Keynote Address Prepared for the 30th Anniversary International Conference on Systems Research, Informatics and Cybernetics
Baden-Baden, Germany, July 30-August 3, 2018
Abstract
The Synergism Hypothesis, first proposed in 1983, refers to a causal theory that seeks to explain the evolution of biological complexity over time, from the origins of life to the twenty-first century. It could be characterized as an economic theory of complexity. Synergies of various kinds have also played a central role in the evolution of humankind over the past 5-7 million years, in what I call the Self-Made Man scenario, and it is a driver of our emergent global “superorganism” as well. However, all living systems require (cybernetic) control – or governance – for the common good, and this is one of the great challenges for our increasingly precarious future as a species.
Keywords: Synergy, cooperation, natural selection, synergistic selection, superorganism, cybernetics, governance, common good.
It seems that synergy is an idea whose time has finally come. First there was Aristotle in the Metaphysics, who famously noted that, where a system is concerned, “the whole is over and above its parts, and not just the sum of them all.” Then there was the engineer-inventor Buckminster Fuller, who developed a spatial and geometric perspective in which everything in the universe is viewed as a system of interacting parts (ultimately including even philosophy and metaphysics), which he dubbed “synergetics”. Then there was the theoretical physicist Hermann Haken, inspired by the work on lasers, who independently developed a science of self-organizing physical systems focused especially on reductions in entropy, or the degrees of freedom in any system. In Haken’s version of synergetics, an important mathematical concept is the “order parameter.”
I became a part of this narrative in the late 1970s and early 1980s from the perspective of evolutionary biology and the ubiquitous presence of synergistic functional effects in living organisms and the natural world. This led to what I call the Synergism Hypothesis – a theory about the causal role of synergy in the evolution of biological complexity over time, from the very origins of life to 21st century human societies.
Among other things, this theory shifted the theoretical paradigm in evolutionary biology away from neo-Darwinism, with its emphasis on the role of “random” genetic mutations and individualistic competition in evolution, to the functional interactions between organisms and their environments, and the unique cooperative, or combined effects that may result. One could call it an economic theory of complexity in evolution. This theory was first proposed in my 1983 book titled The Synergism Hypothesis: A Theory of Progressive Evolution. The book and the theory were mostly ignored at the time.
Then, in the 1990s, the biologists John Maynard Smith and Eӧrs Szathmáry published two books on the “major transitions” in evolution and independently came to the same conclusion about the role of synergy in the evolution of biological complexity. Maynard Smith also developed the concept of Synergistic Selection in an unrelated 1982 scientific paper. Synergistic Selection is, in effect, a sub-category of natural selection that is focused on the influence of cooperative behaviors and non-additive benefits – or 2+2=5.
During the next 20 years, as biologists became increasingly interested in the role of cooperation in nature, and in the problem of how to explain the evolution of biological complexity, the Synergism Hypothesis and Synergistic Selection gradually gained recognition, culminating in my joint article on the subject with Eӧrs Szathmáry in the Journal of Theoretical Biology in 2015, and in my 2018 book Synergistic Selection: How Cooperation Has Shaped Evolution and the Rise of Humankind. (It is indicative of the sea change in evolutionary biology that the new book, my fourth one on this subject, has received many supportive reviews.)
Before I discuss the Synergism Hypothesis, perhaps I should define what the word “Synergy” means. It seems the term is only vaguely familiar to many people. It is often associated with corporate mergers, or drug interactions, or some other commonplace phenomenon. In reality, synergy is literally everywhere around us. It represents one of the great governing principles in the natural world and ranks right up there with such heavyweight concepts as gravity, energy, and information in helping us to understand how the world works (although it also travels under many aliases, like emergence, mutualism, density dependence, critical mass, cooperativity, threshold effects, even perfect storms).
People often define synergy with a paraphrase of Aristotle: A whole that is greater than the sum of its parts. But this is actually a very narrow and even misleading definition. Sometimes wholes are not greater than the sum of their parts, just different. A much-cited example of synergy is water, the combined product of two elemental gases. However, water is not “greater than” hydrogen and oxygen. It is qualitatively different. Accordingly, I prefer to define synergy more broadly as “combined, or cooperative effects [of all kinds] that are not otherwise attainable.” Synergy is not, therefore, some sort of independent “force” but simply a category of functional effects.
There are, in fact, many different kinds of synergy in the natural world. I identify and describe at least a dozen different types in my book. One of the most important kinds involves a division of labor (or what I prefer to call a “combination of labor”). A favorite example is how the breakdown of cellulose in a cow’s rumen depends on five distinct strains of bacteria, each of which produces a different enzyme that can accomplish a specific conversion step in the process. A very different kind of synergy is involved in teamwork – say a tug-of-war — where everyone is pulling together in the same direction to produce a combined outcome. Still another kind of synergy is associated with joint environmental conditioning. For instance, huddling behavior in emperor penguins during the Antarctic winter enables them to share heat and reduce their individual energy expenditures by 20-50 percent.
So, what exactly is the Synergism Hypothesis? Simply stated, it proposes that cooperative interactions of various kinds, however they may occur, can produce novel synergies with functional advantages that may, in turn, become a direct cause of natural selection. The Synergism Hypothesis is focused on the favorable selection of synergistic “wholes” and the combinations of genes that produce these wholes. The parts (and their genes) may, in effect, become interdependent units of evolutionary change. Thus, it is the functional (economic) benefits associated with various kinds of synergistic effects in any given context that are the underlying cause of cooperative relationships – and complex organization – in the natural world. The synergy produced by the whole provides the proximate functional payoffs that may differentially favor the survival and reproduction of the parts (and their genes). The 20th century Behaviorist psychologist, B.F. Skinner, called it “selection by consequences.” It could also be called Holistic Darwinism, because it is entirely consistent with natural selection theory, properly understood.
One example, among the many cited in my book, is the evolution of the eukaryotes – one of the major transitions in evolution. Increased size and complexity can have many functional advantages in the natural world, and eukaryotic cells, inclusive of their elaborate internal architecture, are some 10-15,000 times larger on average than the typical prokaryote, like bacteria. However, this huge size difference requires many orders of magnitude more energy, and the key to solving this functional imperative was a symbiotic (synergistic) union between an ancestral prokaryote and an ancestor of the specialized, energy producing mitochondria in modern eukaryotic cells. Not only was this potent new combination of labor mutually beneficial for each of the two partners, but it created a pathway for expanding and multiplying these functional benefits many times over. Some specialized cells in complex organisms like humans may contain hundreds, or even thousands, of mitochondria. Liver cells, for instance, have some 2,500 mitochondria and muscle cells may have several times that number. It is what I refer to as a “synergy of scale.”
The Synergism Hypothesis also provides an explanation for the overall trajectory of human evolution. I call it the Self-Made Man scenario. The thesis is that synergistic behavioral initiatives and cultural inventions of various kinds have played a leading role throughout the entire course of human evolution, dating back some 5-7 million years, and that anatomical changes have followed and tracked these behavioral innovations over time. Although the influence of behavior in shaping evolution can be found in many other species as well, this causal dynamic culminated in the evolution of humankind. In a very real sense, our species invented itself.
In the Self-Made Man scenario, there were three keys to our ancestors’ ultimate success: social cooperation, innovation, and synergy. The earliest of our direct ancestors, the australopithecines, were small (about 3 feet tall) and slow-moving. They could not have survived the harsh physical challenges of living on the ground nor held their own against the many large predators in their environment – like the pack-hunting Palhyaena – without foraging together in cooperative groups and defending themselves collectively with the tools they had invented for procuring food, and for self-defense (probably digging sticks that doubled as clubs, and perhaps thrown rocks). The result was a game-changing synergy – cooperative outcomes that could not otherwise have been achieved.
The rest of the multi-million-year story of our evolution has followed this same general script. Cooperation and innovation have been the underlying themes, and the synergies that were produced (the unique “economic” benefits) were the reason why we cooperated. Thus, the emergence of much larger, and bigger-brained Homo erectus, some 2 million years ago, was the product of a synergistic joint venture, namely, the hunting of big game animals in closely cooperating groups with the aid of an array of new tools – finely balanced throwing spears, hand axes, cutting tools, carriers, and (eventually) fire and cooking. Not to mention (most likely) sequestered home bases, midwifery, and the first baby-sitting cooperatives. It was, in effect, a “collective survival enterprise,” and it was sustained by multiple synergies.
The final emergence of modern humankind, perhaps 300,000 years ago, involved a further elaboration of this collective survival strategy, with close cooperation and new technologies continuing to drive the process, as I detail in my book. Now, in the 21st century, the human species has grown into a world-wide population of some 7.6 billion people, many of them living in dense super-tribes supported by mind-boggling technologies and doomsday weapons. Meanwhile, the collective survival enterprise has become an increasingly global effort. We are ever-more interdependent when it comes to meeting our basic survival and reproductive needs. (About one-third of the total global GDP in 2017 consisted of trade and tourism.) And a key part of this evolving survival strategy is an enormously complex – synergistic – division of labor (or a combination of labor, in my terminology). It transcends our many cultural and political boundaries. The evolutionary biologists have a term for it. They call it a “superorganism”.
The idea that any socially organized group – say, a colony of leaf cutter ants – can be compared to an organism goes back to Plato in the Republic, but the term superorganism was coined by the 19th century polymath Herbert Spencer. The word reflects the fact there is a two-way interdependence between the individual members (the parts) and the social system as a whole; the viability of the whole depends on its parts, and vice versa. It is also true that, like an organism, a superorganism requires “governance” – coordination and regulation of the parts for the “common good”, as the biologist Egbert Leigh has stressed in his important work on what he calls the “parliament of the genes” – meaning an organism’s self-governing mechanisms. And this is where cybernetics comes into the story.
I have developed a cybernetic approach to governance in living systems, inclusive of superorganisms, that I call “control information theory.” If energy is “the capacity to do work,” in the classic definition, control information is “the capacity to control the capacity to do work” in a thermodynamic, energy-consuming process. Control information is concerned with the acquisition, disposition, and utilization of matter/energy in living systems. At the molecular level, DNA and RNA play a key control role, while, at the organism level, an array of regulatory and repair capabilities, sensory and feedback mechanisms, developmental flexibilities, and mental capacities (among other things) are very important. In social systems, likewise, there can be a variety of control information mechanisms at work. In leaf cutter ants, for instance, they include a wide array of chemical, visual, auditory, and tactile signals, and even quorum sensing behaviors.
Cybernetic communications and self-governance processes are also ubiquitous in human societies, needless to say. Indeed, the need for cybernetic control for the common good in human societies has now emerged as one of the most important and challenging problems of the 21st century, along with global warming and economic inequality. This will be the subject of my next book, tentatively titled: Last Chance! A Species in Peril.
The challenge we face going forward was forcefully stated by one of the most distinguished political commentators of the twentieth century, Walter Lippmann, in a 1969 interview just before he died. Here is an excerpt from the longer quote in my Synergistic Selection book:
“This is not the first time that human affairs have been chaotic and seemed ungovernable. But never before, I think, have the stakes been so high…What is really pressing upon us is that the need to be governed…threatens to exceed man’s capacity to govern… The supreme question before mankind – to which I shall not live to know the answer – is how men will be able to make themselves willing and able to save themselves.”
Almost a half century later, Lippmann’s “supreme question” remains unanswered. We are running out of time. However, we do know which path we must take. A positive way forward will depend, as it always has in our ages-long evolutionary history, on cooperation, innovation, and synergy – and global governance on behalf of the global survival enterprise. Now we must summon the collective will to choose this path.