Jonathan Birch — Organisms as societies

Here, "society" is being used as a metaphor rather than a description. I would prefer to use "system" rather than "society," and to compare biological systems with social systems, since this is more descriptive and less evocative. At the same time, I agree that the use of "society" is legitimate and useful in biology and evolutionary theory.  

There are three major types of systems, corresponding to the three major branches of science — physical, biological, and social. There are resemblances and important differences in these types of system.

That said, the article is short and worth knowing about, since it indicates a rising trend in the field and evolutionary biology is exerting increasing influence on social, political, and economic thinking. 

So is the systems approach. General Systems Theory was founded by biologist Ludwig von Bertalanffy. Economist Kenneth Boulding switched from conventional economics to general systems theory. 

OUPblog

Organisms as societies

Jonathan Birch is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Philosophy, Logic and Scientific Method at the London School of Economics and Political Science, specializing in the philosophy of evolutionary biology

Diane Coyle — Not the smartest animals

Natura non facit saltus. (Nature does not make jumps.)

The current trend in liberalism is to extend rights to animals as in "animal rights. Most liberal jurisdictions have humane laws. Kosher and halal injunctions also relate to prohibition of animal cruelty. Buddhists include all beings. So do so-called primitive peoples.

The idea that reason can be separated from biology and ontology is a Western notion that arose in ancient Greece with the assumption that the rational principle distinguishes humans from non-humans. This was expressed philosophically and theologically through the concept of the human soul. In Christian doctrine, only humans had souls. This gave rise to the René Descartes assuming a separation of mind and body, as well as that animals were machines without souls.

This led to the Western liberal concept of the person as distinct from the individual. While human individuals are unique and unequal "accidentally," human "personhood" makes all humans equal as persons, meaning that there is no innate privilege through birth, so all are equal before the law and all enjoy equal rights as human beings, although under bourgeois liberalism, "all" was initially defined to exclude women and those to of European ethnicity.

This concept and its associated assumptions was questioned by science, which could find no material basis for it. Humans came to be viewed as machines without souls, like other animals. This became the basis for behaviorism in psychology, which was imported into economics as a fundamental assumption called "rationality"as "maximizing utility." Think Pavlov's dogs, Skinner's pigeons and lab rats. This was not lost on marketing & advertising, and PR.

Psychology and the social sciences are moving beyond that view based on discoveries in biology and neurology. Evolutionary theory is also refuting the Cartesian assumptions as well. See, for example, Antonio Damasio, Descartes' Error.

The Enlightened Economist
Not the smartest animals
Diane Coyle | freelance economist and a former advisor to the UK Treasury. She is a member of the UK Competition Commission and is acting Chairman of the BBC Trust, the governing body of the British Broadcasting Corporation

Roger Erickson — The Cognition of Aggregate Discourse

The Cognition of Aggregate Discourse

The Neurology of Consumer Compulsion is the title of an interesting, recent essay.

This essay includes & extends what I've been saying all along ... but this still doesn't answer the question of "how".

If only it were that simple. How about adding "The Cognition of Aggregate Discourse" ?

Let me explain what that means. Warren Mosler once asked me a killer question, one that I knew the answer to.

"How do you get people to explore their options?"

If you can ask that question, you can also ask "How do you get an aggregate to explore it's aggregate options?"

For individuals, the answer is simple. You challenge them, or they meet their own challenges, and then natural selection takes over ... assuming they are a recombinant species.

For aggregates, the answer is the same, just on a larger scale. How do aggregates perceive, parse and select from their expanding options?

Roughly the same way as individuals do, but on a larger scale. Whether among neurons or between citizens, "cognition" is held in the body of discourse of an aggregate.

Why isn't OUR electorate acting more inteligently, and letting itself explore the insanely great options staring us in the face?

Because there's a great disconnect here.

More than 99% of people with biology backgrounds don't practice or study the fundamentals of political economics or business.

Similarly, more than 99% of political economists or business people don't learn squat about any field of science whatsoever, let alone some biology.

The disconnect is between all forms of those that know "how" but never know where their aggregate is going or why, ..... and those who ponder long enough to discern "why" but in the process never learn quite enough about how to actually get anything done very quickly.

Until the how- & why-people interact far more seamlessly, they can't produce an aggregate that is greater than the sum of it's uncoordinated parts.

Without more practice, group intercourse never gets past the 1st-date phase, and the whole aggregate is doomed to being a lousy parent churning out socially-clumsy offspring.. Everything requires extensive practice, and nothing more than re-inventing culture on a larger scale.

So there's a simple truth sitting in the mirror all the time.

It's never enough to publish or announce what you know.

All that matters in the end is practicing interactions with all available neighbors, so that the value of those interactions catalyzes the urge to selectively explore greater, not just lesser, tempting options.

It's even more important to discover how to integrate inventions & discoveries than it is to invent or discover. Both are necessary but not sufficient.

Why? Because there are vast differences between what key individuals and whole disciplines claim to know ..... and how their electorates actually behave.

Face it. Our cells, ourselves and our aggregate are all biological machines, with already amazing and rapidly expanding degrees of freedom.

Neither individuals nor aggregates are fully engaged and motivated until they sense the actual carrot in front of their nose. And they don't SELECT which carrot to pursue, until it's overwhelmingly clear which is larger/sweeter/surer.

Interdisciplinary (democratic) interactions drive aggregate awareness.
Aggregate awareness exposes personal+aggregate opportunities.
[Aggregate+personal] opportunities drive optimization of personal/aggregate activity.
Coordination of personal/aggregate activity drives further interactions ...

And so it is that an auto-catalytic culture is born, with an intrinsic feed-forward loop. But that loop engages only if we drive group-wide interactions above the threshold that separates growth from decline, and cultural inflation from cultural deflation.

I often conclude that the solution for all of our ills is to simply add this particular tale to our collection of "Just-So-Stories" told to pre-K students, and ingrained into their consciousness by age 10. If they achieve a sense of their expanding context, then manipulating new data is a trivial coincidence.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walter_A._Shewhart#Later_work

The Neurology of Consumer Compulsion
https://blog.p2pfoundation.net/neurology-consumer-compulsion/2016/04/09



Roger Erickson

11:34 AM

"Aggregate success tracks the quality [including tempo] of distributed decision-making."
http://mikenormaneconomics.blogspot.com/2012/08/return-on-coordination.html

Corollary? The dynamic-quality of distributed decision-making tracks PRACTICE at increasing the aggregate tempo of distributed discourse.

Google Plus
The Cognition of Aggregate Discourse
Roger Erickson
Posted with permission

Diego Espinosa — The Answer Is Under Your Foot. How Ants Solve Inequality

Information in biology applied to economics.

Evonomics
The Answer Is Under Your Foot. How Ants Solve InequalityDiego Espinosa runs Sistema Research, a consulting firm that applies a complex systems approach to strategic uncertainty. He also teaches security analysis at the University of San Diego.

David S. Wilson and Dag O. Hessen — Bernie Sanders and His Critics Should Know Why Norway Is a Success—An unorthodox approach to understanding economic systems

Senator and presidential candidate Bernie Sanders stated many times that America should emulate the Nordic model in terms of economic policy. Is this so unrealistic, as many critics point out? And what if we took a totally unorthodox approach to examining why Norway appears to be a success story? That is what biologists David Sloan Wilson and Norwegian Dag Hessen do in their essay titled “Blueprint for a Global Village”, which appeared with commentaries in the Evolution Institute’s Social Evolution Forum and is reprinted here. We think that both Bernie and his critics can learn a lot about good governance by approaching it from a multi-level evolutionary perspective.

Evonomics
Bernie Sanders and His Critics Should Know Why Norway Is a Success—An unorthodox approach to understanding economic systems

David Wilson, SUNY Distinguished Professor of Biology and Anthropology at Binghamton University, and Dag Hessen, Professor of Biology at the University of Oslo

See also

David Sloan Wilson, "Economics and Evolution as Different Paradigms" Series

This series is a must-read if you haven't yet.

Kate Douglas — After the crash, can biologists fix economics?

THE GLOBAL financial crisis of 2008 took the world by surprise. Few mainstream economists saw it coming. Most were blind even to the possibility of such a catastrophic collapse. Since then, they have failed to agree on the interventions required to fix it. But it’s not just the crash: there is a growing feeling that orthodox economics can’t provide the answers to our most pressing problems, such as why inequality is spiralling. No wonder there’s talk of revolution.

Earlier this year, several dozen quiet radicals met in a boxy red building on the outskirts of Frankfurt, Germany, to plot just that. The stated aim of this Ernst Strüngmann Forum at the Frankfurt Institute for Advanced Studies was to create “a new synthesis for economics”.  But the most zealous of the participants – an unlikely alliance of economists, anthropologists, ecologists and evolutionary biologists – really do want to overthrow the old regime. They hope their ideas will mark the beginning of a new movement to rework economics using tools from more successful scientific disciplines.…

“Morality evolved out of cooperation within and competition between groups, so when acting as a single group to tackle global problems we will have to assume the role of natural selection ourselves,” [David Sloan]Wilson says. This might involve pursuing a wide variety of strategies, identifying those that work best, and then creating incentives to cooperate on implementation. “In some ways it’s the opposite of the invisible hand.”

Heresy! It's the basis of heterodox economics.

See also, Biologist David Sloan Wilson on social science, economics and evolution

New Scientist

After the crash, can biologists fix economics?
Kate Douglas

ht Mark Thoma at Economist's View

Mark Buchanan — Actually, Economists Can Predict Financial Crises

Economists have long argued that they shouldn’t be expected to predict crises, such as the one that almost sank the global economy five years ago.

That depends on how you define the word “predict.”...

The answer is that predictions can be useful without being quite so precise. Scientists make valuable predictions all the time that have little to do with foreseeing the future, but develop our understanding of cause and effect....

In this sense of a causal relationship, quite a few people did foretell the financial crisis....
The challenge for economists is to find those indicators that can provide regulators with reliable early warnings of trouble....

One problem has been “physics envy” -- a longing for certainty and for beautiful, timeless equations that can wrap up economic reality in some final way. Economics is actually more like biology, with perpetual change and evolution at its core. This means we’ll have to go on discovering new ways to identify useful clues about emerging problems as finance changes and investors jump into new products and strategies. Perpetual adaptation is part of living in a complex world.

Bloomberg
Actually, Economists Can Predict Financial Crises
Mark Buchanan, theoretical physicist
(h/t Mark Thoma at Economist's View

Lord Keynes — King on Post Keynesian Approaches to Microfoundations

One of the most important insights King makes is this: the idea of reducing macroeconomics to neoclassical microeconomics is an instance of the strong reductionist fallacy.

Strong reductionism has already failed, not only in biology, but also (more importantly) in the social sciences (King 2012: 226). There are fundamental emergent properties in macroeconomic systems that make their reduction to microeconomics impossible (King 2012: 226).
For example, a lower-order set of parts in a biological system may interact in ways that cannot be inferred by reductionist analysis (King 2012: 51). The principle of “downward causation” consists in the manner by which a “whole” (a system broadly defined) may affect, constrain or influence its parts.
In economics, we see macroeconomic phenomena that are irreducibly social in nature. 

Nor does the strong version of methodological individualism work (King 2012: 60; see also Hodgson 2007). For interactions between individuals may cause “emergent properties” or (that is to say) novel properties not displayed by, or deducible from, the individuals in isolation.

Social Democracy For The 21st Century
King on Post Keynesian Approaches to Microfoundations
Lord Keynes

King gives two reasons for the continuing attraction of the neoclassical microfoundations delusion: physics envy and politics in the age of neoliberalism (King 2012: 229). Reductionist ontological thinking in economics is nothing less than the attempt to reduce macroeconomics to the aggregate of micro behaviour, and the assumption of individual rationality implies a socially rational outcome (King 2012: 229, quoting Denis 2009: 14). In other words, this method produces the delusion that laissez faire results in the best economic outcomes.

Bingo. But nothing new to the readers of this blog.

J. D. Alt — Modern Money and the Altruistic Gene

In his recent book The Social Conquest of Earth, Edward O. Wilson lifts a corner of human history and reveals what appears to be a hidden mechanism of its intricately complex guidance system....

In (extremely) simplified form, the guidance system described by Wilson is this: Human societies are composed of individuals who are dominated (at any given moment) by one or the other of two genetic traits—the “selfish gene” or the “altruistic gene”. The selfish gene leads individuals to take actions benefitting their personal selves. The altruistic gene leads individuals to take actions benefitting the social group to which they belong.

The interplay between these two genetic traits creates the following dynamic of social evolution: Within a given social group, the selfish gene will always competitively dominate (and defeat) the altruistic gene. However, when there is competition between two social groups, the group with the most active altruistic genes will always dominate and defeat the group with the most active selfish genes. In terms of reproductive success then, natural selection is continuously choosing the selfish gene of individuals within any group while, at the same time, it is choosing the altruistic gene in groups that out-compete other groups. The tension and interplay between these two competitive dynamics is what guides the course of human history....

When MMT begins to take root in the mainstream minds of economic thinking, its message that the concept of limited dollar resources is a false premise (that, in fact, a sovereign nation issuing its own fiat currency has unlimited dollars available to spend as it chooses) this message is clearly a potential tool of enormous power for the altruistic gene. Not only does it remove the divisive and false choices the limited dollar argument foists upon society, denying the selfish-gene one its most effective and clever gambits, it places the opportunity for great deeds and actions clearly in the hands of those who wish to benefit society as a whole.

New Economic Perspectives
Modern Money and the Altruistic Gene
J. D. Alt

David Sloan Wilson on the nature of regulation

Before we can think clearly about regulation, we need to think clearly about another important word: narrative. A narrative is a story that organizes our experience and compels certain actions. We need narratives, because the real world is too complex to comprehend without simplification. Narratives are invariably distortions of the real world because otherwise they could not perform their simplifying function. The simpler and more compelling a narrative the better--but only if it compels us to do the right thing. When a narrative compels us to do the wrong thing, then it traps us like a prison that we cannot easily escape because of the way that the narrative has structured our experience. The only way to break out of a narrative prison is to challenge and replace the narrative. The new narrative will also be a simplification, but one that is hopefully better anchored in reality and compels us to do the right thing.

Evolution — This View of Life
The Nature of Regulation I: Breaking Out of Our Narrative Prisons
David Sloan Wilson

The Nature of Regulation II: Regulate or Die

More to come on this.

David Bollier on the significance of the idea of the commons

One of my working hypotheses has been that commons discourse has great power because it is able to function as an open platform. It is both general and specific. I frequently compare the commons to DNA because both are under-specified design structures that evolve and adapt in relationship to local circumstances. A certain ambiguity and incompleteness in the language of the commons is precisely what enables people to infuse it with their own specific values, needs and aspirations. And this is what makes the commons both universally appealing and particular in its manifestations.

The Buffalo Commons: The Social Life of a Metaphor

by David Bollier — news and perspectives on the commons

While Bollier's post on the buffalo commons is interesting, the only paragraph that I think is a must-read is the first, quoted above, especially in relation to what Roger Erickson has been saying.

White House Promotes a Bioeconomy

 The Obama administration is expected to announce a broad plan on Thursday to foster development of the nation’s “bioeconomy,” including the use of renewable resources and biological manufacturing methods.
The National Bioeconomy Blueprint, as the plan is called, discusses a variety of measures and strategies to spur research and development of medical treatments, crops, biofuels and biological manufacturing processes that would replace harsher industrial methods.

Read it at The New York Times | Energy & Environment

White House Promotes a Bioeconomy
By Andrew Pollack

Economics needs to abandon mechanistic models, which came in with the Industrial Revolution, Newtonian physics, and technological innovtion, and get back to biological models, which were characteristic of the Agricultural Age. Think the film, Being There.

There's a down side though, too:

Some groups are also calling for regulation of a field that could be a cornerstone of the bioeconomy, synthetic biology, which involves synthesizing DNA to create novel organisms to perform specific tasks. The blueprint does note that creation and use of novel organisms “carry potential safety and security risks if misapplied.”

Jim Thomas of the ETC Group, an environmental organization, said the whole idea of a bioeconomy was misguided. Using crops and other plants for energy or manufacturing could lead to destruction of forests, particularly in the tropics, and increases in food prices“A biomass economy is the recipe for more land grabs, increased hunger, particularly in the developing world, and putting more control of land and food production in the hand of large agribusiness,” he said.

Roger Erickson — Evolutionary scientist looks at employment and social structure

Roger Erickson Says [at moslereconomics.com]:
April 9th, 2012 at 8:48 am

the Upper Looting Class doesn’t want staff, they want serfs

see: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-04-09/worker-shortage-dogs-trail-king-as-s-d-jobs-go-begging.html

this is all about disparity; we’ll see if “flat” population structure outdoes class-segregated populations; they always have in the past; 

so far, the path to fastest adaptive rate has been to maximize flexibility/agility/diversity in the smallest population (i.e., no class barriers);

having less agile lower-classes on hand looks convenient one day, but is a non-scalable burden the next day;

in any adaptive race, you’ll see a large spectrum of options tried, but the weight of model-species evidence indicates that there’s a sweet spot with tolerance limits:

“species able to increase group agility (aka diversity/flexibility) while controlling the inter-dependency-costs that come with population size … inevitably outdo competitors”

that’s basically why eukaryotes outdo prokaryotes, (diploid vs haploid)

& why social species outdo solitary species (diverse teams able to rapidly combine team-behaviors greater than the sum of visible member properties)

& why democracies outdo monarchies/aristocracies;

& why “flat” organizations outdo hierarchical ones.

It’s odd to see a conservative political movement develop in parallel to the “flat” organizational structure of industries like Intel (not to mention within our supposed Democracy). It’s as though business & public purpose have temporarily separated, and must re-connect.