David Ellerman on Adaptive Landscapes
January 02, 2009 01:24PM
David Ellerman speaks at the 2008 Workshop on the Good Ancestor Principle about the resilience ideas of C.S. Holling and the adaptive landscape metaphor developed by Sewall Wright.
Sewall Wright was one of the three modern developers of population genetics. … He was the one that invented this whole idea of adaptive landscapes that we hear about in Santa Fe Institute-type of literature.
He was the only one in this modern Darwinistic synthesis that faced up to the question that – if you think of these hills of fitness, and evolution is driving you higher and higher on the hill of fitness: What do you do if you are on the wrong hill? What if it’s a rugged landscape?
Economists like to assume something that they call convexity, which means that there’s only one hill. You don’t have to worry about it. They just have these profit-maximizing firms that drive to the top of the hill.
But Sewall Wright faced the question: How can you go against selectionary pressures – go down the hill, and cross over, as it were, the land bridge to the other, higher hill? And he answered the question, like Darwin, by talking to artificial breeders.
He asked: Do you keep all your herd, your reproductive herd, in one herd? They said no. We divide it up into subgroups. They are actually quite small, so you can get the fixation of certain traits. When we get a good trait, in one of the subherds, we take that seed and spread it among the others.
So you get this, what in human terms we would call cross-learning, benchmarking between the herds. … They (the herds) had to be separate to try separate things, but they had to be connected enough to get the ratcheting-up effect, when one of these subherds got a good innovation, to be able to then spread that seed. This is what is called Sewall Wright’s theory of shifting balances.
Getting back to the economists’ idea of convexity (in which) there’s only one hill and you assume profit maximization. If it’s the wrong hill, you need some other mechanism in society that actually goes against profit maximization to innovate. And that’s where the notion of philanthropy comes in. Philanthropy can try things that in the short run are not profit maximizing, can innovate.
[Update Jan 03: Apologies for not including the full citation, below.]
This is a portion of the discussion at the Upift Academy's 2008 Good Ancestors Principle workshop in Encinitas, Ca. Feb 19, 2008. It includes discussions by David Elleman, Dorion Sagan, Valdis Krebs, Frank Mosca, Frederick Turner, and Tom Munnecke, discussing some of the concepts behind resilency in systems, including the work of Buzz Hollings. Produced by Tom Munnecke.
Copyright © 2008 Blip Networks Inc.
