Diversification, integration, and cooperation.
Abstract
Two great trends are evident in the evolution of life on Earth: towards increasing diversification and towards increasing integration. Diversification has spread living processes across the planet, progressively increasing the range of environments and free energy sources exploited by life. Integration has proceeded through a stepwise process in which living entities at one level are integrated into cooperative groups that become larger-scale entities at the next level, and so on, producing cooperative organizations of increasing scale (for example, cooperative groups of simple cells gave rise to the more complex eukaryote cells, groups of these gave rise to multi-cellular organisms, and cooperative groups of these organisms produced animal societies). The trend towards increasing integration has continued during human evolution with the progressive increase in the scale of human groups and societies. The trends towards increasing diversification and integration are both driven by selection. An understanding of the trajectory and causal drivers of the trends suggests that they are likely to culminate in the emergence of a global entity. This entity would emerge from the integration of the living processes, matter, energy and technology of the planet into a global cooperative organization. Such an integration of the results of previous diversifications would enable the global entity to exploit the widest possible range of resources across the varied circumstances of the planet. This paper demonstrates that it's case for directionality meets the tests and criticisms that have proven fatal to previous claims for directionality in evolution.
Integration – consistent with the pan-European perspective, which itself is compatible with diversification, since it by no means supports or implies any sort of European panmixia.
As far as any “global entity” goes – even with cooperation, there are differences of interests within the components of that cooperation (yes, even among Europeans) – there needs to be balance. There is nothing per se wrong with global cooperation – as long as White interests – fundamentally and foremost White survival and genetic continuity – are part of the equation. Otherwise, no global cooperation should occur, and without Whites – the glue that would hold it all together – such cooperation will not be possible. Why should Whites participate in a process that leads to their own extinction? That’s a prescriptive question, because descriptively, that is precisely what Whites are currently doing.
This paper presents a case for directionality in evolution that does not suffer from the deficiencies that have undermined other claims.
I’m not convinced by the mechanistic arguments (or even the main thesis of directionality) – but neither do I reject them – but there are other points of interest here.
It should be emphasized from the outset that the claim outlined here is made in relation to the evolution of all living processes on Earth, including humans and human organizations. As the paper will demonstrate, the trajectory of evolution can only be properly understood if the evolution of all living processes is taken into account, ultimately as a whole. In particular, the full nature of the trajectory cannot be identified and understood by focusing on, for example, only biological evolution. As we shall see, human cultural evolution and the evolution of human organisations and technology (including artificial intelligence) play a critically important role in driving the trajectory beyond a certain point.
That is all consistent with MacDonald’s “group evolutionary strategies” (which Derbyshire pretended not to understand - after all, we can’t get “Rosie” upset now, can we?).
The nature of the evolutionary mechanisms that explore possibility space prove to be far less important in driving the trajectory than is the structure of the possibility space. In particular, the trajectory is shaped primarily by the nature and location of evolutionary attractors in possibility space.
Thus, by altering the environment, we can change the “possibility space” and the “evolutionary attractors” to shift “directionality” where we wish it to go, no? More racist Whites, please.
Other parts of paper:
Section 2 of the paper begins to outline the case for a particular form of overall directionality. It identifies a large-scale pattern that is evident in the evolution of life on Earth.
Section 3 provides the pattern with micro-foundations by presenting a model which demonstrates that this pattern is driven by natural selection and other accepted evolutionary processes.
Section 4 subjects the model and its key predictions to appropriate tests, including those that have been failed by other claims for overall directionality.
Section 5 concludes the paper by providing an overview of the trajectory of evolution and discussing some of its key implications.2. A large-scale pattern
If we stand back from the evolution of life on Earth and view it as a whole, a number of patterns are apparent.
An obvious trend is that living processes have diversified as evolution proceeded. When life first began on Earth, it was limited to exploiting only a tiny proportion of available free energy sources under a very restricted range of environmental conditions. From there living processes have diversified progressively as evolution unfolded, spreading across the planet, adapting to an ever-widening range of environmental conditions and exploiting more and more sources of free energy. This trend towards increasing diversification has continued up until the present with the emergence of humans, albeit now mainly through the processes of cultural evolution, rather than through gene-based adaptation and speciation.
Racial differentiation. The cultural part is consistent with MacDonald’s theses. However, while change today may be mainly cultural, it is not exclusively so. Genetic adaption continues.
But a less obvious trend that moves in a very different direction is also apparent. As well as the trajectory towards increasing diversification, there is also a trend towards increasing integration. As the evolution of life on Earth has unfolded, living processes have increasingly come to be integrated into cooperative organizations of larger and larger scale.
Imperium Europa.
This progressive integration of organisms into cooperative organizations of increasing scale is not limited to evolution driven by gene-based natural selection. The trend has continued in human evolution where cultural evolutionary processes now predominate: small kin groups were integrated into bands, bands were integrated into tribes, these formed the constituents of kingdoms and city states, and these in turn have been integrated into nation states (Stewart, 2000, Turchin, 1977).
And Imperiums?
At each step in this process of integration, smaller-scale entities are integrated into cooperative organizations that become larger-scale entities at the next level of organization. Typically the larger-scale entities undergo a relatively rapid diversification and adaptive radiation (e.g. see Knoll and Bambach, 2000). As evolution unfolds, this step-wise process repeats itself, producing cooperative organizations of living processes of greater and greater scale. At each step, a new level of nesting of entities within larger-scale entities arises. And as evolution proceeds, entities with greater levels of nestedness emerge. The result is the familiar nested-hierarchical structure of living processes.
If the idea of nested, hierarchical structures sounds familiar with respect to EGI, then you have been paying attention; for example, read this. There are concentric circles of racial and ethnic interests, which ultimately conflate to nested circles of genetic interest. Race-based levels of interest and ethnic-based circles can be compatible. Like the trend towards diversification, the trend towards integration seems to be continuing apace at present. Humans are increasingly integrating other living processes into its organizations through activities such as farming, aquaculture and broader ecosystem management. And human organization itself seems likely to continue to increase in scale. Although rudimentary, the League of Nations and the United Nations were early attempts to build supra-national organizations on a global scale.
And they have been gross failures, for not taking into account those nested interests; with the UN today waging war against the most fundamental interests of the European peoples.
Some forms of economic organization are already global, and regional cooperatives of nation states such as the European Union have emerged. Global crises such as human-induced climate change seem to be increasingly evoking coordinated responses across nation states.
Yes, Whites will do the solving, while China will continue to pollute. A coordinated response?
The idea that some form of global governance is essential for human survival and flourishing is now strongly supported by many leading international relations researchers (e.g. see Craig, 2008) and economists (e.g. see Walker et al., 2009).
Shilling for globalism. The nationalist-populist response extant today suggests that the lower levels of nested interests are not being properly cared for by global managers, and in the absence of such care, and in the absence of a mechanism to fairly adjudicate competing interests, you cannot expect lower level nests to stick with the program. Global solutions are not meant to be a White racial suicide pact.
That cooperation can produce significant fitness advantages is not controversial (e.g. see Corning, 1983, Dugatkin, 1999, Miller, 1978, Ridley, 1996, Stewart, 2000). Cooperative organizations have the potential to be more successful than isolated individuals. Whatever the evolutionary challenges, living processes can respond to them more effectively if they form cooperative organizations and if their actions are coordinated. In part this is because cooperation enables the exploitation of synergies, including through specialization and division of labour (Corning, 1983). Furthermore, the larger the scale of any cooperative organization, the more resources are commanded by it, the greater its power, the larger the impact and scale of its actions, the greater the potential for collective adaptation and intelligence, and therefore the wider the range of environmental challenges that it can meet.
Pan-European cooperation. Group selection.
But cooperation does not evolve easily (e.g. see Boyd and Richerson, 2005, Buss, 1987, Olson, 1965, Williams, 1966). The reasons for this are well understood. Consider a population of living entities that compete for limited resources. Entities that invest resources in beneficial cooperation but fail to capture sufficient benefits of that cooperation, will tend to be out-competed. Other entities that take the benefits of cooperation without investing in the cooperation (free riders) will tend to do better than co-operators. Free riders undermine the capacity of co-operators to capture the benefits created by their cooperation.
So, free riders constitute the “cooperation problem.” This has been discussed in detail at this blog, reflecting the large amount of analysis of the free rider problem by Salter and MacDonald. The author continues:
If co-operators within a group of entities were able to capture all the benefits of their cooperation, cooperative organization would self-organize (in more general terms, the cooperation problem would be solved comprehensively if all the entities in a group capture the impacts of their actions on the group as a whole, whether the impacts are beneficial or harmful) (Stewart, 2000). Cooperation in which the benefits to the individual exceed the costs to the individual would be selected at the individual level (unless some alternative, more effective cooperation emerged). If this fundamental condition for cooperative self-organization were met, individual entities that engage in cooperation would out-compete non-co-operators. It would be in the evolutionary/adaptive interests of individuals to cooperate. As a consequence, the group would be able to explore the possibility space for cooperative organization, and any form of cooperation that was discovered and which was more advantageous would be able to persist in the population.
One has to suppress free riding and ensure that cooperation benefits the cooperator more than it harms. This has all been discussed here in great detail, and studies have shown that ethnocentric cooperation can outcompete free riding. Leftists and HBDers may not want to hear that, but that is the reality, nevertheless. Also see this. …are there circumstances in which co-operators can capture sufficient of the benefits of cooperation to enable some simpler forms of cooperation to persist?
Yes.
Co-operators will capture proportionately more of the benefits of cooperation if they interact cooperatively with other co-operators more often than if all cooperative interactions are random. This will ensure that the benefits of cooperation are more likely to be shared amongst co-operators than leak to free-riders. If this condition is met, co-operators will capture a disproportionate share of the benefits of cooperation, and may capture sufficient to outweigh the costs of cooperation and the benefits that ‘leak’ to free riders. To the extent that this condition is met, co-operators will be collectively autocatalytic (they will collectively facilitate each other's success), and cooperative organization will be able to persist and be a target of selection (Ulanowicz, 2009).
And the aforementioned analysis has determined that, yes, properly constructed cooperative structures can defeat and outcompete free riding. The next time an HBDer engages in rants about “free riding makes ethnic nepotism impossible” – they are lying to you, and they have an agenda. They want to convince Whites not to engage in ethnic nepotism, so that Jews and Asians can have the whole field to themselves, sans competition.
It is conceivable that this condition could be met stochastically at times in a population. But it is likely to be met far more reliably if the cooperative interactions within the population are biased in some way.
Two main ways in which this bias can occur are:
1) Population structure: cooperative interactions may be biased because the population of entities is structured in ways that increase the likelihood that co-operators interact with other co-operators…Or the population may be formed into groups that tend to concentrate co-operators and restrict invasion by free-riders (e.g. Okasha, 2006).
Exclude parasitic ethnies.
2) Active selection: interactions may also be biased because co-operators selectively choose to interact with other entities that are more likely to be co-operators (conversely, they may also selectively exclude or punish entities that are more likely to be non-co-operators).
Punish White traitors. No ethnostate for you!
If the cooperation problem is to be overcome comprehensively, free-riding must be prevented, and as far as possible, the benefits of cooperation must go to the co-operators that create them. If this is to be achieved consistently and comprehensively in relation to a group of entities, special arrangements that have three key characteristics need to be in place (Stewart, 2000):
1) Power: the arrangements must have power over the entities in the group (including over co-operators and free riders), and the power to re-distribute the benefits of cooperation amongst members of the group in favour of co-operators. Power means the ability to influence or constrain without being influenced in return. If the arrangements could be influenced in return by those they need to control, control would break down. For example, free riders would be able to escape effective suppression by the arrangements.
We must have the technology of the state, and impose social controls against free riding. Libertarianism is poison. Hyper-individualism is poison. There must be the power to enforce reciprocity in cooperation for genetic interests.
2) Evolvability: the arrangements must be evolvable/adaptable. This enables the arrangements to explore the space of possibilities for supressing free-riders and for supporting beneficial cooperation. It gives the arrangements the capacity to optimize their use of power over entities, and to adapt their control as free-riders and other non-co-operators evolve and adapt to escape their control.
Fossilized dogma is no good. The power structures – the “arrangements” for suppressing free riding and facilitating cooperation – must evolve. No doubt free riding will evolve in an attempt to evade detection and suppression. There will be an ‘arms race.”
3) Alignment of interests: the evolutionary/adaptive interests of the arrangements must be aligned with the overall evolutionary/adaptive interests of the group of entities that it manages. Evolvability/adaptability per se is not enough. Unless interests are aligned in this way, the arrangements will not necessarily evolve/adapt in the direction needed to solve the cooperation problem. They will not necessarily use their power and evolvability to suppress free-riders and to support cooperation.
This is crucial. The “arrangements” must have the same interests as the managed entities, or else the “arrangements” themselves will be free riders. Consider the global elites of today who have – or at least perceive themselves to have – a different set of interests as the populations they manage. This is a dystopian scenario for genetic interests. The system must be set up so it is reinforcing a common set of interests between manager and the managed, so that the evolvability of managers is in the direction of more effective management and away from exploitive free-riding. We want symbiosis, not parasitism.
The problem is how to achieve this, and there are no easy answers. Throughout human history, managerial elites – even when they started out as sincere and authentic representatives of group interests – have become isolated from the managed group and have descended into rent-seeking, exploitative, free-riding behavior. This is virtually a law of human nature, an inevitability – in the absence of some sort of powerful counter-balance this trend. One can say – “make the arrangements, the managers, answerable “to the people” via “democratic processes.” But, of course, the managers have the power to subvert those “democratic processes” to their advantage, which is happening in the West today. This post is not the place to delve into this problem, but it is a problem that needs to be solved.
It is useful to classify the constraints applied by management processes into two categories, although the categories represent extremes on a continuum:
1) Prescriptive constraints: these specify more or less precisely the particular outcomes that occur in the managed group. For example, DNA determines the specific proteins that are produced in a cell, including the quantities. And in a human command economy, the central authority prescribes specific economic outcomes, such as the nature and volume of the consumer goods that are to be produced. Where constraints are prescriptive, evolvability resides primarily in the manager, not in the other entities in the group.
Note the last part – “evolvability resides primarily in the manager” – in this case DNA. Anyone remember the insanity of J Richards and his claim that selection works ultimately at the level of the phenotype, not the genotype? More “movement” madness. Of course, it’s DNA, the genotype, not the phenotype.
2) Enabling constraints: these achieve outcomes that are best for the group without specifying what those outcomes are. They accomplish this by aligning the interests of group members with the interests of the group as a whole, and then letting the entities adapt freely in pursuit of those aligned interests.
Problem: large numbers of Whites today do not perceive that their individual interests align with group – racial – interests. That perception is incorrect, but how can it be corrected? Certainly not by the stupidity of Der Movement, Inc.
Of course, enabling constraints became more effective once evolution produced entities that were highly evolvable and capable of pursuing their own interests adaptively. The potential advantages of having evolvable entities managed by enabling rather than prescriptive constraints were demonstrated by the competitive superiority of free market economies over command economies in the 20th century.
Well, maybe. But given how the “free market economies” have become subverted by globalist elites and middleman minorities, I’m not sanguine for the long term future of the alleged superiority of the “free market” in an age of increasingly militant populism.
It is not difficult to identify scenarios in which selection would favour entities that develop power over others. For example, their power may enable them to monopolize resources (including access to reproductive opportunities), or to predate others. But exercising power in these ways does not necessarily align their evolutionary/adaptive interests with those they have power over.
Right, but they may not care. Jews have been successful – at least in the short-term in any given locale, but possibly long-term for their entire evolutionary history being predators on their host societies.
However, interests begin to be aligned to some extent if the powerful entities discover ways in which they can harvest an on-going stream of benefits from those they control. Once this occurs, they may do better if they use their power to help the group survive and thrive, and thereby produce a larger stream of harvestable benefits, not just a once-off dividend.
OK, agreed, but this requires (a) that the managing entities have innate interests aligned with the managed, and (b) the managers are capable of rational long-term thinking and strategizing.
In some circumstances, proto-managers that solve the cooperation problem and harvest an on-going stream of benefits may be able to do better than if they move between groups, exploiting them as they go.
Bowery’s concept of Jewish virulence.
Where this is the case, selection operating at the level of individual proto-managers will tend to favour those that remain with a group and use their power to increase the stream of benefits that they harvest from it (Stewart, 1995, Stewart, 1997a, Stewart, 2000).
Jewish virulence is decreased when they are forced to stay local and suffer the same fate as the host population.
Salthe (1985) demonstrates that constraints that can control a dynamic of interacting entities may arise in either of two ways:
1) Upper-level constraints: these arise external to the dynamic of entities. They can influence the dynamic without being influenced in return. This is often because they are larger in scale than the entities they constrain, and are constituted by processes that operate significantly more slowly than the interactions in the dynamic. Examples of abiotic upper-level constraints that act on a population of entities include features of the environment that are relatively unchanging from the perspective of the interacting entities, such as large-scale physical structure in the environment. The external managers referred to in this paper are evolvable systems of upper-level constraints. It is worth emphasizing here that they are often constituted by processes rather than entities.
In human affairs, processes and entities become intertwined. Can we separate out the human factor? You have the “process” of “democracy”- and this process becomes subverted by human entities with conflicting interests.
2) Lower-level constraints: these arise within the entities themselves. These constraints are relatively fixed, internal features of the interacting entities that can influence how entities behave in interactions, but are not influenced in return. In effect, they hardwire entities. Examples of lower level constraints in living entities include genetic elements, and internalized norms, customs and beliefs.
In humans, the genes and the “customs and beliefs” are related via cross-talk.
Importantly, the evolutionary interests of a distributed internal manager tend to be aligned with the interests of the group that it manages. The manager will capture the benefits of any cooperative activities within the group, because it exists in each of the members of the group. Selection will therefore favour any variant internal manager that constrains the members of the group in ways that promote beneficial cooperation.
Group selection theory. But this has to be proofed against free riders, particularly against either native or alien elites who have – or believe they have – interests that are in conflict with that of the broader group. Note that “because it exists in each of the members of the group” directly implies that the managerial processes are inherent in all the members of the group. That sounds nice in theory, but managerial elites always form in practice. You will need the “upper-level constraints” to control their behavior, and dependable constrains have not yet been devised.
But the potential of cooperation can be realized only to the extent that the cooperation problem is overcome. Unless the cooperation problem is solved, complex cooperative organization will not arise. It will not come into existence while individual entities fail to capture sufficient of the benefits of their cooperation. Selection at the group level, no matter how powerful, cannot call it into existence.
Free riding is the deadly enemy of group selection, ethnoracial nepotism, and inclusive fitness in defense of genetic interests. Free riding must be fought at all costs.
We have seen that evolvable management, whether external or internal, can overcome the cooperation problem. It can manage a group of entities to ensure that beneficial cooperation can be sustained within the group and can therefore be the target of selection. This massively expands the possibility space that can be explored as the group evolves.
This is straightforward evolutionary biology, but applied to – in the case of humans – political, social, and cultural organization. An objective is to build a managerial structure that is characterized by an inherent trait of evolvability. Just like devising methods to prevent rent-seeking free riding, devising processes and constraints that ensure that the management can evolve is no easy task (and this ability to evolve will, as the author suggests above, help solve the free riding problem- the cooperation problem). I suggest that the management will resist such evolvability, or hijack it for selfish interests – to evolve (or devolve) toward parasitism. Making positive pro-group evolvability “baked into the cake” of managerial entities and processes is a task of fundamental importance. There are no easy answers. Somehow, there has to be self-perpetuating upper-level and lower-level constraints that exhibit positive feedback and self-reinforcement. It may be prudent to have “separation of powers” with multiple entities and/or processes so that competition between them is channeled in the direction, paradoxically, of increasing cooperation in defense of the broader group’s interests.
Where a powerful manager is able to harvest an on-going stream of benefits from the group it manages, it will be able to capture the benefits of any management that increases the productivity of the group.
This assumes a congruence between interests of manager and group, and also assumes a long-term strategy and vision. This is because it is very possible for alien parasitical managers to “harvest an in-going stream of benefits” through destructive exploitation of the managed group. One has only to look at the globalist capitalist elites and/or Jewish control of White societies for examples of this.
It will therefore be able to advance its own evolutionary/adaptive interests by promoting cooperation within the managed group.
Again, only when manager and managed have similar or identical interests, if the manager knows this, and acts long-term. The managers of the West today, with their own selfish interests, act to advance non-cooperation, atomization, and hyper-individualism among the managed White populations.
If managed groups compete with each other, and if a manager is less successful if it lives independently of its group, the most effective way in which it will be able to advance its interests will be to advance those of the managed group. In these circumstances the manager's evolutionary/adaptive interests will tend to be aligned with those of the managed group as a whole (Stewart, 1997a, Stewart, 2000).
Not necessarily. Parasitical managers can wreck a group and then move elsewhere – e.g., Bowery’s Jewish virulence thesis.
Because the manager's evolutionary/adaptive interests will tend to be aligned with those of the group, selection acting on the manager will favour management which aligns the interests of the entities it manages with the interests of the group. As a result, all the members of the group, manager and managed entities alike, will adapt cooperatively to serve the group as a whole. Members of the group will be favoured by selection only insofar as they serve the adaptive interests of the group as a whole. As a consequence, the group will increasingly come to be organized and adapted to function as an entity in its own right.
So, manager and group really need to be more or less genetically similar so that interests will correctly align. A Jewish-Asian overclass and a White underclass is not going to work out, HBDers. Then, once biological homogeneity is established, cultural and social alignment must follow – we cannot have a managerial class that is a free riding parasite, even if it is composed of the co-ethnics of those managed. We need to have social, political, and economic controls on managerial behavior, to suppress free riding and rent seeking behaviors. Wealth disparity definitely needs to be suppressed soaps to eliminate the possibility of an exploitative plutocracy.
However, while ever cooperative organizations of the largest-scale are smaller than the planet, they will constitute a population of organizations that compete with each other. This will produce the cooperation problem. Organizations that act cooperatively towards others will tend to be out-competed. This dynamic is currently evident at the level of nation states. Global warming and international war are both manifestations of the cooperation problem. The existence of the cooperation problem at this level means that potential benefits can be realized through the emergence of global management (including global governance). Global management has the potential to overcome the cooperation problem at the level of nation states.
Effective global management would not only suppress destructive competition between nations.
If genuine differences of interests exist, competition is inevitable. What is “destructive?” Yes, mutually annihilating war should be avoided, and, yes, I generally support Salter’s “universal nationalism.” But the recent history of “global management” suggests that the ONLY competition that will be suppressed is that of Whites competing against Coloreds in order to secure legitimate White interests.
Ultimately it would also have the potential to realize the benefits of integrating all lower level entities into the global organization, including by supporting entities that contribute positively to the global organization. A global manager that is sufficiently powerful and evolvable has the potential to control a hierarchy of management that integrates the living and non-living processes of the planet into a cooperative and unified global entity(for more detailed discussion, see Stewart, 2000).
And this global manager is acceptable only insofar as it respect the rights and interests of lower levels of nested interests.
When we stand back from the evolutionary process on this planet and consider it as a coherent whole, we see that there are two great trends within evolution. One is towards diversification. The other is towards integration and cooperation. As we have seen in some detail, both trends are driven by selection processes that are consistent with mainstream evolutionary theory.
And both are consistent with pan-European racial nationalism that preserves ethnic differences.
As the global entity emerges, it can be expected to increasingly manage the living processes, energy, matter and technology of the entire planet into a coordinated whole. As it develops, it will optimize all the processes on which it depends (including large-scale ecological systems) in order to create the most effective platform for its future evolution.
“Future evolution: will be compromised by a racial panmixia that frustrates the evolutionary path toward increasing diversification by erasing all the evolved differences of population groups that contribute to human genetic and phenotypic diversity.
Of course, this is not likely to be the end of the evolutionary trajectory. The trajectory is likely to have unfolded elsewhere…
Labels: bioculture, EGI, evolution, free riding, group evolutionary strategies, individualism vs. collectivism, James Bowery, pan-European, phenotype vs. genotype, science and technics
