©1981 Kenneth Boulding
One of the
striking things about the human race is that it has the capacity, which is now
in considerable part realized, of developing an image of the whole universe as
it spreads out in space and time. It is doubtful whether even the most
intelligent non-human creature on earth has developed more than an image of its
immediate environment or its own life-span.
This extraordinary
ability of the human race is in large measure a result of its capacity for
interpreting the present structures of which it is aware as records of the
past, for it is by interpreting these structures as records that we are able to
build up in our minds images of the past, extending now perhaps 10 or 20
billion years.
The record of the
past is, of course, very imperfect. In the first place, it is only a minute
part of the past which leaves records at all. Furthermore, the record of the
past is not only a very small sample but an extremely biased one, biased by
durability, for only what is durable in the past survives into the present. We
build up our image of the past by our interpretation of these durables: light
waves, hydrogen atoms, rocks, fossils, bones, prints, impressions, chipped
flints, pots, ruins of buildings, shells, middens,
durable human artefacts, inscriptions, papyri and
scrolls, books and cassettes.
Out of these
fragments of the past that have survived we construct images in our minds of
the world or even the universe as a succession of constantly changing states
through time. How we do this is still a bit of a puzzle. We have, in the first
place, an enormous capacity for fantasy, for imagining worlds that we have not
experienced; the innumerable myths of religions, the gods of Japan and of
Olympus, the adventures of the Odyssey, the world of faerie and of midsummer
night's dreams, the romantic and the Gothic novel, and science fiction. Some of
this we recognize as fantasy, some we believe to be the truth.
The belief that a
particular image is true may just come from authority. When we are children, we
believe what our parents tell us, and even when we are adults, we believe what
those in authority over us tell us. The other source
of the belief that something is true is evidence, and that again is puzzling,
as to what evidence is convincing and what is not. Evidence is what confirms or
contradicts an image of the world. In some cases, evidence is easy and
unambiguous. This is frequently the case in ordinary daily life. We have an
image in our mind of our friend's house; we go there, we find it has burned down, we perceive therefore our image was untrue, and we
revise it accordingly.
Even in our daily
life, however, evidence is ambiguous. What was it we ate that gave us a stomach
ache? What did I do to my wife that made her angry? The ambiguity of evidence
is what gives the detective story its interest and the law its terrifying hold
over us. Were Sacco and Vanzetti guilty?
In some cases we
resolve the ambiguity of evidence by experiment. This has been very important
in science. It only applies, however, to systems which are stable, repeatable,
and divisible, such as chemical systems, in which, for instance, all hydrogen
atoms are essentially similar.
We cannot do
experiments on unique events, and we cannot experiment on the past. We may probe
its records experimentally, but otherwise all we can do is make records,
collect durables, compare them, interpret them, and perceive inconsistencies
between our image and the record.
New records are
discovered; new durables emerge, like Carbon 14; lost documents are discovered,
like the
Under these
circumstances, it seems brash to talk about an evolutionary perspective. How
can we possibly know anything about the enormous complexities of the past with
the extremely meager and biased evidence that we have?
Two considerations
give us reason to go on being brash. One is the capacity of the human mind for
perceiving not only logical necessities, the kind that are involved in
mathematics, but also what might be called empirical necessities, or near
necessities, images of systems and relationships which "almost have to be
that way."
Many of the great
laws of science are indeed truisms or near-truisms. They do not really require
any empirical evidence, except perhaps in regard to the field of their
application. Conservation laws are a good case in point. If there is a fixed
quantity of anything, all we can do is push it around. A certain increase in
one place must mean a corresponding decrease in other places.
Even the famous
second law of thermodynamics, the entropy principle, has this quality of being
a new truism, especially if we restate it in terms of negative entropy or
potential, in which case it takes the generalized form that, if anything
happens, it is because there is a potential for it happening, and after it has
happened, that potential has been used up.
A fundamental
principle I call frivolously the "bathtub theorem" is really an
example of the entropy law in very simple form, that the increase in the
quantity of anything is equal to the additions minus the subtractions. This
might also be called the basic law of population, and again it is an identity.
The principle of
ecological interaction is the first foundation of the evolutionary perspective.
It is also in structure very close to being a truism. We define an ecosystem as
a system of interacting populations of different kinds or species. Then we
suppose that the additions to and subtractions from, and therefore, the rate of
growth of the population of any one species depends upon, or in mathematical
terms is a function of, the size of all the populations in the ecosystem,
including its own.
Essential to the
existence of an ecosystem is the law of eventually diminishing growth of any
one population as its size increases. As the population of any species grows,
its rate of growth will decline until eventually it is zero, at which point the
population is said to be in equilibrium and is occupying a "niche."
Here, again, this
is what might be called an empirical truism, proof or
which is that if it were not so far any species, its population would expand
forever until it filled a continually expanding universe.
The law of
diminishing returns in economics is a special case of the empirical truism,
proof of which is that if it were not so, we could grow all of the world's food
in a flower pot, and everybody knows this is absurd. An empirical truism,
therefore, might also be defined as a proposition which, if it were not true,
would lead to absurdity.
The evolutionary
perspective supposes, therefore, that at any one moment in time or space there
will be an ecosystem and that with a given set of parameters this will move to
an equilibrium at which the rate of growth of all populations in it is zero.
In some places
this equilibrium is remarkably stable, for the parameters are stable. On the
surface of the moon, for instance, the interaction of its various rocks has virtually
ceased. It had changed very slowly indeed over at least 3 billion years, apart
from the impact of an occasional meteorite, until the intrusion of the human
race, the garbage of which may well be around for another 3 billion years.
On earth, however,
the evidence suggests that ecosystems have been extremely unstable and have
undergone constant and irreversible change in their parameters. This is because
of the development of life and therefore of populations of species which are
self-reproducing and which have constant additions and subtractions.
On the moon the
population of rocks suffered neither addition nor subtraction, so they are very
stable, apart from an occasional addition from outer space. With the advent of
DNA, on earth, with its two extraordinary properties of self-reproduction and
of organizing the growth of reproducing phenotypes, a process of extraordinary
irreversible change began on earth, which is bioevolution.
The principal evidence for this, of course, is fossil remains, which can be
dated, at least approximately, by their position in the sequence of rocks and
now, of course, to some extent by radioactive dating.