Major Evolutionary Transition
Description
Clement Vidal:
"METs depict the few moments in the history of life where radical novelty and change has happened. These include the origin of life itself, eukaryote cells, multicellular organisms, sexual reproduction, cultural transmission, mental modelling and, as a growing number of evolutionary scientists are recognizing and debating, the emergence of a kind of planetary superorganism.
..
The core challenge for an MET to succeed is that it has to solve the cooperation barrier (Stewart, 2000). This requires the emergence of a new metasystem that can deploy control mechanisms suppressing free-riding and promoting cooperative processes (Turchin, 1977). Obviously, the specific implementation of such control mechanisms varies with each transition. Once the cooperation barrier is solved, division of labour can start, and matter–energy distribution (the distributor in Living Systems Theory) and information flows (channel and net in LST) need to be present to coordinate the differentiated parts."
(https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/sres.2997)
Discussion
'Axial Entities of the Noosphere as the Fourth 'Major Evolutionary Transition'
David Ronfeldt:
"This will be a "Fourth Major Evolutionary Transition” (MET) from a TIMN and NOO perspective.
The first occurred when the oral information-communications revolution enabled the tribal form to take hold ages ago;
The second, when writing and printing enabled the hierarchical institutional form to consolidate a couple millennia ago;
The third when the electrical information-communications revolution (telephony, telegraphy, etc.) enabled the market form to establish itself in the mix a couple centuries ago. As societies advanced through these METs, so did the noosphere’s formation.
Today we are still on the threshold of a fourth socio-cultural MET: an MET about the spread of the network form enabled by digital and post-digital information-communications technologies. During 1993-1996, when I first wrote about an eventual +N transition, I wasn’t thinking about AIs being important for this. I now sense they may be crucial.
Winning the struggles to add a commons realm, then constructing it alongside the existing three realms (again: civil society, government, market economy) will be a daunting endeavor. It may require far more advanced information, communications, and other noospheric capabilities than I first supposed. Vast world-wide networks will have to be built for monitoring, processing, and sharing all sorts of inputs about all sorts of conditions — environmental, societal, holospheric, etc. This surely can’t and won’t be done without the participation of AIs and socio-noospheric entities like AEONs."
(https://davidronfeldt.substack.com/p/updates-about-superorganisms-holospheres)