ISSS 2006 at Sonoma State University

Juanita Brown, "New Views of Evolution", ISSS 2006 at Sonoma State University, Tuesday, July 11, 2006, 9:15 a.m.

New Views of Evolution with Discussion of Implications in World Cafe Formate.

These participant's notes were created in real-time during the meeting, based on the speaker's presentation(s) and comments from the audience. These should not be viewed as official transcripts of the meeting, but only as an interpretation by a single individual. Lapses, grammatical errors, and typing mistakes may not have been corrected. Questions about content should be directed to the originator. These notes have been contributed by David Ing (daviding@systemicbusiness.org) at the Systemic Business Community ( http://systemicbusiness.org ).

Poem by Debora Hammond

[9:25]

[Host: Juanita Brown; Co-Originator, The World Cafe]

World Cafe originated in living room

Fritjof put up a slide by Maturana: we bring forth a world through networks of conversation through which we participate.
The World Cafe is like a mirror for these evolving networks of conversation

Reading: from Harlene Anderson, family therapy, power and importance of story

Capacity for change ... lies in the unexpressed. Language ... new narratives, new stories. ... we cocreate ...
A hypothesis for our time together.

This morning, a modified cafe, an academic cafe.

Exploring a core question with our speakers as learning partners
What might systems views of evoltuion imply for our own futures?

Speakers:

Sally Goerner, Director, Integral Science Institute
Susan Oyama, Professor Emeritus, John Jay College of Criminal Justice and the Graduate School, City University of New York
Pille Bunnell, Adjunct Professor, Royal Roads University

A progressive dinner party of the mind and heart

Assumption: the knowledge and wisdom that we need is already here, so if we can access all of the years in the room.

Assumption: intelligence emerges as the system connects to itself.

Give an opportunity for emergence.
The power of networked intelligence

Sharon Bennett, interactive learning systems will be mapping these graphically

[9:30]

[Sally Goerner]

I am a nerd, and proud of it.

Believe that the systems science community has developed all of the answers that we need

Today's Copernican Flip: what 20 years of systems science has taught me.

Why aren't we coming together?
How to get the nerds tied together with the warm fuzzy types.
C. P. Snow.
It's in the transition that our future lies.

Copernicus: the world rotated around the sun, a revolutionary idea

Prior, earth at the center of the university
Used by the Catholic Church
Copernicus reorganized the facts

Evolution that isn't selfish gene

Flipping humanity's place, facing the dogma of the economic establishment, that uses the selfish gene idea a lot

Believe that we are at the cusp of change, and it's happened before

Crumbling and emerging
World is crumbling, decay and exhausting itself. Something else is emerging.
Happened also 400 years ago, resulting in the enlightment
Also happened in medieval times
Noble beginning, corrupted ending
Not just a random cycle, a learning cycle
We don't discard the past, but recycle our learning to preserve and transcend

Problem now: these enlightment ideals have been hijacked and replaced with oligarchic interpretations

Laissez faire by the biggest around
Plutocracy
Profits over people and planet
Don't think, open authority
Exploitation and expendability
Manipulation, Deceit, Violence and Gluttony

We show all of the signs of failing times

The real culture ware is between an oligarchy and a learning partnership democracy

Paul Ray: "The New Political Compass"
Over the last 10 years, a new mixed bag of disgruntled independents
Not just progressives or liberals

The good news:

(1) Pressure for change is great
(2) The movement is already large
(3) Better ways already abound

We lack coherency, cohesion and common identity

We need to bring the new enlightment ideals and transcend oligarchic corruption

Spiral dynamics: the green meme people
We need to add the science

Integral science can help fix this: boiling the frog

Flip:

Matter --> Energy
Simple and separable --> Complex and connected
Random --> Awesomely ordered
Randomly colliding matter --> Orderly energy webs

End of 5000 years of plutocracy

Smart growth can be measured quantitatively

Energy creates information and motion

Humanity is a collaborative learning species

Civilization is a knowledge ecosystem

Quantitative understanding of smart growth and social bio-mimicry

If you let selfish gene happen ...
Jared Diamond

Physical basis for the preceding

Self-organization: pressure, pattern until it collapses or goes to the next level
If you boil water that has been cleaned of all impurities, instead of boiling, it explodes

Surface-volume law

Small and connected equals strength and speed

Communication and the physical organization of a system are coevolved, and intelligence coevolves with it

[Questions]

Demonizing early stages. LIke Bateson, two sides of brain. Both/and is better. Presentation is an either/or presentation in its format. Need to incorporate an anti-reductionist viewpoint. Statements say that it's truth is absolutism rather than diversity.

Misunderstanding, don't believe in either/or, and think that oligarchy is part of this.
Believe that nature operates by certain laws.
Scientists work towards better approximations towards laws.
Not just getting together and creating any possible future.
Tension between empiricists (where there are some natural laws out there, and we need to learn from that).

Heard integrate, and there's a possible pattern.

What is it that struck us from Sally's presentation?

[11:07]

[Susan Oyama]

Talk: Developmental Systems and Evolution

Have been known for Developmental Systems Theory -- DST

Evolution and development

Started with nature-nurture opposition

Genes and environment are seen as alternative sources of potency

Politically loaded, e.g. Lawrence Summers furor last summer

Nature-nurture problems are unsolvable, because they're misperceived

They rest on causal dualism
Internal (genetic) versus external

In evolutionary theory, similar opposition

Now, causal polarity is removed
Agent usually seen as natural selection, Darwinism, which is an external force that shapes populations and species
Development constraints are seen as the internal causes
Inside/outside opposition

Have mutually reinforcing gene-centrism

Development is popularly explained by genetic programs, ... , in DNA
Evolution as changed gene frequencies
Suggested that gene centered viewed make all other causal features invisible
Yields a logic: only genes are passed on, a reproductive bottleneck
The next generation has to be generated by these genes
Evolution defines as a flow of genes

Development Systems Theory works on these oppositions: nature-nurture, and gene-developmental

Some systems thinkers have come down on the internal side

Development System?

An alternative to the standard internalist definition
Interactants
Includes the organism, but is no coextensive with the organism
Includes things that influence organism development
Difference between drawing a line between an organization and the causal
Misreading: organism as a coevolving self-organizing system
Includes the organism, and its developmentally relevant environment
Constituents change all of the time
Fuzzy: changing with conditions, and depends on the investigative focus

Pragmatic element in the fuzziness

No constructing agent in this story, no central control
All of these elements are part of the constructive ... in which interactants change
Developmental system is spatially and temporally extended

Call it a system, because interactants are causally connected, and interconnected, impact depends on the rest of the system

Boundary around the organism tends to become theoretically less salient
Might call it a minimal definition of system: doesn't include regulation or regularity
Let self-regulation an empirical matter that sometimes happens or doesn't
No class of system that is priliveged a priori
In specific studies, some are more important with respect to some questions

Genes are part of the story, contributors to interaction, but not central control, and don't hold the instructions for building

Environments also contribute, as full participants in the ongoing systems
Like genes, environments make a difference
Recognize Bateson's definition of a difference
Conventional division between development factors sounds quite odd
Not saying that all interactants are the same, which would say that we have a common metric, that we don't
The relative importance of an interactant depends on the system that we start in, and the interests of the investigator

Not defining the developmental systems once and for all

Historicize nature
Nature is nothing more or less than the developing phenotype, it's the organism
Just as you can take a developmental strip of paper and twist it to become an Moebius strip, take the continuum between nature and nuture, and give it a turn through time
Then no longer have two polls
Have nature as a moving product of nurture
Nature and nurture as product and process

How does a development system look?

Richard Lewinton: system and environment influence each other
Evolution not completely driven from the outside
In DST, development is present in the story
Over evolutionary time, some elements of nurture (development) will become integrated into progressive cycles
Some will emerge over longer time
Progressive life cycles
Not gene-culture coevolution. A continuing beef goes out of nature-nurture, and ratifies it as two streams.
Goal of DST is to have a single but complicated stream
In contrast to dual inheritance theories, DST has concrete, rather than abstract information, moving through time that modularizes bodies
Goal to explicitly bring back into the framework

In evolution, both stability and mutability are function systems dynamics, and need to be explained

Dynamics constrain and explain future systems
Evolution becomes change in the development system

Historical and contextual approach

Reintroduces materiality
In this view, it's no longer possible to view any part as more real, more basic, more fundamental, more healthy, more normal than other parts
Organismic worlds are integral parts of the evolutionary processes

[10:48]

[11:04]

[Pille Bunnell]

Poem

Want to talk about distinctions, and how we make distinctions

Systemic laws as distinctions
Evolution
Language
Cultural change

Acknowledge Maturana, for understanding

A path of reflection, for a long time

Open to shifting

Understanding arises in the flow of reflections

It grows

Distinctions: we have a this and a not-this

Along the domain which this and not-this is valid
Network of distinctions that gets larger and larger
At some point, the first distinction is taken for granted or is accepted as one bit of the richness of all the rest

Every distinction reveals some dimension of regularity

Are we stuck? We can become aware of some difference

Curiosity, surprise, invotitaiton and pain can lead to behaviour

.. and that happens in the emotion of live (in the Maturana sense)

We living in a dynamic temporal architecture

Regularities, nodes
Waves become invisible

May be some systemic laws

Abstractions of the spontaneous course of systemic processes made as poetic distinction with th eoperational coherences inherent in the living of a human observer

One law: Nothing happens because the consequences of that operation are necessary of its occurence

Not a teleological end
Spontaneous organization of components
Systems are collections of elements in a matrix of relations, in matrices that are clumpy or lumpy, in which we can distinguish a dynamic border

Course of interactive systems ... Maturana

Difference levels, continuum

Which criteria do we use for relational dynamics, that we can say as a system
Act on one, act on all; density of relations; operational boundary; discrete entity
Not many discrete entities
Maybe Gaia is the next level of a discrete entity

Living systems are beautiful

Living systems in two domains: constitution, and ...
Systems and medium change coherently
If the coherence is lost, the living system dies (i.e. structural coupling)
Evolution doesn't follow a strict branching, it's chaotic

Multiple relational domains: can do some activities in one manner in one, and then different in others

These propogate over time
Multiple relational domains can be called emotions
Different flows in different relations results in different beings
Difference flows can be called mien

Change in environment is not necessarily the ground, but other living beings

New determines type of relations, influence both relations and composition of new entities

The matrix has a variable inertia

Panarchy
When the network relations in the matrix change, elements either adapt or dissemble

Language is the most complex matter to explain, because we tend to think of it as a system of symbols, but we live in it, a a matrix systems

Live in consensual coordination
A manner of living together, a path of consensual harmony
Consensual coordination, after many repetitions, can be in a recursion, which results in an entirely new thing -- token or object

The recursion is invisible. It exists in itself.

Beginning of language

Grounded in recurrences becomeing conserved
Enables collaborative
e.g. the dog fetches a stick
Recurrence of the object as token happens with increasing ease, and it becomes the ground for a new coordination

Human babies begin naming in their first year, then the process becomes invisible

Distinctions are absorbed

Humans live in language, in an ontological existence

Language arose spontaneously, and is conserved spontaneously in each of our lives

Distinctions are language-dependent (e.g. English vs. Estonian)

Relational flows, or mien, are similarly conserved
Clumps
Intelligent design: different frames, difference scales

Activity domains intercept

Cultural inertia, isn't the same as autopoesis

People live multiple inter-crossing relational domains

Cultural change happens in conversation

We become according to what we conserve

There are no trivial moments

[11:35]

[12:05]

What deeper questions do these perspectives raise?

If I am right and you are right and we disagree, how shall we learn from this?
How do we develop our capacity to standing in a place?
What is the potential of poetry and scholarly and teaching endeavours in social and systems sciences?
How can I see the things we cannot see?
How do we choose to expand our language?
What kind of conversations can change the value account from matter and energy to information
...
If we look at an integral relationship as purposefully supporting, how can we support ...
What are the characteristics of an event that will shift cultural inertia?
What knowledge do we need to inform a successful civilizational transformation?
How do we communicate that ying and yang as mutual ... and complementarity at the same time?
How can we foster a new conversation that relates to difference cultures, religions ... of our age?
Would I rather be right, or rather be loved?

Susan:

How do we think about human agency in the context of systems, especially because agency and systemic explanation have often been at tension with each other

Pille:

How long are we going to keep thinking there there is any one way ... that could lead us to an answer?

Sally:

A lot of tension between the two cultures: science and humanism.

x x

Questions

Question

Response

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