LOL - too true, and not just for armies either - that's applicable to all organizations.Originally Posted by William F. Owen
My complaint about the term comes from viewing it as a misuse of evolutionary language and concepts. The term that they should be using, although there is no way that they could for political reasons, is "eugenics".
Now that I have everyone hot and bothered.....
In evolutionary theory, there are three sub-theories:
- "natural" selection
- heritability, and
- mutation
All of these interlinked sub-theories refer to a basic unit which, in biology, is a DNA sequence (aka a gene). When we get into cultural areas, it's much harder to identify what the unit is, despite Dawkins term "meme". Personally, I've tried to use a decomposable basic unit appropriate to the organizational level of what I'm looking at, but that's problematic as well.
Anyhow, "natural" selection is a process that produces either positive or negative selection criteria; the criteria either "select for" or "select against" genes / memes / whatever. At least this is the general idea. It actually gets much more complex, mainly because selection criteria operate in interlinking environments that are often contained within each other (e.g. think about ecological niches as an "environment" within a larger environment...). At the socio-cultural level, it's even worse, because we are dealing with selection pressures from multiple, overlapping environments.
Here's a simple example: military organizations operate in the "field", in the back end, in the broader political environment and in the social environment. each of these different, overlapping and generally "messy" (i.e. subject to constant change and redefinition) environments produces selection pressures that may well be inverted. IOW, an action may be positively selected for in one environment and negatively selected for in another.
Take retention as a "problem area". In the operational environment, there is a positive selection pressure to have a unit deployed for a long time, especially in a COIN setting. However, in the homeland social environment, that is a negative selection pressure on the people involved (e.g. broken marriages, PTSD, etc., etc.). In the current communications environment, this homeland negative selection pressure gets translated into negative political consequences, so there is now an organization "order" to shorten deployment times. In this case, "accurately defining the problem" means recognizing the interlocking selection pressures and coming out with both a way of priorizing environments and, at the same time, mitigating some of the negative selection pressures.
So, that's natural selection.
"Heritability", in biological terms, refers to the proportion of characteristics that come from genetic rather than environmental sources. In cultural terms, it refers to "learning" and "training" (i.e. the social part of those "environmental sources"). Basically, if we want a theory of heritability that applies to socio-cultural evolution, then we focus on organizational culture, training and education.
But it's actually subtler than that, since we are (somewhat) dealing with a frequency distribution here. For example, if you are training a soldier in basic or OCS and you give 1 hour of training to "cultural awareness" and 100 to kinetic operations, which one will they default to even if the optimal solution to a particular problem was actually contained in the 1 hour? Heritability, in socio-cultural terms, actually requires reinforcement, so the perceptions and 'solutions" (and "problem definitions") will tend to come from the most heavily reinforces part of that training.
"Mutation" is really the study of how change happens in whatever your basic unit of analysis is. Mutations can be beneficial, deadly or neutral depending on the selection pressures involved and the other basic units operating to maintain the organism. In most socio-cultural settings, mutations come about both incrementally as a result of normal operations ("Normal Science" in the Kuhnian sense), via individual "point mutations" (think Road to Damascus conversions), via rapid changes in other environments that now impact the "main" socio-cultural environment of the group (think 9/11....), etc., etc. Many of the socio-cultural mutations, however, are conceived of and constructed by humans (e.g. social movements, new religious movements, revitalization movements, etc., etc.). And some of these constructed mutations are done consciously.
This brings me back to my comment about why what TRADOC is doing should be called eugenics and not adaptability.
Eugenics is the artificial construction of selection pressures that select for and against particular attributes deemed as "good".
Adaptability, OTOH, is rooted more in heritability and actually refers to the variability or scope of actions available to an organism to survive and prosper in a changing environment. In socio-cultural terms, the more you know and the faster you can flip through your options, the greater amount of adaptability you have.
Sheesh, I feel like I'm writing a monograph here.... I'll shut up now.
Cheers,
Marc
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