Social Sciences
Vol. 30, No. 3/September 1999

More about Coevolution
By Nikita Moiseev

I believe that on the main (in my view) issue V. Danilov-Danilyan shares my stand. For several decades I have been trying to prove the impossibility of combating the oncoming crisis using purely technical means. In my view, humanity is in for either a collapse or a drastic restructuring of the foundations of the civilization that came into being as a result of the Neolithic revolution.

But there are also points in Danilov-Danilyan’s article on which we differ. First, we do not understand the term “evolution” is the same way. He interprets it in the purely biological sense: he says, for instance, that evolution is characterized, above all, by the rate at which new species appear. My interpretation of this term is broader and is based on the ideas of the theory of dynamic systems and systems analysis. This is why I identify the term evolution with the concept of self-organization, that is, a system’s change under the impact of internal factors and mechanisms devoid of purposeful principle. As I see it, the formation of species is only one of the phenomena of the self-organization of living matter.

The article that was the object of Danilov-Danilyan critique may not be precise enough on some points, which is what provoked his comments. But I did not consider it necessary to describe them in great detail because these terms came into being in the late 1960s at seminars at the Computing Center in Obninsk, when on the initiative of V. Kovda and N. Timofeev-Ressovsky we, mathematicians and physicists, were told about the great Russian natural sciences and began to seriously discuss V. Vernadsky’s ideas. I believed that in the past 30 years these ideas had become generally known and did not require explanation. This was probably my mistake, and I am going to try to rectify it.

Although Danilov-Danilyan does not discern any substantial distinction between the concepts of the noosphere and the epoch of the noosphere, these are two entirely different things. According to Vernadsky, the noosphere is a state of the biosphere in which mankind assumes the burden of responsibility for further development, not only of society but also the biosphere as a whole, just as reason assumes responsibility for the destiny of the human organism, even if it cannot always cope with this responsibility.

The noosphere is the easiest to define at the level of intuition; filling this concept with real, practical meaning is still a tremendous problem. And if this state is possible (which is not obvious either), the way to it is extremely arduous. The epoch in society’s evolution, that is, noospherogenesis, when mankind, having realized the need and the meaning of the state of “noosphere”, will begin to look for ways to achieve this state, was called by me, maybe not very aptly, the epoch of the noosphere. This epoch may never come at all. And yet we must analyze its specifics and conditions of emergence.

Yet another term that provoked Danilov-Danilyan’s objection is coevolution. I first began to use it at the turn of the 1960s looking for a convenient interpretation of the term noosphere. Its meaning appeared obvious enough to me: the evolution of mankind should be harmonized with the evolution of the biosphere and must not perform the part of a malignant tumor, causing its degradation.

Later I learnt that the dynamics of populations had long been using the term sustainability. It means that the evolution of the different populations comprising a certain biocenosis should not upset the latter’s homeostasis. In other words, it should be coordinated with the evolution of the ecosystem as a whole. In fact, that was the principle of coevolution as applied to a concrete population as part of a certain ecosystem. But it turned out that even earlier, at the turn of the 1920s, Erwin Bauer had introduced the concept of stable disequilibrium. Linguistically it is meaningless, although in actual fact it pertains to the same idea: the evolution of mankind as part of the biosphere cannot be stable and balanced, but it must be coordinated (in the sense of ensuring homeostasis) with the evolution of the natural system, which is also non-balanced and subject to change, that is, obey the laws of its self-organization (evolution). Thus, I was far from being the first to formulate the principle of coevolution as a necessary condition of mankind’s survival and its preservation as part of the biosphere.

Danilov-Danilyan justly points out the qualitative distinction between the rates of evolutionary processes in society and in nature. I have also pointed this out more than once. It is not surprising that elements of such a complex multidimensional system as the biosphere evolve at different rates. Thus, it took tens of millions of years for the equine hoof to shape, while the Australopithecus became homo sapiens in less than three million years. This is why I have always interpreted the term “coevolution of man and the biosphere” as such evolution which does not upset the stability of the biosphere, its homeostasis, but preserves an “evolutionary channel” (I will raise this issue below) man needs. Even before modern-type civilization, able to purposefully change the environment, had come into being, people, like the rest of the living world, existed in conditions of coevolution. If a species violated the principle of coordinated evolution, it became degraded and disappeared. _*

The biosphere is an extremely complex nonlinear system whose evolution follows the laws of self-organization. For all that, it is very unstable. This assertion also requires explanations, since many authors hold the opposite view.

As any complex essentially nonlinear system, the biosphere can function in the vicinity of various attractors or, to put another way, develop along different “evolutionary channels”. The biosphere’s instability lies in the fact that due to a variety of reasons a substitution of evolutionary channels may take place, and a transition from one channel to another means a qualitative structural change, a change of the very self-development mechanism. Henri Poincare used the term bifurcation, and Rene Thom–catastrophe. The history of the biosphere knows many catastrophes. It would not be a gross exaggeration to say that the evolution of the biosphere is a continuous chain of different-scale catastrophes. Thus, one of the first catastrophes that have been studied thoroughly enough was associated with the disappearance of the prokaryotic biosphere. Prokaryotes, which had mastered photosynthesis, began to produce oxygen–a deadly substance for them. As a result, the structure of the biosphere changed and dominance passed to eukaryotes, which had oxygen respiration. The intensity of evolutionary processes rapidly increased.

In the 1980s, when the Computing Center of the USSR Academy of Sciences had a system that imitated the functioning of the biosphere, we staged innumerable computer experiments using it. Their direct purpose was to analyze the consequences of a major nuclear war. Let me remind the reader that it was our computations that introduced the concepts of nuclear winter and nuclear night. But I, for one, emphasized the study of other issues: I did not need computations to realize that nuclear war was inadmissible. Our system made it possible to conduct computations up to the point when the biosphere, which had been subjected to strong effects, regained more or less stable characteristics. I was specially impressed by the fact that the biosphere never returned to the initial state. Each time, it was a new biosphere, and its parameters usually precluded the possibility of the humans’ further evolution.

Unfortunately, our studies have not yet yielded any definite proof: they merely bolstered the hypothesis that under a certain type of perturbation, the biosphere may transfer to a new evolutionary channel. Such a transfer need not be caused only by a large-scale nuclear war.

Although perestroika and the absence of funding that followed it put an end to our studies, their significance can hardly be overestimated. They showed us the biosphere from yet another angle, which until recently had remained outside the researchers’ field of vision.

Computer analysis revealed several important truths to us, or, to be more precise, the legitimacy of formulating several likely hypotheses.

We became convinced that, first, the biosphere can exist in the vicinity of different attractors (evolutionary channels) and, second, that an extremely important research trend is establishing the boundaries of these attractors, above all, the gravitation field of the attractor within whose boundaries man and his civilization had emerged. In other words, we must learn to identify the limits of permissible anthropogenic effects upon the environment that allow the biosphere to stay within the boundaries of the current evolutionary channel.

Studies of the 1980s revealed the deeper meaning of the term coevolution of society and the biosphere and, consequently, the meaning of the concept of noosphere. Using the word coevolution I imply human behavior, the humans’ adaptation to the natural processes under way in the biosphere (i.e., evolution of the environment) that maintains (or promotes the maintenance of) its state in the vicinity of the attractor that made it possible for man to come into being. Thus, the principle of coevolution means such a system of bans (ecological imperatives) which would prevent a change in the biosphere’s parameters that would bring its state up to the boundariers of the attractor, that is, the line that mankind may not cross under any circumstances, if, of course, it wants to preserve itself in the biosphere!

This new definition of the issue is a point of departure for a large range of research projects; thanks to it, they form an integral system and link up with practical activity both in the advancement of technology and in society’s purposeful activity (a system of effects upon the environment that would be able to keep it within the limits required for human existence). I believe that these ideas can help to make more concrete and better to understand not only the concept of coevolution of nature and society but the concepts of noosphere and the process of noospherogenesis.

If we interpret the principle of sustainable development as continuation of the concept of sustainability, if the work aimed at implementing this principle assumes planetary scope, it may well happen that mankind will make the first step in the search of effective noospherogenesis, that is, move closer to the entry into the epoch of the noosphere and make its future secure.

Danilov-Danilyan goes on to discuss the impending environmental problems (an ecological crisis). Here, too, I quite agree with his basic assumptions: I myself have spoken and written in the same vein more than once. The main thing is that it is impossible in principle to combat the crisis using purely technical means. We must qualitatively change the anthropogenic load on the biosphere (as I put it, “realize the ecological imperative”), and this means to restructure society itself. This is the pivotal point of my arguments. To coordinate the permissible load on the biosphere with the possibility of maintaining its stability in the current evolutionary channel is the foundation of both the principle of coevolution and of basic research of the forthcoming century.

It is another thing that ensuring coevolution, that is, keeping the biosphere in the vicinity of the attractor that made it possible for man to come into being, is a mammoth task; dealing with it is the substance of the epoch of the noosphere and, most probably, the rest of mankind’s history. In other words, as soon as man becomes aware of its significance, this task will become eternal, because this is the basic condition of mankind’s survival on our sinful Earth at all times. But to deal with this task, a purposeful effort directed at society and the environment would have to be made. This would not be management in the usual sense, not management of even extremely sophisticated technical systems (like spaceships). In such super-complex systems as human society and the biota, and especially the biosphere as a whole, managed development using the means man has or will develop in the foreseeable future would be impossible!

First, these systems are so large that to process the necessary amount of information we would need computers that are more powerful by 10 orders than the best currently available supercomputers. Second, such systems always contain stochastic elements and have a higher level of uncertainty, including the very concept of management objective.

And yet man is not helpless. He is able to affect parameters of the biosphere, maintain the desirable evolution trends, etc. This is why, back in the early 1960s, I introduced the concept of directed development in my lectures on the theory of large systems. I applied this term to the set of influences able to keep the system’s parameters within certain limits.

Going back to the subject of our discussion, I believe that in the next century, research, both in the natural and in the social sciences, should be channeled into formulating the principles of society’s directed development. Of course, a contribution would have to be made by the effort to create and improve technology and equipment. This is the dialectics of development: although technical and technological might has plunged society into an ecological crisis, combating it is impossible without the development of even more sophisticated technologies and equipment. But the main effort should be concentrated in the humanities: how should we proceed? how to restructure society, change the hierarchy of needs, determine the maximum permissible load on the biosphere and harmonize human vital activity with it? These are the main future problems of science, education and daily life, including the humans’ relations with their environment.

In his article, Danilov-Danilyan draws on the studies done by V. Gorshkov. The latter is an outstanding researcher: in the past 20 years he developed a truly grandiose theory of “biotic regulation”, which keeps the parameters of the biosphere within the boundaries (incidentally, quite broad) required to sustain life. But, as is often the case with big scientists, his own interests fill up the horizon leaving aside many important circumstances in the evolution of the biosphere. I am afraid that, contrary to Bohr’s principle, he refuses to scrutinize other interpretations and theories.

Gorshkov’s study field is, essentially, the negative feedback that exists among the mechanisms that determine the biosphere’s self-organization. But for a system to be able to evolve, for new components to appear in it, positive feedback, which destroys the system’s equilibrium state, is also necessary. And if we adopt a general systemic viewpoint required for the interpretation of the process of self-evolution of such a complex nonlinear dynamic system as the biosphere, we shall see a picture that would be quite unlike the one painted on the basis of the theory of biotic regulation alone.

As any self-developing system, the process of biospheric evolution contains different evolution types. For a long time, new characteristics slowly pile up or, to put it another way, “Darwinian-type evolution” is under way. Then the perturbations which gradually accumulate at the expense of positive feedback (and external factors, should they be present) as it were explodes the system, and it passes through a bifurcation (or catastrophe, to borrow Thom’s term), as a result of which the mechanisms of its evolution undergo a change. The biosphere makes a transition to the field of gravity of another attractor.

I have already discussed one such catastrophe–the destruction of the kingdom of prokaryotes, which at some point destroyed itself, having created an atmosphere that contained oxygen, a gas deadly for the prokaryotes. As a result, evolution took an entirely different turn. Such catastrophes in the history of the biosphere (or its individual parts) were numerous. Among them was the formation of the ozone layer, which enabled living matter to leave the ocean and settle on dry land.

A bifurcation that is of great importance to us occurred very recently, during the Neolithic, when man invented projectiles. Our distant ancestors acquired an implement which enabled them to easily obtain a large amount of food. And they lost no chance using this implement as efficiently as possible. Within several millennia, they wiped out all mammoths and practically all large ungulates, the foundation of the human diet in early Neolithic. This caused a serious environmental crisis, which spread to nearly all the planet. Its population was decimated. This crisis has come to be known as the Neolithic revolution. And it was indeed a revolution. Mankind did not just manage to combat this crisis but, having mastered land cultivation, opened up the first page of modern civilization: the history of the biosphere took a new turn when man began to create an artificial cycle of substances that the “nonhuman biosphere” had never known. It was based on land cultivation, then animal husbandry was added, and finally the people began to include into the natural cycles the so-called minerals, the substances that had long been buried, i.e., removed from natural cycles millions of years ago. The Neolithic revolution signifies the beginning of modern history. Society underwent a qualitative change: property was formed and needs changed, as did the scale of values. But the greatest change was perhaps the much heavier load on the biosphere, which was forced to develop new self-organization mechanisms.

By way of conclusion I would like to go back to the specifics of the evolution of the biosphere. In my view, a new interpretation of the very term living matter is coming into being. In the early 1940s, Erwin Schrodinger wrote in his wonderful book What is Life? (translated into Russian in 1945) that living matter feeds on “negative entropy”; for decades, this phrase of the great physicist has been agitating researchers’ thought. In any case, it does not lend itself to exact one-way interpretation.

However, a few things have recently changed. Mankind has gained an opportunity to measure the flows of energy which comes to the Earth from outer space and which the Earth sends to outer space. These measurements are done from space. Special attention here should be paid to the work done by the RAS Institute of Space Studies (research projects undertaken by M. Izakov and his team). They have shown that within the limits of measurement precision these flows are equal! So at whose expense does the evolution of planetary matter occur? This fact, discovered at the turn of the 1980s, may be the answer to Schrodinger’s question. Indeed, the Earth receives high-frequency solar energy and emits the same amount of calories, but as long-wave energy. However, depending on frequency, energy breeds different-type physicochemical processes. For example, infrared irradiation cannot trigger off the process of photosynthesis, the foundation of the biota’s vital activity. Therefore, there arises an entirely natural hypothesis that a change in the character of the energy flow that takes place in the biosphere causes a change in the organization of planetary material, above all, living matter. Could not this be the meaning of the overall process of the biosphere’s self-organization?

So about 10,000 years ago the system of relations among humans, between society and the biosphere now known as civilization began to form. It gave the people a new level of prosperity, extended their life-span, and did many other things. However, the potential of development in the direction set by the Neolithic revolution is about to be exhausted. Mankind is approaching a new planetary-scale ecological crisis. The cause is the positive feedback resulting from civilization, which at some point in history began to rapidly destroy the biosphere. At present, the only way to preserve man as part of the biosphere is coevolution, that is, a revision of the humans’ way of life that would harmonize people’s needs and the possibility of keeping the biosphere in the evolutionary channel that had produced the phenomenon of man. I repeat, this problem cannot be resolved applying purely mechanical means. We need to qualitatively change the nature of society, we need a new civilization with a new world outlook, in which the ecological imperatives would be as essential as the wish to preserve humans as a species.

Can such civilization come into being? There is no answer to this question yet. In other words, we do not know if mankind would be able to implement the principle of coevolution, or sustainability, or stable disequilibrium. But one thing is more or less obvious: if we fail to implement this principle, mankind may confidently expect cataclysms to which the Neolithic crisis is hardly comparable. Man no longer uses the bison hunter’s weapons, having highly sophisticated nuclear armaments at his disposal. And it would be a delusion to believe them not to be put to use when the crisis of resources reaches its peak.

Awareness of this fact is the main thing, while linguistic disputes are a secondary matter: it seems to me that those who give serious thought to this problem would accept the thesis formulated above. They do not always use the same words and phrases, but have the same thing in mind: man must learn to organize his activity in a way that would secure the future, preserve humans in the vicinity of the attractor which had generated the process of the biosphere’s self-organization that produced homo sapiens. And it is not really a matter of principle whether we call this form of interaction with nature coevolution or use E. Bauer’s or someone else’s terminology.

Translated by Natalia Belskaya

 

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Endnotes

Note 1: N.N. Moiseev, “Coevolution of Nature and Society”, Ekologiya i zhizn, 1997, Jan.-Aug., pp. 4, 5. Back.

Note 2: S.N. Rodin, The Idea of Coevolution, Novosibirsk: Nauka Publishers (Siberian Branch), 1991 (in Russian). Back.

Note 3: R.S. Karpinskaya et al. Philosophy of Nature: A Strategy of Coevolution, Moscow: Interpraks, 1995 (in Russian). Back.

Note 4: Eugene P. Odum, Fundamentals of Ecology, Philadelphia, 1971. Back.

Note 5: Yu.M. Arsky et al. Ecological Problems: What Is Happening, Who Is to Blame and What Is to Be Done? Moscow, 1997 (in Russian). Back.

Note 6: See: V.G. Gorshkov, Physical and Biological Foundations of the Stability of Life, Moscow (in Russian). Back.

Note 7: A.J. Lotka, Elements of Physical Biology, Baltimore: Williams Wilking Co., 1925. Back.

Note 8: V.I. Vernadsky, About Science, Dubna, Fenix Publishers, 1997, Vol. 1, p. 312 (in Russian). Back.

Note 9: V.I. Vernadsky, Issues of Biogeochemistry, Moscow, Leningrad, AS of the USSR Publishing House, 1939, Issue 2, p. 6 (in Russian). Back.

Note 10: A.D. Ursul, The Way to the Noosphere: The Concept of Survival and Sustainable Development of Civilization, Moscow: Luch Publishers, 1993, p. 42 (in Russian). Back.