Adam and Eve revisited

21. The accumulation principle

Behaviour is cumulative. When new levels of organisation are achieved the previous ones don’t simply disappear nor do they fuse with the new. They are modified by virtue of the fact that they are subjected to new sets of constraints but they are still there. This means that it is of little use to study behaviour at different levels of organisation by themselves. Its main implication is the following.

22. The hierarchy of constraints principle

All systems are subject to constraints. This is the same as saying that they are increasing order or reducing randomness. As each level of complexity is achieved a new set of constraints becomes operative. These can be organised hierarchically. The lower the level of complexity to which they correspond, the more they are important because the greater their generality (see the generality principle).

Thus physical constraints apply to all systems. Everything obeys the laws of gravity, also the laws of thermodynamics. Biological constraints apply not only to biological organisms but to families and societies. Social constraints apply to all societies, however artificial. Our society is non-sustainable, principally because its priorities are wrong. It puts economic constraints, i.e. those that are supposed to favour the distribution of resources within a system, before those that ensure the survival of the system itself and even subordinates to them physical and biology constraints.

The principle of “Consumer Sovereignty”, for instance, which states that everything must be subordinated to the satisfaction of – on the whole artificially induced material requirements of individual consumers, reflects this lunatic state of priorities, as does that of permissiveness, which implies that it is actually advantageous to ignore that set of constraints that individuals are subjected to, to enable them to fulfill their differentiated functions within their family and social systems.

23. The cyclic principle

One of the most important ecological constraints at the physical, chemical and biological level of complexity deserves to be stated separately. Indeed in order to prevent the running down of our world and to permit the increase in order that has characterised the last few thousand million years, during which time our biosphere has developed, the raw materials of life have been exploited in an extremely subtle way, each one of them being recycled via complicated processes permitting their constant re-use and avoiding the accumulation of waste.

It is significant that our industrial society has ignored this key constraint. The development of the technosphere has been largely a one-way process, the biosphere being systematically transformed into the technosphere and the waste matter of the technosphere, both of which from the point of view of the biosphere constitute waste, randomness or entropy.

24. The rate of “cybernisation” principle

The rate of change which a system is capable of dealing with depends among other things on the rate at which the control mechanism can function, i.e. the rate at which it can detect data, transduce it into the informational medium used by the model, organise it in the model (or cybernise it), permitting interpretation or prediction and responding accordingly.

In the case of a population whose model is contained in its gene-pool, this rate is very slow. The phylogenetic changes or responses are slow, especially as generations become longer as in man. In order to in. crease the rate of cybernisation, a new set of responses is developed based on a new informational medium, that used by the brain. The information in terms of which one can understand the behaviour of a human social system is formulated partly genetically, partly culturally (neuro-genetically), its generalities in terms of the former, its particularities in terms of the latter.

The particularities of a model are easier to change than the generalities. Their role is to permit petty short-term adaptations which are justified on the basis of small short-term experience, whereas the generalities reflect the long-term experience of the species (see the continuity of information principle).

25. The principle of variety

The improbability of the environmental change to which a system can respond is directly proportional to its “variety”. The concept is applicable to a gene-pool as well as to a brain, i.e. to all cybernisms. It is also applicable to cultures which we are systematically destroying in order to spread our own industrial culture. It is also applicable to ecosystems which are everywhere being simplified as monoculture replaces mixed farming and as herbicides, fungicides and insecticides eliminate “unwanted” species.

One does not need any laboratory experiments to tell us the result can only be to increase instability and hence discontinuities such as “pest” epidemics.

26. The principle of complexity

The precision with which a system can adapt, is the extent to which oscillations (disequilibria and their corrections) can be reduced in a given situation which in turn depends on its complexity (both temporal and spatial). For instance, in an ecosystem, by increasing the number of trophic levels or levels of predation, new qualitative and quantitative controls become operative which must reduce the size of population oscillations occurring through disease and famine – hence increasing stability.

It is to he noted that society, in accordance with the principle of economy, will display the minimum complexity required to deal with environmental challenges. Also its complexity is limited by the levels of complexity principle – thus if increasing complexity is at the expense of its basic structure into families, small communities, etc. it will cease to display order and will become unstable. (See the principle of order.)

It is significant that the technosphere which we are substituting for the biosphere is not as complex as we think. In fact, by nature’s standards it is rudimentary. The most sophisticated piece of equipment devised by man is far less complex than an ordinary virus.

27. The principle of order

The most adaptive situation when no predictions concerning environmental changes can be made is randomness (which I shall take as synonymous with entropy) or an absence of order. As it becomes possible to discern some order in the environment and hence make interpretations and predictions concerning likely changes, so does order build up. Order is organisation, a departure from randomness. Not any organisation but that which most favours the goal of stability.

The technosphere does not display order as its organisation is not homeotelic (see the homeotelic principle) or self-regulating and hence tends towards increasing instability. In the same way a modern state, however centralised, does not display ‘order’. The most adaptive organisation when predictions can be made with total accuracy (assuming this were possible) would be a system in which the steps succeeded each other without change of any sort, i.e. in which a pre-established response were replicated.

I regard this latter situation as displaying the highest possible order. Needless to say, it can never occur. But order will increase as we move from the situation of no prediction to the theoretical situation in which infallible predictions are made. We think of order as synonymous with centralisation.

This is apparent in the case of a system displaying high temporal complexity using an informational medium permitting rapid cybernisation and responses, such as the day to day behaviour of a human organism with a centralised nervous system, or that of an army. It is less apparent but equally so in a system made up of generations of amoebas in a stagnant pool or, for that matter, of Australian aboriginal hunter-gatherer societies. It could also be regarded as displaying high centralisation since the original instructions were handed out a long way back and have scarcely been modified since. This fits in with the normal criterion of order-the extent to which a system can be understood in terms of its generalities or basic instructions.

It is to be noted that a large society will be made up of communities subjected to different environmental pressures in order to respond adaptively to which they must evolve divergent behavioural traits thus a centralised society is likely to be unadaptive.

28. The principle of the optimum strategy

There must be an optimum value to every variable representing a strategy exploited by a system to achieve stability. No such strategy is desirable per se. Therefore there is no possible reason for maximising any one of them. On account of the principle of economy, the optimum will in fact coincide with the minimum required for dealing with environmental challenges. Only a self-regulating system which is linked by feedback loops to all those parts of its environment whose behaviour can affect it, is capable of maintaining itself along the optimum course that provides the best compromise between environmental requirements.

Our society, needless to say, is geared to the maximising of such things as education, prosperity, number of housing units, productivity, etc. Such aims (even were they tending in the right direction) would be incompatible with the maintenance of a stable social system.

29. The principle of competition

Competition is a mechanism whereby systems organise themselves hierarchically in accordance with their ability to fill available niches. It permits thereby the establishment of order within the larger system. If a system is tending towards stability, the greater the competition the greater the hierarchy (which is synonymous with order). If, on the other hand, it is tending towards instability, the greater the competition the greater will be the extent of the organisation tending in the wrong direction and the faster will it move towards its ultimate collapse. In our industrial society, the greater the competition, the more long-term biological and social considerations are subordinated to short-term ‘economic’ ones.

30. The principle of selection

Selection is competition looked at from the point of view of the environment. It does not only occur among mutants or random changes. It occurs also and primarily in fact – among adaptive, i.e. controlled responses. Such responses can be regarded as selected by the environment in the sense that their role is to satisfy an environmental requirement and if there is no such requirement there will be no response. It is precisely because there is no environmental requirement for the mutants, accidents or random responses that they tend to be eliminated (see the Niche principle).

The operation of this principle within a society or a population may appear disagreeable to us. We tend to refer to it as discrimination against the genetically and culturally unadaptive. Yet there is no alternative save the development of a population or a society displaying increasing entropy and eventually breaking down. To encourage the latter appears to be far more immoral than to accept the basic principle that man is subjected to selection like all other forms of life.

Measures tending to prevent the operation of selection by feather-bedding the unadaptive, i.e. via the welfare state, must correspondingly reduce social stability by increasing entropy or randomness. If we decide to take them, then we must be prepared to pay their cost.

31. The homeotelic principle. From the Greek homeo (same) and telos (goal))

If a system is capable of running itself, then its parts or sub-systems at all levels of complexity must be tending towards the same goal. If they were tending towards different and incompatible goals, the system would break down, unless of course, an external force were introduced to hold it together. However, it would then cease to be self-regulating, would become unstable and eventually collapse.

If the parts are capable of behaving homeotelically, it is because they were designed that way by differentiation. This applies equally well to human beings who have been designed phylogenetically and who in a stable society are trained culturally to fulfil their different functions as differentiated members of family and community systems. It can only be expected that a man will obtain the maximum satisfaction by fulfilling such functions as a husband, a father, a son and a member of different social groups.

This explains the counter-productivity of ‘progressive’ education, which is based on Freud’s totally mistaken notion of society as frustrating and inducing neurosis. It is also clear that it is only if its members behave homeotelically in this matter that a system such as a family or a community can survive.

In our society, everything is done to impair homeotely at both the family and communal level. Women are encouraged to take jobs, put their children in crèches and so neglect important maternal functions. Worse still, they are subjected to an education which places no store on the fulfilment of such functions (in which many of the household tasks that have previously provided people with undoubted satisfaction are classified as ‘drudgery’ by those who wish to draw the housewife more directly into the orbit of the cash economy). Also the father is prevented from fulfilling his essential functions as protector of and provide for the family by the all-pervading welfare state that takes over the education and the health problems of his children.

Similarly, homeotely is being impaired at the communal level, since people are being systematically taught that it is the duty of the State to satisfy all their requirements including the most superficial, while the spirit of duty and participation in social affairs which alone insured the survival of stable societies in the past is discouraged in every way. In other words, the introduction of external controls on the massive scale that they now operate in a modern national state must impair homeotely and hence disrupt the self-regulating mechanisms which are alone capable of insuring stability in our family and social systems. [13]

32. The heterotelic principle (from the Greek heteros (different), and telos (an aim or goal))

As a system disintegrates, so it fails to provide the appropriate stimuli required to trigger off the homeotelical responses on the part of its members. The responses that the latter will trigger off will be heterotelic, tending towards different goals from that of the system as a whole and incompatible with them. Thus, to return to the family as it disintegrates the husband might leave his wife for a mistress or resort to various forms of retreatism such as alcohol or drugs, all of which might provide him with personal satisfaction but do nothing to hold the family together.

As a result, the family will disintegrate still further until it eventually ceases to constitute a system capable of autonomous behaviour. This is what is happening today. The extended family which displays complexity and order has already disintegrated into the unstable nuclear family, which in turn is further disintegrating into its constituent parts, the process being most advanced in the suburbs of the large urban agglomerations in America and elsewhere.

33. The accommodation of trends principle

A heterotelic response is not solving a problem, only suppressing one of its manifestations, thereby rendering it more tolerable, and contributing to its perpetuation. Thus the tranquillisers that are now dispensed in astronomical quantities do . no more than render man’s plight as a member of a disintegrating family, community and ecosystem that much more tolerable, serving thereby to perpetuate the process of industrialisation that has actually put him in this plight.

Most of the so-called services provided by industrial society fit within this category. Houses for the old are only necessary with us because the family unit has broken down and people have lost their sense of responsibility towards their parents, which leads them to exile them to such institutions. To provide them is simply to accommodate this tendency and so it is with crèches for children who should be looked after by their own mothers.

So it is with most of the welfare which, in a stable society, is dispensed at the family level, where it must cause the minimum disruption. So it is with most of the consumer goods people are acquiring in ever greater quantities because their acquisition satisfies a heterotelic goal structure, a substitute for that which is normally provided culturally by the family and communal environment.

34. The problem multiplier principle

Heterotelic responses, by tending towards the satisfaction of single requirements to the exclusion of all others, must give rise to more problems than they solve. In addition, external or heterotelic controls, by their very nature, must render systemic ones redundant, which in accordance with the principle of economy must cause them to atrophy. Pesticides will thus destroy the natural controls on insect pests; artificial fertilisers nitrogen-fixing bacteria; in social systems centralised bureaucratic controls such as those operative in Western type nation states must destroy social structures and consequently society’s capacity for self-regulation. [14]

35. The solution-multiplier principle

On the other hand, by setting about to reconstitute or imitate the environment to which a system has been adapted phylogenetically and ontogenetically, one is ensuring the increasing stability and hence the better functioning of very many more than one specific system. Homeotelic responses will thus do far more than solve those problems with which one may be temporarily concerned.

In fact, as they are adopted so must other systems temporarily in disequilibrium fall back into place, for so will the biosphere function that much more closely to the way it has been designed by thousands of millions of years of evolution.

Only homeotelic measures, which reduce rather than increase man’s impact on ecological systems (physical, organic and social) thereby reducing systemic disruption at all these levels, can provide real solutions to the problems of man.

36. Conclusion

Induction and experimentation do not permit us to understand the world we live in. This can only be done by arguing deductively from basic principles. If we do this, it becomes apparent that man’s problems have been totally misinterpreted by the scientific world. They are not due to a ‘lack of development’ calling for further research, technology and industrial development. The opposite is the case. They are the result of a systemic deviation from man’s optimum environment – that to which he has been adapted by millions of years of evolution.

This deviation started with the Neolithic revolution and has been accelerated with the development of industry. Further development, i.e. further deviation from the optimum, can only increase these problems while their solution must reside in developing that way of life, and reconstituting that environment which, in the very unfavourable circumstances in which we find ourselves today, most closely imitates the optimum.

References and further reading

1.		Von Bertalanofy, Ludwig. General Systems. Penguin 1973. General Systems Theory. A critical review in general systems Vol. VII, 1962.
2.		Goldsmith, Edward, “The development of the ecosphere as a single process”. The Ecologist Vol. 1 No. 17. “Responding to the environment as a whole”, The Ecologist Vol. * No. *.
3.		Lee, R. B. and Devote, Man the Hunter, Aldine, Chicago. .1968.
4.		Bridgman, P. W., The Logic of Modern Physics. Macmillan, N.Y. 1960.
5.		Goldsmith, Edward, “The directivity of behaviour”, The Ecologist Vol.1 No.12.
6.		Waddington, C. H., The Strategy of the Genes. George Allen and Unwin, London. 1957. Craik, Kenneth, The Nature of Explanation. Cambridge University Press. 1942.
7.		Wiener, Horbert, Cybernetics. Goldsmith, Edward. “The cybernetics of day to day behaviour”. The Ecologist Vol. 1 No. 12. “Trial and error”, The Ecologist Vol. *. No. 7.
8.		Goldsmith, Edward, “The brain as a probability calculator”. The Ecologist Vol. 1 No.2. “Facts and hypotheses, a false dichotomy”, The Ecologist Vol. 1 No. 9.
9.		De Beer, Gavin, Embryos and Ancestors. Clarendon Press. 1958.
10.		Institute of Ecology, Man in the Living Environment. 1972.
11.		Odum, Eugene. Fundamentals of ecology.
12.		Goldsmith, Edward. “The stable society: Can we achieve it?” The Ecologist Vol. 1 No. 6.
13.		Buckle, T. H., History of Civilisation in England.