Ideas that influenced me: Survival of the fitting

I interrupt my series on People who influenced me to include a title "Ideas that influenced me". The idea I got introduced in early nineties when I was practicing touch typing on an old miniatute type writer was in an article by Kenneth E. Boulding " The evolution of riches". I recently got hold of the practice typescript and decided to include the same here not only for its content but also for the thinking process of grafting one idea on to another. Since Kenneth Boulding is the person here is his picture as well.

THE EVOLUTION OF RICHES

Kenneth E. Boulding

Why did science develop in Europe and not in China, much more advanced technologically in 1400 and seemed to be much more ready for it? The question why some societies develop and others do not or even retrogress- sometimes called the “Needham problem” after the great historian Joseph Needham- is one of the most difficult in the interpretation of human history.Needham confesses he still does not know the answer after 11 or 12 volumes.

Why did Europe an obscure peninsula on the edge of the civilized world in the year 1000, explode all over the world after about 1450? Why did modern Japan join the modern world so quickly after 1870 when China and India found it so difficult? Why did Australia continue to get richer after World war II while Argentina stagnated economically and went over a cliff politically? Coming closer will the US after its brief splendour lapse into stagnation and mediocrity as so many societies have done?

I have argued that modern evolutionary theory can throw a great deal of light on such a question of development although I am not sure it can come up with final answers. It is no accident that development has essentially the same meaning as evolution though it does perhaps have more overtones of human valuations about it.

Development means change for the better and we have the feeling that evolution from the first appearance of DNA to ourselves also represents development according to human values that we are in the same sense better than the amoeba and the dinosaur. The capacity of an organism to evaluate things, play an important role in the evolutionary process because it has survival value.

It is not unreasonable to regard human history and development as an extension of the evolutionary process of evolution changes as it produces change. Biological evolution is different from chemical and physical evolution and societal evolution is different again even though there are profound structural similarities.

Fit to survive

The great Darwinian concept of mutation and selection still dominates evolutionary theory, although our concept of what constitutes mutation and selection has changed profoundly since Darwin. Selection now seems to be a very complex process of ecological interaction.

Darwin’s metaphors here were most unfortunate. The survival of the fittest, a concept he got from Spencer means nothing. If we ask fit for what the answer is fit to survive and all we have is the survival of the surviving and we know that anyway in reality “what survives is what fits” into the complex structure of ecosystems. “Survival of the fitting” would be a better metaphor.

Ecological interaction takes place through the very complex relationships that determine the birth and death rates of a species. A species will survive if it has a niche that is an equilibrium population at which its birth and death rates are equal allowing for certain fluctuations. The birth and death rates depend upon its own population and also on the population of all the other species with which it is in contact including not only the biological species but also physical species and human artifacts . some of these relationships are co operative, some competitive some are productive. But they all add up to survival if the species has a niche, some population at which its birth and death rates are equal.

Mutation is simply another word for change. In biological evolution the more significant changes are of course in the genetic structures. Changes in environmental variables – climate, temperature, rain fall and so on are also very important. Biological genetic mutations are not strictly random. For any given structure the probability distribution of mutations that could take place from it. Some are more probable than others, but there is widespread agreement that a mutation is not much related to the life experience of the organism for which the genetic structure is a programme. Biological evolution at least is not teleological, that is the future which the change determines does not affect the change itself. This is because all that the gene has is know how, it has very little “know what” or “know why”.


However once we get to the human race and to the societal evolution the capacity of human beings for know what and their interest in know why become of great importance. Mutations in human society consists of new ideas, new inventions, new organisations new philosophies, new discoveries and so on most of which involve know what and know why. An increase in know what often produces a considerable increase in know why as we see with the extraordinary technological impact of the scientific revolution.

The concept of selection through ecological interaction however still remains. The principle here is that mutation will not be successful unless it produces a new species. Whether this is a horse, an automobile that has an empty niche that is something that would have an equilibrium population in the ecosystem if it existed,it is very clear that Australia had an empty niche for rabbits, l European type people and artifacts and automobiles.


Just because there is an empty niche does not mean that it will be filled. The mutation that would fill it may not occur. This means that evolution has a profoundly indeterministic element to it. It is not at all like celestial mechanics. The occurrence of mutation of very low probability has had a profound effect on it, and non occurrence perhaps an even more profound effect although it is very hard to know what did not happen that might have happened. The world as it exists today is a result of a long series of probable events that could have easily gone the other way.

This does not mean however that there are some patters are more probable than others. Our images of the future about what our decisions are made are always uncertain but they do have structures of greater or less probability. As I have sometimes said, we have to be prepared to be surprised by the future, but we don’t have to be dumbfounded, which means that as our skills improve we can make decisions that are better than the others we might have made.

What light does this throw on the different patterns of development of different societies? It is clear that if there are no empty niches there will be no development. A society that suppresses anything different from the present that has a rigid orthodoxy that is intolerant of all dissent that thinks it knows all there is to know will clearly be pretty stagnant. Islam after about 1300, Spain of the inquisition, China under the gang of four, are all possible examples . The English toleration of dissent in the18th century had something to do with the Industrial Revolution and the separation of the church and the state in the US has something to do with its economic development.

Another fundamental thing could be the protection of infancy. A potential species may have a niche in an ecosystem if its population gets to be large enough but it may have to get over a hump in its population size below which it may not survive.

The infant industry argument in economics is an interesting case. An industry may not survive if it fails to grow beyond a critical size but would prosper if it is large enough. The development of the human brain almost certainly had something to do with the fact hat the ancestors of homo sapiens developed child care and long infancies. The case for subsidising innovation in their early stage rests some what on this premise.

A third principle is that the rate of mutation itself is important though what determines this is very hard to say. We seem to know very little about this even in this biosphere. But what it is in the structure of the human being that makes some people bubble over with ideas and very creative and others dull and conventional we really do not know. Now do we ever think up something that we have not thought of? There are probably immense processes of random search and selection unconsciously in the human mind.

We could argue of course that the human capacity for innovation is very constant and that differences lie in the degree to which it is encouraged or suppressed. This would suggest that perhaps there is some optimum degree of ecological interaction but this is very hard to identify.

For instance one possible explanation of the development of science – the Needham problem - is that china was too well organized and Europe had the optimum degree of disorganisation. It was in the interest of the Mandarins not to rock the boat too much. In Europe there was separation of church and division into nation states so that Copernicus got away with it in Poland, Tyco Brahe in Denmark, Kepler in Prague and so on. The Romans would certainly have suppressed any rise of science.


The ideal situation seems to be islands in occasional contact. We need islands for infant protection to give mutations smaller humps over which they must get in order to survive.

If the island is too isolated, however, it will not have enough mutation, migration is a very important element in mutation in the evolutionary process, the migration of ideas as much as species. This is perhaps why my ideal world is a world of walled garden with doors – 500 independent nations in stable peace, each with its own culture and identity its own capacity for individual mutation but also related by travrl, trade and functional world organisations. In all this too we have to remember that most changes are adverse, most mutations do not survive and most ideas are bad ones.

SCIENCE DIGEST JUNE 1983

People who influenced me: St. Augustine

St Augustine is an unlikely candidate for people who influenced me, but the accidental introduction to a book of his called 'Confessions' changed my course.

I was astonished at the moderness of the book though it was written in the fourth century, but then it came about that christianity / catholicism and therefore western culture itself was shaped by the works of people like Augustine and later Thomas Acquinas.

Later on the fact that the modern world is in very broad terms in a paradigm of Greco- Roman one carried on by the Catholic church which inherited the Roman Empire, including the jurisprudence of most of the modern western world and its former colonies would suffice to say that the influence of such people are far from appreciated.

However my liking of St. Augustine is captured in his saying,
'Thou hast made us for thyself, O Lord, and our hearts are restless until they find their rest in thee', in that it both captures the ubiquitous restlessness of man but deliberately directed it towards the Lord which is a happy compromiseof the basic condition of man and its positive solution in the Christian quest.

People who influenced me: Richard Bach

Why is a small book called Jonathan Livingstone seagull so attractive. It only writes about a bird who flies and flies up and up against the howls of his own kind and enjoys the process.It is reminiscent of the Old man and the sea which went so existential. But why is this more in management than in existential literature?

This is interesting. Perhaps it has no pretentions as to existential rather it comes about as a neat little book that can be read at a single stretch.

Nevertheless it falls into the positive thinking genre without telling as much. Instead of Peale's examples such as a famous psychologist told which smacks of non varifiability, this book is fictional so much that even an extraction of positive meaning could be disputed. Perhaps more so like Ayn Rand also writing of struggles and struggles and not giving up.

Well, not giving up becomes second nature given exposure to such books and hence the influence on me of Richard Bach.

People who influenced me: Peter Drucker

Peter Drucker is the most influential of the modern management gurus. His style is at times a little roundabout due to its heavy loading of meaning, but there is one book that he has written in a more lucid form, 'The Adventures of a bystander' which is autobiographical. The title of my own blog owes a great deal to the title of this book as also it does to books such as The adventures of Huckleberry Finn.

Drucker is interesting even from a non management point of view. This is due to his uncanny anticipation of the times in which he lived in Europe and his own precocious decision to leave Europe at a very early stage.

Drucker's perceptions are sociological and true to the times. He is the one who gave the Corporation an existence as a modern sociological unit much like the feudalism of yore. The difference is that instead of interpreting what is there he gave an anticipatory value to it in his contention that the twin realities of the modern world are the existence of Corporations and the ubiquitous natue of technology.

From here there is only an extrapolation to a naive career guidance that the two things that man should learn these days are how to live in a world in which Corporations influence so much of life and the necessity of learning technology. One might even say that given no particular genius to any domain all children should aim for an Engineering degree and an MBA.

Once again indirectly we are talking of a New Industrial Society another of his books.The world of the executive comes so vivid in the books of Drucker not as a commentary in what he should be doing. Rather, Drucker is perhaps the only other one with so much of a sociological view of the manager apart fom William Whyte who talked of the organisation man. The fact of his sociological leaning and imagination is not obvious to the one who reads his works as a management past time until they care to inform themselves with the 'Adventures of a bystander'.

People who influenced me:Norman Vincen Peale

Peale's famous quotations are given in bracket under. In spite of the criticisms of Peale as 'the confidence man, that self hypnosis is the method that he adopts', the positive thinking strain of self development has a certain place in the self help world. Many of the concepts of keeping mind positive do have results in that the mind tends to believe whatever it is made to believe and therefore whatever the mind is set to achieve it tends to achieve. This has been known to individuals and later corroborated by evidence including the changes that happen in the brain.

How religion heals is the kind of technique that falls into the same category as Peale's Power of positive thinking. A certain amount of optimism has developed in me in spite of the many tribulations and part of it is due to the influence of people like Peale.

In a world beset with two world wars and a diminishing in the belief in mankind's capacity to maintain itself any sort of solution however temporary it is if it leads to survival for another day and so on should be the minimum value atached to the works of people like Peale.

It is also necesary to mention that in Psychology there is the development of a new strain of thought called positive psychology which is not to be confused with positive thinking.

Positive psychology is a recognition of the deficiency psychology and a movement away from it into eupsychy which looks at what is normal and what works rather than looking at how we can correct the disease with its underlying assumption of pathology which was the paradigm psychology for a long time found itself in. Evidence of this is the negative connotation attached to psychiatry or psychiatric treatment as in such appellations of the practitioner as 'shrink'.

[When life hands you a lemon, make lemonade. Drop the idea that you are Atlas carrying the world on your shoulders. The world would go on even without you. Don't take yourself so seriously.Those who are fired with an enthusiastic idea and who allow it to take hold and dominate their thoughts find that new worlds open for them. As long as enthusiasm holds out, so will new opportunities. It is of practical value to learn to like yourself. Since you must spend so much time with yourself you might as well get some satisfaction out of the relationship. Joy increases as you give it, and diminishes as you try to keep it for yourself. In giving it, you will accumulate a deposit of joy greater than you ever believed possible.
Believe it is possible to solve your problem. Tremendous things happen to the believer. So believe the answer will come. It will.Never talk defeat. Use words like hope, belief, faith, victory. Watch your manner of speech if you wish to develop a peaceful state of mind. Start each day by affirming peaceful, contented and happy attitudes and your days will tend to be pleasant and successful. The trouble with most of us is that we would rather be ruined by praise than saved by criticism. A positive mental attitude is a belief that things are going to turn out well, and that you can overcome any kind of trouble or difficulty. The tests of life are not meant to break you, but to make you. Live your life and forget your age. ]

People who influenced me: Pearl S Buck

Pearl S Buck leaves one hoping that there would be more men and women writing about other cultures like she did so vividly in her 'The good Earth'. It is essentially a Chinese saga written by a non Chinese and therfore leaves a window to the rest of the world.

I have always wondered how it would have been if there was none like Pearl to expose the Chinese mind and culture to the world. In doing so she has left us less tribal and less of an island and taken us one step more towards a universal view of the world without taking anything away from the original culture.

The picture of the Chinese woman who goes behind the bushes to give birth to the baby and comes back to the field to continue her work is poignant as much as it captures the reality and even a possibility. At once she has painted the naturalness of childbirth and humbled us in our anxieties of an event so uneventful in its original.

The other is the picture of the Chinese peasant Wang who takes the services of a barber to clean up on the eve of his wedding. The Chinese peasant woman's and the man's relentless struggle in the farm without even an awarenss that theirs is a struggles captures the original condition of man who in his progress is becoming ever more anxious day by day.

People who influenced me: William Golding

William Golding's 'Lord of the Flies', captures the essence of the moralily in the world in a clever story that leaves a few children on an island without any authority figures.

The children develop their own norms in the absense of controlling parent figures.Unfortunately in an imitation of the real world, it is not the voice of reason and intellect that works in that world but the authoritarian immoral, usurper of power who invents rules of the game of power to suit himself that triumphs and the group invariably moves towards atavism.

This transition of a group of children representative of the civilised class into atavistic savages is an allegory of man shorn of the accumulated civilisational norms and authority and control figures. It reminds us of the precariousness of the moral world. As in the real world glimpses of greatness and moral courage are but glimpses and man in this world is inevitably in a predicalment of slipping into evil even if he wishes otherwise.

While that sums up man's predicament the story is also an exhortation to uphold our civilisation that has so painstakingly reached some semblance of order, justice and hope of further emancipation in a world rife with evil at every corner.

I am especially fond of Golding because I happened to listen to Golding in person at the British Council in Madras in 1987 or 88 in which I still remember his words 'good and evil are the two sides of the same coin' that our world without one is unimaginable and an implicit goading of humankind to preserve the good against all odds.