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p.109 Rupert Riedl... says that the course of evolution is controlled by chance and necessity (cf. 1982, pp221). [JLJ - stolen in turn from Jacques Monod, Chance and Necessity. But he in turn stole the idea from the ancient Greek Democritus, so all is fair, I guess. Riedl's work is in German and is untranslated, as of 2016.]
p.109 Riedl discerns chance at the very lowest level of being in the form of the indeterminate character of microphysical processes. This microcosmic coincidence extends upwards to higher levels of organization, at each stage of evolution acquiring new, specific forms and thus takes part in the macroscopic perceptible events of everyday life... Necessity gains access to this process because as structures appear (by chance), the degrees of freedom for further developmental processes are reduced. Due to this restriction of the effect of chance, caused by ‘systemic conditions’, at all stages of evolution, not every conceivable mutation can take place at biological level, as its consequences would be so serious (as a disruption to the entire system), that the system in its entirety could no longer exist. In this connection, Riedl talks of an ‘internal selection’ (Riedl 1976, p140) which starts as early as the embryonic stage of the individual, and thus becomes effective long before the classic, Darwinian selection by the environment (Riedl 1976, pp157).
p.110 This interplay between chance and necessity gives, in the last resort, a direction to the evolution process. The creative power of chance and the constraints that are caused by the products of its acting thus gives rise to a path along which it is only possible to return with the greatest difficulty and through which completely 'new' phenomena appear. On account of this innovative power (resulting from the directed nature of evolution), Riedl talks of a 'creative process' (Riedl 1982, p225), which possesses a momentum of its own and which reaches up from physical evolution as far as the field of cognitive capabilities. This formal similarity which the evolution process thus shows to learning processes is the reason why Riedl (following Konrad Lorenz) talks of evolution as a 'cognitive process' (Riedl 1982, p223)... a creative process driven by its own momentum
p.110 chance exists in the form of freedom of individual decision-making, while the channelling of chance is caused by those immanent necessities, which will be explained in the following, and which result from the collective actions of individuals.
p.110 the individual and society are not entities that exist separately from each other. In this context, Elias stresses that all external relations of an individual also have a social aspect and thus that the individual and the collective areas determine and permeate each other (Vol.I, pp245): According to him, "Human beings only exist in pluralities, and it is the network of their interdependencies that binds them together" (Vol.I, p261). This is how those groups of interdependent human beings to which Elias assigns the term "figuration" (ibid.) are formed.
p.110 dynamics... is a constitutional element of all social phenomena... we cannot revert to some unchangeable principle, either in the description of individual changes or in the diagnosis and explanation of long-term processes (1984, p98).
p.113 social processes, in Elias' view, are processes planned in the short term but not in the long term, as none of the actors is powerful or omniscient enough to be able to calculate and control their course in more than temporary terms... complex processes cannot be controlled for longer periods of time... Popper believes that this short-term calculability can be used to make developments controllable and thus to make the planning of social processes possible to a limited extent
p.113 it may even seem legitimate to speak of a process that constructs itself, for it takes place even against the express wish of those involved, and follows only its own "relational dynamics" (Vol. II, p161)
p.114 Erwin Schrodinger... the "order-on-order principle"... Its main statement, that order can only be created from another form of order, but never from nowhere, means that an evolving system can only develop further at the expense of other competing systems. The latter fall to a lower level of differentiation as they contribute to the differentiation of the 'higher' system.
p.114 an evolving social system takes away the development chances of a competing and in its complexity more or less comparable system, thus causing the downfall of the latter system.
p.116 This term 'constraints'... comprises all of the internal factors which influence the further course of the evolution of a system by ruling out certain possibilities, thus showing a limiting effect... In the language of Riedl, 'constraints' are the so-called 'systemic conditions of evolution', which are to be understood as a consequence of the 'functional and genetic burden' of a system: the reduced options for different developments caused by the 'constraints' represent the disadvantage which a system has to accept - as Riedl says - for gaining advantages in the speed of its development by systematising its functions (Riedl 1976, p191).
p.120 Gerhard Vollmer... refers to an abundance of organs that have lost their original function and which today serve a completely different purpose for the organism compared to the original function... Vollmer interprets these changes in function as follows: these organs originally possessed their 'later' important function only latently, in the form of a hardly noticeable 'double function'. As the organ served its 'old' function satisfactorily, this 'new' function was able to emerge slowly, it was evident as a special function after it had reached a certain stage of "functional maturity" (p25), and the use of this function was advantageous on account of changes in the environment. [JLJ - perhaps this is how a machine can play a complex game of strategy - it tests the ability of the game pieces to assume multiple functions as the game progresses down lines of probably play, ensuing that appropriate moves can be found if necessary.]
p.123 I should like to sum up by saying that biological aspects of evolution theory can only be applied to higher-order phenomena (social or cultural evolution) if they take sufficient account of the process of evolution as a "process of creative development" (Polyanyi 1985, p49). This condition... makes it clear that evolutionary concepts taken from system theory or constructivism have to be applied here. Only with the help of such concepts... 'constraints', 'emergence', 'self-organization' or 'autopoiesis'... is it possible to approach sociological or cultural phenomena by means of biological categories.
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