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Evolution & The Engine of Development
Integral Theory and Post-metaphysical Entelechy
Originally written in 2007 for JFKU’s Integral Theory graduate program. Previously published at KenWilber.com and IntegralWorld.net. I’ve come a long way since then but feel like this still holds—I’ve made an extensive mind map and bibliography of follow-up research into complex systems science available for free on Patreon. Feel free to email me if you would like to offer feedback.
“As the individual, moment to moment, recreates his illusory boundaries, so reality, moment to moment, conspires to tear them down.”
— Ken Wilber (1986, p. 123)
For its entire existence, evolutionary biology has wrestled with the vitalist concept of a metaphysical force that guides development. Taking an antithetical (and increasingly uncorroborated) stance, most biologists flatly deny any ubiquitous trends in evolution. However, an AQAL study of evolution, informed by developmental psychology, suggests that the interplay between interior and exterior aspects of an organism, as well as those between an individual organism and its ecology, do indeed create a force that drives increasing intelligence, complexity of communicative behavior, and depth of experience. The dynamics of this process are equally apparent in both phylogeny and ontogeny[1] — and it is predominantly at this latter scale of individual development that this paper will explore them.
SYNTAX AND DEVELOPMENT
An energetic imperative drives the ongoing reorganization of a system towards ever-higher waves of inclusion and transcendence; the individual moves to a new level of complexity in response to demands made upon it by the environment. Martin Nowak and Natalia Komarova have formulated a mathematical description to describe this process in evolution of syntactic language, which warrants summary before put in the broader context of human development (2001, p. 288). Their model is based on the concept of a learned association matrix, which connects an arbitrary signal to its meaning (an object, or referent). Efficient construction of this matrix of significance is driven by the benefit conferred to successful communicators, defined as the probability of successful communication between two parties summed over all events and weighted according…
