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THE PROBABILITY OF THE IMPROBABLE
The probability of the improbable:
Society–nature coevolution
by
Helga Weisz
WEISZ, H. (2011): ‘The probability of the improbable: society–nature coevolution’, Geografiska Annaler: Series B, Human
Geography 93 (4): 325–336 .
ABSTRACT. This article aims to show how evolutionary theory,
social-metabolism and sociological systems theory can be utilized
to develop a concept of society–nature coevolution. The article
begins with a conception of industrialization as a socio-­metabolic
transition, that is, a major transformation in the energetic and consequently material basis of society. This transition to industrial
metabolism was essential for the emergence and maintenance of
industrial societies and is at the same time the main cause of global
environmental change. The article proceeds by asking what the
notion of society–nature coevolution can potentially contribute to
understanding environmental sustainability problems. An elaborated concept of coevolution hinges on (1) a more precise and sociologically more meaningful concept of cultural evolution and (2)
understanding how cultural evolution is linked to the environment.
Next I briefly outline major lines of thought and controversies surrounding the idea of cultural evolution. The direction proposed here
commences with an abstract version of Darwinian evolution, which
is then re-specified for social systems, understood as communication systems, as developed by Luhmann. The re-specification implies three important changes in the theoretical outline of cultural
evolution: first, shifting from the human population to the communication system as the unit of cultural evolution and to single communications as the unit of cultural variation; second, shifting from
transmission or inheritance to reproduction as necessary condition
for evolution; and third, shifting from purely internal (communicative) forces of selection towards including also environmental
selection. Adopting elements from the work of Hägerstrand and
Boserup, the primary environmental selective force in cultural evolution is conceptualized as the historically variable constraints in
human time–space occupation. In the conclusions I tie the argument back to its beginning, by arguing that the most radical changes in human time–space occupation have been enabled by major
socio-metabolic transitions in the energy system.
Keywords: communication, cultural evolution, social metabolism,
society–nature coevolution, sustainability, time use
Introduction
Sustainable development seeks to accomplish human well-being without destroying the life support
systems of planet Earth. Sustainability science at
its core thus needs to understand the interactions
between society and nature, how these interactions
have changed over time, and how they may be influenced in the future (Kates et al. 2001). Physical
interactions between social and natural systems are
conceptualized as social or industrial metabolism,
that is, the socially organized exchange of materials
and energy between societies and their environments
(Ayres and Simonis 1994; Fischer-Kowalski 1998;
Steffen et al. 2011; WBGU 2011).1 Contrary to its
biological meaning, the social meaning of metabolism stresses that the metabolic process is socially
organized and highly variable over time and space.
In socio-metabolic terms the industrial revolution which started around 250 years ago in the UK
can be described as a transition from an agrarian
– mostly biomass based – energy metabolism to a
fossil fuel based metabolism (Sieferle et al. 2006).
In the course of this great transformation2 the sociometabolic per capita throughput multiplied by a
factor of three to six, literally fuelled by abundant
availability of cheap high density energy (Weisz
et al. 2001; Krausmann et al. 2008b). From a global
perspective, industrial metabolism continues to expand (Krausmann et al. 2008a; Krausmann et al.
2009). With the industrialization of China and India,
half of today’s world population is experiencing this
transition. This creates an unprecedented challenge
to long-term sustainability, both with respect to the
environment and to intra- and intergenerational
equity.
Our understanding of the quantitative dimensions of social metabolism has made substantial
progress in recent years. Further development of
knowledge hinges on more thorough understanding
of the internal complexities of societies, how these
relate to the environment, and how society and ecology mutually shape their respective long-term evolutionary trajectories.
A concept that has gained increasing popularity in various fields dealing with the long-term aspects of the interactions between social and natural
systems is coevolution. But what exactly is meant
by coevolution? A rather general interpretation is
change over time in mutual response, without further specification of the change mechanism. A more
strict interpretation would seek to specify evolutionary change, as opposed to other processes of change,
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HELGA WEISZ
for both natural and social systems. It is to the latter
interpretation this article seeks to contribute. In the
following I attempt to demonstrate the potential of
sociological systems theory for an interdisciplinary
theory of society–nature coevolution, and for sustainability science in general.
The concept of evolution has a more precise
meaning in biology than in the social sciences. A
more specific meaning of cultural evolution is therefore a sine qua non of an adequate coevolutionary
theory. The next section briefly traces the major
lines of thought characterizing theories of cultural
evolution since the nineteenth century. The third
section deals with different definitions of Darwinian
evolution, discusses their pitfalls and potentials for
establishing a functionally analogous theory for social systems, and suggests a generalized version of
Darwinian evolution. The fourth section attempts
to re-specify this generalized version for social
systems, drawing upon Luhmann’s theory, and discusses its potential for developing a concept of society–nature coevolution. The conclusion summarizes
the main argument and conceptually relates coevolution to industrial metabolism as the main sustainability challenge.
Two roots of cultural evolution: the Spencerian
and the Darwinian tradition
Considerable ambiguity and controversy characterize debates on cultural evolution in science and humanities since the nineteenth century. This makes it
difficult to introduce and position an evolutionary
understanding of social change in relation to environmental change.3 It is not possible here to do justice to this rich and at times confusing intellectual
heritage.4 Instead I will briefly point out two roots
of cultural evolution. Hereby the purpose is to make
the fundamental theoretical differences in the major
lines of thought explicit and thereby avoid confusion that arises from different intellectual traditions
sharing the same name.
One line of thought goes back to Herbert
Spencer. In their influential article ‘Does culture
evolve?’, Fracchia and Lewontin (1999) ascribe the
Spencerian tradition to a class of theories they call
transformational theories of change. The main characteristic of a transformational theory ‘is that the
ensemble of elements changes in time because each
of the elements in the ensemble undergoes roughly
the same secular change during its individual history. That is, the evolution of the ensemble is a result
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of the developmental pattern of each individual’
(Fracchia and Lewontin 1999, p. 60). This refers to
what in biology is known as ontogeny (also called
development), the development of an organism from
the fertilized egg to its mature form. The work of
embryologists van Baer and Milne-Edwards indeed
influenced Spencer in formulating his ideas about
cultural evolution. These theories can, therefore,
also be called developmentalist. Inherent to such an
understanding of cultural evolution is the claim that
cultures develop over time in a causal process that is
directional, progressive, and proceeding along more
or less well defined stages from the homogenous to
the heterogeneous. A Spencerian understanding of
cultural evolution dominated nineteenth-century
cultural anthropology and regained some influence
in the mid twentieth century in ecological anthropology through the works of Leslie Wight and Julian
Steward. It has however been widely contested on
the grounds of merely claiming but not explaining
its fundamental hypotheses, and on the grounds of
its unsubstantiated assumption of progress (Boas
1982; Dunnell 1988; Fracchia and Lewontin 1999;
Gingrich 2010).
The second main approach to cultural evolution
dates back to Charles Darwin and is denoted variational by Fracchia and Lewontin (1999, p. 61), who
explain that ‘in variational evolution, the history of
the ensemble is not a consequence of the uniform
unfolding of individual life histories. Rather, variational evolution through time is a consequence of
variation among members.’ This approach thus represents a radical break with transformational theories of historical change.
Darwin’s unique contribution to theories of
change in general was to introduce a new explanatory principle of change, radically different from
previous explanations of historical processes. For
Darwin, evolution was the dominant mechanism
of change in the composition and occurrence of
biological species. It can be demonstrated, however, that this mechanism of change also works in
systems other than the biological systems for which
it was originally conceived. Examples include artificial life research and technical optimization processes (see, e.g., Rechenberg 1973; Goldberg 1989;
Holland 1992; Brooks 2001). In a very fundamental
way this justifies the search for functionally equivalent evolutionary mechanisms in social systems.
Such a search for a functionally equivalent
mechanism is less straightforward than one might
think. The idea of a socio-cultural counterpart to
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THE PROBABILITY OF THE IMPROBABLE
biological evolution has been rejected on a number of grounds. Evolutionary biologist Stephen
Jay Gould (1996), for example, argues that cultural
change is fundamentally different from biological
evolution for three main reasons. First he claims that
social change is faster than biological evolution.
This is certainly not a general rule. Think of the pace
of change between pests and pesticides, antibiotics
and pathogen bacteria, or vaccines and viruses, compared to transformations of social structures such as
from feudalism to capitalism. Especially pathogens,
with their fast evolution, are and have been a strong
evolutionary force in human history (Crosby 1986;
McNeill 2010).
Second, Gould argues that social inheritance,
as opposed to biological, is Larmarckian, a term
coined after Jean-Baptiste de Lamarck (1744–1829)
who mistakenly thought that properties which are
acquired by organisms during their lifetime by practise are at least partly hereditary and thus represent
an evolutionary force.
Here it is important to recall the background of
Gould’s argument. Gene transmission is the modern
biological concept of the hereditary mechanism. In
many early Darwinian theories of cultural evolution
learning was posed as a counterpart to gene transmission (e.g., Cavalli-Sforza and Feldman 1981;
Boyd and Richerson 1989). In biology, genes were
for a long time assumed to be transmitted only from
one generation to the next, that is, from parents to
children (called vertical transmission) and not between organisms of the same generation (called horizontal transmission). Apparently learning occurs
both between and within generations. Therefore
learning often is referred to as horizontal transmission and in addition – in a rather vague analogy (i.e.
acquired during the life time of the organism) – as
Lamarckian.
In the light of modern biology and modern communication theory these arguments seem to be obsolete. Modern biology discovered that mechanisms of
horizontal gene transfer indeed occur, and systems
theory laid ground for a new understanding of communication as recursive system rather than a transmission process (Luhmann 1984).5
As we will see later, horizontal and vertical
transmission are concepts which gear to the human
population as the reference system for cultural evolution. Once the reference system for cultural evolution is understood as being the communication
system, the population specific distinction between
horizontal and vertical transmission which relies
on a distinction between generations as well as the
whole idea of a gene equivalent, becomes obsolete.
Darwin developed his theory without knowledge about the foundations of genetics that had been
laid down by his contemporary Gregor Mendel. The
foundations of evolutionary theory were thus developed without specifying any hereditary mechanism.
This suggests that either The Origin of Species does
not qualify as evolutionary theory, or we must acknowledge that an evolutionary theory can be developed without specifying a hereditary mechanism.6
Finally, Gould claims that social change is inherently
connected to progress whereas biological evolution
is not. Indeed there seems to be a persistent mutual
misunderstanding between the natural and the social sciences. In rebutting what he sees as a common
misunderstanding of biological evolutionary theory,
namely the assumption of progress, Gould ends up
claiming progress to be inherent to the social realm,
a claim that is emphatically contested in the social
sciences (see, e.g., Habermas 1976). Other differences between biological evolution and cultural
change have been drawn upon, including the notion
of a cultural gene equivalent (van den Bergh and
Gowdy 2000), or the role of reproductive isolation
(Gould 1996).
Searching for a functional equivalent of biological evolution in the sphere of culture or society can
lead to diametrically opposed results, depending
on the specific elements upon which the counterpart is initially built. A more fundamental question
is implicitly at stake here, namely: Can there be
something like a generalized evolutionary theory of
which the biological is one instance? More specifically, can we formulate an evolutionary mechanism
that adequately defines the conditions necessary
for biological evolution to take place, but general
enough to transcend the biological case?
‘Draw a distinction and create a universe’:7
definitions of evolution
This idea of a general evolutionary theory is not
new, elements of it can be found already in The
Origin of Species. In past decades two attempts became particularly well known. Dawkins (1982 and
1998) suggested a form of a universal Darwinism
centred around an assumed gene equivalent which
he called meme, later popularized especially by
Dennett (1995). More recently Geoffrey Hodgson
proposed a concept of generalized Darwinism
which entertains a very similar abstract formulation
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HELGA WEISZ
of evolution as the one I am proposing here, but implies a profoundly different understanding of social
systems (Hodgson 2005).
The question arises: what would a definition
of evolution look like, that fully abstracts from the
biological case? Let us begin with Darwin. In the
first edition of On the Origin of Species by Means of
Natural Selection; or, the Preservation of Favoured
Races in the Struggle of Life, he defines natural selection as follows (Darwin 1968 [1859], pp. 130–
131; he did not yet use the term evolution):
Can the principle of selection, which we have
seen so potent in the hands of man, apply in
nature? I think that we shall see it can act most
effectually. Let it be borne in mind in what an
endless number of strange peculiarities our domestic productions, and, in a lesser degree, those
under nature, vary; and how strong the hereditary tendency is. Under domestication, it may be
truly said that the whole organization becomes
in some degree plastic. Let it be borne in mind
how infinitely complex and close-fitting are the
mutual relations of all organic beings to each
other and to their physical conditions of life.
Can it, then, be thought improbable, seeing that
variations useful to man have undoubtedly occurred, that other variations useful in some way
to each being in the great and complex battle of
life, should sometimes occur in the course of
thousand generations? If such do occur, can we
doubt (remembering that more individuals are
born than can possibly survive) that individuals
having any advantage, however slight, over others, would have the best chance of surviving and
of procreating their kind? On the other hand, we
may feel sure that any variation in the least degree injurious would be rigidly destroyed. This
preservation of favourable variations and the
rejection of injurious variations, I call Natural
Selection. Variations neither useful nor injurious
would not be affected by natural selection, and
would be left a fluctuating element, as perhaps
we see in the species called polymorphic.
Darwin starts from a problem that is directly opposed to ours. He had observed and intensively studied a man made selection principle: breeding. He
has seen how potent this principle was to produce
change or variation over time (‘an endless number
of strange peculiarities’) and that these changes are
to a remarkable degree conserved over generations
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(‘how strong the hereditary tendency is’) under the
hand of man (selection). He then poses the cautious
question, if it could be possible that this principle
also works without the interference by man – thus
the term natural selection. To substantiate this idea
Darwin recalls the following empirical observations:
Variation occurs not only under domestication
but also in nature.
There is a strong hereditary principle.
More individuals are born than can possibly survive and procreate.
From these observations he concludes that those individual organisms which carried favourable variations would have a higher chance for survival and
procreation and over a very long period of time this
would lead to the richness of species we observe.
This formal structure of describing the mechanism
of evolution – specifying the necessary and sufficient conditions for selection to work – has by and
large been kept until today.
The kernel of dispute in Darwin’s definition
of natural selection lies in the precise meaning of
the two terms advantage and favourable variation.
Later biologists would use the terms adaptation and
fitness, and the role of these concepts in evolution
remains a major source of debate within biology.8
Two main charges are levelled against them: the
inherent difficulty to definitely prove that a trait is
an adaptation (see in particular Gould and Lewontin
1979), and the veiled circularity behind the guise of
empirical claims. If fitness is defined as reproductive
success, then fitness cannot be measured through
reproductive success, as this would be an obvious
explanatory circularity.
Still there is something compellingly obvious about the idea of adaptation. As Levins and
Lewontin (1985, p. 9) put it, ‘the serious methodological and epistemological difficulties in the use
of adaptive explanations should not blind us to the
fact that many features of organisms clearly seem to
be convergent solutions to obvious environmental
problems. It is surely no accident that fish have fins,
that aquatic mammals have altered their appendages
to form finlike flippers …’.
From a more general perspective organisms
are undoubtedly adapted: otherwise they would
not exist, or soon go extinct. In a stable environment evolution would sooner or later result in the
optimal fit achievable with the given variation. In a
quickly changing environment, however, evolution
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THE PROBABILITY OF THE IMPROBABLE
would but ensure that a next generation exists, a
phenomenon that has been termed red queen’s race,
after Lewis Carrol’s Red Queen from Through the
Looking-Glass who says: ‘It takes all the running
you can do, to keep in the same place.’ How large
are the constraints – in particular, developmental
and general physical constraints – on the availability of variations? And what exactly is the environment to which an organism is adapted: the general
non-living environment, the ecological niche, or
other species? To what extent are organisms able
to change or even construct their environments in
a way that better serves their needs, a phenomenon
that has been called niche construction (Laland et al.
2000)? These are fundamental questions and despite
the fact that they have been intensively explored in
biology, the outcome remains contested. Regarding
a possible theory of cultural evolution these issues
are significantly under-researched.
But is it at all necessary to refer to adaptation in
defining the necessary and sufficient conditions for
evolution by selection? I do not think so. Take the
following definition of evolution from Ernst Mayr
(1984), one of the founders of the synthetic theory
of evolution.
1. Many traits of organisms are variable, which
means that members of a species differ from each
other in a number of traits (principle of variation).
2. These variable traits are partly hereditary, which
means that members of a family resemble each
other more than a randomly taken sample of individuals (principle of inheritance).
3. In general, more offspring is procreated than can
possibly survive to reproductive age (principle of
excess offspring).
This is again a version which specifies three empirically observable conditions. If they are met, selection would be the necessary consequence. This
definition of evolution is sufficiently uncontested to
constitute a good basis for developing a generalized
version. I propose the following:
1. There are ensembles of entities which differ from
each other in some characteristics (principle of
variation).
2. These entities have the capacity to reproduce
themselves in a way that the reproduced entity
resembles the original one more than a randomly taken sample of entities from the population
(principle of reproduction).
3. There are limiting environmental conditions, so
that not all progeny can possibly procreate (principle of limiting factors).
These are again selection defining conditions.
The terms employed are very general so as to allow for their re-specification according to different
contexts. Yet the terms are chosen not only with
regard to their generic meaning. Another rationale
for the chosen terms is that they should foster and
not prevent a further re-specification for a social
system, a re-specification that above all must make
sense from a social science perspective.9 For example, most definitions of evolution would not use
the term reproduction but instead heredity (which
is more restricted to the biological case), or in more
general versions ‘transmission’. The notion of
transmission has an implicit vicinity to communication models of the Shannon–Weaver type, which
regard communication as the transmission of a signal between source and receiver. In addition the notion transmission stresses individual cognition and
learning, and thereby impedes an understanding of
the social as a system sui generis, as opposed to
the aggregated effect of the features of individual
humans.
It often goes unrecognized that the definitions of evolution presented above implicitly
refer to operationally closed, self-referential systems in the sense of Heinz von Foerster (1993).
For biological evolution this is obvious. The unit
of biological evolution is the population. From
a systems theory point of view, populations are
operationally closed systems, integrated by genetic recombination. Genes only recombine with
genes, and it is genes that represent the basic unit
of heredity (but not reproduction!). For the social
realm it is less obvious what constitutes the operationally closed system – the unit of evolution. It
is also doubtful if the distinction between heredity and reproduction has a counterpart in social
systems.
If we accept that evolution is a systems phenomenon, we can rephrase the general definition of
Darwinian evolution presented above. An evolving
system has the following properties:
1. It has internal variation.
2. It reproduces itself.
3. There exist limiting conditions to the effect
that not all variation generated can be further
reproduced.
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HELGA WEISZ
If these conditions are given the reproduction of the
system necessitates selection. The realized future is
just one out of a plethora of possible futures but not
any future is possible. And as with biological systems also with social systems, the selection itself
cannot be just arbitrary. However, the criteria for selecting might be very different for biological and for
social systems. At this point it should have become
clear that we need to re-specify the above general
definition of an evolving system for cultural or social systems, before we can further explore socially
specific selection criteria.
Cultural evolution
What is a social system? Social science literature
provides a plethora of theories, often in contradiction, often ignorant of one another. However, if we
take the condition seriously of the unit of evolution
being an operationally closed system then the quest
for the definition of a social system is transformed
into the question: what is the self-referential operation that constitutes a social system? This is precisely the starting point of Luhmann’s (1984) theory of
social systems.
Luhmann’s scientific endeavour was to create
a theory of society based on systems theory, more
specifically on the version known as second order
cybernetics, or the theory of operationally closed,
that is, self-referential systems (Luhmann 1984).
If social systems are to be that kind of system, the
whole theory rests upon a precise definition of the
operation that constitutes this system. Against common wisdom, but fully in accordance with his own
premises, Luhmann’s (1981, p. 20, own translation)
answer is: ‘Society does not consist of humans but
of communication between humans’.
Regarding humans as elements of social systems, Luhmann argues, would make it impossible
to distinguish between social and non-social operations, since not all aspects of humans can be regarded as social. Our thoughts or emotions, for example,
cannot directly be read by others, they are only disclosed by means of communication be these verbal
or non-verbal. Though we communicate our inner
thoughts – an everyday experience – there is no oneto-one correspondence between our thoughts and
what we communicate. Mental activities and communicative activities are different operations. This
is not to say that they do not influence each other.
They do but not directly on the level of each system’s own operation. As Luhmann (1997, p. 105)
330
puts it: ‘Only consciousness can think (nonetheless
it never can think across to another consciousness)
and only society can communicate’.10
It is noteworthy that this conceptualization of social systems as purely symbolic communication systems necessarily implies that all physical “things”
must be assigned to the environment of the social
system. Thus humans, technical artefacts, the built
environment and all non-human biological systems
(other species, ecosystems) and the earth system
as a whole are elements of the environment of the
evolving social systems. Based on this understanding of social systems Luhmann develops a concept
of socio-cultural evolution which I briefly consider
in the following section.
What is the unit of variation in cultural evolution, and what are the sources of variation? In accordance with the general principles of evolution the
unit of variation must be internal, in other words, an
element of the evolving system and not of its environment. Furthermore, the unit of variation must be
capable of reproduction. Luhmann suggests communication as unit of variation in socio-cultural
evolution. How then is variation created within
the communication system? Following Luhmann’s
specification of communication as a three-fold selection process of information, message, and comprehension (Luhmann 1984), we can distinguish
between three types of variation.
With regard to information, the source of variation would be an unexpected or new content in the
meaning (Sinn) of communication. With regard to
the message, variations of dissemination media are
essential: language, scripture, printing, symbolically generalized communication media (such as
money or law), and electronic communication media. According to Luhmann, the most fundamental
mechanism of variation arises from the implicit yes/
no codification of lingual communication (Luhmann
1997). This yes/no codification of language implies
that comprehension can have two forms: accepting
or rejecting a certain information and message.11
A single communication can only impose small
variation. This would suggest that cultural evolution
is a slow process. Cultural evolution often occurs,
however, at a rapid pace, and is also cumulative, as
has been argued especially by Richerson and Boyd
(2005). Consequently we must ask, when and under
which conditions does such acceleration and accumulation occur? Rapid cultural evolution generally
requires that variations reinforce each other, that is,
enhance their chances of being positively selected.
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THE PROBABILITY OF THE IMPROBABLE
Cumulative evolution requires evolutionary variants
that are stabilized enough to serve as the condition
of the possibility for further variants to be selected
in the future. For Luhmann, the important enhancers
of both pace and accumulation of cultural evolution
are the major innovations in dissemination media:
scripture, printing, symbolically generalized communication media (such as money or law), and electronic communication media (Luhmann 1997). He
calls these enhancers evolutionary achievements.12
Having re-specified the principles of variation
and reproduction for social systems, we need to address the limiting environmental factors which can
explain that selection is a necessity. For Luhmann,
there exists no environmental selection in cultural
evolution, selection is always internal to the system.
Selection, according to Luhmann, refers to the structures of the social system. Social structures are relatively inert mutual expectations, which themselves
have been established by selection. Thus social
structures are the result of previous selections and at
the same time catalysts for future selections.
A socio-ecological reframing
How can such a theoretical design possibly inform a
theory of society–nature coevolution and be utilized
in sustainability science? At first glance it cannot at
all, as Luhmann’s theory incorporates two fundamental barriers for its application in a coevolutionary
sustainability science. The first barrier is that there
cannot be any direct energetic or material exchanges
between a society that is conceptualized as a purely
symbolic system and its biophysical environment.13
The second barrier is that there cannot even be an indirect interaction via environmental selection pressures, if only internal selection is allowed.
On closer inspection, however, these theoretical elements are not as fundamental as they initially
seem. Luhmann’s equation of society with the all
encompassing communication system is essentially
a terminological decision. Even within Luhmann’s
theory it is not necessary, from the point of view of
theoretical rigor, to reject any idea of environmental
selection in cultural evolution as no system can reproduce itself without environment and no system can
reproduce itself in any environment.14 The notion of
operational closure does not imply that the system is
autarcic or cannot be influenced by its environment.
The theory of operationally closed systems rather
implies that the environment does not directly interfere at the level of the systems’ internal operation,
although it may exert an influence indirectly. That is,
at the core of the theory of operationally closed systems lies a paradox. These systems are closed at the
level of their constitutive operation, and at the same
time they are open, but only in very selective ways.15
Take for instance the emergence of discourses
about climate change as an illustration of this dialectic of closure and openness in social systems and
their subsystems. The climate does not speak to us.
Society would not know about climate change had
not certain climate phenomena resonated in parts
of society, and had not these parts of society started
communicating about it. The first resonance of a
possible human induced climate change occurred
in parts of the science system, more precisely in atmospheric chemistry. This discipline had the means
to observe the climate and detect changes. That this
was done in the first place, how it was done, how
it was further communicated, and how the new insights were received, were not determined by the
climate, but by the means and interests of the science system – in other words, according to the rules
(programmes) of the science system. Once the topic
of climate change turned into a political issue, it was
picked up – as a topic – by other reference systems,
the policy and economic systems. From that point on
we could observe how the topic of climate change
was treated within the policy and the economic system and that it was treated differently, that is, according to the means and interests of those systems,
which are fundamentally different from those of the
science system. The science system says anthropogenic climate change is real, and impacts on the
Earth system are non-linear and will be unmanageable above a certain increase in global mean temperature. The economic system asks: what is the cost
benefit ratio between mitigation and adaptation? The
policy system asks: how can I maximize my chances
for re-election? This illustrates how the functional
differentiation of our modern societies leads to operational closure within certain subsystems of society.
As a consequence a variation which was positively
selected in one specific communication system (science in our case) will not necessarily be selected
in another system (policy or economy) as well. As
Luhmann argued in Ecological Communication,
this explains the difficulties modern societies have
to adequately deal with problems, such as environmental problems, that cross-cut the competencies of
different function systems (Luhmann 1989).16
Luhmann’s analysis reveals some of the important internal criteria for positive or negative selec-
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HELGA WEISZ
tion of communicative variations and shows how
fundamentally different these criteria can be in the
various sub-systems of society. However, this does
not necessarily eliminate the theoretical possibility
of the existence of environmental selection in cultural evolution. In the same sense as Darwin needed
the observation that more individuals are born than
can possibly survive for his concept of natural selection, a concept of cultural evolution needs to demonstrate why societies cannot just pick up and further
process any communication it produces internally.
The next question therefore is: what are the environmental conditions that shape cultural evolution and
how did they change in the course of history?
From a sustainability point of view, one would
seek changes in the physical environment as major
selective sources. These changes may be natural,
such as the ice ages, or man made, such as the invention of agriculture, the emergence of cities, the
technological inventions of modern times, or climate change due to the emergence of an industrial
metabolism.
Such an understanding of the environment as
major force in cultural evolution should not be confused with older concepts claiming a deterministic
relation between social and environmental structures. A coevolutionary understanding rather claims
that changes in environmental boundary conditions
constitute important conditions of the possibility
for the emergence of new variations, their selection
and accumulation in the evolving social system.17
The environment does not determine specific variations or specific selections, nor does it guarantee
the long-term sustainability of the social system.
Conceptually this is a direct consequence of regarding the social system as operationally closed and
self-referential.
From a socio-ecological point of view we need
to know how the evolving communication system is
connected to its biophysical environment. In a classical Darwinian framework this means to ask what
the limiting environmental factors are for cultural
evolution, and how they changed over time. The
evolving social system, we must keep in mind, is
defined here as an operationally closed communication system. This means that humans are in the
environment of this system. Therefore a Malthusian
interpretation of these limiting factors – food availability limiting population growth – is not applicable
as cultural evolution does not equal the biological
evolution of the human population.
This is not to deny that humans are essential for
332
communication. They are indeed the most important
element in the environment of any communication
system. Without humans there can be no communication.18 However, this does not imply that humans
are part of the communication system. It only means
that humans are as essential to the communication
system as for instance a specific chemical composition of the atmosphere, a specific temperature range, a
specific gravity, photosynthesis, and many other earth
dynamics are essential to humans as environmental
conditions without which humans could not exist.
Nonetheless neither the chemical composition of the
atmosphere, nor the environmental temperature, nor
gravity, nor plants are regarded as elements of humans.
Back to the question what constitutes environmental limitations to the reproduction of communicative variants. I suggest considering time and space
as the fundamental limiting factors in cultural evolution. At first glance this seems to be a very general
statement as time and space are limiting factors for
pretty much everything. What justifies regarding
time and space as the most fundamental limiting
factors of a coevolutionary understanding of society and nature are the following observations. First,
in all human history the theoretical possibilities to
communicate, be it in terms of who with whom, or
in terms of what topics emerge and how they are selected, have been tremendously larger than actually
realized communications.
Second, the total amount of communication
has increased not in proportion to the size of the
population but hyper-exponentially. Quantifying
the amount of communication is certainly difficult.
However, if only the storage space that is needed
to store information (measured in bytes) is considered, growth rates have become enormous. UC
Berkeley’s School of Information Management and
Systems estimated a 30 per cent annual growth in
stored information worldwide between 1999 and
2002 (Lyman and Varian 2003). This surge in communication is attributable to two factors: changes
in societal time allocation and changes in the time
required to overcome spatial distances, which previously functioned as communication barriers.
Communication requires time, or more precisely, it requires human life time. Human time budgets
are limited, the number of people one person can
possibly get in touch with during his or her lifetime
is also limited. The number of persons living on this
planet is limited at any given point in time. In addition, communication requires that humans connect with one another. For the better part of human
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Geografiska Annaler: Series B © 2011 Swedish Society for Anthropology and Geography
THE PROBABILITY OF THE IMPROBABLE
history communication meant to overcome spatial
distances, which also takes time, so the spatial distribution of people and the time required to overcome them must have been a limiting factor for
communication as well. In this sense time and space
constitute environmental limitations to cultural evolution. Understanding the conditions of the possibility of these changes provides a key to understanding
­society–nature coevolution.
Within geography it was especially Torsten
Hägerstrand who gave time and space a similar fundamental explanatory position to understand the interactions between society and nature. Hägerstrand’s
analytical focus was on humans (people), and he
suggested taking a few fundamental space–time
constraints seriously into account, in order to understand society–nature interactions. He stressed
the physical necessity of exclusive space occupation that all things, including humans, require at any
given time. He stresses that time limitation makes
nearness essential, and further the partial exclusiveness of time occupation. You cannot be in two places
at the same time. ‘The finitude of space and time
within the local configuration’, Hägerstrand (1976,
p. 333) says, ‘causes delay, distortions or extinctions of processes. Seen in this perspective the world
seems like a garden where a thousand seeds give rise
to only a hundred flowers’. This is a genuinely evolutionary perspective.
In a similar vein Ester Boserup’s (1965, 1981)
work can be interpreted as an early attempt in this
direction, in particular her analyses of the conditions
of technology development in (mostly preindustrial) agriculture in terms of return on human time
investment, population density, and transportation
barriers. A coevolutionary theory could thus take
its starting point from Hägerstrand’s time–space
geography, from Boserup’s insights on the role of
population density for technology development and
Luhmann’s theory of social systems and his analysis of evolutionary achievements in communication
dissemination modes (scripting, printing, symbolically generalized communication media and electronic communication). But these elements must be
tied together, and here I come back to a socio-metabolic perspective on coevolution.
Society–nature coevolution
I began this article with a socio-metabolic interpretation of the transition from an agrarian society to an industrial society. The resulting industrial metabolism
enabled societies to escape the Malthusian trap, to
raise global population numbers by a factor of nine
since 1750, and to increase the per capita energy and
material use in the industrialized world by a factor of
four to six above agrarian levels.
These changes in the boundary conditions of
cultural evolution are themselves results of cultural
evolution. This is not specific for cultural evolution
but can be regarded as a general property of evolution. In biological evolution the emergence of
oxygenic photosynthesis in cyanobacteria, some 2.8
billion years ago, is a case in point. Their continued
photosynthetic activity enriched the earth’s atmosphere with oxygen, a highly toxic substance for organisms at that time. This changed dramatically the
environmental conditions for all future life forms
and can in fact be seen as a major crisis in the history of biological evolution. Eventually, though, the
initially toxic oxygenic atmosphere was the condition of creating the possibility of an unprecedented
explosion of biodiversity and the evolution of all
higher animal life forms, including ourselves, who
do not just tolerate oxygen but decisively need it for
our metabolism.
The above specifications of evolution provide a
perspective on evolution as a systems phenomenon
that necessarily occurs if certain conditions are met.
We identified two types of systems that are capable of
evolution: biological systems (more precisely populations integrated by genetic recombination), and
communication systems in the sense of Luhmann.
But what exactly coevolves? Adopting the term
culture for Luhmann’s social system (Weisz et al.
2001), we may argue that human populations evolve
with their cultural systems. In the course of history, other non-human populations increasingly coevolved with human populations and culture, crops,
livestock, pests, pathogenic germs, and so forth. The
term society–nature coevolution is not totally consistent since in socio-ecological understanding we
would not equate society with a communication system (Fischer-Kowalski and Weisz 2005), nor is all
of “nature” evolving. The expression gene–culture
coevolution coined by Lumsden and Wilson (1981)
appears to be more adequate, but is also not fully
convincing. In our understanding genes are the unit
of variation and not the unit of evolution, which is
the population. Moreover, Lumsden and Wilson’s
proposal established a research tradition employing
fundamentally different assumptions and questions
to the ones employed here. We therefore keep the
term society–nature coevolution.
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Geografiska Annaler: Series B © 2011 Swedish Society for Anthropology and Geography
333
HELGA WEISZ
Coevolution takes place where different evolving systems act as relevant environment for each
other and thereby represent mutually essential
boundary conditions for their evolution. Thus, coevolving systems might be conceived of as being
structurally coupled.
How might this be specified for society–nature
coevolution? Let us reconsider human time and
time–space integration as the fundamental limiting
conditions for cultural evolution. Concerning time
the question then would be: what determines and
changes social time allocation? If we compare for
example agrarian society with modern industrial societies in terms of the structure of the labour force
(as a quantifiable proxy for time allocation), we see
a dramatic transition. In agrarian societies, some 90
per cent of the labour force is occupied by agricultural activities, whereas in modern industrial societies it is between 3 and 5 per cent of the labour force
working in all of the primary sectors (including mining activities).
Two questions arise at this point:
1. What constituted the limiting conditions in agrarian societies that put such stringent constraints
on human time allocation, and how were these
constraints removed in industrial societies? As
historical socio-metabolic studies have shown,
the answer is found in the transition of the energy system from biomass based to fossil fuel
based (Sieferle et al. 2006; Fischer-Kowalski and
Haberl 2007). The main point here is that this industrial metabolism was and remains a necessary
condition allowing the majority of the population
to allocate their time to other economic activities
than physical reproduction.
2. At the same time it is exactly this industrial metabolism that is responsible for the un-­sustainability
of our modern societies and its transition poses the core challenge for future sustainable
development.
In my view, such a coevolutionary perspective illuminates that the environment is not just something
that poses problems to culture. The environment
must be viewed as limiting as well as opening evolutionary pathways for culture. This perspective also
makes intelligible that the very existence of our complex societies depends on countless highly improbable but apparently not impossible achievements in
historical cultural evolution. And this is indeed the
most important and unique property of evolutionary
334
theory in general: to attempt ‘solving the paradox of
the probability of the improbable’ (Luhmann 1997,
p. 413; own translation).
Acknowledgements
Funding by the Austrian Ministry for Science and
Research, programme for Cultural Landscape
Research (KLF) is gratefully acknowledged. I
thank Eric Clark, Marina Fischer-Kowalski, Jürgen
Pelikan, Peter Paul Pichler, Julia Steinberger and
Verena Winiwarter for insightful discussions and
fruitful comments on earlier versions of this article.
Notes
1. The notion social metabolism can be traced back to Marx
(1980) who refers to the labour process as the ‘metabolism between man and nature’.
2. A term coined by Karl Polanyi (1944) to signify the multiple
and in this combination highly improbable circumstances that
needed to coincide for the take-off of the industrial revolution.
3. I use the two terms society and culture largely interchangeably.
This terminological choice adheres to the diverse and controversial intellectual history of theorizing human–environment
relations, which never developed consistent semantics. For a
semantic and conceptual clarification of the terms society and
culture in a socio-ecological context, see Weisz et al. (2001).
4. See, e.g., Luhmann (1982, 1985, 1997); Hodgson (1993, 2005);
Benton (1997); Fracchia and Lewontin (1999); Baldus (2002);
Gilgenmann and Schweitzer (2006).
5. In his textbook about communication Baecker (2005) points
out that in hindsight it seems to have been a fatal idea of Claude
Shannon and Warren Weaver to illustrate their model with a
sender–receiver–channel–transmission model of communication. ‘Since then this model has burdened all forms of language
and communication research with the misleading assumption
that communication is about the transmission of something
identical: that is a message from a sender to a receiver where it
is reproduced. The simple question, who could possibly ascertain this identity, was not posed. Had it been posed one would
have recognized that the identity assumption of communication
cannot be correct. One would have come across how sender,
receiver and possible observer each make their own heads and
tails out of the transmitted message and that only then, via mutual feedback, and error correction each one judges how far he
or she had come with his or her assumptions’ (Baecker 2005,
p. 105, own translation). The irony according to Baecker is that
Shannon’s definition of information as a selection of a specific
message from a larger body of possible messages already was
well suited to conceptualize communication as a recursive error
correction that continuously refers to itself.
6. As pointed out in particular by Riedl, Darwin’s own speculations on the heredity mechanism were clearly Larmarckian
(Riedl and Krall 1994).
7. Spencer-Brown (1997, p. 3).
8. Comprehensive collections of the debate can be found in Sober
(1994) and Hull and Ruse (1998).
9. Considering that the dominant theory of cultural evolution
today, termed dual-inheritance theory (Cavalli-Sforza and
Feldmann 1981; Boyd and Richerson 1989; Richerson and
© The author 2011
Geografiska Annaler: Series B © 2011 Swedish Society for Anthropology and Geography
THE PROBABILITY OF THE IMPROBABLE
Boyd 2005) is rejected by large parts of the humanities and social sciences because of its inadequate understanding of society
or culture (see e.g. Fracchia and Lewontin 1999), this is a crucial point.
10.Own translation from Luhmann (1997, p. 105): ‘Nur ein
Bewusstsein kann denken (aber eben nicht: In ein anderes
Bewusstsein hinüberdenken) und nur die Gesellschaft kann
kommunizieren’.
11.Considering the apparent overflow of information in our modern societies, I am inclined to say the basic variation mechanism of comprehension is not two-valued but three-valued:
accept, reject and ignore. Ignorance as opposed to rejection or
acceptance of a communication can prevent the reproduction of
the communication altogether, or at least have a retarding effect
on cultural evolution, as happened for instance with Mendel’s
foundations of genetics for the evolution of evolutionary
theory.
12. A similar understanding of enhancers of variation in cultural
evolution was suggested by Talcott Parsons (1964), who introduced the idea of evolutionary universals which emerge at the
level of culture and social organization, as opposed to simple
inventions of particular societies.
13.Note that analysing the interaction between society and nature
is considered the core of sustainability science (Kates et al.
2002). Such interaction can only have the form of material and
energy flows, therefore a concept of society to be useful in sustainability science needs to incorporate biophysical structures
which are capable of energetic and materials exchanges with
their environment (Fischer-Kowalski and Weisz 2005).
14.Luhmann himself acknowledged this repeatedly, however he
never further elaborated on this insight. This might have to do
with Luhmann’s strict focus on social elements to explain social
facts which clearly bears the traces of Emile Durkheim, who’s
original endeavour to explain the social as a category sui generis was in fact Luhmann’s first and prime Erkenntnisinteresse
(research goal).
15.Living organisms are the seminal example here. As all biologists learn organisms depend on a persistent bodily closure that
only selectively allows biophysical exchanges with the environment. Their being alive depends as much on the closure as
on the (selective) openness to an – appropriate – environment
with the consequence that both complete isolation from the appropriate environment and inappropriate opening to the environment leads to death.
16.See Simpson et al. (2007) for an illuminating account of
Canada’s climate policy failures since the 1980s, which can
be read as an illustration of Luhmann’s main hypothesis in
Ecological Communication.
17.This is certainly not mainstream thinking in understanding human history as ‘historians like other humans, typically prefer
explanations for the course of human affairs that emphasize
human roles and agency (and do not require forays into the domains of ecology and epistemology)’ (McNeill 2010, p. 7).
18.This is not to deny that non-human species also communicate,
but by doing so they do not reproduce comparable complex
societies.
Helga Weisz
Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research
PO Box 60 12 03
D-14412 Potsdam
Germany
Email: [email protected]
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