On Fri, 30 Jun 1995, Carl H.A. Dassbach wrote:
> Apparently, I have also `offended' some people in raising a question about
> the term `evolution." These were largely off-hand remarks and I have never
> studied or devoted a great deal of thought to the uses and abuses of the
> concept of evolution. Perhaps, my ignorance is a bliss because I have no
> preconceived notions nor specific body of literature to guide me, only
> logic. Moreover, because I admit to being ignorant about the subtleties, I
> really don't want to engage in a debate about the term Instead, two brief
> observations:
>
> 1. Bruce's clarification/distinction between evolution and teleology is is
> not especially convincing because, on the one hand, everything seems to be
> evolving.
I'm waiting to hear what is on the other hand. Perhaps I left my
argument too soft: to me if the theory is teleological, it is not a sound
evolutionary theory. And obviously not everything evolves, because not
all systems are descendents of prior systems of the same type. To have
evolution, you have to have a unit of evolution -- the evolving system --
that reproduces variably, with survival of descendents depending to some
extent on the (variable) characteristics of the descendents.
I am more accustomed to looking at economic institutions and
looking up at the society in which they are found (where I would argue
long and hard that the institutions evolve, instead of emerging from
resource distributions and individual preferences as mainstream economic
theory would have it); I am not yet sufficiently comfortable looking down
at these individual societies in the context of a world-system to
establish to my own satisfaction whether world-system are evolving in
this sense. I would certainly not be offended by an argument that they
are not evolving. If conditions of inter-societal relations in the absence
of a world-system are conducive to emergence of a world-system, and
conditions in the presence of a world-system are conducive to its
maintenance, one would expect to see world-systems emerge, to be replaced
by others if they are for some reason disrupted, and while the
interacting societies would be evolving, later world-systems need not be
descendents of earlier world-systems. So the question is open.
And, beyond all that, I have not settled to my own satisfaction
whether in _The Long 20th C_ evolution is being used in such a
well-defined way. So there's that as well.
> Moreover, I have a hard time understanding a distinction between
> continuous change and discontinuous change because the former is true by
> definition and the latter is a contradiction in terms.
For discontinuous change, read punctuated evolution (I spoke too
loosely here) where periods of relatively slow rates of change are
interupted by periods of rapid rates of change. If the rapid rates of
change are due to the innovation of a new technical or organizational
technology, for example, comparison of periods before and after the
diffusion of the technology will show different technological 'stages'
when examination of the process of change reveals no sharp breaks.
Virtually,
Bruce McFarling, Knoxville
brmcf@utkux1.utk.edu