Evolution is the natural method of operation of systems with specific characteristics. Evolution is the process of adaptation of suitably...
Evolution is the natural method of operation of systems with specific characteristics. Evolution is the process of adaptation of suitably endowed non-equilibrium systems to a changing environment, which allows the system to maintain a stable operating state despite the changing environment.
Evolution is the typical adaptive behavior of the systems of life. The evolutionary functioning of life as a system based on biochemical mechanisms is well known.
Although evolution serves only to maintain the functional state of specific systems, the operation of the evolutionary process necessarily involves the increase of complexity due to the information-managing nature of the evolutionary function, which provides heredity for the generation of diversity. The nature of the operation of evolution has no specific purpose other than to maintain the state of the system, yet its operation necessarily involves development due to the systematic increase in complexity.
Evolution is the typical mode of adaptive operation of living systems, but the living state is not limited to biochemical systems. All systems formed from or consisting of living components maintain their state and develop through evolution. For example, human society is also a living system. Human society as a form of living state is an evolutionary system, and therefore the functioning and behavior of human society can be attributed to the mechanisms of operation that are characteristic of evolution.
The specificity of the evolutionary functioning of human society is that the evolutionary mechanism creating diversity is not realized by the reproduction of society, but works on the lower level building blocks of society - individuals, groups - in such a way that the different characteristics of the adaptive behavior of society to the changing environment creating diversity are manifested on and through the building blocks of society in the form of the creation of different thoughts and ideas, which are propagated in the community as habits, forms of behavior called memes, forming new features, thus creating the necessary diversity for adaptation, which can also become prevalent in the society as a whole.
When we view human society as an evolutionary system, many surprising, originally incomprehensible, difficult-to-explain phenomena and behaviors can become naturally understandable. An example of such an evolutionary behavioral event is the consequent transition from a migratory hunter-gatherer lifestyle to a sedentary life of agriculture and herding.
Agriculture and animal husbandry is a controversial developmental step in the evolution of human society, because in many ways it creates and represents a decline in the quality of human life. However, this developmental step, which is fundamentally independent of the quality of life of individuals, is an understandable and well-explainable progress of the evolutionary functioning of human society, a necessary consequence of evolutionary development.
For thousands of years before the settled form of life, humans lived in small kin-based groups, using the resources more or less readily available in the environment, practicing a hunter-gatherer lifestyle (hunting is also essentially a form of gathering). When the hunter-gatherer community's habitat was depleted of the necessary resources, the group simply moved on to another location. During this period of time, the increasing complexity characteristic of evolution, manifested in the accumulation of information, creates technological development that enhances the hunter-gatherer lifestyle.
The size of the group living together was determined by the amount of resources per unit area available in the living area that could be obtained with the skills available. If the size of the group exceeded the amount of resources available due to reproduction, the group would simply split up and move far enough away from each other until the resources in the area made the population sustainable again.
This expansive form of growth can function as long as there is sufficient suitable territory. This method of evolutionary survival has practically allowed the suitable land of the Earth to be populated at a density appropriate for the hunter-gatherer lifestyle. The spread of humanity by migration is an evolutionary necessity of the hunter-gatherer lifestyle of the species.
This lifestyle is predatory and exploitative, as is typical of natural evolution. The survival of humanity in the process of adaptation by natural evolution, due to its advanced cognitive abilities and the absence of a competitor with similar abilities, does not lead to a balanced equilibrium among the species living together in the same habitat, but to the total exploitation of living and non-living resources, to the extinction of other less evolved species, including human beings, and to the disruption of the ecological balance.
This expansive, predatory, environmentally destructive lifestyle is a feature of the naturally evolving existence of the unrivaled intelligent human species.
But all growth, eventually, has its limits. The growth of humanity at that time was limited by the amount of resources available through a hunter-gatherer lifestyle.
What can happen to migrating humanity when the living space required by growth reaches its limits? How can evolution then maintain the living state of society?
The habitat of freely migrating human groups struggling for resources increasingly overlaps as they grow and necessarily multiply, creating competition that leads to collisions and clashes for survival.
This competition would automatically regulate population size in a natural way, but because of the ability to accumulate knowledge unique to the intelligent human species, there is no equilibrium between competing groups, but competition favors and creates groups with greater potential. A community with greater knowledge and more advanced technology leads to and results in greater size, which becomes capable of displacing the less capable from the habitat.
Only the human species, due to its intelligence capable of creating and accumulating knowledge, is capable of unlimited growth, which behavior is also characteristic of the functioning and preservation of the living state maintained by natural evolution. The more capable, those who are greater in quantity and/or more advanced in quality, are able to grow.
The evolutionary advantage of size and skill applies to the evolution of human communities within species. Survival-advantaged groups that grow larger also require more advanced organization, and thus cooperation evolves. This consequential stage of development, based on and driven by natural evolution, allows and requires the emergence of larger groups in the competition for survival.
This form of hunter-gatherer lifestyle can continue as long as expansion is possible at the expense of the existence of smaller or less capable groups in the available area.
It is worth noting that the evolutionary struggle of cohesive groups for survival and growth has accompanied human history from the very beginning and continues today at the level of societies in the form of the struggle for regional and global dominance. The quest for local or global superpower status is a necessary consequence of the natural evolutionary functioning of human society.
Those groups, for example, which are left out of this process of integration, which consequently also requires a kind of self-abandonment, those groups participate in the natural evolution in the stays of the smaller ones in the competition between each other, with the risks of extinction, where the stronger, the larger, the more capable survive in all cases. The formation of groups of countries, political blocs, based on the same ideological values, or even formed on temporary common interests, is the result of the operation of life-supporting natural evolution in human society.
In the late hunter-gatherer form of humankind, the necessary growth, the increase in group size, i.e. the increase in potential at the expense of others eventually leads to the encounter of objective obstacles. The resources available for gathering and hunting, as well as the limitation of living space by other, similarly developed and therefore no longer conquerable surrounding groups, impose limits on the growth of a given group.
For objective reasons, the area of each group cannot increase continuously, even though an increase in size is an evolutionary advantage for the survival of the living organism. In this new situation, the only way to achieve the evolutionary advantage of increasing the size of the community is to be able to obtain more resources intensively on the available living space.
Obviously, in this case, the hunter-gatherer lifestyle no longer provides the opportunity for growth. Consequently, the evolutionary advantage is given to the group of people who live in a sufficiently suitable area and are able to develop intensive resource production on the available land, which requires the development of appropriate technologies of agriculture to replace gathering and herding to replace hunting, leading to the emergence of a sedentary lifestyle. As a necessary consequence of evolution, settled communities develop that are able to grow intensively in suitable areas.
The development of settled agriculture and animal husbandry in human society is the result of a natural evolutionary process that supports the survival of the living state. In practice, communities were more likely to survive, develop, and dominate if they were able to grow in potential within a given fixed area, which at that time was made possible by locally feasible, and therefore stationary, agriculture and animal husbandry.
This type of development, based on natural evolution, is still taking place. Today, the evolutionary process is no longer based primarily on the occupation of territories of individual societies or countries, although incidents of this can still be observed in the development of less socially advanced societies using non-community decision-making, but rather in the emergence of increasingly integrated spheres of societies with shared values.
In this competition based on natural evolution, the more efficient, intensively developing societies will be able to dominate, and the process of extensive growth will favor the highest possible level of integration based on cooperation. And the process, according to the development of the moral level of societies, will increasingly continue not as a process of mutual destruction, but of the natural degradation of the less capable societies.
The key evolutionary factor for humanity today in adapting to a changing environment is migration due to climate change.
Humanity has always been subject to migration in the evolutionary struggle for individual and societal survival, and migration has sometimes resulted in significant changes to the natural and social environment in the past. Migration today has the potential to produce similar effects to those seen in human history, but the organizational, moral and technological development of humanity today, and the socio-geography of the society in which it has formed, fundamentally influence the course, impact and outcome of migration today.
The process can be characterized by aggression for survival, of course, but the societies that will emerge winning and growing in potential are those that are able to use migration as a resource, integrating it into their society and using the displaced masses for the benefit of society as a whole.
Mass integration inevitably leads to the transformation of societies that is inherent in the process. Those societies that are able to increase their potential through migration will become dominant in their environment, while other societies will wither and become insignificant. There is probably no universal mechanism for increasing potential through migration, but a universal method can be the acceptance of differences if and as long as it leads to the development of cooperation, which necessarily leads to the desired and expected increase in social cohesion. This is a fundamental interest, a survival factor for both the host and the recipient.
Those societies, and only those societies, that are able to successfully implement the adaptation process will be able to manage climate-change induced migration.
In this process, just as in the development of early agriculture and animal husbandry, so in the entire history of humanity operating by natural evolution, the improvement of the quality of life of the individual is not the primary factor of evolution, since this criterion is not a typical motivation for natural evolution to operate, and since it clearly did not and does not occur.
Sedentary life is a consequence of evolution, as the mechanisms of increasing complexity for the potential of the system to increase for evolutionary survival. The inevitable consequences of this process is the development of technology, the growth of a given population, the increase in the potential capabilities of a given society, regardless of the quality of life available to its members.
The predatory, exploitative mode of survival derived from natural evolution is obviously also present and prevalent within the cooperating group. The differentiation of different groups in relation to the availability of resources, which is already the result of the social differentiation resulting from the initial cooperation, continues throughout the evolution of society, creates differentiation in the distribution of resources within society, causes the development of hierarchical social differentiation in relation to the availability of resources within the group, leads to the development of ruling classes, and even to the development of dominant classes that exist independently of individual abilities. The emergence of inequalities and the growth of inequality in the course of social development are the result of the operation of natural evolution.
The early sedentary way of life in areas with suitable resources led to the emergence of highly differentiated, dominant, dominating societies in their environment, capable of increasing the social potential in the available limited space and even allowing the growth of the number of individuals. As a result of a larger population and the prosperity of certain groups within the community, development also catalyzes the development of science and technology, which is a prerequisite for the exponential growth of the potential capabilities of this form of life.
As long as the available area of the settled lifeform allows development to provide the necessary increase in required resources, the population has an evolutionary advantage and is capable of expansion. However, only the natural evolutionary processes that apply to human societies play a role in the formation of dominant societies, empires, and the quality of life achieved by the individuals that form the society is not a determining factor in this process.
There is no doubt that the historical process has raised the overall standard of living achieved by humanity. However, this is not the result of the evolutionary development of human society, but of the accumulation of knowledge as a by-product of the evolutionary process. Through its accumulated knowledge, humankind is increasingly able to overcome dangerous and harmful phenomena, including those caused by itself. However, this does not necessarily go hand in hand with an increase in the level of satisfaction and happiness of the individuals who form society, as experience and social surveys show.
The natural evolutionary process of human society can be generalized, and the natural evolutionary process of society is still ongoing. The impact of digitalization on human society today works in a similar way. The potential and consequently the survivability of societies that adopt and increasingly use digitalization is increasing, while the overall well-being of individuals and society is not directly correlated with the increase of society's potential, and the natural evolutionary functioning on internal predatory groups also limits the uniform development of society as a whole.
Human society is a living evolutionary system, the rules of natural evolution act on society as a whole, while individual members of society are not essentially determinants but merely participants in this process. In conclusion, among other things, the ambivalent development of agriculture and animal husbandry, can be understood and explained by the development of human society through natural evolution.
Shrinking societies are an interesting and ambivalent stage of current development. More and more, the growth of the potential of societies does not require the growth of the size of societies. The effect of individual growth of prosperity prevails by not having the burden of raising children, still the potential of society can grow by the subsequent growth of using technology and benefiting from migration.
The question immediately arises: Is it possible to motivate evolutionary adaptive social progress in a way that is strictly and consistently derived from the happiness and increased well-being of society and its members?
Natural evolution serves to maintain the survival potential of the living individual undergoing the evolutionary process, and survival potential is not strictly correlated with the subjective well-being of that individual. Survival potential is the result of evolution, and subjective well-being is more related to the fulfillment of desires that satisfy needs.
In fact, dissatisfaction, i.e., subjective frustration, is a more important motivating factor for the change required by evolution than achieving an increase in satisfaction.
Although there is no precedent in the history of human evolutionary development for attempts to achieve evolutionary adaptation and development in a manner other than natural evolution, based solely on increasing the subjective well-being of individuals, there are societies in which well-being increases relatively more than in other societies. Even though increasing subjective well-being to increase the survival potential of society is not necessarily a conscious goal in these societies, it is still possible to examine the strength of the relationship. It is also interesting to examine the opposite case, i.e. how a decrease in subjective well-being affects the survival potential of a society. The likely ambiguity of the answer is due to the success of some authoritarian regimes.
The applied social governance method certainly plays a fundamental role in the process of welfare-based adaptation and development of a society, and therefore finding and applying the optimal social governance method may be the key to welfare-based social evolution.
But natural evolution is not the ultimate way for humanity with intelligence to evolve. The development of human society by natural evolutionary mechanisms can be replaced by a mode of directed evolution, which could eventually lead to the unlimited existence and constant development of the form of intelligence by the human species. The evolution of human society as a living system is still continuing, and intelligent humanity may even potentially be able to direct evolution for sustainable development.
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