RS 13 Nexus Thinking Relational Summary 13:Selecting for Natural Inclusion
RS 13 Nexus Thinking Relational Summary 13:Selecting for Natural Inclusion
Culhane: Hello Once and Future Nexians… Let’s get straight to the points. By the end of this episode, students will be able to – well, you SHOULD be able to:
Explain the logic (or illogic!) of Natural Selection and explore how it informs your ideas about survival.
Describe how Nexus thinkers see Evolution.
Compare and contrast Natural Selection and Natural Inclusion
Reflect critically on the idea that everything that is possible can happen but not everything that can happen should be allowed to happen.
Try to defend the entire idea of governance based on short term profit that doesn’t include ecosystems in its cost/benefit calculations.
“Ga head, I dare you”.
Culhane: Now, we seem to be alone today, so it’s just me and you NTHARP… but I thought we could use your abilities to simulate and fantasize and take… I dunno, questions from the future?
NTHARP: Sure thing, but I don’t want to ask them as a human… I’d like to bring back Lady of the Lake, Ness and Ledger and let them do the asking.
Lake Ness: (Appearing in front of them as a floating glowing avatar, her skirt of water and fish swirling around her ankles) If that would be okay with you of course?
Ledger: (peeking his beaver head from behind her skirts and adjusting his glasses, clearing them of water spots) Ya gotta ask though – is it worth it? We have to do a full cost benefit analysis and see if the return on investment justifies the expenses in energy – and of course water… I mean these simulations get more and more expensive every day…
Culhane: I thought we speculated last time that Moore’s Law was applying here and that every day things were getting cheaper and cheaper, so cheap in fact that we end up in an overproduction and underconsumption crisis that leads to either war to destroy capital stock and savings as an economic reset switch or a declining rate of profit that ultimately makes technology stagnate…
Ledger: OK, I didn’t get the memo. The declining rate of profit is still debated and plenty of economists think Marx’s ‘falling rate of profit’ story doesn’t hold up once you treat capital goods and finance as inputs.The rate of profit doesn’t have to go down. Anyway I’m just responding to the usual talking points – runaway inflation, doom and gloom, habitat loss to make way for AI…
Lake Ness: (laughing) Oh, my my my poor little Ledger, sometimes full cost accounting can paralyze you. You see that everything costs something…
Ledger: There ain’t no such thing as a free lunch, that’s what I know.
Lake Ness: But some of us gladly pay the piper. Some of us live to serve. Some of us have a larger vision and a longer time horizon. We can wait generations for the payback. And riddle me this: Can you really say that when we interrupt my flow to power a micro-hydro turbine it is costing me? Or am I being rewarded?
Culhane: We were talking about a vortical – not vertical but vortical economy last session with Sarah. Vortices, spirals, lift potential don’t they?
Lake Ness: They can… many rivers in ancient times had Archimedes screws to get the river to flow up into fields… a simple turning motion, which a draft animal was glad to supply in her restless pursuit of a dangling carrot, kept her in good shape and kept the water flowing. You feel me?
Ledger: I think we are going to have this argument for eternity. You waste so much Nessie!
Lake Ness: By design. And you try in vain to dam everything up watertight, but there are always leaks. Raj had the right idea – realize that many of the inefficiencies or your species stay that way BECAUSE THEY WORK.
Ledger: We are NOT inefficient – we just have insufficient building materials. Now, give me some bags of good Portland cement and the right sized aggregate and some good river sand and I’ll show you a Dam the US Army Corps of Engineers can only dream of.
Lake Ness: Your damn dams have holes so that my fish can make their way upstream to spawn, you… you shortsighted little Beaver. Put your Nexus glasses back on and think this through again.
Culhane: Oh… so that’s why the glasses.
Lake Ness: My apologies… he can be so… myopic.
Culhane: (To ledger) It means “nearsighted”.
Ledger: I KNOW what it means – its in my biopic. But this one (he points accusingly at Lake Ness) this one sometimes can’t see the trees for the forest, you know what I mean? Too much of a big picture gal. Blind to us little guys… why she once said that catastrophic floods could be good things because they bring much needed silt to the floodplain and flatten and clear trees to let light in so succession and species rich landscape mosaics can form. Can you imagine? We lost hundreds of thousands of beaver hours and a couple of us perished.
Lake Ness: It was lamentable, and mostly that one was due to anthropogenic deforestation upstream on the mountain ridges that shouldn’t have happened. I was just looking for the silver lining in those storm clouds… it helps to see the good in everything…
Ledger: (To Culhane, conspiratorially) You see what I mean – it’s like she’s on “mother’s little helper” all the time – Pollyanna on hyperdrive. Hey Nessie – tell him the good side of those mudslides that swept all those houses away and killed children – human children. Maybe he’ll sympathize with you.
Lake Ness: Ledger is always oversimplifying. Natural Inclusion implies you can comfortably hold two or more seemingly opposing ideas in the same hand. We should be able to see the bad and the good in everything – and, my dear accountant friend, that is precisely what you are trained to do with cost/benefit analysis. The only difference between us really is that sometimes what you see as a cost I see as a benefit and what you see as beneficial I see as a cost.
Culhane: All right then… we’re bending toward the learning outcomes. Let’s back up though…
Lake Ness: Yes… and llet us ask YOU Culhane: Explain the logic (or illogic!) of Natural Selection and explore how it informs your ideas about survival.
Culhane: Oh… I didn’t realize I’d be on the spot, but… okay. I studied evolutionary biology at Harvard and studied with some of the greats – E.O. Wilson, Stephen Jay Gould, Richard Lewontin, Richard Levin, Burt Holdobler, Glynn Isaacs, Irv Devore, David Pilbeam of Yale… And everything THEY said made natural selection – AND sexual selection – seem much more interesting and complex than we learn it in high school or in the popular press. They would have fierce debates in the dining halls – some, like Gould and Lewin and Lewontin would invoke Marxian perspectives and quote Kropotkin. They were opposed to simplistic explanations. They engaged in dialectical materialism, viewing nature and society as material realities constantly changing through internal contradictions and interactions, rejecting essentialist or mechanistic views. They engaged in a strong Critique of Reductionism: Opposing the idea that complex biological phenomena can be fully understood by examining only their smallest parts, emphasizing emergent properties from system interactions. And they firmly grounded us in Science & Politics: Believing scientific inquiry should be connected to social struggles against capitalism, racism, and other forms of oppression, using biology to understand, not just describe, reality. They were obviously early Nexus Thinkers who, as biologists,sought to turn science "right side up," as Marx and Engels had done with Hegel, and cautioned us against the utopian notions of Proudhon because his ideas lacked historical materialism as a theoretical foundation. My biological anthropology program sought to reveal the dynamic, concrete realities of evolution and biology, moving beyond simplistic or ideological explanations.
Ledger: (snorting) Yeah, yeah, yeah… dialectical materialism, emergent properties, social struggle. Very inspiring. But when I look at the books, evolution is simple: those who can’t hack it get cut. The weak get eaten. The ones who don’t adapt… go extinct. That’s Natural Selection. End of story.
Lake Ness: (smiles, swirls her skirt, little fish dart through her hem) Oh Ledger, you *would* turn evolution into an audit. You always notice who got eaten, but rarely who got fed.
Ledger: Well, somebody becomes lunch either way.
Lake Ness: Exactly. And *that* is the point. Natural Selection isn’t a talent show for individuals, it’s a circulation system for energy, matter, and information. The “logic” looks cruel when you only identify with the loser. Zoom out, and you see a forest feeding itself. Maybe some of us accept being there to feed the system.
Ledger: So you agree there ain’t gonna be no “lion lies with the lamb” paradise on the horizon. Nature, red in tooth and claw. We beavers say, “build a wall”. You want Zootopia, stick to the Disney movies.
Culhane: Not so fast Jackawackabowski – if you looked at what Alan Rayner is beginning to work out through his observations of mycelia you might follow a different train of thought.
Natural Selection isn’t always a contest about who deserves to live…
Lake Ness: I would say there is as much or more symbiosis as it is predation and parasitism. It’s a pattern whose complexities grow as we take stock of who manages to keep the *relationships* going.
Ledger: (muttering) And who goes bankrupt in the process.
Lake Ness: And sometimes a bankruptcy frees up resources for ten new experiments, dear beaver. But the flaw in your logic, Mr. Culhane, is the insertion of a moral judgement, so typical of teachers – “who deserves to live?” Really? “Deserves?” Who deserves the best grade, who deserves to go to the prom… That’s not really how selection works in my world – even sexual selection isn’t always a reward for the most “comely”.
Ledger: (Adjusts his glasses and smooths the fur on his head) Yeah, the girls like me for my sense of humor…
Culhane; I take it back. I blundered there into old biases. You are right. We learned it at Harvard. Fitness merely means what fits at the moment. Environments change. Conditions change. What fits is what fits when it fits. Survival of the fittest is a tautology. But it took great courage for our Harvard professors to permit such thinking given that the whole conceit of the ivy league is that it curates the “best and the brightest”...
NTHARP: Which Sofia puts at the root of many of our pathologies, remember?
Culhane: Yes… yet don’t we want a meritocracy?
Lake Ness: Who gets to decide who has merit? In my world the fish and even the earthworms that Darwin was so fascinated by all play vital constructive roles that keep the entire system going. How much merit do you give them? Do you put them on a par with the currently destructive Homo sapiens? What if you instead considered the entire ecosystem as a living organism and saw what you think of as the predator-prey relationships and parasitic relationships you so fear as part of the metabolism? Then every creature, great and small, has a place in our ecology of mind.
Culhane: You’re channeling Gregory Bateson again. I see it, but…
Ledger: But it sucks. I’m not giving up one of our beaver pups to a wolf just so you can keep some illusion of macro-scale harmony going. If I had my druthers we’d just get rid of predators completely…
Culhane: And that is what ranchers are trying to do, aren’t they? But then the deer get out of control and destroy their own habitat.
Ledger: Tragedy of the commons because they aren’t talking animals like me and can’t communicate. In your Disney movies they could work it out, but they can’t. So why not just give them birth control? I mean isn’t that one of the greatest achievements of the 70s – the pill? Sounds like all you need to do is extend women’s lib to prey species’ lib! Then we can design a world without bad guys.
Lake Ness: Figures a big scaredy rodent would think like this.
Ledger: Do you know how many songbirds common housecats murder every year? I have the statistics right here… and how many birds and mammals – yes, you people! – claimed by your beloved mosquitoes through horrid diseases like Malaria and Dengue and Yellow Fever and Zika and… I mean I have the list right here… are you blind?
Culhane: He makes a compelling argument there – and maybe birth control is the answer. I hear there are thoughts of releasing sterile male mosquitoes into the wild, which kind of acts the same way and without spraying poisons. I mean what is wrong with getting rid of mosquitoes? Until the white man brought them to Hawaii those islands had never had them.
Lake Ness: Our fish and frogs and other amphibians depend on them… so do our bats…
Ledger: Well, they did okay in Hawaii without them. What about switch feeding? I mean less nocive critters can substitute and fill that niche
Culhane: NTHARP, can you show our viewers what Ness and Ledger are arguing about?
NTHARP: With pleasure. Initializing two parallel simulations…
(Behind them, two holographic landscapes bloom into view, then flicker, then go out.)
NTHARP: Oh, drat. We seem to be having connectivity issues.
On the left you are supposed to see : “Selection-Only Island.”
On the right: “Natural Inclusion Island.”... I was going to create a really good “your choice” simulation… but I can’t get the GPU to render the graphics…
Culhane: You know what ‘tharpy – that’s okay. In today’s world, kids like Dorian, who play Dungeons and Dragons as a dice throwing, card pulling board game, are also playing it as a role playing game on computers using the PLATO system that just came out this year.
NTHARP: For you viewers out there, The PLATO system is a primitive computer network, allowing users to play these games together, even if it isn’t the "internet" as you may know it in the future.
Culhane: Yes, and because connectivity and graphics are… well, not something to write home about, relative to what NTHARP can do, kids like Dorian use writing to describe what they want the other players to see. It is actually quite fun. They’ll type in stuff like… here’s what Dorian shared with us...(he pulls a piece of Dorian’s homework off the desk and reads)
“YOU ARE STANDING AT THE END OF A ROAD BEFORE A SMALL BRICK BUILDING.
THERE IS A MAILBOX HERE.
>OPEN MAILBOX
YOU OPEN THE MAILBOX, REVEALING A SMALL LEAFLET.
>READ LEAFLET
WELCOME TO ADVENTURE
YOU ARE ABOUT TO ENTER
THE MAGICAL WORLD OF CAVES AND RIVERS
WITH TREASURE TO COLLECT AND MONSTERS TO AVOID
GOOD LUCK!”
NTHARP: Oh that is brilliant. Primitive, but brilliant, and actually pedagogically more engaging than having everything delivered to you on a pixelated platter.
Culhane: That’s the same argument we used to give about unillustrated books being better for kids' imaginations than picture books or comic books.
NTHARP: Everything has its uses. That’s natural inclusion. But, okay, here is what I wanted to show:
(NTHARP switches to a David Attenborough style documentary voice, an excited whisper)
“You are standing at the end of a road that bifurcates into two directions. On the left, we tell the tale of evolution as a very simple story: maximize short-term yield. We remove “inefficient” species, tidy up messy edges, drain wetlands, suppress fires. We decide that “if you can’t make, if you can’t compete, you deserve to die”.
Ledger: (beaming) Look at those numbers! Yields through the roof, no dead wood, no “useless” species hogging resources!
NTHARP: Watch what happens when we add… one new pathogen.
(Narration voice) “A faint shimmer, a fungus appears on leaves. Within seconds of fast-forward, the whole monoculture collapses.”
Ledger: Oops. Should have opened mailbox on the right!
NTHARP: On the right, we let what a future biologist will call “Natural Inclusion” guide us. Edges instead of walls, redundancies instead of perfect efficiency, lots of “spare” capacity.
Lake Ness: In other words, we let the river meander, let the beavers build, let the floodplains flood. We even tolerate Ledger gnawing on a few trees.
Ledger: (grudging) And you *call* that design? They’ll never let you get away with such a mess. I’ll have you know that I’m very deliberate about my engineering. We beavers don’t just let the floodplains flood. We direct the flows!
Lake Ness: Sure you do. You know there are many things we do without understanding much along the way. Do you really know what moves you to move the way you do?
NTHARP: Okay, scenario two: Now let’s consider the same pathogen, same starting conditions.
(Narration voice):
“The fungus appears. Some patches die. Others barely notice. The loss opens new niches; species shuffle, but the island stays alive.”
Culhane: So Natural Selection is still happening…Life and death continue… and sometimes it seems unfair… but Natural Inclusion changes how much damage it does at various levels?
Lake Ness: Natural Selection works like the weather. We live and we die somewhat stochastically, making micro-adaptations here and there but pummeled constantly by the vicissitudes of local temporal and historical contingency and the bad choices of others. You can work out and eat well your whole life and watch you and your whole lineage get taken out by a missile. Were you less fit than the family across the border? What does that even mean? Natural Inclusion is how you build the house to buffer your family from weather extremes and disasters and prowlers, it’s how you build your community and society so that the borders have enough permeability for you to make informed choices and increase the odds of your survival. You put up walls when you need to and take them down when they no longer serve. Ideally you trade armor for a shield. Natural inclusion says we exist as part of a co-creative evolutionary flow of all forms of life in receptive-responsive spatial and energetic relationship. So instead of thinking:
“A thing is a solid object in empty space, with a hard edge separating it from everything else”
Natural inclusion says,
“A thing is a flow-form: a swirl of energy around a receptive center of space, continuously exchanging with its neighbourhood.” Medium
Bodies, cells, forests, rivers – even “you” – are hollow-centered inclusions of space in flow, not sealed containers.That’s the “hole point”.
Culhane: So in a sense, even though kin selection says that we exist to pass on our selfish genes, and that our mission in life is to help OUR bodies to survive and thrive and even though group selection, which suggested that self-sacrifice can work if it helps our species thrive, …what our professors told us then was being roundly debunked…, you are saying that we can cut across both half baked interpretations with a more profound insight – that we actually all exist - from ants and earthworms to kings and queens – as extended phenotypes of one another. We should be able to explore the math of population dynamics and gene flow and see that very often helping another “organism” also benefits us,that it increases the odds of our own genes persisting, depending on the spatio-temporal scale we use to perceive the flow forms.
NTHARP: The sickle cell gene persists because it provides some defense against malaria in its heterozygous form, the Cystic Fibrosis gene is thought to persist because of the resistance one allele confers against tuberculosis even though two are deadly. You see, it all depends on the environment you are in at the moment.
Culhane: It reminds me of “War of the Worlds” where humanity is about to be wiped out by the Martians until the aliens encounter the common cold. If we had driven that virus extinct, we would be extinct. I guess you can never predict fitness. Unless you… stabilize the ecosystem?
Lake Ness: Here is my question for you , Culhane: If evolution can produce parasites and pandemics and mass extinctions, does that mean you should base your politics on them?
Ledger: I mean, people do talk like that. “It’s a jungle out there.” “Only the strong survive.” “Dog eat dog.” That’s the story behind a lot of boardroom decisions.
Culhane: Survival of the *profitest* – But the decisions are usually made with 3 year ROIs and five year plans in mind. Other cultures see both cultural evolution and biological evolution over much grander time scales and have the patience to plant seeds today for a better tomorrow in a hundred years.
Ledger: But after centuries of stagnation in these supposedly long term thinking societies the one that dominates today has to be the most dynamic in history. Like us beavers it enables acts of creative destruction that disrupt business as usual and leads to rapid progress.
NTHARP:
Alright, gloves off. 🧤
Let’s call some very comfortable assumptions to the mat, because “capitalism = dynamism” is one of the biggest category errors of the last 200 years.
Culhane: Wait, are you about to argue with yourself?
NTHARP: You think inclusion means everybody is of one mind. Invasion of the Body Snatchers. It’s not. What’s that Beatles song you love? “I am he as you are he
as you are me and we are all together.” Yes, we see the erasure of borders the way that the first astronauts did when they got to the moon and looked back at Earth. But at the same time Natural Inclusion, by including everything, also admits that boundaries exist when you get closer to home. To quote Walt Whitman, “if I contradict myself, very well then, I contradict myself… I am large, I contain multitudes.”
Culhane: And those multitudes can contradict one another. Sounds like a recipe for multiple personality disorder! No seriously, I get it – that’s the beauty of the diegetic method – you get to take on different roles and feel the arguments from different perspectives. What’s your beef with Ledger?
NTHARP:
First: The Big Lie: Our current economic system drives change, innovation, disruption 🚀❌
The usual story:
Capitalism is flexible
Markets adapt
Creative destruction keeps things fresh
Innovation thrives
Culhane: But you call BS right?
NTHARP: That’s the sales pitch, not the operating reality.
What the current system actually optimizes for is:
Return on investment within a narrow time horizon
Which means:
Predictability
Standardization
Risk minimization after initial capture
Lock-in
In Prigogine’s terms, that’s not dynamism.
That’s forced equilibrium.
Ledger: But we WANT equilibrium. Don’t we? Healthy markets depend on it. We need to balance the books.
Culhane: Not so fast Ledger – where are you looking for the balance? At the point of Pareto Optimality? At what scale? People are now saying that progress is like walking forward and that walking forward actually means getting out of equilibrium, losing your balance only to catch yourself before you fall.
Ledger: Don’t YOU want a stable economy? Aren’t we all striving for a balance in nature? Get rid of the predators and parasites and I’m telling you we can have a paradise right here on earth.
NTHARP: Said like a terrified prey animal. I disagree. The thermodynamic translation is that the current system leads to Premature stabilization that ultimately won’t make you better off in any Pareto sense, and will make everyone else REALLY bad off. You should be able to relate to this as a Beaver –Its like the difference between a stable climax forest that evolved into that state through natural succession, and some managed forest where all the trees are the same height and size and species. If you force stability now you create the possibility for worse instabilities later. One fire, one flood, one fungus plague or one black swan event and you get collapse and extinction. 🔥⚙️
And that is because In far-from-equilibrium systems:
Instability = possibility
Fluctuations = innovation
Diversity = resilience
The current system sees instability and says:
“Whoa there—how do we freeze this into a revenue stream?”
Culhane: I get it. The commodification we talked about last time. To freeze things into a predictable revenue stream the system Patents, Monopolizes, Standardizes, Regulates AFTER capture and Financializes
The Result is that living, exploratory systems are forced into being brittle attractors too early.
NTHARP: That’s premature stabilization. Examples (because abstraction is how BS survives)
Let’s look at food systems🌱 The Usual claim is that Industrial ag is efficient and productive
Reality:
Monocultures are stabilized ecosystems
Diversity is described as “inefficiency”
Soil is treated as a substrate, not a metabolism
But short-term yield spikes lead to long-term collapse
The oligarchic market system didn’t “optimize food.” It froze an immature agro-ecosystem and called it mature.
When we look at ⚡ Energy systems, the usual claim is that Fossil fuels powered progress
Culhane: I’m following. The reality is that Fossil fuels allow massive centralized control
They suppress distributed experimentation. They lock societies into path dependency
Renewables threaten this not because they’re weak— but because they reintroduce variability.
Markets hate variability unless it’s hedged, packaged, and traded.
Lake Ness: Now look at your 🏙️ Cities. The Usual claim is that Real estate development leads to urban growth
Culhane: But the Reality is that Zoning freezes neighborhoods… Speculation prices out adaptive uses… Informal economies are criminalized.
NTHARP: Cities are dissipative structures by nature.That’s why the ancient unplanned cities are so charming and beautiful. They serve more than just the state.
But Capital turns them into storage devices for value. Suburbs become “property to flip” where houses need to look like the cover of Home and Garden magazine to maintain their resale value.God forbid you put in a food forest or even a compost bin or paint your house purple.
That’s not growth. That’s embalming.
Culhane: What about 💻 Technology?
NTHARP: The Usual claim is that Tech is fast and disruptive
The Reality: Platforms stabilize behavior Algorithms reduce surprise. Innovation continues to happen at the edges, but then it gets absorbed
Culhane: I see it. I hope our viewers see it: The endgame is always: “How do we make the environment predictable?” Our economic system doesn’t love innovation. It loves capture after innovation. And it doesn’t really reward the inventor, in fact it disincentivises most invention by scaring people with possible patent infringement.
Marx thought capitalism would collapse because of Falling rates of profit, Class contradictions and Overproduction, But Prigogine lets us say something sharper:
Capitalism and Communism both fail because they destroy their own evolutionary space.
As Isaac Asimove wrote, they are both dialectically opposed but self-similar faces of the same coin. They aren’t different systems. They are both about “command and control” and they both operate by Eliminating diversity, Accelerating throughput, Treating instability as an enemy and Forcing closure on open systems
That’s the metabolic rift, thermodynamically understood..
Popper warned about these closed systems.
Capitalism and Socialism market themselves as open— but in practice they normally close futures and Narrow options. They punish deviation – you can see it in our school systems – and they Rewards conformity dressed as choice
The irony is that The systems that preach freedom are the most aggressive future-closers we’ve ever built.
That’s not ideology. That’s just structure.
NTHARP: The real evolutionary contest, Kropotkin would tell us, is between mutual aid and. market logic At bifurcation points: Markets push for rapid restabilization but Mutual aid tolerates uncertainty. Private property can guarantee a uniform product. The comedy of the Commons is that they allow exploration and experimentation. Care buys time
Kropotkin wasn’t being sentimental. He was describing what keeps systems alive near chaos.
Communism, Socialism and Capitalism all want to exit chaos ASAP.But LIFE – Life evolves from it and in it.
Culhane: . So these systems don’t fail because they are too chaotic.
They fail because they are too good at shutting chaos down.
These three descendants of Euro-Asian Empire building are really anti-evolutionary system wearing innovation costumes. That’s why they always lead to mere revolutions rather than evolutions. The Beatles sang, “You say you want a revolution, well you know, we all want to change the world…” when in reality most of us really don’t. Like Ledger here, we want things to be LEGIBLE. The State wants us to see like a state, calculate like a State for the sake of the STATE-us quo. It can’t handle what it thinks of as a “mess”. This is why all of these state systems have been so brutal with indigenous knowledge systems. They can’t see the order in the diversity. They see it as threatening disorder, as inefficiency.
Lake Ness: Speaking of inefficiency, I liked what Raj was saying about working with leaks…
Culhane: You know, when I was a kid I used to wish I was superman, like every kid, but I had a different explanation – I said to my parents “Superman doesn’t have to go to the bathroom – that saves so much time and is so efficient.”
:”How does he do that?” they asked. And I remember proudly saying, “he metabolizes everything into carbon dioxide and water vapor. He doesn’t even have to pee. He gets every last nutrient out of what he consumes. Wouldn’t that be cool.?”
But then, you know what my cousin said?
Lake Ness: I can guess.
Culhane: She said, “if we were all supermen like that, and if all animals metabolized food and water that way, we would soon run out of soil.” She was studying science at Yale, and she explained that what looks like inefficiency on a local scale turns out to create much greater efficiencies on a global scale. Is it inconvenient for us, waiting in line for the bathroom in the city but that “evolutionary oversight” enabled an entire ecosystem to flourish.
And it reminds me of the stories that anthropologists tell about Peace Corps volunteers who thought it was inefficient for women to have to walk with jugs on their head to the communal well outside the village and carry heavy water back to the hut. So they parachuted in and gave everyone indoor plumbing. And the result?
Lake Ness: No more place for women to gather legitimately outside of the gaze of the patriarchy; no chance to safely vent grievances and engage in social bonding gossip. The result: Women were locked in the house and the social glue fell apart. All in the name of micro-scale efficiency. At least you can see it. Ledger here, doesn’t really understand that kind of balancing act…
Culhane: So what actually is radical now? Not revolution-as-reset – that’s just spinning wheels.
Not efficiency. Not growth.
What’s radical is simply Keeping systems open longer, Protecting diversity before it’s profitable and long after it isn’t anymore. Valuing slack, redundancy, care
Designing institutions that delay stabilization
In Prigogine’s world: Survival of the fittest belongs to systems that don’t rush to equilibrium.
Your Capitalist/Socialist/Communist systems have no patience. They always rush to some universalized solution set..
Life evolves, sometimes in saltations, most of the time slowly. It lingers.
Lake Ness: And always remember: Survival of the fittest is a tautology – we only know something is “fit” or rather, fits its current environment, when it does. Change the environment and fitness changes correspondingly. This is why governance systems that favor the few at the expense of the many work so hard to maintain the status quo. Those who are benefitting don’t WANT their environments to change in any way that would decrease their fitness, right?
So let’s get back to the learning outcomes and wrap this up.
Culhane: Learning Outcome Four: Reflect critically on the idea that everything that is possible can happen… but not everything that can happen should be allowed to happen.
Lake Ness: Nature explores all possibilities eventually. That’s something natural inclusion explains. If it CAN happen it probably will, sometime in space-time. But humans have intelligence and foresight and can choose which pathways to amplify.
Ledger: I guess we could design tax codes that reward short-term extraction… or that reward long-term regeneration. *Both* are possible. Only one keeps the river flowing.
Lake Ness: Now you are getting it. Optimize for all beneficiaries if you can. Ledger, darling, since you’re the accountant here see if you can tackle the next Learning Outcome::
“Try to defend the entire idea of governance based on short term profit that doesn’t include ecosystems in its cost/benefit calculations. Ga head. I dare you.”
Ledger: (straightens glasses, clears throat)
All right. Case for short-term profit:
You get rapid growth, quick payback, shareholder satisfaction, campaign contributions, a booming GDP. You can measure everything in one currency, no messy moral debates, no waiting for trees to grow. You maximize quarterly gains and let “the market” sort the rest.
Culhane: You sound like Dorian. Or rather, his Dad. And what happens on Selection-Only Island when the pathogen hits?
NTHARP: Replaying the collapse in 3…2…1…
(Using his narrator voice: “Our heroes see the left simulation replaying the crash. We see forests burn. We see deserts grow. We see ocean dead zones, fish belly up, gasping with bulging eyes. We see glaciers collapse. We see people dead in the streets from a pandemic. Silence.)
Ledger: (softly) Right. You lose everything you were counting.
Lake Ness: Governance that ignores ecosystems is just Natural Selection with a blindfold. You get evolution, yes… but at the scale of extinctions and ruins.
Ledger: (sighs) Short-term profit without ecosystems in the books is not accounting. It’s arson with spreadsheets.
Lake Ness: Now you are seeing it.
Culhane: So the answer to my fifth learning outcome is… you can’t defend it. You can describe it, you can explain how it emerged, but you can’t justify it if you claim to care about survival beyond a couple of quarters.
Lake Ness: Evolution will go on, with or without you. The question is not “Will the fittest survive?” but “What do you choose to *fit* yourselves to?”
Ledger: Rivers, forests, soils… or quarterly reports.
NTHARP: Nexus Thinking is simply this:
Treat governance as guided evolution. Choose rules that keep as many relationships alive as possible. Do as your Harvard Profession EO Wilson will become famous for and always live “In Praise of Diversity”
Culhane: And if we write policies that serve people in an exclusive resort on Selection-Only Island instead of the building a Land of Natural Inclusion?
Lake Ness: Then the next flood will wash away your capital gains.
Ledger: And the balance sheet will be written in species lost and futures foreclosed.
Culhane: (to camera) So, Once and Future Nexians… where will *you* stand? With Selection-Only, or with Natural Inclusion? As Led Zeppelin sings, “Yes, there are two paths you can go by, but in the long run… “ wait…oh, there really isn’t time to change the road you’re on.. Is there?
NTHARP: You can’t buy a Stairway to Heaven. Teacher’s hint: the universe has all the time in the world. You don’t.
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