Evo-Bio and Sloppy Thinking, Part II

In Evo-Bio and Sloppy Thinking Part I, I introduced the ideas of Effective and Final Cause, and how they might be important to social theorists. This post won't make much sense if you don't read that one first. If you've read that post already, you should remember the limits I placed on where each type of causation applies:

*Effective Cause exists in all physical systems.
*Final Cause exists in those systems, such as evolution and human behavior, in which infinite possibilities exist but only a small subset of these possibilities are viable.

Since the mission statement of this essay is to help readers think clearly and detect unclear thinking, I should pause here and note that what I wrote above about Final Cause contains sloppy thinking. If you want to work your analytical muscles by figuring out the source of the sloppiness, you should stop now to reflect before I move on.

If you pinpointed my use of the word "viable" as the source of the sloppy thinking in my statement, then you and I are on the same page. Unless I declare a context for it explicitly, "viable" is all but meaningless. Because this is an essay about sociobiology, and evo-bio is something most of you have pre-existing ideas about, I can guess that you probably treated "viable" as meaning "increasing an individual's chances to survive and reproduce," but as a reader evaluating the coherence of my ideas, it's useful for you to be aware that you're making that assumption.

As a writer, I could (and normally would) use that implication as a bookmark in your understanding. Later, I could come back to it and say "When I used the word viable, I meant XY." If there was any doubt that your understanding of the term "viable" was the same as my intended meaning when I used it, though, a failure to clarify what I meant would be criminally sloppy on my part and you would be right to point that out.

If I'm trying to sell you an idea, it's in your best interests to know if it's based on clean or sloppy thinking.

Further, lest you be tempted to assume that all of this is irrelevant hair-splitting: "increasing an individual's chances to survive and reproduce" will NOT be my intended meaning for every use of the word "viable". In later installments of this essay I'll talk about the interaction of different units of viability and their effects on human behavior; examples of this include the interaction of evolution and human behavior, or human behavior and human institutions such as marriage. At this point, this essay almost - almost! - has a sound enough conceptual framework established that we can reasonably start to discuss the guts of human action from that kind of perspective. All that remains is to establish more clearly exactly what I mean when I say "Final Cause Systems."

These are systems in which changes create a result that either is or is not viable; the existence of viability in the context of a Final Cause system seems to give its results a purpose and the context itself seems to give it rules. In fact, any Final Cause System is probably easiest to understand if you think of it as being like a game, the rules of which are a natural consequence of what it means to be "viable" in a specific context. In the interests of clearly demonstrating how such "games" work, I'll start with evolution:

In the game of evolution, the player is a single copy of the human genome. The player is not the organism, and it is not the species. Because your genes don't change appreciably over the course of your life, and a new genome is created only when you reproduce, each round of the game lasts a single generation. A genome "wins" if it contains instructions for the growth of an organism that A) survives long enough to reproduce, B) successfully reproduces, and C) when it reproduces, creates a new genome which is likely to win the next round of the game.

The game of evolution is played exclusively in the planning stages. The only "moves" allowed are changes to the genome itself before the round begins, and there are only two methods by which these changes can be made:

1. Random Mutation
2. Sexual Reproduction (as contrasted with asexual reproduction)

The second option, sexual reproduction, is actually just a strategy developed in a previous round of the game. It "won" by increasing genetic variation (in game terms, the number of possible moves). Sexual reproduction operates by pooling half of the moves that created one player with half of the moves that created the other; no new moves can be created in this way. It's also worth noting that without the development of strategies that result in good sexual selection, sexual reproduction is as likely to result in the acquisition of bad strategies as good.

The only source of innovation in evolution is mutation.

The playing field of the game is set up as follows: an organism, constructed according to the specifications of the genome, is released into some environment. If it produces a new winning genome, the round is won. The environment the organism is released into is subject to variation whose type tends to be predictable within limits, while its degree and timing is unpredictable.

In case that's not clear I'll provide some examples:

*Types of Change (Predictable): Availability of food resources can vary drastically. Composition of the atmosphere (Nitrogen, Oxygen, Carbon Dioxide etc.) tends not to vary greatly between generations.
*Degree and Timing of Change (Unpredictable): Variation in available food resources can happen to any degree at any time: a particularly good year can result in abundant vegetation (small change), or the decimation of a competing species by disease can lead to exclusive access to a food supply (large change).

For the most part, however, the environment of each round tends to resemble the environment used for the round before it. Because the genome is static throughout a single round of the game of evolution, a "winning" genome is one which codes for the construction of an organism primed to deal appropriately with the variation it encounters, and this is where genetics meet behavior.

Evo-Bio and Sloppy Thinking III will focus on the way that evolution and behavior interact in human beings; because these are both Final Cause Systems (and because I'll later develop other Final Cause Systems), I'll wrap with a shorthand notation that ought to be useful in comparing and contrasting the two. This is what I'll be using, from here out:

System: A label for the Final Cause system in question.
Viability: The "win condition" of the Final Cause System in question; the purpose of changes or actions governed by it.
Medium: The context in which the Final Cause System occurs.
Method: The form taken by changes or actions in the Final Cause System.
Input: The beginning elements of the "Final Cause" game.
Output: The ending elements of the "Final Cause" game.

For Evolution, this would be:


System: Evolution
Viability: production of new viable genome by genome-coded organism
Medium: genome (DNA)
Method: Mutation, sexual reproduction
Input: genome-coded organism + predictably variable environment
Output: viable new genome(s), OR non-viable new genome(s), OR nothing at all