives to these complex adaptations are not an object of awareness, and the organisation takes adaptations founded on the hard wired arrangements as given, and not subject to choice.
(b) Systemic modelling: this allows the modelling of the wider social and other systems in which the organisation participates. It includes modelling of the social and other processes which have fixed many of the organisation=s particular adaptations, strategies, and values/objectives, and which also determine the extent to which these adaptations are successful. These adaptations, strategies and values are therefore no longer experienced as fixed or given, and can be reviewed in the light of the modelling. An individual with this level of modelling ability is able to successfully manage a cooperative organisation of individuals, using its modelling ability to discover controls which will promote beneficial cooperative organisation, and adapting its management during the life of the cooperative organisation.
(c) Evolutionary modelling: this entails the modelling of the evolutionary processes which have ultimately formed the organisation and its particular adaptations, strategies and objectives/values, and which will ultimately determine the future evolutionary success of the organisation and the success of the higher level organisations in which the organisation participates. The organisation will therefore be aware of the progressive evolutionary sequences identified in this article, and of its place in those on-going processes. This allows the organisation to review the adaptations, strategies, and values established by earlier evolutionary mechanisms in the light of their appropriateness to the future wider scale progressive evolutionary processes. In particular, it enables the organisation to adaptively preempt the wider scale evolutionary trends before they manifest as the differential reproductive success of organisations. Organisations might do this by, for example, promoting the formation of higher level organisations capable of successful cooperative adaptation on wider and wider scales.
This progressive improvement of the modelling capacity continues the trend that began with the evolution of simple ultrastable arrangements which tested possible adaptations solely against the ability of their immediate effects to usefully deal with changes as they arise within the organisation: as the new levels of management associated with these modelling capacities are progressively added, the organisation will increasingly be managed so that its adaptation takes into account the effects of possible adaptations over wider and wider scales of space and time. The organisation will therefore progressively move closer to the ideal of ensuring that entities within the organisation are adapted by appropriately taking into account the effects of their actions on others in the organisation and on the organisation as a whole, no matter how distant those effects may be in space or time.
4.2 The evolution of cooperative human organisation
4.2.1 Lower level management
We have seen that genetic arrangements which constrain the characteristics of individuals can control a group of individuals where the arrangements are reproduced in each of the members of the group. Lower level management of this kind has been responsible for the initial evolution of cooperative multicellular organisation, and cooperative non-human societies.
We have also seen that the evolution of the ability of individuals to adapt during their life eventually resulted in the capacity for individuals to acquire new internal constraints and predispositions during their life (e.g. learned behaviours). Once these learned constraints could be transmitted between individuals (e.g. through the inculcation of behaviours in offspring by their parents), it became possible for a group to be controlled by lower level management constituted not by genetic constraints, but by learned behavioural constraints. A cluster of behavioural constraints which include a predisposition to inculcate the cluster in others could reproduce throughout a group, predisposing members of the group to behave cooperatively.
These types of arrangements are seen in their most highly developed form in human organisation. There is strong evidence that early human hunter/gatherer groups were cooperative and highly egalitarian within groups (e.g. see Knauft, 1991; Erdal and Whiten, 1994; and Wilson and Sober, 1994). This type of organisation could be achieved within a genetically disparate group by a cluster of inculcated behavioural norms which constrained individuals to behave in ways which remove any disadvantage from behaving cooperatively e.g. by predisposing individuals to share the benefits of cooperation and to refrain from cheating. The success of such a manager within a group would be enhanced if the manager included behavioural constraints which actuated individuals to punish or expel individuals which failed to behave consistently with all the behavioural norms (e.g. individuals in whom the cluster of constraints had not been reproduced). Such a lower level manager could successfully compete with alternatives within the group, as well as producing a group which could out-compete other groups which were unable to exploit the benefits of cooperation.
Lower level managers are also able to arise and persist within modern, large scale human organisation where the predominant form of management is upper level: for example, an appropriate cluster of inculcated behavioural constraints can reproduce across a group to form organisations such as the Hutterite groups which are discussed in detail by Wilson and Sober (1994).
However, groups which are controlled by lower level management constituted by inculcated behaviour patterns are fundamentally limited in their ability to adapt heritably during the life of the group. This is because lower level management can sustain cooperation within a group only to the extent that it successfully hard wires individuals to behave in ways which may be contrary to their individual interests, and maintains these constraints through time. Relaxation of the hard wired constraints will result in a return to the pursuit of individual interests at the expense of the group, with the collapse of cooperation.
Management could permit variation and experimentation in the hard wired constraints only if it had the capacity to distinguish between useful and harmful variants, and the capacity to suppress any new variants which prove to be harmful (e.g. which involve a new form of cheating, or involve any other pursuit of individual interests at the expense of group interests). The lower level management of human groups does not have this capacity. Except in the limited circumstances where other arrangements can successfully control variation (e.g. see Stewart, 1997[a]), management must therefore indiscriminately suppress all variation which could possibly be harmful, including variation arising in management itself, even though this will also suppress variation which could be beneficial. Variation which could possibly be harmful can be permitted to arise only with the formation of new groups, concentrating selection and adaptation at the between-group level (Wilson and Sober, 1994). The result is the stifling of innovation and adaptive ability during the life of the group. Rigid enforcement of norms and strict adherence to traditional ways of doing things is a feature of this form of human organisation. It is no accident that the technology used by Hutterite groups is greatly out of date, and that traditional human groups showed little change and innovation in their social and other practices over long periods.
4.2.2 The emergence of upper level management
The development within humans of a capacity for systemic modelling made possible the emergence of upper level management which overcame these limitations of lower level management. Systemic modelling improved the ability of humans to discover actions which produce benefits that are significantly displaced in space or in time from the immediate effects of the action, and where the causal connections between the action and their benefits are complex. As a consequence, upper level management informed by systemic modelling was no longer limited to discovering and adapting only those interventions which produced largely immediate and direct benefits. Because many of the interventions and actions needed to establish cooperative arrangements and to harvest their benefits are complex, systemic modelling greatly enhanced the ability of upper level managers (e.g. chiefs, kings or other rulers) to produce cooperative human organisation.
Upper level managers informed by systemic modelling therefore had a much superior ability to continuously adapt the management of human organisation during its life. Such a management has the ability to continually distinguish between beneficial and harmful variation arising within the group during its life. And it can continuously adapt its management to control variants as they arise. In contrast to lower level management, upper level management informed by well developed systemic modelling does not have to suppress all possibly harmful variation during the life of the organisation. To the extent it can distinguish harmful variation from beneficial, it can suppress only the harmful rather than having to suppress all of the variation. As a consequence, organisations which included this form of management were significantly superior in their ability to adapt heritably during their life from the outset. They did not have to evolve such a capacity by traversing the full evolutionary sequence outlined above in which the ability to adapt during the life of the organisation emerged for the first time.
The result has been the forms of modern human organisation which have arisen progressively since the latest ice age about 12,000 years ago, and which are managed largely by upper level managers such as rulers, committees, and governments. These managers have the capacity to continuously adapt their management within the organisation to improve cooperative arrangements and to adapt them to changing circumstances, and have enabled an extraordinary amount of cooperative division of labour and specialisation.
Although upper level management informed by systemic modelling has a much superior capacity to continuously adapt the management of an organisation during its life, lower level as well as upper level management has been significant in the evolution of modern human organisation to date: initially, until upper level management accumulated sufficient knowledge to provide effective management, strong lower level management was essential for the maintenance of cooperative organisation. The lower level management was necessary to constrain the actions of members of the organisation in ways which assisted the prevention of the breakdown of the group though competition, cheating and free riding.
Furthermore, even where the systemic modelling capacity of upper level management was well developed, its task of managing a complex human organisation could be assisted and simplified by the existence of lower level management which promoted cooperation. For example, as economic theorists such as North (1991) and Pelikan (1995) have suggested, the reproduction across an organisation of behaviour patterns which constrain individuals to be trustworthy and refrain from cheating in economic exchange relations can reduce the need for upper level controls in which the State punishes breaches of contract. For these reasons, upper level managers of human organisations have often fostered the reproduction of lower level constraints which complement the interests of the managers (e.g. the promotion by the State of particular values and norms).
However, the limited ability of lower level management to adapt as circumstances change has resulted in its progressive displacement by upper level management. Where organisational changes reduce the effectiveness of lower level management, or impair its capacity to reproduce across the organisation, the greater adaptive ability of upper level management has meant that it is likely to take over the management functions previously performed by the lower level management. Furthermore, improvement of the capacity in humans for systemic modelling has enabled the revision of earlier adaptations, including the revision of inculcated behaviour patterns which previously constrained behaviour. Consequently, the most recent period of human evolution has seen the weakening of lower level management, the rise of individualism in which humans use their modelling capacity to choose between alternative adaptations rather than relying on inculcated responses, and an enormous increase in the scope and differentiation of upper level management as it has taken over more of the management burden from lower level management.
4.2.3 The future evolution of human organisation
Since their first emergence, human organisations managed by upper level management have increased substantially in scale, exploiting the benefits of cooperative adaptation over wider and wider scales of space and time. In the future, the potential for benefits to be gained from the further expansion of cooperative organisation should tend to drive the establishment of an upper level management which manages an organisation on the scale of the planet. This level of management would manage processes that arise within lower levels of organisation (e.g. nation states) and that have effects which extend beyond the border of any one state e.g. acts of aggression between states, and wide scale environmental degradation. As for management at all other levels of organisation, this would ensure that processes within the planetary organisation are not able to successfully pursue their own interests at the expense of others, and are able to benefit from their beneficial cooperative effects on others. The establishment of this planetary organisation would be assisted by the further development amongst humans of a capacity for systemic modelling. This would eventually provide widespread recognition of the benefits of management on a planetary scale. The development of a capacity for evolutionary modelling would accelerate the establishment of the planetary organisation.
However, the emergence of this planetary organisation would not exhaust the potential for cooperative organisation on the scale of the planet. It would not fully achieve the ideal of ensuring that within the organisation, the adaptation of individuals (including managers) would appropriately take into account the effects of possible adaptations on others in the organisation, treating effects on others as effects on self. This is because the current systems of human government (upper level management) are fundamentally limited in their management ability. I will briefly discuss three of the main limitations:
(a) As pointed out in relation to economic systems by Hayek (1948), central governments do not have access to the information necessary to determine the ideal cooperative outcomes in particular circumstances, and to devise the management interventions to implement these. This Aplanning@ limitation can be circumvented somewhat if governments limit their management as far as possible to establishing the governance which is necessary to underpin the operation of systems of exchange relations within the organisation (e.g. horizontal economic markets). Where these systems of exchange relations are effective, the participants capture the beneficial effects of their actions on others, and have access to the information that governments lack. However, systems of exchange relations are also limited in their ability to comprehensively explore cooperative possibilities: for example, they do not allow participants to capture the benefits of their effects on others where the effects cannot be contained to those involved in the exchanges (e.g. public goods); and their effectiveness is ultimately subject to the limitations which apply to central government, because the effectiveness of systems of exchange relations in turn depends on the effectiveness of the systems of governance which underpin them, such as the institutions which enforce property rights and prevent cheating (e.g. see Hodgson, 1988) .
(b) The coincidence of interests between management and the organisation as a whole is not likely to be complete (the analysis of McGuire and Olson [1996] demonstrate that the conditions under which the coincidence is complete are not met by current systems of governance). This is particularly the case where the success of a ruler or government can be influenced by individuals and groups with non-representative interests. It will be in the interests of these individuals and groups to use their influence to have the management provide them with additional benefits at the expense of the organisation. However, to the extent that any individual in an organisation does not capture the net effects of its actions on others, either by receiving more benefits or less, the organisation will fail to optimally explore the benefits of cooperative organisation. And to the extent that governance intervenes any further in the actions of individuals than is necessary to ensure they experience the net effects of their actions on others, it unnecessarily restricts their freedom as well as impairing the effectiveness of the organisation as a whole. Many of the features of modern governance (including the democratic process itself) can be interpreted as attempts to overcome this >conflict of interest= limitation by constraining rulers and governments to act solely within the interests of the organisation. The test of the success of such measures is whether they result in government in which individuals driven solely by self interest will always seek to govern only in the interests of the organisation as a whole. Existing systems of governance clearly fail this test.
(c) Modern systems of government have limited time horizons: they do not contain processes which ensure that all the future effects of actions are taken into account in determining adaptation. The effects of possible adaptations on future generations generally count little in determining which adaptations are adopted. A planetary organisation managed by human government which was limited in this way would not invest the considerable resources needed to establish a comprehensive capacity to adapt in relation to possible future events which might arise outside the planetary organisation. As a result, the capacity of such an organisation to adapt in relation to the outside/future (including in interactions with other living systems of the same scale) would be more comparable to the ability of a plant, rather than to the ability of a mammal.
Currently, our systems of governance are devised and adapted by the same sort of processes that were so ineffective at devising and adapting economic outcomes in Soviet-style planned economies. The limitations of these processes mean that a system of planetary management implemented and adapted by humans through existing systems of governance would not exhaust the potential benefits of adaptive cooperative organisation on the scale of the planet. To identify the nature of the evolutionary trends that this unexhausted potential will tend to drive, it is necessary to identify organisational arrangements which would overcome these limitations. What sort of arrangements would produce governance which would evolve optimally, searching for improvements, and adapting to new circumstances?
Stewart (1995) outlines a form of adaptive organisation (termed a system of competitive vertical exchange relations) which would produce an upper level management that evolves optimally. Key features of such an adaptive system of governance are: (a) the management interventions which would be implemented would be determined by competition between alternative interventions on the basis of their ability to produce net benefits to the individuals and groups which they would affect within the organisation; (b) the extent to which an intervention would provide net benefits (and therefore its competitive ability) would be determined by the extent of the resources which those affected by the intervention were prepared to exchange for its implementation; (c) the development and offering of alternative interventions would be open to entrepreneurial activity. Ultimately, all management interventions, including those which establish the vertical system itself, would be adaptable on this basis.
Such a system (a) involves supra individual cognition in the sense that it discovers adaptations by trial and error processes which operate across individuals rather than within individuals; (b) operates through an invisible hand process in that it produces its beneficial organisational effects though the pursuit by individuals (including those in management) only of their own interests; (c) tends to approach the ideal in which all individuals, including those in management, capture the net effects on others of their actions; (d) therefore will tend to approach the organisational ideal in which individuals adapt as if they treat their effects on others as effects on self; and (e) therefore also tends to approach the ideal in which the interventions of management are limited only to what is essential to ensure individuals experience the net effects of their actions on others i.e. maximises individual freedom.
Such a vertical system which would manage and complement systems of horizontal exchange relations such as economic markets could largely overcome the >planning= and >conflict of interest= limitations which impair the effectiveness of current forms of government. The benefits that a vertical system could deliver to the organisation and to the individuals and groups that participate in the system could be recognised by individuals with a well developed capacity for systemic modelling. A capacity for evolutionary modelling would assist this recognition. It is feasible that such a system could be adopted through the current democratic systems of government if and when sufficient numbers of humans develop the capacity for systemic modelling. However, the adoption of a vertical system would be likely to be resisted by those who, under current systems of governance, do better than merely capture the benefits of their effects on others. This resistance would include promoting loyalty and respect for current systems of government, and promoting the belief that any change would be risky.
However, an effective vertical system would not of itself overcome the restrictions on the adaptive capacity of current forms of government that result from limited time horizons. It is only where the humans which participate in the organisation are informed by evolutionary modelling that these restrictions would be fully overcome. Evolutionary modellers would be aware of the future direction of the evolutionary processes in which the human system is embedded and therefore would be aware that the planetary organisation must develop the capacity to adapt and act for the outside/future if it is to participate in the continued expansion in space and time of living organisation which is able to adapt cooperatively on wider and wider scales. Evolutionary modellers would therefore support the establishment of arrangements which would result in the self actualisation of the planetary organisation: this would mean that the planetary organisation would develop its own objectives/values, plans, self-awareness, modelling capacity and projects, and it would be capable of adapting coherently as a whole. The development of evolutionary modelling would therefore enable adaptive process within humans and within human organisation to preempt the operation of natural selection which might otherwise operate at the between-organisation level, producing a self actualised planetary organisation without the operation of competition or differential reproductive success between planetary organisations.
This does not mean that evolutionary modellers would sacrifice their immediate interests to attempt to take into account the longer term and wider scale evolutionary consequences of their actions. Instead, evolutionary modellers would draw on their understanding of the types of organisation which permit the successful formation of larger scale cooperative organisation. They would therefore support the implementation of management which ensures that individuals experience the net effects on others in the organisation of their actions, no matter how distant in space or time those effects may be. This management would ensure that when individuals adapt to immediate circumstances, they also adapt effectively in the light of the longer term consequences of their actions. An appropriate vertical system would enable evolutionary modellers to establish a system of management which would align the immediate interests of individuals with their longer term interests in this way. This is because such a vertical system tends to establish whatever management arrangements are necessary to satisfy the objectives/values of the members of the organisation.
The development of a capacity for evolutionary modelling could be expected to reduce resistance to the implementation of an appropriate vertical system, even amongst individuals and groups who are disproportionately advantaged under current systems of governance. Individuals informed by evolutionary modelling would be less driven to accumulate resources to satisfy the acquisitive objectives/values which currently motivate many humans, and which are known by evolutionary modellers to have been initially established in humans by flawed, limited and superseded evolutionary mechanisms (e.g. natural selection operating on genetic variation). This would particularly be the case where pursuit of these objectives/values would be inconsistent with values/objectives which serve longer term evolutionary interests. These considerations also suggest that the task of successfully managing organisations of evolutionary modellers would be less demanding.
With the full attainment of evolutionary modelling, human cooperative organisation would have evolved from a form of organisation in which humans were constrained by inculcated beliefs and genetic predispositions to act cooperatively, though organisation in which individuals were in large part coerced to act cooperatively, to organisation in which humans utilise a modelling capacity to choose to be subject to a dynamic and responsive management which aligns their interests with the organisational interest.
Of course, whether human organisation will successfully evolve in this way to further exploit the potential benefits of cooperation is not certain: as we shall discuss in the next section, the fact that there are potential benefits to be gained through complex new forms of cooperative organisation does not mean that these will be discovered and taken advantage of by a particular species under particular circumstances where the species discovers adaptations through the operation of limited evolutionary mechanisms. However, given sufficient time on any suitable planet, the existence of these potential benefits will drive evolutionary processes which are likely to eventually produce a species which manages a living organisation on the scale of the planet.
5. CONCLUSION
The weight of opinion amongst evolutionary biologists currently appears to be strongly against a progressive view of evolution (e.g. see Niteckie, 1998).
In this section, I will briefly outline a number of the main criticisms which have been directed against previous approaches which suggest that evolution is progressive, and indicate how they are overcome by the approach presented here.
As noted earlier, a central argument raised by those who suggest that evolution cannot be progressive is that natural selection provides adaptation only to changing local environments, and that the tracking of these changes cannot produce sustained directional evolution: some directional change can be expected, but it will end as selective circumstances change or as opportunities for further adaptive improvement are exhausted (e.g. Maynard Smith, (1988); and Gould 1996).
The weakness in this argument is that adaptations which are able to improve fitness are not limited to adaptations which track local environmental changes back and forth, providing closer adaptation only to whatever local circumstances prevail at a particular time (e.g. a sequence of adaptations which produce thicker fur as mean temperatures decline, or thinner fur as temperatures increase again). Fitness can also be improved by adaptations which are general in the sense that they are capable of providing benefits across a wide range of local environmental conditions (e.g. a single adaptation that improves the physiological ability of an organism to adapt to changes in temperatures, producing benefits whether mean temperatures increase or decrease). Such general adaptations will remain beneficial despite wide changes in local conditions, and can be progressively improved by further general adaptations. Reversals in the direction of changes in local conditions will not bring these sequences of progressive evolution to an end, as it will for local adaptations.
This article has argued that there is an inexhaustible potential for general adaptations which can produce benefits irrespective of changing environmental conditions by improving the ability of living processes to exploit the advantages of cooperative organisation on wider and wider scales. At any particular level of organisation, these general adaptations may either improve the capacity for beneficial cooperative arrangements to be exploited between organisms (e.g. by the formation of hierarchical organisations of organisms); or may improve the capacity for cooperative arrangements within individual organisms to be optimised and adapted (e.g. by enabling the effects of possible adaptations across wider and wider scales of space and time to be taken into account in adapting the organism). Although the particular cooperative arrangements which these general adaptations make possible in any particular environment may be beneficial only locally, the general adaptations make such improved cooperative arrangements achievable across a wide range of environmental conditions.
However, the view presented here that there is a general potential for beneficial cooperation seems to raise another difficulty: why haven=t all lineages of organisms progressed in these ways? If improved cooperative management within and between organisms has the potential to produce benefits generally across environments, why aren=t all species progressively discovering improved general adaptations of this type? Bacteria are often cited as an example of organisms which show no recent progressive evolution (Ayala, 1988; and Gould, 1996).
The first point to be made from the perspective developed here is that progressive evolution has been much more widespread than is generally recognised. For example, the participation by bacteria in cooperative organisation is common, ranging from bacteria which are included in symbiotic assemblages, to the descendants of bacteria which participate in eukaryote cells which in turn participate in multicellular organisms, which in turn participate in social systems (e.g. see Cavalier-Smith, 1981). In this way, bacteria have been centrally involved in the progressive expansion of cooperative organisation across space and time. This involvement includes progress in the ability to cooperatively adapt in relation to events of wider and wider scale: the descendants of bacteria which participate in higher level organisations are adapted by the management of those organisations in relation to events and considerations of wider scale. For example, although bacteria have not themselves developed a capacity for internal modelling, those that participate in larger scale organisations which have this capacity will be adapted in relation to events of wider scale as if their adaptation were itself directly guided by internal modelling.
Secondly, the extent to which existing lineages of organisms are participating in the progressive evolution of cooperative organisation is growing rapidly. In particular, an increasingly wide range of organisms such as domestic animals, plants, pests, and disease-causing organisms are being managed as participants in cooperative organisations managed by humans. With the formation of a planetary organisation, the extent of this management of other organisms would increase substantially. This would particularly be the case as management improved its ability to manage the planetary system in ways which will optimise its capacity to successfully adapt for the outside/future: management would need to take advantage of all the potential resources of the system to optimise its adaptive capacity.
This management is likely to include genetic engineering which is already being used by humans to produce new forms of organism that can contribute greater benefits to human organisation. The potential benefits of cooperation between organisms are likely to encourage further management interventions along these lines to produce new cooperative organisations of organisms. For example, these could include cooperative assemblages of bacteria that provide particular benefits to the planetary organisation. The potential to engineer new beneficial forms of cooperative organisation which have not yet been fully exploited by natural selection should be considerable: the trial and error process of natural selection operating on genetic variation has a very limited capacity to explore the space of all possible gene-based organisms and organisations of organisms, and it can be expected that there will be considerable advantage in its further exploration by upper levels of management informed by evolutionary modelling.
Increasingly as a planetary organisation evolves, more and more of the living processes on the planet would be managed so that they participate cooperatively in the organisation, and would be managed so that they are adapted in relation to events of wider and wider scales, including in relation to any participation in yet larger scale living organisations.
Nevertheless, in the past, many lineages have not shared in progressive trends for long periods. However, the existence of a general potential for beneficial cooperation does not mean that all lineages will realise this potential by improving cooperative management within and between organisms. This is because the general benefits of cooperation are comprehensively accessible only with the evolution of complex hierarchical organisational arrangements, and an evolutionary mechanism such as natural selection which searches for adaptations by trial and error is limited in its ability to discover such arrangements. This is particularly the case where there is no set of simpler adaptations which are each able to provide general fitness benefits, and which are able to serve as intermediary steps in the evolution of the complex organisational arrangements. If such general intermediary adaptations were readily available, evolution could proceed toward the complex organisational adaptations across lineages and environments. However, without intermediary adaptations which are able to produce fitness benefits in a variety of environments, evolution must rely on there being particular local environmental conditions which select in favour of local adaptations which fortuitously can also serve as intermediaries to the general organisational adaptations.
Other factors will also limit the extent to which lineages participate in progressive evolution: small, simple organisms such as bacteria will be less likely to be able to successfully include within them complex hierarchical organisational arrangements, such as those necessary to establish a capacity for evolutionary modelling; and lineages which first discover progressive and intermediary adaptations are likely to exploit the circumstances which produce the greatest benefits for the adaptations, reducing the availability of circumstances which will produce sufficient selective advantages to drive similar evolution in other lineages.
These considerations suggest that it is therefore not surprising that many lineages fail to share the progressive trends, even though improved cooperative management within and between organisms have the potential to produce benefits generally across environments. However, this pattern of intermittent progressive evolution is likely to prevail only while the evolutionary mechanism is limited in its capacity to search for beneficial adaptations. Progressive evolution is likely to be more general and pronounced once evolution produces more effective evolutionary processes such as a mechanism informed by evolutionary modelling.
However, these considerations seem to raise another serious problem: if the general adaptations which exploit the benefits of cooperation within or between organisms are able to increase fitness across environments, why do lineages which discover general adaptations often appear to have failed to out-compete and replace the lineages that have not discovered general adaptations? Furthermore, if the progressive lineages fail to displace the non-progressives, and the non-progressives continue to persist, how can it be said that the progressive lineages are >better= than the non-progressive lineages in any sense which is evolutionarily meaningful? In particular, if bacteria which are not part of wider scale cooperative organisation have flourished, aren=t they as evolutionarily successful as, for example, humans?
If we are to adequately assess the relative evolutionary success of various lineages, it is essential to undertake the assessment over wide enough scales of space and time. This is because over narrower scales, other factors may be more important in determining the relative success of lineages, particularly where the evolutionary mechanism is natural selection operating on genetic variation. For example, a lineage which discovers a general adaptation which provides fitness benefits across environments may nonetheless fail to out-compete other lineages in other environments: this will be the case where the other lineages carry various local adaptations to their environments which, in those environments, outweigh the general benefits provided by the general adaptation. Similarly, a progressive lineage could be ousted by a non-progressive lineage if the benefits of the progressive=s general adaptations were outweighed by its inferior local adaptation to its environment.
Furthermore, even though a general adaptation provides fitness benefits across environments, the fitness cost of realising the general adaptation may vary across lineages and environments, and in some cases may not outweigh the fitness benefits provided by the adaptation. In those cases, a progressive lineage may not prevail, until a more cost/effective way of realising the general adaptation is discovered. For example, in relation to a niche which strongly favours small size, the establishment and maintenance of a highly complex organisational arrangement will incur a relatively higher cost to fitness unless the arrangement can be achieved just as effectively on a smaller scale at proportionate cost; lineages occupying such niches would be resistant to being out-competed by progressive lineages until the progressive lineages discovered ways of cost/effectively implementing their general adaptations on smaller scales.
However, as general adaptations accumulate over time, and as their accumulated contributions to fitness become more significant, the ability of progressive lineages to adaptively radiate by out-competing other lineages will increase. Nevertheless, for any given level of superiority in relation to general adaptations, there will be a corresponding level of disadvantage in relation to local adaptations that will not be overcome. For these reasons, progressive evolution underpinned by natural selection operating on genetic variation will proceed in fits and starts, and the extent to which progressive lineages oust non-progressives will be strongly influenced by historical contingencies.
Over much longer time scales, the probability of survival of non-progressive lineages will greatly diminish. As we have seen, the evolution of a planetary organisation would result in lineages that were formerly non-progressive increasingly being managed and adapted as part of the planetary organisation. And as the planetary organisation develops, its human management would increasingly engineer organisms and cooperative relationships between organisms to optimise their contributions to the planetary organisation. Human management would use its superior cognitive ability to adapt organisms so that they evolve progressively in ways which would overcome the historical contingencies and other limitations which restricted the evolutionary mechanism based on the more cognitively limited natural selection operating on genetic variation. Furthermore, the planetary management could be expected to further develop the practise of current human organisation to utilise machines and other non-living processes instead of organisms where their contributions to the planetary organisation are superior.
Increasingly, non-progressive lineages would either begin to participate in progressive evolution by being incorporated into wider scale cooperative organisation, or would be directly suppressed by the planetary organisation, or would be out-competed by members of the planetary organisation whose fitness is increased by participation in cooperative arrangements.
However, the evolutionary superiority of lineages which participate in cooperative organisation would be most clearly seen in relation to the ability of the organisation to successfully adapt to wider scale events, particularly in relation to other living organisations of similar or greater scale. As it develops a capacity to adapt for its outside/future, the planetary organisation would develop the ability to adapt to external events of abiotic or biotic origin which might otherwise threaten its continued existence on this planet. This adaptive capacity might involve relocation to other planets, and may also involve the further spread of human organisation and its technological and other adaptations over greater scales of space and time.
The critical point here is that non-human organisms which are part of the human organisation would be adapted to these larger scale events along with the rest of the organisation, and would, for example, participate in any relocation and in any spread of the organisation. In contrast, lineages which do not participate in the planetary organisation would not be successfully adapted to these wider scale events, and would not participate in any future evolutionary success which necessitates the ability to adapt coherently on larger scales. Gould (1996) acknowledges that bacteria are unlikely to survive what currently appears to be the inevitable eventual explosion of the sun. However, he fails to recognise that the likely survival of such an event by a human organisation which is able to adapt on a sufficiently large scale illustrates the superiority of such a human organisation in strictly evolutionary terms.
Of course, it is impossible to predict how successful a planetary organisation informed by evolutionary modelling would be at adapting to the particular large scale events which actually arise in the future. However, it is possible to state with certainty that such an organisation would be able to successfully adapt to a much wider range of large scale events than would non-progressive lineages, or than would a planetary organisation which does not develop the ability to adapt for the outside/future, and which is not informed by evolutionary modelling.
These considerations also suggest that the future evolutionary success of humanity will depend heavily on the acquisition of a well developed capacity for evolutionary modelling. A comprehensive theory of evolutionary progress will be an essential component of such a capacity. In the evolution of living processes on any planet, the development of an adequate theory of evolutionary progress will therefore itself be a critical milestone in the progress of evolution.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I gratefully acknowledge the benefit of useful comments from Jeremy Evans, David Richards and Wilson Kenell.
THE EVOLUTIONARY SIGNIFICANCE OF SPIRITUAL DEVELOPMENT John Stewart (http://www4.tpg.com.au/users/jes999/ ) This article was published in the September 2003 issue of the online journal Metanexus which can be found at: http://www.metanexus.net/monthly/2003.09.html Evolutionary adaptability Adaptability is of central importance to the evolutionary process. It is through adaptation that organisms are able to survive in changing environments, become better suited to their existing environment, or expand into new environments. In general, organisms that are more adaptable can be expected to be more successful in evolutionary terms. A major improvement in adaptive ability is a major evolutionary advance. Humans are the most adaptable organism to live on this planet. We use our rapidly improving science and technology to survive and satisfy our adaptive goals in a wide range of environments. Whatever adaptive problem we put our minds to, we can generally find a solution. We have proven far more adaptable than organisms that evolve by gene-based evolution. It took millions of years for genetic evolution to discover how to produce reptiles that fly, while humans developed the technology to achieve this in a few thousand years. The massive adaptive improvements seen in human capacities over recent centuries are significantly greater than could be achieved by genetic evolution over hundreds of millions of years. Whatever our wants, whatever our needs, we are very effective at finding ways to manipulate our environment to achieve them. But we are very poor at achieving things that we do not want. We don’t use our creativity to find better ways to achieve things we are not motivated to achieve. In evolutionary terms, this turns out to be the central limitation in human adaptability. Typically we do not see this as a limitation. It does not prevent us from doing anything that we want to do. It does not stop us from living happy and fulfilled lives. We do not feel restricted because we have no desire to do what we have no desire to do. If we evaluate our adaptability by asking whether it enables us to satisfy our needs and wants, we continue to see ourselves as being highly adaptable. But if we measure our adaptive ability in evolutionary terms, we reach a very different conclusion. What if our continued evolutionary success demands that we adapt in ways that conflict with the satisfaction of our existing needs and wants? What if our existing motivations and needs do not produce the behaviours that are best in evolutionary terms? These sorts of conflicts between our needs and evolution’s needs seem highly likely to emerge during our evolutionary future. It is improbable that the needs and wants implanted in us by our evolutionary past will produce the behaviour that is also optimal for our future. This means that our adaptability is seriously limited in evolutionary terms. There is an enormous range of behaviours, life styles and technologies that we would not want given our current needs and motivations. But these might be critically important for achieving evolutionary success in the future. We have a very large evolutionary blind spot. We are not motivated to explore an immense variety of adaptive possibilities, no matter how useful they may be in evolutionary terms. Until we overcome this limitation, we will continue to use genetic engineering, artificial intelligence and other technological advances to satisfy our past evolutionary needs and conditioning, rather than to achieve future evolutionary success. If we are to be successful in evolutionary terms in the future, we will need to overcome this adaptive limitation. We will have to be able to do whatever it takes for future success. Humanity will need to free itself from the needs and wants installed in us by our biological and cultural past. For this we will find that we will need to develop in ways that have traditionally been classified as spiritual. Humanity will need to widely adopt the practices currently associated with spiritual development if we are to continue to be successful in evolutionary terms. To get a better understanding of how human adaptability would need to change in the future, it is useful to see how adaptability has improved during the past evolution of life on Earth. This will enable us to locate the current level of human adaptability within a long sequence of evolutionary improvements. We will see how our current level surpassed previous abilities, but how it too is limited. This will help identify the new capacities we would have to develop if we are to overcome these limitations. It will point to the new psychological skills and capacities we need if we are to overcome our current deficiencies. The evolution of adaptability There are a number of quite distinct mechanisms that adapt organisms on our planet[i][1]. One of the first to emerge was gene-based natural selection. With this mechanism, organisms produce offspring that differ genetically from each other and from their parents. The genetic difference might produce a change within the organism that carries it. This changed characteristic might in turn make the individual more successful and have a greater number of surviving offspring. If so, the proportion of individuals that carry the genetic difference will increase, and the genetic difference will spread throughout the population. The population will be better adapted, having acquired an improved characteristic. Gene-based natural selection discovers adaptations by trying out changes amongst offspring. But gene-based natural selection operates only across generations. It does not adapt individual organisms during their life. It is unable to discover new adaptations by trying out changes within the individual while it lives. Obviously an adaptive mechanism that could do so would have a significant advantage in evolutionary terms. It could discover and implement improved adaptations continuously within individuals, long before genetic evolution was able to do so. Somewhat ironically, the adaptive arrangements that operate within organisms during their life were discovered and established by genetic evolution. Genetic evolution has developed the superior adaptive mechanisms that have the potential to replace it, at least in humans. The first adaptive mechanisms established by genetic evolution searched for better adaptation by trying out changes within the organism, using trial and error. But how could the organism’s systems know whether a particular change had improved the organism’s adaptation? This was a key challenge for genetic evolution—it had to install the organism with some way of identifying the internal changes that were beneficial in evolutionary terms. This challenge was easier in the case of changes that produced some immediate improvement in the functioning of the organism. The efficacy of a change could be judged against its immediate effects within the organism. For example, changes to the amount of oxygen delivered to a tissue could be evaluated by their effect on the metabolic rate in the tissue. The challenge could not be met so easily for changes that might produce longer-term evolutionary advantage, without immediate beneficial effects on the organism. Behaviour that leads to sexual reproduction provides a clear example. These behaviours have no immediate pay-off for the organism. They do not improve its functioning, and may even impede it. How could evolution fit out organisms so that they implemented behavioural changes that led towards successful reproduction, and rejected behaviour that did not? The answer discovered by genetic evolution was to install organisms with an internal reward system. This system rewards individuals internally when they try out behaviours that are beneficial in evolutionary terms, and punishes them when they do otherwise. We experience these internal rewards as various kinds of attractive feelings, motivations and emotions. The habits and behaviour patterns that an organism adopts are those that are positively reinforced by its internal reward system. Its behaviour and lifestyle is shaped by the goals that are established by its motivations and emotions. The internal rewards and punishments act as proxies for evolutionary success. Genetic evolution tunes the system of motivations and emotions so that when an organism pursues its internal rewards, it acts in a way that leads to evolutionary success. An organism’s motivations and emotions guide it to discover and implement adaptations that are beneficial in evolutionary terms. If circumstances change, and a particular behaviour is no longer optimal in evolutionary terms, genetic evolution will modify the internal reward system so that the behaviour is no longer reinforced. Genetic evolution adapts the internal reward system so that the organism’s goals continue to be aligned with evolutionary success. Other important developments in the evolution of adaptive mechanisms within organisms were learning and imitation. Once an organism discovered by trial-and-error that a particular change was useful in particular circumstances, learning enabled it to implement that adaptive change whenever those circumstances arose again. And imitation enabled an organism to adopt an adaptive change discovered by another individual, without having to discover it for itself. Both these improvements reduced the amount of trial-and-error that organisms had to use to adapt. But the most significant and far-reaching advance in adaptability came with the development of a capacity for mental modelling[ii][2]. This capacity is very familiar to us—it is most fully developed in humans. We use thinking and other mental representations to model the effects of our behaviour on our environment. So instead of having to try out alternative actions in practice, humans can use mental models to predict their effects. We can try out possible adaptations mentally. This significantly reduces the need for costly trial and error in the search for adaptive behaviour, and enables us to take account of the (predicted) future consequences of our actions. Our ability to test alternative behaviours mentally is the basis of our capacity to plan ahead, imagine alternatives, invent and adapt technology, build structures such as houses and roads, radically modify our external environment for our adaptive goals, establish long-term objectives, imagine how we might change the world, develop strategic plans, design projects and undertake activities that pay off only in the future (such as plant crops and feed animals). The acquisition of language was a critically important step forward in our ability to construct mental models. Language and associated forms of communication enabled humans to share the knowledge used for building models. Communication enabled all members of a society to acquire and use the knowledge discovered by any individual. It also enabled knowledge to be accumulated across the generations. The progressive accumulation of knowledge has enabled humans to model a greater range of interactions with our environment, and to predict the consequences of our actions over wider scales of space and time. This has enabled us to discover more effective ways of achieving our adaptive goals and obtaining positive reinforcement from our internal reward systems. Our ability to construct and manipulate models has also improved as we have learnt to augment our mental abilities with external artefacts such as pen and paper, books, recording devices, computers and other forms of artificial intelligence. Our mental adaptability can be expected to continue to improve as humanity accumulates more knowledge about how the external world responds to our interventions and as artificial intelligence is developed. The full evolutionary potential of mental modelling is obvious. Once organisms have accumulated sufficient knowledge, their modelling will often be superior to the internal reward system at identifying the adaptations that are best in evolutionary terms. No longer would the organisms have to be guided towards evolutionary success solely by a system of motivations and emotions. Instead the organisms could use mental modelling to identify and implement the actions that would enable it to survive and flourish into the future. Mental models have the potential to be far superior than the internal reward system established by genetic evolution in the organisms’ evolutionary past. The motivations and volitions (moral or otherwise) that were favoured by Darwinian selection in their evolutionary past are highly unlikely to be optimal for their successful survival throughout the next million years. And as circumstances change into the future, the values and motivations that are optimal are likely to change repeatedly. But mental modelling is not able to fulfil its enormous adaptive potential when it first emerges. Initially, it does not have the capability to take over the adaptation of the organism. It has not accumulated the detailed knowledge and information needed to predict the future consequences of a wide range of alternative actions. As a result, modelling will be less effective than the pre-existing motivation and reward systems at discovering the best adaptations. However mental modelling will still provide immediate advantages. It enables the organism to find better ways of achieving its internal rewards and motivations. The organism can use mental models to identify the behaviours that will achieve outcomes that produce desirable internal states. Initially mental modelling will not establish or change the adaptive goals of the organism—it begins as a servant of the pre-existing motivation and reward systems. Limitations of human adaptability It is easy to locate humanity within this evolutionary sequence[iii][3]. Humans are not yet organisms that use mental modelling to adapt in whatever ways are necessary for future evolutionary success. We are still organisms that spend their lives pursuing proxies for evolutionary success as ends in themselves. We use our mental modelling to work out how to achieve the goals set by our internal reward and motivation system—goals that we have been fitted out with by natural selection and that are modified to a limited extent by conditioning during our upbringing. We use the enormous power of mental modelling to see how we can act on the world to produce desirable psychological states and avoid unpleasant ones. For most this means using modelling to pursue sex, wealth, popularity, satisfying relationships, social status, power, feelings of uniqueness, and so on. And we spend our lives trying to avoid undesirable psychological states such as those associated with stress, guilt, depression, loneliness, hunger, and shame. But when our evolutionary interests clash with these motivations and emotional responses, our evolutionary interests lose out. We have not yet developed a comprehensive capacity to free ourselves from the dictates of our biological and social past. We cannot adapt or modify at will our likes and dislikes, our emotional reactions, our motivations, what it is that gives us pleasure or displeasure, our habits, or our personality traits (eg we cannot change from extrovert to introvert at will). Few of us can effortlessly ‘turn the other cheek’ even when we can see mentally that it is in our interests to do so. This is the case whether these predispositions are largely inherited, or the product of individual experience during our upbringing. As a result, the evolutionary adaptability of humanity is seriously limited. We do not use the immense capacity of mental modelling to pursue evolutionary ends. Adaptations exist that are superior in evolutionary terms, we can see that they are superior, but we do not implement them. Instead we spend our lives chasing positive reinforcement from our internal reward system. If humanity is to realise the full evolutionary potential of mental modelling, we will have to free ourselves from our biological and cultural past. Can humans develop such a psychological capacity? Or will our ability to adapt be forever constrained by the predispositions resulting from our evolutionary history? Will we be able to adapt only in directions currently rewarded by our internal reward system, irrespective of what is best for our evolutionary future? Or can we develop the capacity to move at right angles to our history and conditioning, and to adapt in whatever ways will produce future evolutionary success? Modern scientific psychology has not yet developed an understanding of how we can develop a psychological capacity along these lines. To date it has concentrated on understanding how our psychology currently operates, and how pathologies can be corrected. It has little to say about our potential for future psychological development. Spiritual development But humans have accumulated an extensive body of knowledge and practice about how we can develop these new psychological capacities. This knowledge is embodied in religious and spiritual systems. Although some systems are more explicit about it than others, and some have a number of other goals for spiritual development, the world’s major religious systems all advocate the development of an ability to free oneself from particular emotional responses, desires and motivations. Furthermore, all systems contain methodologies and practices that can assist the development of such a capacity. Despite the fact that religious systems use widely different terminology to describe their practices and beliefs, it is possible to identify a broadly common approach to spiritual development. Most practices are directed at promoting the emergence of a new self that stands outside the individual’s emotional states, thoughts, and sensations. This new observing self is not bound up in the flow of thoughts and feelings and sees them as objects of attention. The individual experiences herself as the new observing self, as separate from her thoughts, feelings and sensations, and able to treat them as objects that can be managed and modified[iv][4]. What were once part of the subject are objects in relation to the new self, and can be managed and controlled by it[v][5]. This contrasts with the individual’s experience before a new observing self is developed. Previously the individual tended to be absorbed in and identified with emotional reactions and thoughts, was not aware of herself as separate to them, and could not easily choose whether to be influenced by them. The individual experienced herself as her motivations and thoughts, and defined herself through them and through the personality traits and behaviour patterns they entrenched. The new self is given a wide variety of names in various religious and philosophical systems, including the silent witness, the true self, Buddha mind, the Lord, the observer, the soul, atman, the master, Christ consciousness, the observing “I”, an emergent metasystem transition[vi][6], and the higher self. Religious systems generally promote the emergence of the new self through practices that separate the mind into an observing part and an observed part. The observing part is the precursor to the new self. These practices typically operate by turning attention and awareness inwards, and directing it at mental contents—at sensations, emotions, motivations, mental images and thoughts as they arise in the mind. For example, many religious systems require adherents to struggle against the dictates of their ‘lower’ desires and impulses. Doing so directs attention inwards, makes these mental states objects of attention and begins the separation of the mind into an observing part and an observed part. The waging of an internal war against desires and impulses will assist the development a new self that stands outside them and is no longer identified with them. Other practices also enhance the separation of the mind into an observing part and an observed part. Meditation typically involves turning attention inwards and making thoughts and emotional states objects of attention[vii][7]. Similarly the mindfulness practices of Buddhism and the self-observation[viii][8] of Gurdjieff promote the development of the new observing self during ordinary life. These practices focus attention on the physical sensations, emotions, mental images and thought that arise as the individual goes about daily activities and interactions. All these techniques emphasise that self-observation it to be passive and non-judgemental. This assists in ensuring that the new observing self does not identify with or become absorbed in mental contents as they arise. A number of practices help the observing self to remain separate from mental contents. Some of these operate by dampening mental activity and reducing the incidence of intense emotional experiences. This makes it easier for the new self to stand outside the flow of mental contents without becoming absorbed and identified with them. Examples include practices that take individuals away from the pressures of normal life such as retreats, monastic life, asceticism, and pilgrimages. Many systems have also discovered that meditation is an effective method of tranquillising mental activity, and that prayer and devotion can have similar effects. Most systems emphasise that repeated effort and vigilance is needed to maintain separation—the individual will tend to slip back into identification with thoughts and emotional states, and will find it very difficult to stand outside and observe them for extended periods. These practices also develop the ability of the individual to dispose attention wilfully and to break the control of attention by emotional states. Devotional practices also enhance this ability—they require the individual to continually bring attention back to the object of devotion and away from distractions. The new self that can be developed as a result of these practices is relatively free of the adaptive goals of the internal reward system. Once the emerging new self can remain functionally separate from motivations and emotional impulses, it can decide whether or not to be influenced by them. Instead of ‘going with’ these impulses as they arise, it can decide not to act on them. This functional separation also enables the new self to control the disposition of attention. The new self can direct attention and energy only at activities that serve the aims of the self. As the observing self accumulates knowledge about the operation of the motivational and emotional system, it improves its capacity to manage them. The individual learns how to modify the goals of her internal reward system, and is then able to align them with goals and objectives of her choosing. As a result, the individual can find motivation and emotional satisfaction in whatever activities serve her goals and objectives. For example, if an individual chooses to pursue evolutionary success as her ultimate goal, she will be able to align her internal reward system with evolutionary goals[ix][9]. The metaphor of a carriage (or chariot) drawn by horses has been used by a number of religious and philosophical systems to represent the psychology of a person who has developed these capacities[x][10]. Generally the driver is the intellect, the horses the emotions, the carriage the body, and the master in the carriage (or lord of the chariot) is the new self. The master coordinates the actions of the various components so that they cooperate together to serve the objectives and goals set by the master. Importantly, this metaphor emphasises that the new self does not repress, override, or take over the functions of the emotions and the body. A competent higher self, like a competent manager of a modern corporation, or like the conductor of an orchestra, works with and makes best use of the special abilities of the elements it manages. Why have religions developed this extensive body of knowledge and practice about freeing humans from the requirements of their motivational and emotional systems? A key reason is that religions generally promote adherence to ethical systems that conflict with the dictates of our internal reward system. Religions have learnt that it takes much more than an intellectual commitment to an ethical system before an individual is able to implement it. Reason does not control the passions until the individual has developed a new psychological structure that has the capacity to manage the individual’s internal reward system. Another reason for religions’ deep interest in this area is the intuition that only a self that has transcended emotional impulses could conceivably live beyond the body. A self that is bound up in bodily desires and emotional responses will surely die when the body that gave rise to them dies. A number of religious traditions that take this position also believe that the end point of spiritual development is the fusion of this transcendent self with the absolute (eg God). Of course, the great majority of the members of religions do not develop a higher self. Most do not adopt in full the practices prescribed by their religion, and few understand the practices and beliefs in the terms described here. Very few Christians develop the capacity to effortlessly turn the other cheek in the full sense of that metaphor. If the practices of spiritual development are to succeed in transforming the psychology of humanity in general, they will need to be enhanced and developed. This is most likely to be achieved if the practices are investigated by modern scientific psychology, and eventually integrated into it. If spiritual practices are subjected to the sceptical scrutiny and rigorous testing of modern science, the practices and beliefs that are grounded in fact could be separated from those that are embedded in supposition and baseless mysticism. And the powerful techniques and extensive resources of modern science could be used to discover new and better practices. This process would continue the progressive expansion of science into new domains that has taken place throughout its relatively young history. Science has grown by incorporating and developing bodies of knowledge that were initially unsystematic and riddled with contradictions and folk knowledge. The future Until we humans develop the capacity to free ourselves from our biological and cultural past, our evolutionary adaptability will be seriously constrained. We will not use the enormous potential of mental modelling to identify and implement the actions that will contribute most to the evolutionary success of humanity. Instead of using our technological advances and economic resources for evolutionary goals, we will continue to use them only to serve the needs and wants established by our evolutionary past and conditioning. Humanity will continue to spend its time on this planet masturbating stone age desires, going nowhere in evolutionary terms. Alternatively we could massively enhance our evolutionary adaptability by freeing ourselves from the dictates of our biological and cultural past. We could develop the ability to align our internal reward and motivation system with evolutionary goals. This would enable us to find satisfaction and motivation in whatever adaptations serve these goals. With this capacity we could choose to implement whatever actions would advance the evolutionary success of humanity, and would find satisfaction and motivation in doing so. This would enable us to use the immense power of mental modelling to pursue evolutionary goals, rather than continue to blindly pursue outdated and inaccurate proxies for evolutionary success as ends in themselves. If we make this transition, humans would become self-evolving beings, able to adapt in whatever directions are necessary for future evolutionary success, relatively unfettered by our biological past or by our previous life experiences. As we move out into the solar system, the galaxy and the universe, we would be able to change our adaptive goals and behaviour in whatever ways were demanded by the challenges we meet. We would be able to continually recreate ourselves, to change human nature at will, to repeatedly sacrifice what we are for what we can become, to continually die and be born again.

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