The most common way in which flexible, responsive systems of thinking about reality become rigid, dead dogmas/ideologies is by reductionism. Christianity reduced to the Ten Commandments. Class conflict reduced to Marxism. Capitalism reduced to the Invisible Hand. Psychology reduced to behaviorism.
1. Biological Science avoids reductionismAt least, in science, they seem to understand the risk of reductionism. They understand the difference between useful abstractions and dangerous reductionisms, a.k.a., scientisms.
Case in point, the current round of extensions to the basic ideas of natural selection. These extensions add ideas from information theory/complexity and physics/form. That is, biologists are updating the 80 year old Modern Synthesis - the idea that all of biology can be reduced to the DNA in an organism's genome. This update is necessary to defend evolutionary theory from creationists equating an "incomplete" theory with a "wrong" theory.
The whole idea that DNA dictates and the organism obeys is, at this point in scientific history, outmoded. Its more like a mature (as opposed to embryonic) organism signals its genome to manufacture certain molecules or to start certain cell programs (e.g., cell division, apoptosis, heat shock, etc.) as part of the organism's drive to maintain a homeostasis with its environment, i.e., to avoid death.
As for DNA, it is now accepted that there simply isn't enough information available in the genome to dictate all of the structure and behavior of an advanced, multi-cellular organism. Rather, the molecules made by genes interact with each other via complex spatio-temporal gradients and patterns, constrained by the laws of physics and chemistry, to produce forms that depend on both genes and the environment. For example, brain connections are overbuilt, then pruned back during early development, based on signals from the environment.
Today, DNA is being demoted from being synonymous with evolution to being one control system among several others - epigenetic regulation, RNA interference, alternative splicing, horizontal gene transfer by viruses and transposons. Already, forty years ago, it was shown that "evolution" means something completely different in a test tube than in a living cell.
"The only way in which the DNA can be accurately and completely replicated is within the context of a dividing cell; that is to say, it is the cell that reproduces. In a classic experiment, Spiegelman in I967 showed what happens to a molecular replicating system in a test-tube, without any cellular organization around it. The replicating molecules (the nucleic acid templates) require an energy source, building-blocks (i.e. nucleotide bases), and an enzyme to help the polymerization process that is involved in self-copying of the templates. Then away it goes, making more copies of the specific nucleotide sequences that define the initial templates. But the interesting result was that these initial templates did not stay the same; they were not accurately copied. They got shorter and shorter until they reached the minimal size compatible with the sequence retaining self-copying properties. And as they got shorter, the copying process went faster.
So what happened was natural selection in a test-tube: the shorter templates that copied themselves faster become more numerous than the slower, while the larger ones were gradually eliminated. This looks like Darwinian evolution in a test-tube. But the interesting result was that this evolution went one way: towards greater simplicity. Actual evolution tends to go towards greater complexity, species becoming more elaborate in their structure and behaviour, though the process can also go in reverse, towards simplicity. But DNA on its own can go nowhere but towards greater simplicity. In order for evolution of complexity to occur DNA has to be within a cellular context; the whole system evolves as a reproducing unit."
- Brian Goodwin, "How The Leopard Changed Its Spots: The Evolution of Complexity", Phoenix: London, 1994.
Clearly, the boundary conditions outside the cell nucleus affect what the "optimum" pathway for evolution is. If you say that a "cell" contains only one control system (DNA) and is given an infinite amount of energy and raw materials, then fitness is defined as throwing away all the means cells normally have of gathering energy and making raw materials. In a "free lunch" world, who needs farming? In a real world, as opposed to a laboratory test tube, that is suicidal behavior.
2. Reductionism in businessFor the past 30 years, America's business community has been in the grip of such a reductionism. In their case, business has similarly been reduced to nothing more than management (DNA or genotype). The extended phenotype of factories, workers, and infrastructure has been relegated (reduced by dogma) to being nothing but the plodding servants and non-living products of brilliant entrepreneurs, who portray themselves as the innovative genome/DNA of business.
Granted that management is the information infrastructure of business, as DNA is of cells. But business is about more than management. So, we have spent 30 years conducting a "business DNA in a test tube" experiment. And, we have gotten the same result as the biologists.
We have given managers all the money (ATP) they need to concoct whatever business scheme they want. But since they are now rewarded (given ATP) whether or not the schemes are profitable (fit) or not, the incentive to managers is to get rid of every aspect of business that doesn't contribute to generating business SCHEMES at an ever faster rate. (Like manufacturing stuff, instead of contracting it out.) It doesn't matter to CEOs if the schemes work. It only matters that they get an inflated, off-the-top cut from ever more schemes at an ever faster rate.
In pursuit of CEO loot, the genes that code for American factories and machines and workers have been thrown away (outsourced to 3rd world sweatshops). Its a well-understood progression in tech business that once you outsource manufacturing, engineering tends to follow it. Then, the whole business walks away, and all that are left are shares in a foreign company. That's bad news for American workers; but its a paycheck/finders' fee for the CEOs and the Wall St. bankers at each step of the sellout.
As with the test tube DNA, so with American products and American society - they have become ever more simplistic and impoverished. The same products in the same chain stores coast to coast. Our cars are pale copycats of Japanese and Europeans. Our suburbs and our entertainment have become boring (and unsustainable) clones, a caricature of America's golden age in the 1950s. "One size fits nobody" is the order of the day; because it is more profitable to give the consumer what's cheaper instead of what he wants.
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The real problem with this failed experiment in business DNA is its cost to our society. Instead of a few bucks worth of ATP and DNA to do an experiment in a test tube, we have allowed our CEOs and Wall St. gurus to churn through trillions of dollars of our assets, to breakdown our store of factory floor know-how, and to send our manufacturing capacity overseas.
The great, 30 year experiment in trickle-down has proven to be nothing more than an exercise in asset stripping. Today, the assets are stripped, replaced with bullshit paper promissory notes, which have recently lost all credibility. When we are done flushing the real assets of the government down the Fannie Mae/Freddie Mac drain, the Great Looting will come to an end. Because we won't have any more ATP to fuel the pointless, but self-aggrandizing, whirl of CEO schemes.
The only question is: even in the face of abject failure, is the American CEO class capable of admitting it made a gigantic mistake? Speaking as an experimentalist, I would have to say no.
arendt
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