Hi Folks,

Rob, some really god questions; TT some excellent answers (BTW, hat serum we got injected with also seems to shift language use as well ).

Roundabout into:

For a number of years, I have been trying to model the emergent properties of what we general call "culture" and its relationship to "society" and "macrosocial reality". Early on, I got hooked on the idea that if you can't ground your observations via a chain of causation back into biological reality, then you don't have a theory (you have a theology). Luckily, the version I subscribe to is "weak" in the sense that I hold that culture emerges from biological reality but is not determined by biological reality. Think of it as we all have to eat, but what we eat can be highly variant (i.e. non-deterministic as long as it meets certain minimal requirements).

This led me to look at just how we (Anthropologists and social scientists in general) apply the concepts from evolutionary theory in our work. What struck me was that most of us do it so poorly and fall into the teleological trap that grabbed Spencer (i.e. that we are evolving towards something). A lot of this seemed to cme from the use of certain terms, e.g. "adaptation", "evolution", "survival of the fittest" (another invention by Spencer), that were applied in ways that Darwin never intended.

I we go back to Darwin's original meanings, we end up with some interesting conditions that, I think, may help set the grounds to answer Rob's questions. BTW, I am using a set of conditions outlined by William Calvin in a paper called The Six Essentials? Minimal Requirements for the Darwinian Bootstrapping of Quality (Journal of Memetics - Evolutionary Models of Information Transmission, 1 available here or here).

  1. There must be a pattern involved.
  2. The pattern must be copied somehow (indeed, that which is copied may serve to define the pattern). [Together, 1 and 2 are the minimum replicable unit - so, in a sense, we could reduce six essentials to five. But I'm splitting rather than lumping here because so many "sparse Darwinian" processes exhibit a pattern without replication.]
  3. Variant patterns must sometimes be produced by chance - though it need not be purely random, as another process could well bias the directionality of the small sidesteps that result. Superpositions and recombinations will also suffice.
  4. The pattern and its variant must compete with one another for occupation of a limited work space. For example, bluegrass and crab grass compete for back yards. Limited means the workspace forces choices, unlike a wide-open niche with enough resources for all to survive. Observe that we're now talking about populations of a pattern, not one at a time.
  5. The competition is biased by a multifaceted environment: for example, how often the grass is watered, cut, fertilized, and frozen, giving one pattern more of the lawn than another. That's Darwin's natural selection.
  6. New variants always preferentially occur around the more successful of the current patterns. In biology, there is a skewed survival to reproductive maturity (environmental selection is mostly juvenile mortality) or a skewed distribution of those adults who successfully mate (sexual selection). This what Darwin later called an inheritance principle. Variations are not just random jumps from some standard starting position; rather, they are usually little sidesteps from a pretty-good solution (most variants are worse than a parent, but a few may be even better, and become the preferred source of further variants).
Okay, so within these conditions we have some terms that need to be puled out:

Pattern: let's leave this for the moment since it could be any type of information pattern. If we were talking tactics, we could use TTPs.

Replication: think education, training, stories / rumours about how to get promoted, etc.

Workspace: just another way of saying "environment", but a useful word shift since the term "environment" has more and more come to mean the physical environment solely.

Variation: new versions of a pattern. This is what biologists would call a "mutation" or, in some cases, an "exaptation" (it means taking something that evolved for one purpose and applying it to a completely different situation). In the case of a "mutation" it may be "simple" in the sense of just modifying one or two interactions (e.g. patrolling using a random walk rather than a pre-planned route every time) or it may be "complex" (e.g. leaving FOBs and living in the communities - think of this type as an "innovation").

"Success": ideally, this refers to one of two things; a) success at individual survival (individual level) and b) success at replicating itself (population level). This is sometimes called a "measure of fitness".

Adaptation actually refers to the combination of two of these - variation and success. In effect, "adaptation" is both the generation of "new patterns" and to competition of those variations within an environment.

part 2 ...