In Harmonium

Posted By Marc on August 23, 2009

I got back two days ago from the TRADOC Senior Leaders Conference, and I am still mulling over the implications of what I saw there.  I have a rather peculiar way to “mull things over” – I set part of my mind in semi-autonomous mode and let it pick away at it until something “appears” in my consciousness.  One of these appeared yesterday as I was writing on the SWC thread about the Gettysburg Staff Ride, and I think it is worth pulling it out a bit further.  In particular, what popped into my head was that all through the conference, the term “adaptability” was being misused.

“When I use a word it means just what I choose it to mean – neither more nor less.”

All words have meanings and many have multiple meanings that are context dependent.  As Humpty Dumpty notes “The questions is which is to be master” – the word or the person using it.   One can always reject the mastership of words – Lexical tyranny – but only at the expense of destroying one’s ability to communicate with others using those words.

I mentioned earlier that the term “adaptability” was being misused at the TRADOC SLC, but it wasn’t until yesterday that I was able to articulate what my sub-conscious had pointed out to me.  Throughout the conference, the term was being used as a synonym for “flexibility” while, at the same time, being used in the specific context of training, not education, and in the broader context of evolutionary theory without ever once talking about evolutionary theory.

In effect, a word / concept – “adaptability” – was being taken outside of the context in which it was created, and applied without that context to a situation for which it was not suited without the rest of the context.  This cavalier use of a term / concept has some pretty serious implications since by rejecting the lexical tyranny of the term they have also destroyed much of the utility of the concept.  In effect, they are throwing out the baby with the bathwater without even realizing it.

What is “adaptability”?

In order to understand what the term / concept means, we have to understand where it stands in relationship to the rest of evolutionary theory.

In evolutionary theory, there are three sub-theories:

1. “natural” selection
2. heritability, and
3. mutation

All of these interlinked sub-theories refer to a basic unit which, in biology, is a DNA sequence (aka a gene). When we get into cultural areas, it’s much harder to identify what the unit is, despite Dawkins term “meme“.   Earlier this year, I presented a paper on cultural evolution at the Naval Postgraduate School conference on Culture, Culture Modeling, Counterinsurgency and Conflict Behaviour.  In that paper, I argued that the “basic unit” of analysis had to be a “pattern of information”; I drew that from Wm. Calvin’s excellent article on the topic available here.

“Information”, however, is not a sui generis, stand alone “thing” – it is a property that derives from one or more interlocking systems.  Usually, I would argue that there are a minimum of three interlocking systems involved: a system of “sensing”, a system of interpretation, and a system action. Or, in other words, canm I see it, what does it mean and what should I do about it.  I’ll come back to this later on…

“Natural” selection is a process that produces either positive or negative selection criteria; the criteria either “select for” or “select against” a pattern of information. At least this is the general idea, although tt actually gets much more complex because selection criteria operate in interlinking environments that are often contained within each other. At the socio-cultural level, it is even worse, because we are dealing with selection pressures from multiple, overlapping environments.

Here’s a simple example: military organizations operate in the “field”, in the back end, in the broader political environment and in the social environment. each of these different, overlapping and generally “messy” (i.e. subject to constant change and redefinition) environments produces selection pressures that may well be inverted. In other words, an “pattern of information” 9and actions especially) may be positively selected for in one environment and negatively selected for in another.

“Heritability“, in biological terms, refers to the proportion of characteristics that come from genetic rather than environmental sources. In cultural terms, it refers to “learning” and “training” (i.e. the social part of those “environmental sources”). Basically, if we want a theory of heritability that applies to socio-cultural evolution, then we focus on organizational culture, training and education.  In particular, I have found Andre Abbott’s model of professional tasks in The System of Professions to be a really great model for heritability in socio-cultural settings.

But it’s actually subtler than that, since we are dealing with a frequency distribution (actually a fuzzy set topology, but let’s not get too complex). For example, if you are training a soldier in basic or OCS and you give 1 hour of training to “cultural awareness” and 100 to kinetic operations, which one will they default to? Heritability, in socio-cultural terms, actually requires reinforcement, so the perceptions (sensing), solutions (interpretation and actions) and “problem definitions” (interpretations) will tend to come from the most heavily reinforces part of that training.

“Mutation” is really the study of how change happens in whatever your basic unit of analysis is. Mutations can be beneficial, deadly or neutral depending on the selection pressures involved and the other basic units operating to maintain the organism. In most socio-cultural settings, mutations come about both incrementally as a result of normal operations (“Normal Science” in the Kuhnian sense), via individual “point mutations” (think Road to Damascus conversions), via rapid changes in other environments that now impact the “main” socio-cultural environment of the group (think 9/11….), etc., etc. Many of the socio-cultural mutations, however, are conceived of and constructed by humans (e.g. social movements, new religious movements, revitalization movements, etc., etc.). And some of these constructed mutations are done consciously.

Adaptability, is rooted both in heritability and mutation, and actually refers to the variability or scope of actions available to an organism to survive and prosper in a changing environment. In socio-cultural terms, the more you know and the faster you can flip through your options, the greater amount of adaptability you have. Training, on the other hand, is rooted in the construction of selection pressures that reduce the scope of actions available to an organism.

Could evolutionary theory work for military training?

The short answer is “Yes”.  Indeed, evolutionary theory (actually, neo-Darwinian evolutionary theory), has direct applicability to any large organization and to most socio-cultural processes.  The devil, however, is in the details, and many of those details are extremely antagonistic to the military, often for very good reasons.

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Postscript

Part of this post comes from a post I made at this thread on the Small Wars Council.  I am in the process of writing up a series of papers that I hope to publish as a book on the application of Darwinian neo-evolutionary theory to the study of warfare as an examination of the broader of how it illuminates our (human) construction of ontologies and culture.

Category: Evolutionary Theory
Tags: Evolutionary Theory, TRADOC Senior Leaders Conference