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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, © The author 2011 Geografiska Annaler: Series B © 2011 Swedish Society for Anthropology and Geography 325 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 326 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 © The author 2011 Geografiska Annaler: Series B © 2011 Swedish Society for Anthropology and Geography 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 © The author 2011 Geografiska Annaler: Series B © 2011 Swedish Society for Anthropology and Geography 327 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 328 (‘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 © The author 2011 Geografiska Annaler: Series B © 2011 Swedish Society for Anthropology and Geography 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. © The author 2011 Geografiska Annaler: Series B © 2011 Swedish Society for Anthropology and Geography 329 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. © The author 2011 Geografiska Annaler: Series B © 2011 Swedish Society for Anthropology and Geography 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- © The author 2011 Geografiska Annaler: Series B © 2011 Swedish Society for Anthropology and Geography 331 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 © The author 2011 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. © The author 2011 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. 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