 In this video we'll be discussing the process of evolution as it acts on macro-scale social systems of all kind. We'll be talking about the different stages within this process and how through this process of evolution social systems can develop to exhibit greater complexity over time. The question of what exactly complexity is is one of the big open questions within complexity theory as there are a number of different approaches to trying to answer this question. We can for example talk about it in terms of computation or connectivity among various other approaches. But evolution also offers us one answer to this question. This perspective comes with a recognition that systems do not start out complex, all systems start out simple and evolve to become complex. Through this process of evolution the sub-components within the system become more specialized and differentiated. But also it involves a process of reintegration, increased interconnectivity and interdependence between those different subsystems. As an example we can think about the human body. Of course we started out as very simple unicellular organisms like every other creature but through a long process of evolution different cells have come to work together whilst also becoming increasingly specialized and it is through this combination of integration and differentiation during the process of evolution that our bodies have become the complex systems that they are today. From this evolutionary perspective a complex system is a system that is both differentiated and integrated and out of that we get synergies and the emergence of complex phenomena. The first thing for us to note is that evolution is not something that only happens to dinosaurs and monkeys, it's a pervasive phenomena in our world. The mechanism of evolution in the abstract is a process of development for any kind of adaptive system. Ecosystems, economies, societies, cultures, football teams, ideas, religions, political parties and the list goes on. Evolution is essentially the same process as adaptation but now operating on the macro scale. Adaptation is how an individual responds to change within their environment. Evolution is the process through which a whole population of agents responds to change within its environment. Both adaptation and evolution do not require a centralized regulatory system, they both happen in a distributed fashion. With evolution there is no one single divine entity that gets to make choices about which creatures will live or die. That choice is distributed out across the entire ecosystem. Just as no one in free market economies gets to say which products will be produced or not produced. That choice is made by many different producers and consumers across the entire market as part of an evolutionary process. The point for us to take away is that evolution is a macro scale process of development within any adaptive system that is characterized by a distributed mechanism of selection. Within this world of evolution there is no right or wrong, good or bad, there is only really survival and adaptation. Survival means being able to effectively intercept and transform resources within some environment. Adaptation means being able to alter your state so as to be able to continue performing this function when the input values from the environment change. It is through being able to do both of these that you can ensure your survival and this environment may be ecological while we are talking about some biological creature or it may be some business within an economy, some political movement within a society or some ideology within a culture. For all of these entities to survive within their particular environment they have to be intercepting and transforming resources effectively and be capable of adapting as the environment changes. If you can't do that then over time you will become irrelevant within that environment and ultimately discontinued. The whole mechanism through which this operates is called the process of evolution. This process of evolution then operates through a number of key stages that need to be performed successfully for the process to be effective. Firstly, we need the production of variety in order to create a new set of possible solutions to the changing context. Secondly, those variants need to be exposed to their operating environment in order to see how effective they are within that context. And finally, we need some objective mechanism for selecting and replicating those that have been successful while discontinuing those that have not. For evolution to act on any population there needs to be variety among its members In terms of sociocultural evolution this would mean a variety of subcultures, information and knowledge sources, political ideologies and social institutions plus the capacity to create new ones through cross-mixing. Low barriers to entry would be important enabling marginal beliefs and institutions to get a foothold and gain some exposure. The internet is a good example of this as it allows otherwise marginal ideas and subcultures to get exposure through low-cost mass communication making it easier for people to access and remix content into new cultural variants and easily create new organisations around them. This is like the prototyping stage in design. This stage in the process will be most effective when there are lots of different building blocks, the capacity to easily mix them, putting them together and taking them apart and having low barriers to entry so that we can rapidly deploy and test them, fail early and quickly at low cost and learn fast. Internet organisations are again a good example of this. Through social networking technology we can very rapidly create dynamic organisations around some theme or location and collaborate at low cost allowing for a much greater possible number and diversity of new organisations. With such low barriers to entry we can have rapid iteration to see which ones might scale. These different types of socio-cultural institutions need to be given the time and autonomy to develop in order to see how well they are suited to that particular context. What is needed here is a level playing field so that all variants can compete in a somewhat equal fashion, that is to say that all are exposed to the same environment within which they have to compete. If there is one dominant ideology, culture or political regime that is given precedence over all others, this will work to hinder the emergence of new variants that may be better suited than the existing incumbents and create barriers to change in evolution. Here we can see the cost of unequal socio-economic opportunities, a cost that may not be born immediately but will have a long term detrimental effect on the system as a whole, that will again lead us into self-organised criticality on the macro scale reducing sustainability. Democratic political processes are an example of this, theoretically they allow for a number of different political parties and ideologies to compete on an even playing field. But of course this is not always what happens in practice. And for example we increase the amount of money for campaigning. This will distort the process, decreasing the number of viable possibilities to those that are amenable to the interests of the economic incumbents. This will sooner or later reduce the solution set that the system has to respond to the challenges it is presented. Although diversity and variety may be necessary for evolution and change, they also carry a cost. Perhaps these different belief systems, cultures, social movements or other institutions have explored the full state space of possibilities within that social context and we have some metric for understanding which ones perform best. There then needs to be some mechanism for selecting those most successful variants and replicating them so that they will become more prevalent within the future life cycle to the whole system. For those that have proven less effective are not replicated and left to expire. Within democracies, political parties are subject to selection at the ballot box. Companies are subject to selection by their consumers. When people stop believing and spreading an ideology it becomes discontinued. But in that discontinuing we get the release of resources that were previously occupied and the system makes space for those resources to be reconfigured through those patterns of organization that have proven most successful within this cycle to the evolutionary process. Evolution is not a process of luxury, it is a process of necessity of long term survival. If it is not performed then the systems chances of survival in the long run will be degraded and distortion to any stage within the process, whether it involves excluding new variants from emerging, giving them an unequal field on which to compete or distorting the selection process, the net result of this would be a degradation to the macro system leading to some form of self-organized criticality. Evolution may not give us short-term optimal solutions but what it does produce is long-term sustainability. We can think of it as a framework for how to manage the development of distributed complex systems sustainably. Through this process of evolution the system becomes both more differentiated and integrated. As the system goes through this process of evolution it has to develop new differentiated subsystems in order to operate in new environments. With this process of differentiation the system comes to have more parts with those parts being more specialized and autonomous. For example traditional hunter-gatherer societies have only a few dozen distinct functional roles within the community, while a modern census would recognize approximately 10,000 to 20,000 distinct occupations. But in order for the whole system to be effective and sustainable it also has to integrate those subsystems and through the process of integration these parts become more interconnected and interdependent. For example today most of humanity is deeply interdependent through our common dependence upon the global economy, within which there are many differentiated specialized functions that are highly interconnected and interdependent. Through this process of evolution a social system can transform from a small society with few subsystems to those that are large with many different interconnected subsystems and this complexity enables the system to operate sustainably in a broader environment as we've gone from local patterns of organization within small communities to the emergence of today's burgeoning global society. In summary then we've been taking a brief overview to this process of evolution as it acts on macro-scale sociocultural systems. We described evolution as a distributed process through which a complex adaptive system responds to change within its environment without centralized coordination and how through this process the system can develop over time to exhibit greater complexity which enables it in turn to function within broader more complex environments. We talked about how evolution operates through a number of key stages that need to be performed successfully for the process to be effective including firstly the production of variety in order to create a new set of possible solutions to the changing context with these variants then needing to be exposed to their operating environment in order to see how effective they are within that context and finally we talked about the need for some objective mechanism for selecting and replicating those that have been successful while discontinuing those that have not.