What Will Disappear by 2030?

Cindy Wagner, the future-savvy editor at The Futurist magazine is running a new feature, Disappearing Futures: What Won’t Be Around in 2030? They are looking for around 300 words, a good length for crowdsourced submissions. Email Cindy if you’d like to send in your own. I sent a shorter version of the piece below, considering three things I expect to disappear (or head greatly in that direction) over this timeframe: Endangered Languages, Economic Immigration Barriers, and Mass Fundamentalist Religious Intolerance. Agree or disagree? Let me know in the comments, thanks.

The leading language learning software on the planet. Waiting to be disrupted by something entirely free and crowdsourced, like Wikipedia.

True Wearable wristphone concept, 2007. Someone make this now. Please.

By 2020, the ubiquity and affordability of wearable smartphones (Google glass, wristphones, etc), and the power of the conversational interface (Google Now, etc.) will give enterprising youth everywhere access to “teacherless education,” lifelong learning by talking to their peers and machines. The “killer app” of teacherless education will be learning a developed nations language while learning their own, increasingly from birth. Their wearable will “listen in” as they learn their native language, and deliver the same words in the foreign language, along with images, learning aids, and games that reinforce and test their proficiency, and post their language skill level on global recruiting, collaboration, and microwork networks (LinkedIn, oDesk, etc.). Imagine a Rosetta Stone that’s free, wearable, conversational, and 24/7, and you’re foreseeing what I call Global English. Want to help it emerge faster? Call me, I’ve got a few ideas.

As this linguistic convergence accelerates, perhaps one fourth of the ~6,000 languages spoken today, mostly the 3,000 or so endangered languages, may disappear by 2030, and other less-spoken ethnic languages will continue to lose mindshare, as developed nations languages with the most open cultures increasingly take their place. While we mourn the loss of endangered languages and the minds that speak them, what matters most is making sure their cultural history, values, and semantic complexity are captured in the languages we continue to speak. We’ll also see many more scientific, technical, business, social, and artistic “languages” (knowledge bases) increasingly taught from birth with these amazing learning systems.

A mix of merit-based and humanitarian immigration has always been a key driver of economic and cultural wealth. Politicos may not want it, but the internet will accelerate global virtual immigration.

English, the global language of business today (and much easier to learn than Chinese, it’s closest competitor), should benefit most, bringing English-speaking nations as many as 1 billion new “virtual immigrants” by 2030, growing the total English-language workforce on the order of 50% in two decades, a rate of growth we haven’t seen since Industrial Revolution-era immigration. In the high-bandwidth 2020’s, many economic barriers to participating in the global economy will disappear. Eager underemployed youth anywhere, speaking the same language and increasingly understanding the same global culture, will be able to work with large and small companies everywhere, vastly accelerating global innovation and entrepreneurship in the 2030′s and beyond. That will be an amazing time.

While most youth and adults will likely use machine translation for any contact with outside cultures (certainly the most convenient option), the “death of language learning” predicted by some futurists by the 2030′s simply won’t occur. Indeed, enterprising companies like Open English are accelerating English-language learning today with $1000, yearlong, four-person online classes. Imagine what will happen when this price drops to free, the learning is 24/7, and the AI behind it gets good. Consider further how the parents who push their children to learn a leading foreign language (or two) will give those children both measurably greater economic opportunities and I believe, provably greater collaborative and cognitive fluencies, since learning a foreign language and getting immersion experiences in that culture, even digitally, allows you to better think in, work with, and understand that culture. Although there are as yet no good measures for the semantic size of vocabularies in our languages, (a topic we care about, unlike R.L.G.’s conclusion in the post I’ve linked to) it is well known that leading languages have by far the largest semantic vocabularies by comparison to languages spoken by just a few hundred thousand people. English is often claimed to have a special place in this regard, having absorbed so many words and concepts from other cultures, and with deep technical vocabularies, that some estimate that it has over 1 million words now. Of all the knowledge bases one could easily learn at birth, choice of language(s) seems key. Linguists and cognitive psychologists have argued for decades that language influences thought. What we can all agree on is that semantic complexity influences thought, and that some languages have much more of it than others. It is also true that learning just a tiny percentage (perhaps 2%?) of the words in most languages can give you basic fluency in that language, and we can expect to see a lot more of this kind of polyglot learning of languages in the future.

One day, when we hit the tech singularity (which I’m guessing will be in the 2060′s, and it’s just a guess because acceleration studies doesn’t exist yet as a funded field, we have some waking up still to do) I imagine the AIs will create, and teach us all, a new global language that is a semantic mashup of all the best of our global cultures, even more than our mongrel English, and with a structure that is grammatically easier and phonetically far more efficient (perhaps by using all 100 phonemes we use across all cultures, instead of just the 20 or so in a typical language) than anything that exists today. An Esperanto for the late 21st century. But until that time arrives, what seems obvious to me is that English, the most widely taught foreign language today, will continue to win as the collaboration language of choice in coming decades, just as cities will continue to win over rural areas.  And those who speak in any language will have a much richer ability to interact with all others who use that language.

Now for perhaps the most controversial prediction. As long as global science, technology, free trade, and wealth continue to accelerate, as I expect they will, and our resilience to catastrophes of all types continues to grow, all the major religions and ideologies will grow more ecumenical and secular as well. Mass fundamentalist religious intolerance, still a serious issue today (Islamists of the West, Hindus of Dalits, Christians of gays, etc.) will be decimated in the ambiently intelligent, hyperconnected world of 2030. Specifically, fundamentalist religious movements ability to use economic or other catastrophes to roll back social reforms at national levels, as we saw in the Iranian Revolution in 1979 (there were many reasons for the revolution but reactionary mass religious fundamentalism was a key driver, as I’ve written before), will have disappeared for good, in any nation. Political and religious fundamentalist backlashes within subcultures will always be with us, but we can expect (and hope) they’ll be far more circumscribed, weak, and short-lived in a world of youth who see those views as extremist, arrogant, and counterproductive. Amen!

About the Author: John M. Smart is a technology foresight scholar, educator, speaker, and consultant. President, Acceleration Studies Foundation. Blog: http://EverSmarterWorld.com

Keep Calm and Carry On – Reacting to the Boston Marathon Bombing

I’ve had some deep discussions today about the Boston Marathon bombings with friends. Here’s something I shared with a friend who lives in the Boston area in Massachusetts. His predominant feeling right now is disillusionment. If you’re in the same boat, I hope you find it helpful in some way. Thanks for any feedback.

Friend, I hope this event won’t shake your faith in humanity or in the continued acceleration of global progress, or in our ability to better understand what progress is, and for reasons yet to be discovered, why accelerating progress seems only partly under our control, and partly driven by the amazingly intelligent and self-correcting environment into which we were born.

There are always half of one percent of us who are seriously broken in some way. It is surprising, when you stop to think about it, that majority of us are so strongly against doing such cowardly and terrible things. Almost all violence is rapidly self-limiting. It can be a calculation of fairness, a seeking of justice in the wild. Or a case of beliefs being seriously out of step with reality, or emotions not being sufficiently regulated. Fortunately, for the vast majority of us, our moral sentiments and desire to cooperate are incredibly deep, selected and self-organized over countless previous life cycles. At the same time, our tools and policies for protecting the world system get only better and smarter. We must understand these processes better, and aggressively work to improve them in society and the individual.

The mentally ill, extremists and oligarchs throughout history are a persistently tiny fraction of society. The main effect of mental illness events like this (these particular bombings, irrational as they are, are even more a mental and psychological illness than an extremist/terrorist event, as I see it), aside from their tragic short-term cost, is to grow our global immunity to them in future years. If we learn from them (a critical “if”), they accelerate the emergence of the transparency tools and social development programs that we know is our future, and as long as it is increasingly a bottom-up, citizen-driven transparency and social development process, we gain greater control over both the extremists and the autocrats, our democracy strengthens, and the world gets collectively more intelligent. Imagine, as social and media futurist Alvis Brigis says, if it was ten years in the future and one out of twenty people in that Boston crowd had been wearing Google Glass or an equivalent? (I’m a Glass Explorer, so I’m looking forward to getting an early adopter version of this fantastic new wearable computer and lifelogging tech). They’d all be able to share their recent archives and feeds and it wouldn’t be long before we’d have the perpetrators identities and last public locations.

Mental illness is one issue, but what about oligarchy (government by elites, without representation) and plutocracy (government by the wealthy), and the way such governments breed extremism in the developing world by replacing culture with commercialism, removing self-determination and representation, and inducing cornered cultures to react with Fundamentalism? If increasing political, economic, and social fairness is a clear vector of social progress, how do we keep building it in all our societies in the years ahead?

With regard to the plutocrats, there is good news: our global rich poor divide has never been smaller. It was highest in the 13th century  under Feudalism by several measures, and has slowly decreased ever since. But the problem we face is that in the world’s leading and fastest developing countries inequality seesaws, at first going up as the wealth of new technology revolutions is initially captured by the well-capitalized few, and then later down again as the revolution works its way out to the many, where the maturing and cheapening tech allows disruptive new entrepreneurship on top of the platform, and as new rights and entitlements eventually emerge.

The Finland Phenomenon, a great film on the education reform the US needs to make more self-reliant, innovative, and less fearful citizens.

As Joseph Stiglitz discusses in The Price of Inequality, 2013, we need a certain amount of income inequality to spur innovation, but if we let it get too big, the wealthy and the corporations capture our political machinery, only their interests are represented, and democracy, political reform, and political compromise and moderation die. Due to tech globalization’s great wealth creation, income inequality has grown rapidly in the last 60 years in a handful of nations, in the 1970′s-80′s in the US, UK, and Israel, and in the 1990′s and 2000′s also in rapidly developing countries like China and Brazil (and to a much lower degree, in a few low-inequality countries like Germany and Sweden). In the U.S., asset inequality is now so extreme that just 1% of us own 40% of the nation’s wealth. When our lower and middle classes can no longer find meaningful jobs under constant technological change, while we see other developed nations doing far better with education and job creation, we should not be surprised. We let this happen, by letting our MNCs get larger than governments (instead of splitting them up, as we used to), and by dismantling progressive income and inheritance tax for the wealthy (which last existed seriously in the US in the 1950′s).

To bring this back to the theme of this post, another big price of plutocracy is that our citizens lose the ability to engage with the developing world an empathic and positive-sum way, and our fear grows. We fear technological progress, as the job disruption dumps us into a degraded society that doesn’t keep job creation and retraining as the top priority. We fear the further loss of jobs via outsourcing. We fear immigration, and forget that merit-based immigration is one of the fastest creators of new jobs, science, and industries. We fear other belief systems, and we demonize the other, rather than finding common cause with the moderates in every religion and group. As our political system gets captured by unresponsive and polarized elites (they are wealth driven and fight hard to divide the spoils among themselves), tough social problems like educational reform don’t get done. See The Finland Phenomenon for an excellent example of what we can will one day do to fix our broken educational system, when we finally get the political will. In the meantime, our citizens grow increasingly globally ignorant, inward-focused, and politically apathetic, or polarized and uncompromising like their wealthy masters.

Source: Growing Unequal?, OECD 2008.
Click the graphic for the report.

But, thank the Universe, America is an outlier, with our elites capturing such an outsized portion of the new technological wealth in the last six decades that we are going temporarily against the global trend. We will eventually reverse this and be forced, by accelerating technoeconomic integration, to get back to the global trend. The developed OCED countries as a whole aren’t following our sad course of sixty years of rapidly increasing income inequality and 60% higher levels of income poverty, as the 2008 OECD graphic at right shows. Remember that for the global economy, the absolute size of the inequity gap is still closing since Feudalism. As visionary books like Abundance, 2012, make clear, we can see how extreme global economic and educational poverty will disappear just a few decades hence.  Many of the emerging nations are now in the process of growing their GDP two or three times faster than us. Check out Gapminder.org for some beautiful graphs telling that story. If we’re thinking at all about accelerating tech, we can see a new world of the conversational interface and of teacherless education (to use futurist Thomas Frey’s great phrase) less than ten years hence, where every literate and illiterate child has a wearable waterproof smartphone on their wrist, listening in to what they are learning and teaching them who knows what.

Accelerating technology always causes evolutionary disruption in the first phase. More money goes to the rich and the leading corporations, at first, rather than the rest of society from any new technological and trade revolution, be it industrial, transportation, mass consumption, communications, personal computing, internet, web services, or any other revolution affecting the global marketplace. In the U.S. and a few other countries, these and other revolutions have been the dominant story of the latest 60 years of globalization. In turn, the vast new wealth increase of the MNCs, many of whom now have revenues larger than those of the leading countries, and their unrestrained effects on the developing world, has been a great driver of the clash of cultures and the extremist events we see today. We are pushing citizens in many of these cultures to change at a rate far faster than their reformists are comfortable with, and successive waves of technology innovation are driving them (and us, but always to a far lesser degree) continually out of their livelihoods into a globally wealthier but, in the absence of good retraining and social safety nets, a much more socially uncertain future.

Eventually the global system, being not only evolutionary but also developmental, always gains irreversible new levels of total positive-sum integration, and immunity. For the system as a whole, virtuous cycles are always underway and antifragility will increasingly dominate, if global development is like living systems development, as I believe it is. I hope you can find a way to see and guide the positive changes that will come from this tragic event, as they surely must.

Bruce Schneier, Security Maven

So regarding our emotions and actions around this bombing, with a potential to cause disproportionate fear and immune response, as occurred after 9/11, I think Bruce Schneier’s brief piece in The Atlantic says it best: “Keep Calm and Carry On.” Let’s not overreact, overspend, overregulate. Let’s not fixate on or overgeneralize this rare event itself, or get scared. Let’s continue to work calmly on the social development processes (income equity, representation, education, psych services, job creation, civics, religious tolerance and reform) that will reduce the probability of this happening again, and the transparency processes (primarily bottom up, and secondarily top down cameras, sensors, networks, databases, pattern recognizers, human intelligence) that will increase our ability to find, isolate, and help (or at least, prevent from further harm) the broken folks or individual who did this.

Let’s implement our actions carefully and incrementally, while always insuring their social benefits exceed their costs. Let’s keep calm and carry on.

Leadership of Technological Change (35 min video)

A recent keynote, at USNI’s West Conference, Jan 2013, San Diego, CA. The talk has three parts:

1. A brief intro to evolutionary developmental foresight, a strategically useful theory of change for leaders,

2. A selection of important developmental (highly probable) opportunities, disruptions, and threats I think we can expect in coming years due to accelerating technological change,

3. Strategies for innovation, management, and foresight (IMF) with respect to technological change that can be employed by middle and senior mgmt.

Those who want one quick takeaway may enjoy the last minute, starting at 35:06, which wraps up with a Navy innovation brand vision for an Open Oceans GIS Platform. I think something like this could be a big win-win for Navy global transparency and partnership activities, and with luck, some Navy service leader is out there now championing a variant of this idea.

Hope you like it! As always let me know your thoughts below or by email (johnsmart{at}accelerating{dot}org),  thanks.

Obama’s BRAIN Initiative – A Failure of Mapping Vision

A “clarified” mouse brain at right (lipids removed, all else stays in place). Transparent to optical microscopy, all proteins, receptors, RNAs can be repetitively interrogated with molecular probes. Amazing!

[4/18/2013 Update: The Stanford press release on 4/10 announcing CLARITY, the Karl Deisseroth lab's amazing new method for optically transparent brain mapping, just makes everything I said below even more correct and urgent, from my perspective. Deisseroth is one of the 15 experts on Obama's neuroscience dream team, so I'm sure he advised the White House of its implications. The CLARITY paper was accepted for review at Nature in September 2012. The CLARITY method is like PCR, a multipurpose, revolutionary new research tool that will open up vast new imaging and molecular phenotyping research capabilities in any biological tissue, and in particular the brain. Salk's Terry Sejnowski said: "It's exactly the technique everyone's been waiting for." He told the Associate Press that it will speed up brain anatomy research by "10 to 100 times."

And yet Obama's team still proposed just $100M in funding for brain mapping for the first year. That's simply ridiculous. Please, America, wake up! It's time to spend some real money on neuroscience and bust humanity out of its ignorance. Stop being scared of how much better things will soon be, once we've cracked the riddles of neural information processing. Someone also needs to give Deisseroth a serious prize or two. Optogenetics and CLARITY, both out of his lab, are each profoundly important biological sciences breakthroughs.]

This post goes in my deviants category, as it is about someone who I believe has made an important but correctable mistake, and who should therefore be called out and (in this case gently) reproved, so they might act better in the future.

Obama’s BRAIN (Brain Research through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies) Initiative, announced today, concerns what is arguably the most important scientific project we humans are doing today: figuring out how higher biological intelligence works, by using new tools to explore and map it at all relevant resolutions. Neuroscientists have developed powerful new optogenetics tools for monitoring neural action in vivo at molecular, cellular and circuit levels  (activity maps). There are also new tools for the automated mapping of synaptic connections (connectomics maps) in chemically preserved brains, tools that led Ken Hayworth and I to co-found the Brain Preservation Foundation. Many tools are still to be developed, but several are already proven, they just need funding to use them to build activity and connectomics maps and conduct more experiments that tell us what’s going on in the brain. Brain mapping has many potential benefits for science and medicine, but its greatest promise, in my opinion, is that it will allow us to improve our models of intelligence in our much faster and eventually far more capable electronic systems.

Maps matter for many reasons, one being that some of the brain’s circuit structure and function will turn out to be highly similar from brain to brain (developmental) and some will be unpredictably different (sometimes called “evolutionary” or “Darwinian” differences). Understanding the developmental parts of the brain, and how they constrain and enable the evolutionary parts, will get us much farther down the road of building self-improving artificial intelligences. Activity and connectomics maps, and a few other new tools for monitoring neural activity at molecular scale will finally allow us to uncover the neural coding system, the ways networks of neurons store short and long term information in their association patterns and strengths. Having these maps and other monitoring tools will of course provide many medical and neuroscientific benefits, and these can be sold most easily to the general public, but the intelligence benefit for science and society, via advances in computational neuroscience and machine learning may quickly become the most important for us.

Obama hinted in his State of the Union address in February that he wanted to see America’s brain-mapping and related neuroscience efforts  “reach level of research and development not seen since the height of the Space Race.”  But in his announcement today he has committed just $100M to the project for its first year budget. $100M! And the money committed so far is a hodge-podge that is not project or map focused. Consider that Europe’s Human Brain Project just got $1.3B committed from the EU for the next ten years, even though that project is doing far less critical, lower-resolution simulation work that will very likely have a poorer payoff. The Europeans, at least, are putting their money where their mouth is, and focusing on a big project. Our effort is, unfortunately, a very lame start. Yes, the Human Genome Project started with the same small seed funding the first year. But that was when genomics was untested, proteomics a dream, and understanding and mapping the brain still largely unreachable. We’re way beyond that now. We know how important this is. It’s time to match real funds with the rhetoric.

The scientists involved in the BRAIN initiative know we’ll need at least $3B to make major discoveries with activity maps alone, and this estimate doesn’t even include synapse-level connectomics maps, which deserve a few billion as well, if we really want to figure out the neural coding language. $5B is not a lot of money for the incredible intellectual advances we can expect. This is a whole new domain of neuroscience we are opening up. To put this in perspective, we are presently spending $85 billion per month on QE3. Obama cobbled this $100M together by redirecting existing funds in NIH, DARPA, and NSF budgets, so it isn’t even new money, it’s just reclassified R&D. An NIH working group has been designated to develop a multi-year plan with cost estimates by June 2014, and Obama has fast tracked the group by asking for an interim report by fall 2013. But its still quite unclear what the goals of the project are, and whether connectomics maps will even play a role.  With regard to connectomics maps, we are not talking about the misnamed “Human Connectome Project”, which is actually just a Projectome Project (a map of white matter axons, not synapses). We are talking about a real synapse-level connectome. If they pass on funding at least a representative subset of synapse-level connectomics maps, that will be a major failure of nerve.

Isn’t $100M a great start for Year 1? Not in my book. I think it is reasonable, for a project of this potential benefit, to expect us to start with a level of finding that is ten times more, at least a billion dollars up front, and a commitment to seek at least a billion a year for the next ten years. That’s enough to influence more folks going into the field, and this project is worth every dollar. We should and can demand a lot more from this second term president, particularly one who understands science and tech the way he does. Obama has committed to a commission to study bioethical issues related to the project (a concession to conservatives perhaps), but so far his “dream team” of 15 neuroscientists have not committed to connectomics maps, or to a massive push to crack the neural coding algorithms. Perhaps they will, but given the vagueness of today’s announcement, it’s quite possible we will miss a very important chance to make this a well-defined project, and prioritize what matters most.

Perhaps what’s needed next is an open letter, by a number of leading neuroscientists, about immense social promise of these new brain mapping and research technologies, and a statement of the likely benefits to come if we spend big on them now. Something like the Einstein-Szilard letter to Franklin D. Roosevelt, which helped launch the Manhattan Project, but this letter would be public, and benefits-driven, rather than private, and dangers-driven. The Manhattan Project cost roughly $26 billion in 2013 dollars. That’s the scale, give or take ten billion, at which brain sciences investment today would make a profound difference to the future of humanity.

As just one example of a health-focused bill we could all get behind, starting now, would be a ten year, ten billion dollar effort focused on preventing or delaying Alzheimer’s and normal age-related memory loss, which we know needs more basic research if we are to solve this problem in our lifetimes. Such a bill could easily include a commitment to five billion dollars of brain mapping over the decade, and a specific push to understand learning and memory and crack the neural coding algorithms. Understanding normal maps, seeing how maps change in memory loss, and how the brain compensates via neuroplasticity, would be huge advances for medical science and therapy. I recommend reading Norman Doidge, in The Brain that Changes Itself, 2007,  for fantastic and motivating examples of how resilient our brains can be to memory loss and damage.

Ultimately, as readers of this blog know, whether second-term American politicians have the courage to say it publicly or not yet, I think smarter machines, not more 20th century jobs, have become the primary wealth creator, so that’s where our thoughts should go first, as we look for ways to improve our lot. I think it’s time we got serious as a species about realizing what kind of progress the universe has engaged us in. We are here to use our wits and works to become something greater than ourselves. Our highest role appears to be to take what the universe has done with us and make something even smarter, more ethical, more productive, and more resilient as our progeny. This is what civilization has been about, since the birth of technology, as I see it.

Want to let the Obama administration know your thoughts on making Brain Mapping, including connectomics maps, a top funding priority? You can send a brief email to the White House by using this form, as I have. Thanks.

Mankind Rising: Why Evolutionary Developmentalism Will Inherit the Future

Evo Devo Universe – Exploring Models of Universal Evolution and Development

What is evolutionary development (“evo devo”)? It is a minority view of change in science, business, policy, foresight and philosophy today, a simultaneous application of both evolutionary and developmental thinking to the universe and its replicating subsystems. It is derived from evo-devo biology, a view of biological change that is redefining our thinking about evolution and development. As a big picture perspective on complex systems, I think evo devo models will be critical to understanding our past, present, and future. The sixty-some scholars at Evo Devo Universe, an interdisciplinary community I co-founded with philosopher Clement Vidal in 2008, are interested in arguing, critiquing and testing evolutionary and developmental models of the universe and its subsystems, and exploring their variations and implications.

Whatever else our universe is, and allowing that there are physical mysteries, like dark matter, dark energy, the substructure of quarks, and the nature of black holes still to be uncovered, reasonable analysis suggests that it is both evolutionary and developmental, or “evo devo”. Like a living organism, it undergoes both experimental, stochastic, divergent, and unpredictable change, a process we can call evolution , and at the same time, programmed, convergent, conservative, and predictable change, a process we can call development. Evo devo thinking is practiced by any who realize that parts of our future are unpredictable and creative, while other parts are predictable and conservative, and that in the universe, as in life, both processes are always operating at the same time.

Like living organisms, our universe may have a developmental life cycle.

Our universe builds intelligence in a developmental hierarchy as it unfolds, from physics, to chemistry, to biology, to biominds, to postbiological intelligence. As physicists like Lee Smolin (The Life of the Cosmos, 1999) have argued, our universe may also be chained to a developmental life cycle, like a living organism. Since almost every interesting complex system we know of within the universe, from solar systems to cells, undergoes some form of replication, inheritance, variation, and selection to build its complexity, it is parsimonious (conceptually the simplest model) to suspect this is how the universe built its complexity as well, within a still poorly understood environment that physicists call the multiverse.

An evo devo universe answers theologian William Paley’s famous watchmaker argument, that only a God could have designed our planet’s breathtaking complexity, with the observation that any physical system that has both evolutionary  (variation) and developmental (replication, inheritance) features, and operates in a selective environment, will self-organize its own adaptive complexity as replication proceeds. Consider how replicating stars have advanced from the primitive Population III stars to the far more complex Population I solar systems, like our Sun and its complex planets, over galactic time. Replicating evo devo chemicals built up from nucleic acids to cells, over billions of years. Replicating evo devo cells created multicellular life with nervous systems,  again over billions of years.  Replicating evo devo nervous systems forged hominids, over roughly 500 million years. Replicating languages, ideas, and behaviors in hominid brains birthed nonbiological computing systems, over something like 5 million years. Now computing and robotics systems, whose replication is presently aided by human culture, are soon (within the next few decades, it seems) going to be able to replicate, evolve, and develop autonomously. As much as some might find comfort in believing in a God who designed our universe, it is perhaps even more comforting to believe, tentatively and conditionally, in the history and abilities of this evolutionary and developmental  self-organization process itself. Evo devo processes have apparently created both matter and mind, and have been astonishingly resilient to generating complexity and intelligence at ever-accelerating rates. These processes may even transcend our universe, and may have determined the first replicator, if such a thing exists. Then again, perhaps our physics and information theory will never reach back that far, and such knowledge may forever remain metaphysics. In the meantime we can say that Big History, the science story of the universe so far, is sufficiently awe inspiring, humbling, useful, and hopeful to give us guidance, once we place it in an evo devo frame. As we’ll suggest, we now know enough about evolution and development at the universal scale to begin relating these processes to our own lives, and most interestingly, to ask how we can make our values and goals more consistent with universal processes.

As our universe grows islands of accelerating local order and intelligence in a sea of ever-increasing entropy, physics tells us this process cannot continue forever. The universe’s “body” is aging, and will end in either heat death, or a big rip, or both. If our universe is indeed a replicating complex adaptive system that engages in both evolution and development, as it grows older it must package its intelligence into some kind of reproductive system, so it’s complexity can survive its death and begin again. Developmental models thus argue that intelligent civilizations throughout the universe are part of that reproductive system – protecting our complexity and ultimately reproducing the universe and further improving the intelligence it contains. In other words, growing, protecting, and reproducing personal, family, social, and universal intelligence may be the evolutionary developmental purpose of all intelligent beings, to the greatest extent that they are able.

Charles Darwin, On the Origin of Species, 1859

Beginning in 1859, Charles Darwin helped us to clearly see evolutionism in living systems, for the first time. Discovering that humanity was an incremental, experimental product of the natural world was a revolutionary advance over our intellectually passive, antirational and humanocentric religious beliefs. But until we also understand and accept developmentalism, recognizing that the universe not only evolves but develops, the purpose and values of the universe, and our place in it will remain high mysteries about which science has little of interest to say. Our science will remain infantile, descriptive without also being prescriptive, and unable to deeply inform our morality and politics. That must and will change in coming decades.

Curiosity – A Discover Channel TV Series

As an example of where we are today, I just watched a Discovery Channel program on evolution, Mankind Rising, available for $1.99 at YouTube.  It is Season 2, Episode 8 of Curiosity a new educational television series launched by Discovery founder and chairman John Hendricks. Curiosity is a five-year, multi-million dollar initiative to tackle fundamental questions and mysteries of science, technology, and society, in sixty episodes. There is also a commendable Curiosity initiative in American K-12 schools, to use the show to increase our children’s engagement in STEM education.

Mankind Rising – Season 2, Episode 8 of Curiosity

Mankind Rising considers the question “How did we get here?” It tells the journey of humanity from the cooling of life’s nursery, Earth, 4 billion years ago, and the emergence of the first cell 3.8 billion years ago, to Homo erectus, anatomically modern humans, 1.8 million years ago. It does this in one 43 minute time-lapsed computer animation, the first time our biological history has received such a treatment, as far as I know. The animation is primitive, but it holds your interest enough to follow the story. And what an amazing story it is.  We see a lovely visualization of the Phylogenetic hypothesis, which proposes that human hiccups are a holdover from our amphibian ancestry, when we gulped air at the surface across our gills, which are now vestigial (think of pharyngeal pouches in human embryos), before we grew lungs. Human babies do a lot of gulping-hiccuping both in utero and when born prematurely, and both amphibian gill-gulping and human hiccups are stopped by elevated carbon dioxide, hence the folk remedy to breathe into a bag to stop them.

We also get to see the rise of the first tool users, Homo habilis, 4 million years ago, in a dramatic sequence where an early human strikes one rock against another and is fascinated to discover a sharp rock in his hands. H. habilis’ ability to hold sharp rocks and clubs in their hands, and use them imitatively in groups to defend against other animals was perhaps the original human event. The best definition of humanity, in my opinion, is any species that gains the ability to use technology creatively and socially to continually turn themselves into something more than their biological selves. We inevitably become a species with both greater mind (rationality, intellect) and greater heart (emotion, empathy, love), two core kinds of intelligence. I would predict the first collaborative rock-users on any Earth-like planet must soon thereafter become its dominant species, as there are so many paths to further adaptiveness from the powerful developmental duo of creative tool use and socially imitative behavior.

Homo habilis, perhaps the first persistence hunters.

One clever thing that the first socially-adept rock- and club-holding animals on any Earth-like planet gain access to is pack hunting (and if good at sweating,  persistence hunting). Learning these two skills may have doubled our brain size by giving us our first reliable access to meat, a very high-energy fuel source. We may have begun with pack hunting by ambush, which chimpanzees do today, and then graduated to persistence hunting, or running down our prey. We primates sweat across our entire bodies, not just through our mouths like other mammals. Humans have developed our sweating and cooling ability the best of all primates by far. As a result, two or three of us can run to heat exhaustion any animals that can’t sweat, if we hunt them in the mid-day sun.  Some people persistence hunt even today, as seen in this seven minute Life on Earth clip of San Bushmen running down a Kudu antelope in the Kalahari desert. Mankind Rising ends with Homo erectus (“human upright”), possibly the first language-using humans, 1.8 million years ago. We don’t yet have fossil evidence their larynx was anatomically modern, but there are indirect arguments.  Language, both a form of socially imitative behavior and a fundamental tool for information encoding and processing, was very likely the final technology needed to push our species from the animal to the human level.

In Evolutionism, the Universe is a Massive Set of Random Events, Randomly Interacting.

Unfortunately, there are serious shortcomings to Mankind Rising as an educational device. The show’s narrative, and the theory it represents, are the standard one-sided, dogmatically-presented story of life’s evolution, with no hint of life’s development. As a result, it treats humanity’s history as one big series of unpredictable accidents. This is the perspective of universal evolutionism, also called “Universal Darwinism” ”, which considers random selection to be the only process in universal change, ignoring the possibility of universal development. In evolutionism, all the great emergence events are told as happening randomly and contingently. The show even makes the extreme claim that life itself emerged “against the laws of probability.” The emergence of humanlike animals is also presented as a stroke of blind luck, because the K-T meteorite wiped out our predators, the dinosaurs. All of this is true in part, only from one set of perspectives, that of the individual, organism, or individual event. In other words this story, and evolutionism in general, is a dangerously incomplete half-truth.

When we look at the same events from the perspective of the universal system, the environment, or distributions of events over time, we can easily argue that many particular forms and functions appear physically predetermined to emerge. Consider two genetically identical biological twins, or two snowflakes. Most of what happens to them up close, at the molecular scale, is randomly, contingently, unpredictably different. The microstructure of all the twin’s organs, including their brain, fingerprints, and many other molecular features are as different as the designs on two snowflakes. But look at them from across the room, taking a system or environmental perspective, and you see that they achieve many of the same developmental endpoints over time. The twins have the same body and facial structure and many of the same personality traits, constrained by the organism’s developmental genes and the shared environment. The snowflake’s hexagonal structure is developmentally predetermined, constrained by the way water forms hydrogen bonds as it freezes.

Just like biological development, universal development happens because of the special initial conditions (physical laws, or “genes”) of our universe, the time constancy and environmental sameness (isotropy) of some physical law throughout the universe/system/environment, and the apparent commonness (ubiquity) of Earth-like planets in our universe, a suspicion that will hopefully be proven by astrobiologists in coming years. Examples of developmental processes and structures are easy to propose. We can see developmental physics in the motions of the planets, which are highly future-predictable, as Isaac Newton discovered. Other physical processes, such as the production of black holes in general relativity, the acceleration of entropy production, and of complexification in special locations, also appear highly predictable and universal. Other physics by contrast, such as nonlinear dynamics and quantum physics, looks highly evolutionary and unpredictable. As we move up the complexity hierarchy from physics to chemistry to biology, to society, our list of potential evolutionary and developmental forms and processes rapidly grows.

In Developmentalism, Certain Universal Forms and Functions are Statistically Fated to Emerge, as in Biological Development

Convergent form and function in placental and marsupial mammals – a famous example of convergent evolution, or better, convergent evolutionary development.

Other examples of inevitable, ubiquitous developments in our universe may include organic chemistry as the only easy path to complex molecular evo devo, iron-core, watery planets with carbon and nitrogen cycles and plate tectonics, and replicating nucleic acids, lipid membranes, amino acids, and proteins as the only easy path to cells, oxidative phosphorylation redox chemistry as the only easy path to high-energy chemical life, multicellular organisms, bilateral symmetry, eyes, skeletons, armor, jointed limbs, land colonization, wings, opposable thumbs, brains, language, social intelligence, written language, math, science, and various technology archetypes, from sharp rocks and clubs to levers, wheels, electricity, and computers. These potentially universal forms and functions may be destined to emerge, because of the particular initial conditions and laws of the universe in which evolution is occurring, and each are destined to become optimal or dominant, for their time, in environments in which accelerating complexification and intelligence growth are occurring.

On Earth, we have seen a number of these forms, such as eyes, emerge and persist independently in various separate evolutionary lineages and environments. Independent emergence, convergence, and optimization or dominance of developmental forms and processes is one good way to separate them from the much larger set of ongoing evolutionary experiments. Developmental forms and functions are those that will be more adaptive at each particular stage of environmental complexity, in more contexts and species. Think of two eyes for a predator, over three or one eye. Or four wheels for a car, over three or more than four wheels. Or all the body form and function types that converged in placental and marsupial mammals. Australia separated early from the other continents, yet produced many similar mammal types via marsupials, plus a few new ones, like the kangaroo. This is a classic example of convergent evolution, or more accurately, convergent evolutionary development, when we examine biological change from the planet and universe’s perspective.

Evolution is destined to randomly, contingently, and creatively but inevitably discover these optimal developmental forms and functions, in most environments. For more on evolutionary developmentalism, feel free to read my 50-page precis, Evo Devo Universe?, 2008, and let me know your thoughts. To see one place where evo devo theory may eventually lead us, you might also enjoy my 12-page paper, The Transcension Hypothesis, 2012, which argues that black holes are uniquely strong attractors for the future of intelligent life throughout the universe.

Would Raptors Have Led Inevitably to Dinosaur Humanoids (Dinosauroids), if the K-T Meteorite Hadn’t Hit 65 Mya? That is the Dinosauroid Hypothesis, a Developmentalist Proposal.

As another example ignored by the show, several evolutionary developmentalists have independently proposed that our very-easy-to-create-yet-general-purpose  “humanoid form”, a bilaterally symmetric bipedal tetrapod with two eyes and two opposable thumbs, is a very likely outcome for all biological intelligences that first achieve our level of sophistication on all Earth-like planets. If we saw such “early” alien intelligences from across a dimly lit room, if they somehow had access to a way to reach us very quickly, before they turned postbiological (they apparently don’t, and postbiologicals apparently have other interests) they would they look roughly like us, as the astrophysicist Frank Drake, author of the Drake equation, has argued. Our mammalian history may have given us a unique evolutionary pathway to our developmental humanity, one with its own irreplaceable value, but if the K-T meteorite hadn’t hit, it is easy for an evolutionary developmentalist to argue that the dinosaurs would have independently and inevitably discovered the humanoid form, rocks, language, and tools. Why?

If you have seen the movie Jurassic Park, or have read up on raptors like Troodon, you know that they had semi-opposable digits and hunted in packs, in both the day and the night. It is easy to bet that the first raptor descendants that also learned how to hold sharp rocks and clubs in their hands in close-quarters combat would have forever after owned the role of top biological species. It would be game over, and competitive exclusion, for all other species that wanted that niche. Once you are manipulating tools in your hands, and speaking with your larynx, it’s easy to imagine that your body is forced upright, and your tail is no longer useful. You are engaged in runaway complexification of your social and technical intelligence – you’ve become human, and the leading edge universal intelligence has jumped to a higher substrate. Dale Russell, author of the Dinosauroid hypothesis in 1982, was scoffed at by conventional evolutionists back then, and the model is still largely ignored today, see for example Wikipedia’s short and evolutionist-biased paragraph on it. This treatment is most likely because of the hornet’s nest of implications that evolutionary developmentalism introduces. [I need to do an ISI Web of Knowledge search at a University to find all papers that have referenced Russell's paper in the 30 years since its publication, to review everyone who has looked seriously at the issue of dinosauroid evolutionary development since. Anyone want to volunteer for that?]

The hand of Troodon inequalis, with a partly opposable digit.

Note the closeup of the hand of Stenonychosaurus (now called Troodon) inequalis, from Russell’s paper, “Reconstructions of the small cretaceous theropod Stenonychosauris inequalis and a hypothetical dinosauroid,” Dale A. Russell and Ron Séguin, Syllogeus, 37, 1982. The authors state the structure of the carpal block on Troodon’s hands argues that one of the three fingers partially opposed the other two as shown. The shape of the ulna also suggests its forearms rotated. It probably used its hands to snatch small prey, and to grab hold of larger dinosaurs while ripping into them with the raptorial claw on the inside of each of its feet. Troodon was a member of a very successful and diverse clade of small bipedal, binocular vision dinosaurs with one free claw on their feet, the Deinonychosaurs (“fearsome claw lizards”). These animals lived over the last 100 million years of the 165 million years of dinosaur existence, and were among the smartest and most agile dinosaurs known, with the highest brain-to-body ratios of any animals in the Mesozoic era. Most Deinonychosaurs had hands that were a useful combination of small wings and three long claws. Troodon was in a special subfamily that had lost the wings but retained the three long digits on each hand. According to Russell, Troodon’s brain-to-body ratio was the highest known for dinosaurs at the time. Because of their special abilities, I would argue that Deinonychosaurs  were not only members of an evolutionarily successful niche, they also occupied an inevitably successful developmental niche as well.

The assumption here, made by a handful of anthropologists and evolutionary scholars over the years, is that trees are a key niche, the “developmental bottleneck,” through which the first rock-throwing and club-wielding hominids will very likely pass, on a typical Earth-like planet. Swinging from limb to limb requires very dextrous hands, and just as importantly, a cerebellum and forebrain that can predict where the body will go in space. With their manipulative hands, with or without wings, their big, strong legs and multipurpose feet, yet their small size, Deinonychosaurs would have been impressive tree climbers, able to get rapidly up and down from considerable heights. If they were the largest and strongest animals physically capable of doing so, which seems likely, this argues that they would have permanently occupied the special niche that primates would later inhabit. Imagine primates trying to get into the trees later with Deinonychosaurs running about – I can’t. If  tree climbing and swinging is the fastest and best way to build grasping hands and predictive brains good at simulating complex trajectories and eventually, simulating and imitating the mental states of others in their pack, then if Deinonychosaurs dominated that niche, it is reasonable to expect a Deinonychosaur to be the first to make the jump to tool use. Troodon couldn’t swing in the trees, but he would have been very agile among them, able to use them for escape and evasion. He had two manipulative hands that would have been very useful both in killing and in avoiding being killed. This looks to me like a case for competitive exclusion. Tree environments may be the dominant developmental place on land to breed smart, socially-imitative and tool-using species, just as land appears to be the dominant developmental place for all species that use built structures, on any Earth-like planet, because water is a much less efficient and forgiving fluid than air. The irrepressible Jacques Cousteau discovered that octopi build small houses for themselves out of rocks, but tides and currents in water are very unforgiving, so it is logical that on any planet where land is also available, runaway tool use will happen on land first.

The universe, from its perspective, will use the first language-capable tool-using species to start selection for smarter and more social brains and ideas, in a new complexity space of memetic evo devo, using Richard Dawkin’s concept of the meme as any elemental mentally replicating behavior or idea, and also selecting for increasingly complex and self-aware technologies, in a new complexity space of technetic evo devo, using Susan Blackmore’s concept of the techneme as an elemental socially replicating technological form or algorithm. Once this explosive emergence happens, biological evo devo (genetic change) has now becomes so slow by comparison that its further changes are increasingly future irrelevant. Now memetic change (ideas) in concert with technetic change (tech forms and algorithms) drive the future.

Simon Conway Morris – A Leading Evolutionary Developmentalist (but he might not use that term)

In the years since Russell’s indecent proposal, hundreds of other scientists, including the paleontologist Simon Conway Morris (Life’s Solution, 2001 and The Deep Structure of Biology, 2008) have proposed that humanity’s most advanced features, including our morality, emotions, and tool use, have all been independently discovered, to varying degrees, in other vertebrate and invertebrate species on Earth. If something happened to us, we can be confident that another species would very quickly emerge to become the dominant “human” tool-users in our place. In other words, local runaway complexification seems well protected by the universe. There is a developmental immune system operating, to ensure that human emergence, and remergence if catastrophes like the K-T meteorite occur, is both an inevitable and an accelerating event. Only the quality of our present transition to postbiological (not “posthuman”) status seems evolutionary, based on the morality and wisdom of our actions. Our pathway to and our subtype of humanity my thus be special and unique, but our humanity itself, in many of its key features, seems to be a product of the universe, far more than a product of our own free choice. Learning to see, accept, and better manage all this hidden development is the great challenge of our era.

Fortunately, these and other developmentalist hypotheses can increasingly be tested by computer simulation, as our computing technology, historical data, and scientific theory get progressively better. Run the universe simulation multiple times, and anything that appears environmentally dominant time and again is developmental. The rest, of course, is creative and evolutionary. To recap our earlier example, hexagonal snowflake structure will be developmental on all Earth-like planets with snow. But the pattern on each snowflake  will be evolutionary, and unpredictably unique, both on Earth and everywhere else. Nature uses both types of processes to build intelligence.

In Evolutionary Development, the Universe is not just a Ladder of Nature (above), or a Random Experiment (standard Evolutionary theory), but some useful combination of the two simpler models.

Let me stress here that evolutionary development is no return to the Aristotelian scala naturae (Ladder of Nature, Great Chain of Being), where all important matter and process are predestined by God into some strict hierarchy of emergence. Only the developmental framework of universal complexification is statistically predetermined in evo devo models, not the evolutionary painting itself, which is the bulk of the work of art. Nor is it a Newtonian or Laplacian “clockwork universe” model, which proposed total physical predetermination. Each of these models of are universal development without meaningful evolution. They are as one-sided and incomplete as Darwinian theory is today. Nor is it the Blind Tinkerer that universal evolutionists like Richard Dawkins (The Blind Watchmaker, 1996) or the writers of Mankind Rising portray. It appears that our universe is more complex and interesting than these models suppose – it is predictable in certain critical parts that are necessary for its function and replication, and it is intrinsically unpredictable and creative in all the rest of its parts. Furthermore, unpredictable evolution and predictable development may be constrained to work together in ways that maximize intelligence and adaptation, both for leading-edge systems, and for universe as a system.

A Good Overview of Evo-Devo Biology

 Evo-devo biology is an academic community of several thousand theoretical and applied evolutionary and developmental biologists who seek to improve standard evolutionary theory by more rigorously modeling the way evolutionary and developmental processes interact in living systems to produce biological modules, morphologies, species, and ecosystems.  Books like From Embryology to Evo-Devo, 2009, and Convergent Evolution: Limited Forms Most Beautiful, 2011, are great intros to this emerging field. I expect most evolutionary developmental biologists would agree with the statement that evolution and development are in many ways opposite and equally fundamental processes in complex living systems, and that neither can be properly understood without reference to its interaction with the other.

If you doubt the idea of universal development, read this great 2011 book!

The best of this work realizes there are two key forms of selection and fitness landscapes operating in natural selection – evolutionary selection, which is divergent and treelike, with chaotic attractors, and developmental selection, which is convergent and funnel-like, with standard attractors. Thus evolutionary developmentalism is an attempt to generalize the evo-devo biological perspective to nonliving replicating complex adaptive systems as well, including solar systems, prebiological chemistry, ideas, technology, and in particular, to the universe as a system.

Let’s close this overview with one revealing example of the interaction of evolution and development. In biological systems, the vast majority of our genes, roughly 95% of them, are evolutionary, meaning they change randomly and unpredictably over macroscopic time, continually recombining and varying as species reproduce. Only about 3-5% of our genes control our developmental processes, and those highly conserved genes, our “developmental genetic toolkit“, direct predictable changes in the organism as it traces a life cycle in its environment. As I’ve argued before, as a 95%/5% Evo/Devo Rule, roughly 95% of the processes or events in a wide variety of complex adaptive systems, including organizations, societies, species, and the universe may turn out be creative bottom-up and evolutionary, and only 5% may be predictable top-down, and developmental, though this evo devo ratio must surely vary by system to some degree. The generic value of a 95/5 Rule in building and maintaining intelligent systems, if one exists, would explain why the vast majority of universal change appears to be evolutionary and unpredictable in complex systems, what systems theorist Kevin Kelly called Out of Control in his lovely 1994 book. Yet a critical subset of events and processes in these systems also appears to be developmental. Discovering that subset will make our world vastly more understandable, and show how it is constrained to certain future destinies, even as creativity and experimentation keep growing in the evolutionary domains.

So what do we gain from conditionally holding and exploring the hypothesis of universal evolutionary development? Quite a lot, I think:

First, we regain an open mind. Rather than telling humanity’s history from a dogmatic and one-sided perspective, and assuming that our past existence in the universe is predominantly a “random accident,” we remember that there are many highly predictable things about our universe, such as classical mechanics, the laws of thermodynamics, and accelerating change. This allows us to present life’s story as a mystery: What parts of its emergence are very highly probable, or statistically predetermined? What parts are improbable accidents? We lose our blind faith that neo-Darwinism explains all of life or the universe, and we realize that there appears to be a balance between evolutionary experiment and developmental predetermination in all things in the universe, as in life.

Second, we regain our humility. We no longer see ourselves as special, miraculous accidents. It is commonly suggested that we are incredibly unique in the universe, and that we emerged “against astronomical odds.” On the contrary, developmentalists suspect that many or all of the things we hold most dear about humanity, including our brains, language, emotions, love, morality, consciousness, tools, technology, and scientific curiosity, are all highly likely or even inevitable developments on Earth-like planets all across the universe. This kind of thinking, looking for our universals as well as our uniquenesses, moves us from a Western exceptionalism frame of mind to one that also includes an Eastern or Buddhist perspective. We may not only be unique and individual experiments, but we may also be members of a type that is as common as sand grains on a beach, instruments of a larger cycle of universal development and replication.

Third, we lose our unjustified fearfulness of and pessimism toward the future, and replace it with courage and practical optimism. The evolutionary accident story of humanity teaches us to be ever vigilant for things that could end our species at any moment. Vigilance is adaptive, but fear is usually not. We are constantly reminded by evolutionists that 99% of all species that ever lived are extinct (yes, but they were all necessary experiments, and their useful information lives on), and we live in a random, hostile and purposeless universe (no). Evolutionists conveniently forget that the patterns of intelligence in those species that died are almost all highly redundantly backed up in the other surviving organisms on the planet. Life is very, very good at preserving relevant pattern, information, and complexity, and now with science and technology, it is getting far better still at complexity protection and resiliency. When we study how complexity has emerged in life’s history, we gain a new appreciation for the smoothness of the rise of complexity and intelligence on Earth. Every catastrophe we can point to appears to have primarily catalyzed further immediate jumps in life’s accelerating intelligence and adaptiveness at the leading edge. Life needs regular catastrophe to make it stronger, and it is resilient beyond all expectation. What causes this resilience? Apparently a combination of evolutionary diversity and developmental immune systems, and we are still undervalue the former, and are mostly ignorant of the latter. If the universe is developmental, we can expect it has some kind of immune systems protecting its development, just as living systems do. The more we are willing to consider the idea that the universe may be both evolving and developing, the more we can open our eyes to hidden processes that are protecting and driving us toward a particular, predetermined future, even as each individual and civilization on Earth and in the universe will take its own partly unpredictable and creative evolutionary paths.

Fourth, we gain an understanding of universal purpose. Talk of purpose legitimately scares most scientists, who are so recently free of religion interfering in their work. They claim they don’t want to return to a faith-based view of the world, but we all have and should constantly revise a set of faiths, as our reason and intuition still leave so much unexplained. Unexamined faiths are the most dangerous kind. Evolutionists put a lot of unexamined and unrecognized faith in their purposeless universe model, so much that it can blind them to the value of admitting and exploring the unknown. Many scientists attack hypotheses of universal teleology wherever they find them – even as they live in a world that they clearly know is predictable in part. We must call that stance hypocrisy, as predictability is a basic form of teleology, or purpose. Evolutionary and behavioral psychologists are now proposing biologically-inspired scientific theories of human values. I recommend The Moral Landscape, by Sam Harris, 2011, which I’ve reviewed earlier.  But most of this work still is not deeply biologically-inspired, as it remains focused on evolution, ignoring development. We must recognize that a better understanding of universal evolution and development can help science derive more useful and more universal evolutionary and developmental values. I believe it is both the best definition and the purpose of humanity to use technology to continually reshape us, individually and collectively, into something more than our biological selves, and to do this in as deliberate and ethical a way as possible, using both evolutionary and developmental means. We can further realize that it appears to be our universal purpose to think, feel, act, and build in ways that maximize our intellectual and emotional intelligence, advancing our minds and hearts.

Fifth, we recognize that very important parts of the future are predictable. This benefit is the most useful to me as a professional futurist. Increasingly, we find foresight practitioners who accept the likelihood of developmental futures. Consider Pierre Wack at Royal Dutch/Shell’s foresight group, who proposed the inevitable TINA (There Is No Alternative) trends in economic liberalization and globalization in the 1980′s. Or Ron Inglehart and Christian Welzel, who have charted the inevitable developmental advance (with brief and partial evolutionary reversals) of evidence-based rationalism and personal freedom in all nations over the last 40 years.  Some leading recent books arguing for the inevitability of certain kinds of social development are Robert Wright’s Nonzero, 2000 (on positive sum rulesets), Steven Pinker’s The Better Angels of Our Nature (on violence reduction) and Ian Morris’s, The Measure of Civilization, 2013 (I have not read the latter but am very much looking forward to it). There are still far too many professional futurists who confidently and ignorantly claim that the future is entirely evolutionary (“cannot be predicted”). But a growing number of leaders, strategists, and futurists see regionally and globally dominant trends and inevitable convergences, make good predictions, and use increasingly better data and feedback to improve their models.

Great New Book on Prediction

For a good recent book on this, read Nate Silver’s excellent The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail But Some Don’t, 2012. I may review this book in a future post. As we learn take an evolutionary developmentalist perspective, at first unconsciously and later consciously, we will greatly grow our predictive capacity in coming decades. More of us will foresee, accept, and start managing toward the ethical emergence of such inevitable coming technological developments as the conversational interface and big data, deeply biologically-inspired (evo and devo) machine intelligence and robotics, cybertwins/digitwins and the values-mapped web, lifelogs and peak experience summaries, the wearable web and augmented reality, teacherless education, and the metaverse. Professional futurists and forecasters are now developing our first really powerful tools and models that will keep expanding our prediction domains and horizons, and improving the reliability and accuracy of our forecasts. I believe evolutionary developmentalism is a foundational model that all long range forecasters and strategists need to embrace. Not only must we realize there are possible and preferable futures ahead of us, but we must be convinced that there are inevitable and highly probable futures as well, futures which can increasingly be uncovered as our intelligence, data, and methods improve. Such an effort, at a species level, is the only way we can map what remains truly unpredictable, at each level of our collective intelligence.

We’ve got a long way to go before modern science is willing to give the developmentalist perspective the same consideration and intellectual honesty that we presently give the evolutionist perspective. A lot of papers will have to be published. A lot of arguments will have to be made, and evidence marshaled. Courageous scientists will have to build the bridge from the developmentalist aspects of physics, chemistry, and biology to the highest aspects of our humanity, our ethics, consciousness, purpose, and spirituality. Convergent Evolution is one of several fields that will win lots of converts to developmentalism as it advances. Astrobiology will likely also play a big role, if it shows us just how common our type of life is in the universe, as many suspect it will.

A Classic in Business Foresight – Parts of the Future are Quite Predictable. Ignore at Your Peril.

Fortunately, as futurist Alvis Brigis noted to me in a recent conversation, many of the world’s leading companies are already surprisingly developmentalist in their strategy and planning. We can trace this shift back at least to Pierre Wack’s strategy group at Royal Dutch/Shell in the 1980′s, as discussed in Peter Schwartz’s The Art of the Long View, 1996, a classic in business foresight. Wack realized that in order to do good scenario planning (exploring “what could happen”, and the best strategic responses to major uncertainties) one should first constrain the possibility space by understanding what is very likely to continue to happen in the larger environment.  To restate this in evo devo language, Wack recommended starting with developmental foresight, and then doing evolutionary foresight (exploring alternative futures) within a testable developmental frame. Treating both evo and devo foresight perspectives seriously is a key challenge for strategy leaders. Many management and foresight consultancies are good at one, but not the other, as it’s a lot easier to pick one perspective as your dominant framework than to have to continually figure out how to integrate two opposing processes. Yet both are critical to understanding and managing change.

I do technology foresight consulting for several companies, and follow foresight work at the consultancies, and I’m convinced that those companies with the best predictions, forecasts, and foresight processes interfacing with their strategic planning groups are winning increasingly large advantages in their markets every year. All the most successful companies realize there are many highly predictable aspects of our future, and collectively our business and government leaders are now betting trillions annually on their predictions. A few are using good foresight processes, but most are still flying by the seat of their pants.

The executives leading our most successful companies don’t see the world as a random accident, like an evolutionist, or some naive and self-absorbed postmodernist who lives off the exponentiating wealth and leisure of the very same science and technology that he argues are “not uniquely privileged perspectives” on the universe. Let’s hope our young scientists in coming years have the courage to be as developmentalist in their research, strategy, and perspective as our leading corporations are today. And as our biologically-inspired intelligent machines, destined to be faster and better at pattern recognition than us, will be a few decades hence. Will modern science recognize the evolutionary developmental nature of the universe before human-surpassing machine intelligences arrive and definitively show it to us? That is hard to say. But I believe we can predict with high probability that as mankind continues its incredible rise, our leaders, planners, and builders must become evolutionary developmentalists if we are to learn to see reality through the universe’s eyes, not just our own.