Implications: the birth of a new
worldview
Darwinian theory – more than a piece of biology
What is fascinating about Darwin’s theory of evolution is how broadly it has been applied across many fields. Survival of the fittest, a term coined by Spencer, has been utilized as a dictum-cum-dogma in many areas of study. It underpins competition as a central means of selection in terms of interviews, school and university examinations, sport, politics, philosophy and warfare. Being the best became the clarion call of capitalism. Even television game shows embraced the concept: Winner takes all, Mastermind, Perfection, The Weakest Link, Survivor, Dog Eat Dog to name but a few. Job promotions, management structure and organizational structure are all framed within Darwinian thinking. Form rather than function dominates, the best forms always winning. Progress is driven by competition, and the Enlightenment philosophy that so dominates today is a comfortable bedfellow with this piece of science. Perhaps more importantly, Darwinian theory is seen as a cornerstone of Humanism, accounting for the one great mystery, the origin of life. This theory provided a creation story without the need to reference a god, a fundamental requirement in Enlightenment thinking. Finally, this is a reductionist school of thinking, reducing to the selfish gene. Reductionism, the philosophy of the time, dominating science and more general thinking, set vertical thinking in pace for humans to solve all the problems facing us. Nature placed no limits upon us, and neither did church nor state. The sharp edged sword of reductionist intellect and technology could build a better world.
Some fundamental differences in the theories
The thermodynamic theory of evolution that I have set out differs hugely from Darwinian thinking. Its emphasis is on opportunity and space, not competition and selective pressure. It is about expansion, not contraction, and about possibility, not judgement. Problem solving emerges from freedom, not rejection. Life is seen not as the outcome of reduced variation, but as the exploration of energetic space. Furthermore, the driving force is not some extension of artificial selection but rather the laws of physics that work throughout the cosmos . Thus we are not only stardust, but shaped by the same forces that orchestrate that stardust. The thermodynamic theory involves systems thinking, not reductionism, and embraces transductionism, not reductionism. There is no selfish gene and no unit of selection; rather, levels of organization interact separately with the laws of physics, and converse between themselves as a true system with emergent properties throughout.
In the same way as Darwinian theory has reached into many aspect of economics, biology and society, so should its replacement. There is a lifetime of work to be done on this, but here are just a few examples.
Biology: Obviously, this new theory has greatest implications for biology, in terms of how we understand life. We now have a theory that unifies biology, in terms of ecology, population dynamics, ecosystem succession, developmental biology and evolution. This is transductionism at work, where the same set of laws determines all aspects of life on earth. This also has great significance for exobiology, the biology of life outwith earth. Given the chemical elements and a knowledge of the radiative energy available, we can understand how life on another celestial body could develop and evolve.
Ecosystem damage can be assessed by measuring entropy production, providing a much improved way of assessing conservation strategies and environmental impact. Recovery from ecosystem collapse can also be monitored. Already, there has been significant progress in understanding many other areas of biology chemistry and geography using these approaches.
Business and economics: Three key issues arise here: competition, function v form and creativity. Competition has been the key driving force for businesses. In many ways this is understandable in a dog-eat-dog world, and generally seems to work. The fittest companies survive. But do they? There are very few global companies of more than 100 years duration. Dominance often brings stagnation, monopoly and abuse of the market, both in terms of immoral business practice, exploitation of the workforce, destruction of the environment and abuse of the customer. The price of milk and other foodstuff is a good example currently. Low prices, driven by competition and a bid to bankrupt opponent brands (the how-low-can-you-go strategy), dominate. Low price brings with it low respect for the ecological cost of producing a particular item. This feeds back into an export of ecological responsibility, devaluing the true cost of agriculture. It also forces out good farming practice as it cannot compete with industrial scale agriculture. This is a classic example of competition driving out globally sustainable practice. Selfish genes and memes take no account of the broader system. The thermodynamic theory of evolution sets out a completely different model. Here, each level of organization is linked to all levels and works sub-optimally for the good of the system. Excess entropic output cannot occur, as it destabilizes the entire system. Thus any aspect of life is an outcome of conversation and balance, optimizing for the system as a whole. An example of a company challenging the competition model is the engineering firm, Mace Group Ltd, whose founder, Ian MacPherson set out to engender collaboration instead of combative business practice.
Function v form represents another big difference between Darwinian and thermodynamic theories. Darwin’s theory very much focused on superiority of form. Thermodynamic theory instead focuses on function. Forms are randomly produced, and there are millions of them. At a functional level there are relatively few options. Function is restored after a mass extinction, whereas forms are usually very different. Trophodynamics is restored, as is ecosystem function. Imagine a bus carrying the entire cast of a play to the theatre. If it crashed and killed most of the cast (a mass extinction), the play would still continue in the same way, but with different structures (actors) representing the play. The play remains the same, it’s just the actors that change. Function represents the play, form the actors. The laws of thermodynamics also account for the fact that there is a food pyramid, not a food cube.
Why is this important for businesses? It is important because management structure and human resource thinking generally relies on a form-based approach: people in set positions doing a particular role. The hope is to match the best people to that role. The irony is that the business landscape is constantly changing, yet the roles in a company tend to stay the same. The thermodynamic approach would advocate that roles should be flexible, with the staff being prepared to take on a completely different role when the context calls for this. A manager might revert to the shop floor for a particular situation, while someone working on a lathe may have perfect management skills for a particular context. Intelligent management will be a flexible functioning entity embracing all. The correct structure for a particular challenge should emerge from the whole, rather than be set in stone and limited by some static form. The Biosphere Research Institute has pioneered Functional Management and offer consultancies to business interested in working on this.
Finally, creativity is a crucial skill for any company to possess, particularly in challenging fast-moving environments like the current business context. Again, the Darwinian approach often kills this. As competition increases, the company resists change, becoming more conservative. Competition and selective pressure works to narrow variation within the company, just as it does in pig-breeding (an important inspiration for Darwin when he framed his theory). Highly bred pigs would not survive well in the wild. Yet in fact when things get tough, variation is the lifeline to survival. Thus a company should seek to maintain opportunity and diffusive space if it is to diversify successfully, rather than stagnate and conserve. In much the same way as maximum yield occurs below maximum population size in fisheries, so maximum creativity occurs below maximum organizational complexity. Thus the creative elements of a company need different management.
Education The prescribed curriculum and examination system has long dominated educational practice. The “curve” in the USA pits peers against each other in a single intake, whereas the British system attempts to compare individuals to an historic standard. In each case, rewards for those who are most able to match the limited criteria are large – places on the best courses at the best universities. Some schools also run entrance examinations. This is a very Darwinian approach. Yet it is widely acknowledged that there are many different learning approaches, with some children thriving within one approach while others thrive within another. In spite of this, our educational programme subjects all children to the same assessment system. This is clearly unfair, preferential and prejudicial.
The thermodynamic theory of evolution sets out a very different approach where children are allowed freedom to explore knowledge in unrestricted ways, acknowledging that each individual occupies a unique learning space. Here the emphasis is on exploring the learning function (the thermodynamic approach), rather than competing between different learning forms (the Darwinian approach). Furthermore, the thermodynamic approach recognizes that each child’s learning context is unique, and thus assessing any one child against another within the same examination context is unrepresentative of abilities and unfair. It is the drive to learn that is important, not the destination. By recognizing how we learn, we can then approach problem solving as task delivery in a way that best utilizes our abilities. Thus, just as diversification is key to diversity, exploring how we learn is key to learning. We would, therefore, advocate a new approach to education.
Conservation biology. Conservation biology has for decades followed the reductionist model of neo-Darwinism, in terms of approaching ecosystems as little houses built of square bricks. It has become acceptable to insert bricks at our leisure. A beaver family here, a cane toad there. We feel that we can engineer nature in order to repair it, like a car that needs an old part replaced. However nature is an emergent property, not a building of blocks. Adding a beaver without a predator may work for a few years, but then the populations will spiral out of control, as in the Elbe and Oder rivers in Germany. Furthermore, preventing the young beavers from migrating freely will lead to inbreeding and excessive use of the habitat. This is a Darwinian approach and a humanist position. The thermodynamic theory of evolution instead takes a systems theory emergence approach. We would espouse removing human interference and letting nature take its own path to recovery. It will do this. It has done it before following mass extinctions. The laws of thermodynamics have directed operations throughout the universe. Our input isn’t going to be needed.
Surprisingly, strategies for conservation are usually carried out in pursuit of a reductionist strategy. This is highly surprising, given that ecology is best understood using systems theory. Very little ecological knowledge is applied by the conservation movement. Trees are planted in fields that are not forest soils. This will not form a forest. You cannot make a forest. It emerges from succession, signifying maximum entropic output. Introducing beavers to a habitat that no longer contains its predators (wolves and bears) is tantamount to ecological suicide, as the populations will become uncontrolled, surpassing the entropic production tolerable for a stable biome, and leading, ultimately to a crash in ecosystem function. Stopping these same beavers from migrating will again lead to unsustainably large local populations and to genetic inbreeding depression. Ecosystems are not built of little blocks. Reductionist thinking will always fail to grasp how ecology works. Diversification is a force within nature, an emergent property that is driven by thermodynamics operating throughout the system. The best thing to do is to leave it to work as it always has done.
Agriculture. Darwinian thinking advances the reductionist approach, where efficiency and optimality rule, and the gene is the unit of selection and therefore the unit of construction. Thus industrial agriculture works well within this, as do genetically modified crops (since genes are the building blocks of everything according to neo-Darwinism). However agriculture is the most environmentally damaging of all human activities, and the industrial agriculture of the 21st century is particularly disastrous, in terms of global warming, eutrophication and habitat destruction: the three horsemen of the modern apocalypse. Emergent consequences of eutrophication and increased energy flux are not considered. Grow more bread and feed more people, full stop. Thermodynamic theory presents a very different picture. The biosphere emerges from conversation between all levels of organization, each of which is suboptimal at its own level, with a limit to the amount of entropy produced, Smax. Beyond this point we risk destabilization. Thus agriculture needs to be sub-optimal if it is to have a minimal impact upon the Biosphere. Reducing energy flux by reducing the leakage of nutrients into habitats where they increase energy flux is essential. Bringing agriculture closer to the natural world by integrating it with the natural world, through beetle banks, intercropping and agroforestry is a step further in the right direction. By cutting agricultural waste (40% of agricultural produce is lost between field and table), we can mostly solve the food shortages, while more natural agriculture will also reduce soil erosion, increase soil organic matter, increase water holding content of the soil, and reduce salinization of soils.
Sustainability: Given the importance of conversation and emergence, we would stress that sustainable economics, ecology and sociology cannot be achieved in a reductionist way, but rather as a whole. Thus we would suggest that there will need to be sub-optimality in each of these three arenas, and the outcome will be an emergent solution. What we can contribute is to remove barriers and allow solutions to diffuse into solution space, just as life has diffused into the biosphere. Sustainability theory too often refers to our planet as ‘spaceship earth’, an incorrect concept. Earth is an open system, and is a waste generator. Thus waste generation is the norm, and the planet cannot be argued to be a perfect, waste-regeneration model. A circular economy does not exist in nature. Finally, long life products will not provide a solution, as they must be thermodynamically more wasteful in the formation that short-lived products. Furthermore, ecosystems normally require fast turnover, not slow turnover.
General problem-solving: In any field where problem solving is important, be it business, education, academia or family life, the thermodynamic theory of evolution offers a very different direction when compared to Darwinian thinking, which decreases diversity and slows evolutionary thought. Rather than competitive, selective approaches, which dominate today, thermodynamic theory espouses an empty market place approach, where thinking can freely diffuse into the widest solution space possible. Diversification can only run at its most successful when free from boundaries. Furthermore, structured hierarchies form barriers. Thus a child may find a solution as well or better than an adult. A cleaner in a company may find the solution better than a senior manager. We should use all thought to generate ideas and by doing so, we will have a much more creative process. Furthermore, working with other families/businesses/university departments will be much more beneficial than competing with them. This is even more important in terms of sustainability issues, where we face huge, wicked problems that require huge solutions.
Self-perception: Who are we and what is our place within the bigger scheme of things? How we perceive ourselves and others around us is very much determined by the evolutionary philosophy that we adopt. Darwinian theory has at its centre the ideas of fitness, selection, rejection and competition. Society frames competitive measures, such as earnings, career-progression and the school and university you attend in order to measure the social status of an individual. Those who do not correspond to these measures of fitness are deemed unsuccessful and in need of re-education. The thermodynamic theory presented in this paper has a very different approach, where each person is a celebration of the laws of the cosmos, occupying a unique place within ecospace with a unique perspective on the universe. Furthermore human rights are the outcomes of this celebration, where each of us offers unique expression of life, but also are the outcomes of the same drive, a diffusion of humanity in space and time. Thus the gas chambers of the Nazi regime would find no support in this approach, unable to cling to eugenics as a means to “give evolution a helping hand”.
Instead, statistical thermodynamics presents our human race as emergent from all of its individual members, rather than as racial, religious and political competition. Emergence cannot be socially engineered, nor selected for, but rather it comes from a conversation between all levels of organization, thus firmly placing the human within the greater scheme of things. Communalism cannot be created, but can be re-awakened. Darwinian theory offers us no sense of place. We are outcomes of a fight, a battle between genes, selfish genes. Yet as we have seen in this paper, it fails to explain evolutionary diversification through time, and fails completely in terms of understanding the role of succession in evolution. Rather, thermodynamic theory provides a context of creative opportunism, of contribution to the greater whole, and of a conversation and emergent totality, driven by the laws that pervade all else in the universe. We are part of a much bigger thing, rather than a product of our genes. Thus we can celebrate our diversity and understand our essence so much more fundamentally, wherein what is different about each of us is as special as what we have in common.
Darwinian theory – more than a piece of biology
What is fascinating about Darwin’s theory of evolution is how broadly it has been applied across many fields. Survival of the fittest, a term coined by Spencer, has been utilized as a dictum-cum-dogma in many areas of study. It underpins competition as a central means of selection in terms of interviews, school and university examinations, sport, politics, philosophy and warfare. Being the best became the clarion call of capitalism. Even television game shows embraced the concept: Winner takes all, Mastermind, Perfection, The Weakest Link, Survivor, Dog Eat Dog to name but a few. Job promotions, management structure and organizational structure are all framed within Darwinian thinking. Form rather than function dominates, the best forms always winning. Progress is driven by competition, and the Enlightenment philosophy that so dominates today is a comfortable bedfellow with this piece of science. Perhaps more importantly, Darwinian theory is seen as a cornerstone of Humanism, accounting for the one great mystery, the origin of life. This theory provided a creation story without the need to reference a god, a fundamental requirement in Enlightenment thinking. Finally, this is a reductionist school of thinking, reducing to the selfish gene. Reductionism, the philosophy of the time, dominating science and more general thinking, set vertical thinking in pace for humans to solve all the problems facing us. Nature placed no limits upon us, and neither did church nor state. The sharp edged sword of reductionist intellect and technology could build a better world.
Some fundamental differences in the theories
The thermodynamic theory of evolution that I have set out differs hugely from Darwinian thinking. Its emphasis is on opportunity and space, not competition and selective pressure. It is about expansion, not contraction, and about possibility, not judgement. Problem solving emerges from freedom, not rejection. Life is seen not as the outcome of reduced variation, but as the exploration of energetic space. Furthermore, the driving force is not some extension of artificial selection but rather the laws of physics that work throughout the cosmos . Thus we are not only stardust, but shaped by the same forces that orchestrate that stardust. The thermodynamic theory involves systems thinking, not reductionism, and embraces transductionism, not reductionism. There is no selfish gene and no unit of selection; rather, levels of organization interact separately with the laws of physics, and converse between themselves as a true system with emergent properties throughout.
In the same way as Darwinian theory has reached into many aspect of economics, biology and society, so should its replacement. There is a lifetime of work to be done on this, but here are just a few examples.
Biology: Obviously, this new theory has greatest implications for biology, in terms of how we understand life. We now have a theory that unifies biology, in terms of ecology, population dynamics, ecosystem succession, developmental biology and evolution. This is transductionism at work, where the same set of laws determines all aspects of life on earth. This also has great significance for exobiology, the biology of life outwith earth. Given the chemical elements and a knowledge of the radiative energy available, we can understand how life on another celestial body could develop and evolve.
Ecosystem damage can be assessed by measuring entropy production, providing a much improved way of assessing conservation strategies and environmental impact. Recovery from ecosystem collapse can also be monitored. Already, there has been significant progress in understanding many other areas of biology chemistry and geography using these approaches.
Business and economics: Three key issues arise here: competition, function v form and creativity. Competition has been the key driving force for businesses. In many ways this is understandable in a dog-eat-dog world, and generally seems to work. The fittest companies survive. But do they? There are very few global companies of more than 100 years duration. Dominance often brings stagnation, monopoly and abuse of the market, both in terms of immoral business practice, exploitation of the workforce, destruction of the environment and abuse of the customer. The price of milk and other foodstuff is a good example currently. Low prices, driven by competition and a bid to bankrupt opponent brands (the how-low-can-you-go strategy), dominate. Low price brings with it low respect for the ecological cost of producing a particular item. This feeds back into an export of ecological responsibility, devaluing the true cost of agriculture. It also forces out good farming practice as it cannot compete with industrial scale agriculture. This is a classic example of competition driving out globally sustainable practice. Selfish genes and memes take no account of the broader system. The thermodynamic theory of evolution sets out a completely different model. Here, each level of organization is linked to all levels and works sub-optimally for the good of the system. Excess entropic output cannot occur, as it destabilizes the entire system. Thus any aspect of life is an outcome of conversation and balance, optimizing for the system as a whole. An example of a company challenging the competition model is the engineering firm, Mace Group Ltd, whose founder, Ian MacPherson set out to engender collaboration instead of combative business practice.
Function v form represents another big difference between Darwinian and thermodynamic theories. Darwin’s theory very much focused on superiority of form. Thermodynamic theory instead focuses on function. Forms are randomly produced, and there are millions of them. At a functional level there are relatively few options. Function is restored after a mass extinction, whereas forms are usually very different. Trophodynamics is restored, as is ecosystem function. Imagine a bus carrying the entire cast of a play to the theatre. If it crashed and killed most of the cast (a mass extinction), the play would still continue in the same way, but with different structures (actors) representing the play. The play remains the same, it’s just the actors that change. Function represents the play, form the actors. The laws of thermodynamics also account for the fact that there is a food pyramid, not a food cube.
Why is this important for businesses? It is important because management structure and human resource thinking generally relies on a form-based approach: people in set positions doing a particular role. The hope is to match the best people to that role. The irony is that the business landscape is constantly changing, yet the roles in a company tend to stay the same. The thermodynamic approach would advocate that roles should be flexible, with the staff being prepared to take on a completely different role when the context calls for this. A manager might revert to the shop floor for a particular situation, while someone working on a lathe may have perfect management skills for a particular context. Intelligent management will be a flexible functioning entity embracing all. The correct structure for a particular challenge should emerge from the whole, rather than be set in stone and limited by some static form. The Biosphere Research Institute has pioneered Functional Management and offer consultancies to business interested in working on this.
Finally, creativity is a crucial skill for any company to possess, particularly in challenging fast-moving environments like the current business context. Again, the Darwinian approach often kills this. As competition increases, the company resists change, becoming more conservative. Competition and selective pressure works to narrow variation within the company, just as it does in pig-breeding (an important inspiration for Darwin when he framed his theory). Highly bred pigs would not survive well in the wild. Yet in fact when things get tough, variation is the lifeline to survival. Thus a company should seek to maintain opportunity and diffusive space if it is to diversify successfully, rather than stagnate and conserve. In much the same way as maximum yield occurs below maximum population size in fisheries, so maximum creativity occurs below maximum organizational complexity. Thus the creative elements of a company need different management.
Education The prescribed curriculum and examination system has long dominated educational practice. The “curve” in the USA pits peers against each other in a single intake, whereas the British system attempts to compare individuals to an historic standard. In each case, rewards for those who are most able to match the limited criteria are large – places on the best courses at the best universities. Some schools also run entrance examinations. This is a very Darwinian approach. Yet it is widely acknowledged that there are many different learning approaches, with some children thriving within one approach while others thrive within another. In spite of this, our educational programme subjects all children to the same assessment system. This is clearly unfair, preferential and prejudicial.
The thermodynamic theory of evolution sets out a very different approach where children are allowed freedom to explore knowledge in unrestricted ways, acknowledging that each individual occupies a unique learning space. Here the emphasis is on exploring the learning function (the thermodynamic approach), rather than competing between different learning forms (the Darwinian approach). Furthermore, the thermodynamic approach recognizes that each child’s learning context is unique, and thus assessing any one child against another within the same examination context is unrepresentative of abilities and unfair. It is the drive to learn that is important, not the destination. By recognizing how we learn, we can then approach problem solving as task delivery in a way that best utilizes our abilities. Thus, just as diversification is key to diversity, exploring how we learn is key to learning. We would, therefore, advocate a new approach to education.
Conservation biology. Conservation biology has for decades followed the reductionist model of neo-Darwinism, in terms of approaching ecosystems as little houses built of square bricks. It has become acceptable to insert bricks at our leisure. A beaver family here, a cane toad there. We feel that we can engineer nature in order to repair it, like a car that needs an old part replaced. However nature is an emergent property, not a building of blocks. Adding a beaver without a predator may work for a few years, but then the populations will spiral out of control, as in the Elbe and Oder rivers in Germany. Furthermore, preventing the young beavers from migrating freely will lead to inbreeding and excessive use of the habitat. This is a Darwinian approach and a humanist position. The thermodynamic theory of evolution instead takes a systems theory emergence approach. We would espouse removing human interference and letting nature take its own path to recovery. It will do this. It has done it before following mass extinctions. The laws of thermodynamics have directed operations throughout the universe. Our input isn’t going to be needed.
Surprisingly, strategies for conservation are usually carried out in pursuit of a reductionist strategy. This is highly surprising, given that ecology is best understood using systems theory. Very little ecological knowledge is applied by the conservation movement. Trees are planted in fields that are not forest soils. This will not form a forest. You cannot make a forest. It emerges from succession, signifying maximum entropic output. Introducing beavers to a habitat that no longer contains its predators (wolves and bears) is tantamount to ecological suicide, as the populations will become uncontrolled, surpassing the entropic production tolerable for a stable biome, and leading, ultimately to a crash in ecosystem function. Stopping these same beavers from migrating will again lead to unsustainably large local populations and to genetic inbreeding depression. Ecosystems are not built of little blocks. Reductionist thinking will always fail to grasp how ecology works. Diversification is a force within nature, an emergent property that is driven by thermodynamics operating throughout the system. The best thing to do is to leave it to work as it always has done.
Agriculture. Darwinian thinking advances the reductionist approach, where efficiency and optimality rule, and the gene is the unit of selection and therefore the unit of construction. Thus industrial agriculture works well within this, as do genetically modified crops (since genes are the building blocks of everything according to neo-Darwinism). However agriculture is the most environmentally damaging of all human activities, and the industrial agriculture of the 21st century is particularly disastrous, in terms of global warming, eutrophication and habitat destruction: the three horsemen of the modern apocalypse. Emergent consequences of eutrophication and increased energy flux are not considered. Grow more bread and feed more people, full stop. Thermodynamic theory presents a very different picture. The biosphere emerges from conversation between all levels of organization, each of which is suboptimal at its own level, with a limit to the amount of entropy produced, Smax. Beyond this point we risk destabilization. Thus agriculture needs to be sub-optimal if it is to have a minimal impact upon the Biosphere. Reducing energy flux by reducing the leakage of nutrients into habitats where they increase energy flux is essential. Bringing agriculture closer to the natural world by integrating it with the natural world, through beetle banks, intercropping and agroforestry is a step further in the right direction. By cutting agricultural waste (40% of agricultural produce is lost between field and table), we can mostly solve the food shortages, while more natural agriculture will also reduce soil erosion, increase soil organic matter, increase water holding content of the soil, and reduce salinization of soils.
Sustainability: Given the importance of conversation and emergence, we would stress that sustainable economics, ecology and sociology cannot be achieved in a reductionist way, but rather as a whole. Thus we would suggest that there will need to be sub-optimality in each of these three arenas, and the outcome will be an emergent solution. What we can contribute is to remove barriers and allow solutions to diffuse into solution space, just as life has diffused into the biosphere. Sustainability theory too often refers to our planet as ‘spaceship earth’, an incorrect concept. Earth is an open system, and is a waste generator. Thus waste generation is the norm, and the planet cannot be argued to be a perfect, waste-regeneration model. A circular economy does not exist in nature. Finally, long life products will not provide a solution, as they must be thermodynamically more wasteful in the formation that short-lived products. Furthermore, ecosystems normally require fast turnover, not slow turnover.
General problem-solving: In any field where problem solving is important, be it business, education, academia or family life, the thermodynamic theory of evolution offers a very different direction when compared to Darwinian thinking, which decreases diversity and slows evolutionary thought. Rather than competitive, selective approaches, which dominate today, thermodynamic theory espouses an empty market place approach, where thinking can freely diffuse into the widest solution space possible. Diversification can only run at its most successful when free from boundaries. Furthermore, structured hierarchies form barriers. Thus a child may find a solution as well or better than an adult. A cleaner in a company may find the solution better than a senior manager. We should use all thought to generate ideas and by doing so, we will have a much more creative process. Furthermore, working with other families/businesses/university departments will be much more beneficial than competing with them. This is even more important in terms of sustainability issues, where we face huge, wicked problems that require huge solutions.
Self-perception: Who are we and what is our place within the bigger scheme of things? How we perceive ourselves and others around us is very much determined by the evolutionary philosophy that we adopt. Darwinian theory has at its centre the ideas of fitness, selection, rejection and competition. Society frames competitive measures, such as earnings, career-progression and the school and university you attend in order to measure the social status of an individual. Those who do not correspond to these measures of fitness are deemed unsuccessful and in need of re-education. The thermodynamic theory presented in this paper has a very different approach, where each person is a celebration of the laws of the cosmos, occupying a unique place within ecospace with a unique perspective on the universe. Furthermore human rights are the outcomes of this celebration, where each of us offers unique expression of life, but also are the outcomes of the same drive, a diffusion of humanity in space and time. Thus the gas chambers of the Nazi regime would find no support in this approach, unable to cling to eugenics as a means to “give evolution a helping hand”.
Instead, statistical thermodynamics presents our human race as emergent from all of its individual members, rather than as racial, religious and political competition. Emergence cannot be socially engineered, nor selected for, but rather it comes from a conversation between all levels of organization, thus firmly placing the human within the greater scheme of things. Communalism cannot be created, but can be re-awakened. Darwinian theory offers us no sense of place. We are outcomes of a fight, a battle between genes, selfish genes. Yet as we have seen in this paper, it fails to explain evolutionary diversification through time, and fails completely in terms of understanding the role of succession in evolution. Rather, thermodynamic theory provides a context of creative opportunism, of contribution to the greater whole, and of a conversation and emergent totality, driven by the laws that pervade all else in the universe. We are part of a much bigger thing, rather than a product of our genes. Thus we can celebrate our diversity and understand our essence so much more fundamentally, wherein what is different about each of us is as special as what we have in common.