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p.2 The evolutionary paradigm is still almost totally neglected by a social science which finds its purpose in reducing the human world to the equilibrium perfection, structural unambiguity and permanence, hierarchical control, and predictability of machine-like structures. In contrast, the contributors to this book try to develop a new understanding of an evolving world of human systems which are characterized by the same aspects of imperfection, nonequilibrium, and nonpredictabiilty, of differentiation and symbiotic pluralism, which seem to govern life in all its manifestations.
p.3 Part I deals with the evolutionary paradigm in an emergent perspective... Part II deals with formal approaches to evolving systems which are based on process thinking and therefore... are capable of representing to some degree that basic characteristic of life which expresses itself as "continuity in change."
p.3 Dynamic process thinking - in contrast to equilibrium-oriented structural thinking - leads to a generalized concept of evolutionary experimentation
p.6-7 The thrust of evolution seems to further flexibility of the "system phenotype" (the individual system) at all levels... By virtue of this flexibility, the evolutionary processes work through evolutionary experimentation at many levels of an open learning hierarchy - testing directions, not places, and finding confirmation a posteriori through vindication (and not a priori through certainty and prediction).
p.13 a surprisingly large amount of the environment which exerts natural selection on an animal is the more or less direct result of the animal's own behavior.
[JLJ - Yes, but each individual animal in question is an offspring of parents who (each) were resilient and 'matched' enough to the demands of their environment to survive and reproduce, and the same of their parents (and parents' parents). Critically, we find ourselves daily in a 'predicament' which we must somehow manage, with the natural tools to do so. We ought to be able to think and to act effectively in our environment, as we are a variation on successful forms.]
p.21 Being is becoming.
[JLJ - Being is an ordered transformation from one state to another, where the initial and end states are somewhat undefined.]
p.28 Attention and interest become stimulated only when there is in the environment a minimum of ambiguity, secrecy, fuzziness, and indeterminacy.
p.31 The emergence of consciousness falls together with the emergence of questioning... At the very moment in which man becomes aware of a lack of regularity, he also recognizes the possibilities inherent in this lack.In this way, a question becomes the trigger for a wish and at the same time the wish becomes the trigger for the question.
[JLJ - Questioning is simply a wise and practical way to proceed in the predicament, when things are not 100% clear, yet remain practically navigatable... A consciousness is perhaps an effectively matched state between a neural network and perceptions of input from an environment which shocks "us" into existence, ideally producing an emergent feeling of being and becoming, and which exists precisely between a sandwich of regenerated memories of the past and practically generated anticipations of the future...]
p.33 We have discussed man as a wishing creature. In this perspective, and to a much greater extent than any other creature, man does not live in an environment which is pregiven, but in a world which he creates himself. He creates his world as a mirror image of himself... Man views everything factual against the background of the possible, which in this way, becomes present.
p.33 No encyclopedia is capable of saving a language which is no longer spoken.
[JLJ - The section author Walter Pankow likely did not take Latin in High School or college... the collection of Latin literature becomes the repository of the language which is no longer spoken. Thank you Sister Marie Lawrence for three years of Latin in High School...]
p.37 In a structural view, dynamic phenomena are described as processes determined by structure - comparable to a liquid flowing in a fixed piping structure, or a combustion process in an engine block.
p.39 In a nonequilibrium world of self-realizing, self-balancing systems, process and structure become complementary aspects of the same overall order of process, or evolution. As interacting processes define temporary structures - comparable to standing-wave patterns in physics - so structures define new processes, which in turn give rise to new temporary structures.
p.40 Biological evolution already may be understood as "the generation of organisms with nonrandom behavioral responses to the environment. The whole thrust has been toward improving the correlation between the environment and the behavior of organisms" (Dunn, 1971).
p.40 Human evolution is both unfolding of an inherent dynamic potential, and correlation with many levels of dynamic environment which, in their totality, fall together with universal evolution.
p.41 When a single-cell organism moves in an environment, it does so by "testing" the immediate environment in numerous short steps in all directions before making a big step in one selected direction, "vindicating" the validity of the choice only after venturing out so boldly.
p.50 Two highly significant characteristics apply to all four modes of learning: First, learning is always open-ended, never deterministic; it is geared to a process of open-ended experimentation, comparable to the strategic exploration of available options with subsequent vindication of the choice made - in other words, it is learning by doing in a partially informed way, guided by higher modes of learning... Second, what is learned is not places or states or relations, but a sense of direction; thus, evolutionary learning inherently refers primarily to process, not to structure. These two characteristics may be combined in the notion of evolutionary experimentation.
p.59 All unfolding of energy may be described in dialectic terms (tension field between opposites) if viewed from outside, and in complementary terms (opposites containing each other) if viewed from inside.
p.60 In modern physics... the "bootstrap model"... holds that nature cannot be reduced to fundamental entities... but evolves entirely through the self-consistency of a web of processes.
p.63 generally, equilibrium tends to make an ecosystem nonresilient and unhealthy, and may ruin it... Life will eventually try to break through any artificial system boundaries. Two basic rules for purposeful organization or planning seem to follow immediately: (1) Make structure as flexible as possible, so that it can be changed by emergent changes in the interaction of processes; and (2) identify and enhance evolutionary processes of change, recognize and respect their self-bounding nature.
p.66-67 it would not come as a surprise if the capabilities of resisting well and of transforming well turned out to be just complementary aspects of that same systems' flexibility which we keep encountering in so many manifestations.
p.77 Such models, however complex, are still so simple that they should not be viewed in a definitive and quantitative way. They are more powerfully used as a starting point to organize and guide understanding.
p.81 resilience... is a measure of the persistence of systems and of their ability to absorb change and disturbance and still maintain the same relationships between populations or state variables.
p.83 Resilience determines the persistence of relationships within a system and is a measure of the ability of this system to absorb changes of state variables, driving variables, and parameters, and still persist. In this definition, resilience is the property of the system and persistence or probability of extinction is the result.
p.83 In Slobodkin's (1964) terms, evolution is like a game, but a distinctive one in which the only payoff is to stay in the game. Therefore a major strategy selected is... one which allows persistence by maintaining flexibility above all else. A population responds to any environmental change by the initiation of a series of... changes that restore its ability to respond to subsequent unpredictable environmental changes.
p.86 resilience is concerned with probabilities of extinction
p.87 A management approach based on resilience... would emphasize the need to keep options open, the need to view events in a regional rather than a local context, and the need to emphasize heterogeneity... The resilience framework... does not require a precise capacity to predict the future, but only a qualitative capacity to devise systems that can absorb and accommodate future events in whatever unexpected form they may take.
[JLJ - ...and just as important, the ability to design diagnostic tests which assess this capacity and which allow one to compare competing designs and intelligently select one design over another.]
p.95 In order to be able to take form, a dissipative structure requires a nonlinear mechanism to function. It is this mechanism which is responsible for the amplification mechanism of the fluctuation. Dissipative structures thus form the bridge between function and structure.
p.115 So far, we have discussed structures according to a deterministic description. This method is valid as long as the fluctuations... remain small... Near an instability, however, the importance of the fluctuations can become crucial.
p.126 Bergson (1963, p.503) made the following statement: "The further we penetrate the analysis of the nature of time, the more we understand that duration signifies invention, creation of forms and the continual elaboration of what is absolutely new."
[JLJ - Our human nature is so 'tuned' to the concept of the struggle for survival that we do not see it as such, yet it is what we do, at multiple levels, at all times. Rest and recreation can even be thought of as a necessary recovery phase, so we can be ready again to expend energy in the struggle.]
p.162 Hayek (1975, p.11) actually preconceives a social autopoiesis when he writes: "Though the conduct of the individuals which produces the social order is guided in part by deliberately enforced rules, the order is still a spontaneous order, corresponding to an organism rather than to an organization. It does not rest on the activities being fitted together according to a preconceived plan, but on their being adjusted to one another through the confinement of the action of each by certain general rules."
p.177 Holling defines stability as a system's ability to return to an equilibrium state after a temporary disturbance, and resillience as its [JLJ - a system's] ability to absorb change and to persist... Holling's suggestion that systems with low fluctuations are also more likely to have low resilience... What then is the relation between "stability" and "complexity"...? ... the greater the number of links and alternative pathways in the web, the greater the chance of absorbing environmental shocks, and thus of damping down incipient oscillations.
p.183 [Holling]
The resilience framework... does not require a precise capacity to predict the future, but only a qualitative capacity to devise systems that can absorb and accommodate future events in whatever unexpected form they may take.
p.196 In the field of value theory, vindication is the analogue of validation and confirmation
[JLJ - One can also practically conduct diagnostic tests and estimate the vindication that results down the line, when things have developed, rearranged themselves, and the driving forces have settled into new realities.]
p.214 In a provocative book, The Image of the Future, the Dutch sociologist Fred Polak (1973) noted that when the dominant images of a culture are anticipatory, they "lead" social development and provide direction for change.
p.215 a substantial amount of evidence exists that successful responses to crisis tend to be nonincremental in character, and lead to restructured images and modes of system organization.
p.215 When a human system of any scope is faced with a group of problems that are not possible to resolve by using customary assumptions and procedures, then new ways become necessary. If new ways are not discovered and successfully applied, the system bcomes unhealthy and may fail to survive at all.
p.222 Such processes of discovery... are truly processes of evolutionary experimentation... They... require confronting the truly unknown
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