Negative side-effects of
Progressive Evolution
It is necessary to analyse the
undesirable side-effects of evolution and progress in more
detail. It is important in that respect to distinguish between "blind" evolution,
and "controlled"
progress driven by knowledge. Evolution's
trial-and-error
mode implies a great amount of errors, and therefore a lot of
avoidable waste and suffering. However, the inefficiency of variation is
compensated by the relative efficiency of selection, which
eliminates inadequate trials at an early stage. The controlled mode,
guided by knowledge, produces far fewer errors. However, because its
results are largely shielded from natural selection, its errors will
persist much longer, with potentially more devastating effects.
Ironically, the more fit a design, the more flaws it can afford to
accumulate before it is eliminated by selection.
ParasitismOne common side-effect of all evolutionary
processes is the appearance of parasitism. A design (e.g. an
organism) that thrives provides plenty of resources for another
design to profit from. If that second design uses up resources
needed by the first one, without providing anything in return, the
relation is one of parasitism. Parasitism in the present sense not
only encompasses living organisms, such as viruses, bacteria or
worms, that live inside another organism, but any type of
self-sustaining and self-reproducing phenomena that thrive at the
expense of other self-sustaining phenomena. Examples of parasitic
phenomena in society are drug addiction, computer viruses, clothes
fashions and religious cults (Cullen,
1999), which maintain and spread at the expense of the addicts,
computer users, slaves to fashion, or cult members.
Like all self-reproducing phenomena, "parasites" develop through
a positive feedback process:
the more numerous they are, the faster they spread. This vicious
cycle must stop, however, when the process runs out of resources: if
a parasite has exhausted the hosts' reserves, it can no longer grow.
In the worst case, when the parasite is extremely virulent, this
means that the parasite is eliminated together with its host. In the
more common case, parasite and host population reach a relative
equilibrium, characterized by an on-going "arms race", where the
host tries to evolve better defenses to counter the negative effects
of the parasite, while the parasite tries to evolve more efficient
strategies to make use of the host's resources. In the longer term,
parasitism tends to evolve to symbiosis: a state
of "peaceful coexistence" or even "mutual support", where both
parties live together without any one being harmed by the other's
activities (Dawkins, 1976).
As the examples of addiction and computer viruses illustrate,
contemporary progress provides plenty of opportunities for the
appearance of new types of parasitic phenomena. The abundance of
resources produced by a highly industrialized society--from
agricultural produce to computer processing power to leisure
time--are guaranteed to invite the evolution of new types of
organisms, systems, or patterns of behavior that make use of those
resources, usually at the expense of the people for whom those
resources were intended. Moreover, the ever increasing speed and efficiency
of communications in our society makes it ever easier for the
parasites to spread, as illustrated by computer viruses and the AIDS
epidemic.
Although parasitism explains many of the unexpectedly vicious
side-effects of progress, our
evolutionary understanding of this phenomenon again leads us to an
optimistic view for the long term: because of natural selection,
parasites are much more likely to evolve to a benign form than to
cripple their hosts (and thus reduce their own opportunities). In
the meantime, parasites can create a lot of suffering, though, and
therefore society would do well to monitor and control their
development in the earliest possible stages. In our present,
information-based society, the most dangerous parasites may well be
the ones that infect our mind: misleading ideas (memes) and patterns
of behavior that are easily transmitted from one individual to
another one.
OvershootAnother common side-effect of progress is
simpler in origin but perhaps more subtle in its effects:
overshooting. Controlled progress, unlike blind trial-and-error, is
goal-directed. Most
goals are not specific end-points but general values: phenomena or
states-of-affairs that are considered intrinsically good, and for
which it is preferable to have more than to have less. In practice,
however, there are limits beyond which having more of something
provides no benefits, or can even be harmful. For example, there may
be a trade-off where an increase in one desirable feature will lead
to a decrease in another desirable feature. The precise trade-off
point is difficult to foresee, and therefore goal-directed progress
will have a tendency to overshoot: to produce more of a particular
desirable good or value than is optimal.
Of course, overshooting can be easily corrected through feedback:
once you notice that you have gone too far, you move back a little
until you are on target. However, such a massive and complex process
as societal progress has a large momentum: it is difficult to slow
it down and make it turn back. This is due in part to the inertia of
desire: it is difficult to convince people that they should stop
longing for something that they have always considered desirable in
the past. For example, in a situation where most children die young,
it is desirable to have more children rather than less, but in an
era of vaccination and antibiotics, this desire will quickly lead to
overpopulation.
We can distinguish three major types of negative effects produced
by overshooting:
- overabundance is simply the observation that there can
be too much of a good thing. For example, too much food leads to
obesity and the concomitant health problems; too much
communication leads to information
overload and the resulting stress (see further); too much
fertilizer leads to pollution of rivers. Overabundance of a
particular resource can also invite parasitic phenomena, as we
noted earlier. For example, too much free time may spur behaviors
that "kill time" or "create a purpose", such as drug addiction,
hooliganism, or joining a cult.
- exhaustion follows from the fact that to produce a
valuable good, you generally need to consume another valuable good
or resource. If the speed of production and therefore consumption
is excessive, the resource may be exhausted, endangering the
maintenance of the original good and perhaps many other products
that depend on it. Resource exhaustion is in general corrected
rather quickly by a negative feedback mechanism: as the resource
becomes more scarce, it automatically becomes more valuable, and
therefore more effort is invested in its conservation and renewal.
- "pollution"
is the general phenomenon that the production of a desirable good
may, as a side-effect, lead to the production of some undesirable
"waste products". If the production overshoots its optimal value,
the drawbacks of the waste product may offset the benefits of the
produced good. Here, negative feedback correction is unfortunately
not so automatic, since the one who produces the waste generally
does not pay for its clean-up, and therefore has little incentive
to minimize waste.
All these examples of overshooting can be corrected
by negative feedback. If the control system does not react
adequately, natural selection will eventually eliminate
overshooting. Therefore, overshooting will create problems in the
short term, but these are likely to be solved in the long term.
However, powerful control systems are likely to have more inertia,
and therefore may sustain unfit states far longer than natural
selection alone would allow. A well-known illustration is the "Peter Principle",
the observation that in a bureaucracy people tend to be promoted up
to their level of incompetence. This is a clear example of
overshooting, where people progress through the ranks on the basis
of proven success until they reach a level that is too high for
their capacities. Natural selection would correct this mistake and
"demote" the person back to the level where he or she is most fit,
but the inertia inherent in large bureaucracies makes it likely that
the person will remain stuck in that position for the rest of his or
her career. We should make sure that society as a whole does not
fall into the same trap, and push us into situations that demand
more than we can comfortably handle.
Copyright© 2000 Principia
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