Leveraging creativity

Summary

Introduction

• Behavioral propensity for
  To benefit from shifts in the environment agents must be flexible.  Being sensitive to environmental signals agents who adjust strategic priorities can constrain their competitors. 
  
  flexibility. 
  
• Childhood and adolescent in humans supports the transition from a juvenile configuration, dependent on parents and structured to learn & logistically transform, to adult optimized to the proximate environment.  And it is staged, encouraging male adolescents to escape the hierarchy they grew up in and enter other groups where they may bring in: fresh ideas, risk taking; and alter the existing hierarchy: Steve Jobs & Steve Wozniak, Bill Gates & Paul Allen; while females become highly focused on friendships and communications.  It marks the beginning of Piaget's formal operational stage of cognitive development.  The limbic, autonomic and hormone networks are already deployed and functioning effectively.  The frontal cortex has to be pruned: winning neurons move to their final highly connected positions, and are myelinated over time.  The rest dissolve.  So the frontal lobe does not obtain its adult configuration and networked integration until the mid-twenties when prefrontal cortex control becomes optimal.  The evolutionarily oldest areas of the frontal cortex mature first.  The PFC must be iteratively customized by experience to do the right thing as an adult.  Adolescents:
  • Don't detect irony effectively.  They depend on the DMPFC to do this, unlike adults who leverage the fusiform face area.  
  • Regulate emotions with the ventral striatum while the prefrontal cortex is still being setup.  Dopamine projection density and signalling increase from the ventral tegmentum catalyzing increased interest in dopamine based rewards.  Novelty seeking allows for creative exploration which was necessary to move beyond the familial pack.  Criticisms do not get incorporated into learning models by adolescents leaving their risk assessments very poor.  The target of the dopamine networks, the adolescent accumbens, responds to rewards like a gyrating top - hugely to large rewards, and negatively to small rewards.  Eventually as the frontal regions increase in contribution there are steady improvements in: working memory, flexible rule use, executive organization and task shifting.  And adolescents start to see other people's perspective. 
    
  • Drive the cellular transformations with post-pubescent high levels of testosterone in males, and high but fluctuating estrogen & progesterone levels in females.  Blood flow to the frontal cortex is also diverted on occasion to the groin.  
  • Peer pressure is exceptionally influential in adolescents.  Admired peer comments reduce vmPFC activity and enhance ventral striatal activity.  Adults modulate the mental impact of socially mean treatment: the initial activation of the PAG, anterior cingulate, amygdala, insula cortex; which generate feelings of pain, anger, and disgust, with the VLPFC but that does not occur in adolescents.  
  • Feel empathy intensely, supported by their rampant emotions, interest in novelty, ego.  But feeling the pain of others can induce self-oriented avoidance of the situations. 
    
  development that introduce, through being
  Plans change in complex adaptive systems (CAS) due to the action of genetic operations such as mutation, splitting and recombination.  The nature of the operations is described. 
  
  schematic operators, diverse ideas, different
  The influence of childhood on behavior is significant.  Enneagrams define personality types: Reformer, Helper, Achiever, Individualist, Investigator, Loyalist, Enthusiast, Challenger and Peacemaker; based on the impact of childhood driven wounds. 
  
  The Enneagram becomes a tool to enable interested people to transform from the emotionally wounded base, hidden within the armor of the type, to the liberated underlying essence. 
  
  Childhood leaves each of us with some environmentally specific Basic Fear.  In response each of us adopts an induced Basic Desire of the type.  But as we develop the inner observer, it will support presence and undermine the identification that supports the armor of the type. 
  
  The Enneagram reveals three sets of relations about our type armor:
  

  1. Triadic self revealing: Instinctive, feeling, thinking; childhood needs that became significant wounds
     
  2. Social style groupings: Assertive, compliant, withdrawn; strategies for managing inner conflict
     
  3. Coping styles: Positive outlook, competency, reactive; strategies for defending childhood wounds
     

  Riso and Hudson augment the Enneagram with instinctual distortions reflected in the interests of the variants. 
  
  The Enneagram also offers tools for understanding a person's level of development: unhealthy, average, healthy, liberation; including their current center of gravity, steriotypical social role, wake-up call, leaden rule, red flag, and direction of integration and disintegration. 
  
  Complex adaptive system (CAS) theory associates the models presented by the Enneagram with evolved behaviors and structures in the mind: feelings, emotions, social behaviors, ideas; driven by genetic and cultural evolution and the constraints of family and social life.  Emergent evolved amplifers can be constrained by Riso and Hudson's awareness strategies. 
  
  
  behavioral approaches and curiosity about events that can be leveraged into a: set of tools, network of creative associations, systematically coherent model; to expand the adjacent possible replacing hierarchic constraints with dynamic flows of innovative is the economic realization of invention and combinatorial exaptation.  Keynes noted it provided the unquantifiable beneficial possibility that limits fear of uncertainty.  Innovation operates across all CAS, being supported by genetic and cultural means.  Creativity provides the mutation and recombination genetic operators for the cultural process.  While highly innovative, monopolies: AT&T, IBM; usually have limited economic reach, constraining productivity.  This explains the use of regulation, or even its threat, that can check their power and drive the creations across the economy. 
  products, services and ideas
  
• A rich problem and application network: parents,
  Salman Khan argues that the evolved global education system is inefficient and organized around constraining and corralling students into accepting dubious ratings that lead to mundane roles.  He highlights a radical and already proven alternative which offers effective self-paced deep learning processes supported by technology and freed up attention of teams of teachers.  Building on his personal experience of helping overcome the unjustified failing grade of a relative, Khan:
  

  • Iteratively learns how to teach: Starting with Nadia, Leveraging short videos focused on content, Converging on mastery, With the help of neuroscience, and filling in dependent gaps; resulting in a different approach to the mainstream method. 
    
  • Assesses the broken US education system: Set in its ways, Designed for the 1800s, Inducing holes that are hidden by tests, Tests which ignore creativity.  The resulting teaching process is so inefficient it needs to be supplemented with homework.  Instead teachers were encouraging their pupils to use his tools at home so they could mentor them while they attended school, an inversion that significantly improves the economics. 
    
  • Enters the real world: Builds a scalable service, Working with a real classroom, Trying stealth learning, At Khan Academy full time,  In the curriculum at Los Altos, Supporting life-long learning. 
    
  • Develops The One World Schoolhouse: Back to the future with a one room school, a robust teaching team, and creativity enabled; so with some catalysis even the poorest can become educated and earn credentials for current jobs. 
    
  • Wishes he could also correct: Summer holidays, Transcript based assessments, College education;
  • Concludes it is now possible to provide the infrastructure for creativity to emerge and to support risk taking. 
    

  
  Following our summary of his arguments RSS frames them from the perspective of complex adaptive system (CAS) theory.  Disruption is a powerful force for change but if its force is used to support the current teachers to adopt new processes can it overcome the extended phenotypic alignment and evolutionary amplifiers sustaining the current educational network? 
  
  
  teachers, academics, managers;
  
• Environmental forces that encourage
  This page discusses the mechanisms and effects of emergence underpinning any complex adaptive system (CAS).  Physical forces and constraints follow the rules of complexity.  They generate phenomena and support the indirect emergence of epiphenomena.  Flows of epiphenomena interact in events which support the emergence of equilibrium and autonomous entities.  Autonomous entities enable evolution to operate broadening the adjacent possible.  Key research is reviewed. 
  
  emergence of a
  This page discusses the benefits of geographic clusters of agents and resources at the center of a complex adaptive system (CAS). 
  
  geographic cluster interested in one or more important problems, and discussing and valuing
  Good ideas are successful because they build upon prior developments that have been successfully implemented.  Johnson demonstrates that they are phenotypic expressions of memetic plans subject to the laws of complex adaptive systems (CAS). 
  
  good ideas. 
  
• A vision that drives activity forward, for the lucky a situation without long term stress is a multi-faceted condition reflecting high cortisol levels.  Dr. Robert Sapolsky's studies of baboons indicate that stress helps build readiness for fight or flight.  As these actions occur the levels of cortisol return to the baseline rate.  A stressor is anything that disrupts the regular homeostatic balance.  The stress response is the array of neural and endocrine changes that occur to respond effectively to the crisis and reestablish homeostasis. 
  
  • The short term response to the stressor
    
  • activates the amygdala which: Stimulates the brain stem resulting in inhibition of the parasympathetic nervous system and activation of the sympathetic nervous system with the hormones epinephrine and norepinephrine deployed around the body, Activates the PVN which generates a cascade resulting in glucocorticoid secretion to: get energy to the muscles with increased blood pressure for a powerful response.  The brain's acuity and cognition are stimulated.  The immune system is stimulated with beta-endorphin and repair activities curtail.  In order for the body to destroy bacteria in wounds, pro-inflammatory cytokines increase blood flow to the area.  The induced inflammation signals the brain to activate the insula and through it the ACC.  But when the stressor is
    
  • long term: loneliness, debt; and no action is necessary, or possible, long term damage ensues.  Damage from such stress may only occur in specific situations: Nuclear families coping with parents moving in.  Sustained stress provides an evolved amplifier of a position of dominance and status.  It is a strategy in female aggression used to limit reproductive competition.  Sustained stress:
    
  • Stops the frontal cortex from ensuring we do the harder thing, instead substituting amplification of the individual's propensity for risk-taking and impairing risk assessment! 
    
  • Activates the integration between the thalamus and amygdala. 
    
  • Acts differently on the amygdala in comparison to the frontal cortex and hippocampus: Stress strengthens the integration between the Amygdala and the hippocampus, making the hippocampus fearful. 
    
  • BLA & BNST respond with increased BDNF levels and expanded dendrites persistently increasing anxiety and fear conditioning. 
    
  • Makes it easier to learn a fear association and to consolidate it into long-term memory.  Sustained stress makes it harder to unlearn fear by making the prefrontal cortex inhibit the BLA from learning to break the fear association and weakening the prefrontal cortex's hold over the amygdala.  And glucocorticoids decrease activation of the medial prefrontal cortex during processing of emotional faces.  Accuracy of assessing emotions from faces suffers.  A terrified rat generating lots of glucocorticoids will cause dendrites in the hippocampus to atrophy but when it generates the same amount from excitement of running on a wheel the dendrites expand.  The activation of the amygdala seems to determine how the hippocampus responds. 
    
  • Depletes the nucleus accumbens of dopamine biasing rats toward social subordination and biasing humans toward depression. 
    
  • Disrupts working memory by amplifying norepinephrine signalling in the prefrontal cortex and amygdala to prefrontal cortex signalling until they become destructive.  It also desynchronizes activation in different frontal lobe regions impacting shifting of attention.  
  • Increases the risk of autoimmune disease (Jan 2017) 
  • During depression, stress inhibits dopamine signalling.  
  • Strategies for stress reduction include: Mindfulness. 
    
  , but that's not necessary or usual, and with challenging problems to focus on 
• Thought experiments to stimulate building of new associations 
• Plans change in complex adaptive systems (CAS) due to the action of genetic operations such as mutation, splitting and recombination.  The nature of the operations is described. 
  
  Recombination enabled by a slow hunch and extended by, meat sharing originated, trade networks
  
• An emotion are low level fast unconscious agents distributed across the brain and body which associate, via the amygdala and rich club hubs, important environmental signals with encoded high speed sensors, and distributed programs of action to model: predict, prioritize guidance signals, select and respond effectively, coherently and rapidly to the initial signal.  The majority of emotion centered brain regions interface to the midbrain through the hypothalamus.  The cerebellum and basal ganglia support the integration of emotion and motor functions, rewarding rhythmic movement.  The most accessible signs of emotions are the hard to control and universal facial expressions.  Emotions provide prioritization for conscious access given that an animal has only one body, but possibly many cells, with which to achieve its highest level goals.  Because of this, base emotions clash with group goals and are disparaged by the powerful.  Pinker notes a set of group selected emotions which he classes as: other-condemning, other-praising, other-suffering and self-conscious emotions.  Evolutionary psychology argues evolution shaped human emotions during the long period of hunter-gatherer existence in the African savanna.  Human emotions are universal and include: Anger, Appreciation of natural beauty, Contempt, Disgust, Embarrassment, Fear, Gratitude, Grief, Guilt, Happiness, Honor, Jealousy, Liking, Love, Moral awe, Rage, Romantic love, Lust for revenge, Passion, Sadness, Self-control, Shame, Sympathy, Surprise; and the sham emotions and distrust induced by reciprocal altruism. 
  
  This page discusses the benefits of bringing agents and resources to the dynamically best connected region of a complex adaptive system (CAS). 
  
  centered process coupling the recipient's perception are internal appearences of the external world and the body according to Haikonen.  RSS views them as evolved models that are:
  
  • Associated schematically with the signals generated in response to epi-phenomena detected by sensory receptors and
    
  • Acted on by emergent agents.  
  to the ideas signalled, is an emergent capability which is used by cooperating agents to support coordination & rival agents to support control and dominance.  In eukaryotic cells signalling is used extensively.  A signal interacts with the exposed region of a receptor molecule inducing it to change shape to an activated form.  Chains of enzymes interact with the activated receptor relaying, amplifying and responding to the signal to change the state of the cell.  Many of the signalling pathways pass through the nuclear membrane and interact with the DNA to change its state.  Enzymes sensitive to the changes induced in the DNA then start to operate generating actions including sending further signals.  Cell signalling is reviewed by Helmreich.  Signalling is a fundamental aspect of CAS theory and is discussed from the abstract CAS perspective in signals and sensors.  In AWF the eukaryotic signalling architecture has been abstracted in a codelet based implementation.  To be credible signals must be hard to fake.  To be effective they must be easily detected by the target recipient.  To be efficient they are low cost to produce and destroy. 
  by the creator, enabling
  This page reviews the strategy of setting up an arms race.  At its core this strategy depends on being able to alter, or take advantage of an alteration in, the genome or equivalent.  The situation is illustrated with examples from biology, high tech and politics. 
  
  evolved amplification from
  This page describes the consequences of the asymmetries caused by genotypic traits creating a phenotypic signal in males and selection activity in the female - sexual selection.   
  The impact of this asymmetry is to create a powerful alternative to natural selection with sexual selection's leverage of positive returns.  The mechanisms are described. 
  
  sexual selection.  It helps when the target's interest in the creation has been peeked by the creator's 'star' reputation. 
  
• Carlo Rovelli resolves the paradox of time. 
  Rovelli initially explains that low level physics does not include time:
  

  • A present that is common throughout the universe does not exist
    
  • Events are only partially ordered.  The present is localized
  • The difference between past and future is not foundational.  It occurs because of state that through our blurring appears particular to us
  • Time passes at different speeds dependent on where we are and how fast we travel
    
  • Time's rhythms are due to the gravitational field
    
  • Our quantized physics shows neither space nor time, just processes transforming physical variables. 
    
  • Fundamentally there is no time.  The basic equations evolve together with events, not things 

  Then he explains how in a physical world without time its perception can emerge:
  

  • Our familiar time emerges
    
  • Our interaction with the world is partial, blurred, quantum indeterminate
    
  • The ignorance determines the existence of thermal time and entropy that quantifies our uncertainty
    
  • Directionality of time is real but perspectival.  The entropy of the world in relation to us increases with our thermal time.  The growth of entropy distinguishes past from future: resulting in traces and memories
    
  • Each human is a unified being because: we reflect the world, we formed an image of a unified entity by interacting with our kind, and because of the perspective of memory
    
  • The variable time: is one of the variables of the gravitational field.  With our scale we don't register quantum fluctuations, making space-time appear determined.  At our speed we don't perceive differences in time of different clocks, so we experience a single time: universal, uniform, ordered; which is helpful to our decisions

  
  
  Time made available to iterate around an exploratory
  Walter Shewhart's iterative development process is found in many complex adaptive systems (CAS).  The mechanism is reviewed and its value in coping with random events is explained. 
  
  Shewhart cycle, to help develop instances of the creative idea.  Clear documentation of the schema allows for its replication.  Argyll & Mivert's competitive threats to
  Desmond & Moore paint a picture of Charles Darwin's life, expanded from his own highlights:
  

  • His naughty childhood, 
  • Wasted schooldays,
    
  • Apprenticeship with Grant,
    
  • His extramural activities at Cambridge, walks with Henslow, life with FitzRoy on the Beagle,
    
  • His growing love for science,
    
  • London: geology, journal and Lyell. 
    
  • Moving from Gower Street to Down and writing Origin and other books. 
    
  • He reviewed his position on religion: the long dispute with Emma, his slow collapse of belief - damnation for unbelievers like his father and brother, inward conviction being evolved and unreliable, regretting he had ignored his father's advice; while describing Emma's side of the argument.  He felt happy with his decision to dedicate his life to science.  He closed by asserting after Self & Cross-fertilization his strength will be exhausted.  

  Following our summary of their main points, RSS frames the details from the perspective of complex adaptive system (CAS) theory.  Darwin placed evolution within a CAS framework, and built a network of supporters whose complementary skills helped drive the innovation. 
   
  
  Darwin's origin encouraged a review of the threats and a response that strengthened Charles's published arguments. 
  
• A fulfilling creation, an expression of a good idea, built on a platform is agent generated infrastructure that supports emergence of an entity through: leverage of an abundant energy source, reusable resources; attracting a phenotypically aligned network of agents. 
  of prior successful developments, constructed from simple components including real or virtual
  Plans are interpreted and implemented by agents.  This page discusses the properties of agents in a complex adaptive system (CAS). 
  It then presents examples of agents in different CAS.  The examples include a computer program where modeling and actions are performed by software agents.  These software agents are aggregates. 
  The participation of agents in flows is introduced and some implications of this are outlined. 
  
  agents. 
  
• A signature that highlights, and reinforces, the creative idea to the signalled recipient 
• Constraints, needed to sustain any
  This page introduces the complex adaptive system (CAS) theory frame.  The theory provides an organizing framework that is used by 'life.'  It can be used to evaluate and rank models that claim to describe our perceived reality.  It catalogs the laws and strategies which underpin the operation of systems that are based on the interaction of emergent agents.  It highlights the constraints that shape CAS and so predicts their form.  A proposal that does not conform is wrong. 
  
  John Holland's framework for representing complexity is outlined.  Links to other key aspects of CAS theory discussed at the site are presented. 
  
  CAS, provide a limit on falling into chaos provides an explanation for the apparently random period between water droplets falling from a tap.  Typically the model of the system is poor and so the data captured about the system looks unpredictable - chaotic.  With a better model the system's operation can be explained with standard physical principles.  Hence chaos as defined here is different from complexity.  , but introduce the risk, is an assessment of the likelihood of an independent problem occurring.  It can be assigned an accurate probability since it is independent of other variables in the system.  As such it is different from uncertainty. 
  of becoming stuck in the current, sub-optimal niche. 
  
• A delivery process that ensures the creation breaks through the
  This page introduces the complex adaptive system (CAS) theory frame.  The theory provides an organizing framework that is used by 'life.'  It can be used to evaluate and rank models that claim to describe our perceived reality.  It catalogs the laws and strategies which underpin the operation of systems that are based on the interaction of emergent agents.  It highlights the constraints that shape CAS and so predicts their form.  A proposal that does not conform is wrong. 
  
  John Holland's framework for representing complexity is outlined.  Links to other key aspects of CAS theory discussed at the site are presented. 
  
  CAS
  Flows of different kinds are essential to the operation of complex adaptive systems (CAS). 
  Example flows are outlined.  Constraints on flows support the emergence of the systems.  Examples of constraints are discussed. 
  
  constraints and reaches its appreciative audience, transforms creativity into innovation is the economic realization of invention and combinatorial exaptation.  Keynes noted it provided the unquantifiable beneficial possibility that limits fear of uncertainty.  Innovation operates across all CAS, being supported by genetic and cultural means.  Creativity provides the mutation and recombination genetic operators for the cultural process.  While highly innovative, monopolies: AT&T, IBM; usually have limited economic reach, constraining productivity.  This explains the use of regulation, or even its threat, that can check their power and drive the creations across the economy. 
  . 
  

• Salman Khan argues that the evolved global education system is inefficient and organized around constraining and corralling students into accepting dubious ratings that lead to mundane roles.  He highlights a radical and already proven alternative which offers effective self-paced deep learning processes supported by technology and freed up attention of teams of teachers.  Building on his personal experience of helping overcome the unjustified failing grade of a relative, Khan:
  

  • Iteratively learns how to teach: Starting with Nadia, Leveraging short videos focused on content, Converging on mastery, With the help of neuroscience, and filling in dependent gaps; resulting in a different approach to the mainstream method. 
    
  • Assesses the broken US education system: Set in its ways, Designed for the 1800s, Inducing holes that are hidden by tests, Tests which ignore creativity.  The resulting teaching process is so inefficient it needs to be supplemented with homework.  Instead teachers were encouraging their pupils to use his tools at home so they could mentor them while they attended school, an inversion that significantly improves the economics. 
    
  • Enters the real world: Builds a scalable service, Working with a real classroom, Trying stealth learning, At Khan Academy full time,  In the curriculum at Los Altos, Supporting life-long learning. 
    
  • Develops The One World Schoolhouse: Back to the future with a one room school, a robust teaching team, and creativity enabled; so with some catalysis even the poorest can become educated and earn credentials for current jobs. 
    
  • Wishes he could also correct: Summer holidays, Transcript based assessments, College education;
  • Concludes it is now possible to provide the infrastructure for creativity to emerge and to support risk taking. 
    

  
  Following our summary of his arguments RSS frames them from the perspective of complex adaptive system (CAS) theory.  Disruption is a powerful force for change but if its force is used to support the current teachers to adopt new processes can it overcome the extended phenotypic alignment and evolutionary amplifiers sustaining the current educational network? 
  
  
  Education can benefit by taking account the personality describes the operation of the mind from the perspective of psychological models and tests based on them.  Early 'Western' models of personality resulted in a simple segmentation noting the tension between: individual desires and group needs, and developing models and performing actions.  Dualistic 'Eastern' philosophies promote the legitimacy of an essence which Riso & Hudson argue is hidden within a shell of personality types and is only reached by developing presence.  The logic of a coherent essence is in conflict with the evolved nature of emotions outlined by Pinker.  Terman's studies of personality identified types which Friedman and Martin link to healthy and unhealthy pathways.  Current psychiatric models highlight at least five key aspects:
  • Extroversion-introversion - whether the person gains mental dynamism from socializing or retiring
    
  • Neuroticism-stability - does a person worry or are they calm and self-satisfied
    
  • Agreeableness-antagonism - is a person courteous & trusting or rude and suspicious
    
  • Conscientiousness-un-directedness - is a person careful or careless
    
  • Openness-non-openness - are they daring or conforming
    
  type of the pupil in customizing materials, and making assessments about them.  Additionally, while they are still developmentally is a phase during the operation of a CAS agent.  It allows for schematic strategies to be iteratively blended with environmental signals to solve the logistical issues of migrating newly built and transformed sub-agents.  That is needed to achieve the adult configuration of the agent and optimize it for the proximate environment.  Smiley includes examples of the developmental phase agents required in an emergent CAS.  In situations where parents invest in the growth and memetic learning of their offspring the schematic grab bag can support optimizations to develop models, structures and actions to construct an adept adult.  In humans, adolescence leverages neural plasticity, elder sibling advice and adult coaching to help prepare the deploying neuronal network and body to successfully compete. 
  primed for accepting new
  The agents in complex adaptive systems (CAS) must model their environment to respond effectively to it.  Evolution's schematic operators and Samuel modeling together support the indirect recording of past successes and their strategic use by the current agent to learn how to succeed in the proximate environment. 
  
  models of the world, the
  This page discusses the mechanisms and effects of emergence underpinning any complex adaptive system (CAS).  Physical forces and constraints follow the rules of complexity.  They generate phenomena and support the indirect emergence of epiphenomena.  Flows of epiphenomena interact in events which support the emergence of equilibrium and autonomous entities.  Autonomous entities enable evolution to operate broadening the adjacent possible.  Key research is reviewed. 
  
  emergent cognitive is the ability to orchestrate thought and action in accordance with internal goals according to Princeton's Jonathan Cohen. 
  framework of race can be dismantled, presented for what it is, and the political leverage of the underlying cognitive fear is an emotion which prepares the body for time sensitive action: Blood is sent to the muscles from the gut and skin, Adrenalin is released stimulating: Fuel to be released from the liver, Blood is encouraged to clot, and Face is wide-eyed and fearful.  The short-term high priority goal, experienced as a sense of urgency, is to flee, fight or deflect the danger.  There are both 'innate' - really high priority learning - which are mediated by the central amygdala and learned fears which are mediated by the BLA which learns to fear a stimulus and then signals the central amygdala.  Tara Brach notes we experience fear as a painfully constricted throat, chest and belly, and racing heart.  The mind can build stories of the future which include fearful situations making us anxious about current ideas and actions that we associate with the potential future scenario.  And it can associate traumatic events from early childhood with our being at fault.  Consequent assumptions of our being unworthy can result in shame and fear of losing friendships.  The mechanism for human fear was significantly evolved to protect us in the African savanna.  This does not align perfectly with our needs in current environments: U.S. Grant was unusually un-afraid of the noise or risk of guns and trusted his horses' judgment, which mostly benefited his agency as a modern soldier. 
  of anyone different to our own family can be understood and learned.  Including a representation of
  This page introduces the complex adaptive system (CAS) theory frame.  The theory provides an organizing framework that is used by 'life.'  It can be used to evaluate and rank models that claim to describe our perceived reality.  It catalogs the laws and strategies which underpin the operation of systems that are based on the interaction of emergent agents.  It highlights the constraints that shape CAS and so predicts their form.  A proposal that does not conform is wrong. 
  
  John Holland's framework for representing complexity is outlined.  Links to other key aspects of CAS theory discussed at the site are presented. 
  
  CAS theory highlighting the
  Richard Dawkin's explores how nature has created implementations of designs, without any need for planning or design, through the accumulation of small advantageous changes. 
  
  operation of
  This page reviews the implications of selection, variation and heredity in a complex adaptive system (CAS).  The mechanism and its emergence are discussed. 
  
  evolution can help integrate the sciences and humanities are the study of humans as a collection.  It now includes philosophy, history and literature.  At the time of Pogio Bracciolini its limited focus was on ancient artifacts and ancient texts that illuminated details of Latin language.  E.O. Wilson argues it represents the human capacity for symbolic language, coevolving with the structure of the brain.  He asserts this freed the mind to be creative, entering any imagined world.  This is empowering, except we retain the emotions of our ancient primate ancestors.   and build enlightenment, 
  
• Biological and social sciences can remove chaos provides an explanation for the apparently random period between water droplets falling from a tap.  Typically the model of the system is poor and so the data captured about the system looks unpredictable - chaotic.  With a better model the system's operation can be explained with standard physical principles.  Hence chaos as defined here is different from complexity.   from sampling by taking into account gender differences, developmental is a phase during the operation of a CAS agent.  It allows for schematic strategies to be iteratively blended with environmental signals to solve the logistical issues of migrating newly built and transformed sub-agents.  That is needed to achieve the adult configuration of the agent and optimize it for the proximate environment.  Smiley includes examples of the developmental phase agents required in an emergent CAS.  In situations where parents invest in the growth and memetic learning of their offspring the schematic grab bag can support optimizations to develop models, structures and actions to construct an adept adult.  In humans, adolescence leverages neural plasticity, elder sibling advice and adult coaching to help prepare the deploying neuronal network and body to successfully compete. 
  stages and personality describes the operation of the mind from the perspective of psychological models and tests based on them.  Early 'Western' models of personality resulted in a simple segmentation noting the tension between: individual desires and group needs, and developing models and performing actions.  Dualistic 'Eastern' philosophies promote the legitimacy of an essence which Riso & Hudson argue is hidden within a shell of personality types and is only reached by developing presence.  The logic of a coherent essence is in conflict with the evolved nature of emotions outlined by Pinker.  Terman's studies of personality identified types which Friedman and Martin link to healthy and unhealthy pathways.  Current psychiatric models highlight at least five key aspects:
  • Extroversion-introversion - whether the person gains mental dynamism from socializing or retiring
    
  • Neuroticism-stability - does a person worry or are they calm and self-satisfied
    
  • Agreeableness-antagonism - is a person courteous & trusting or rude and suspicious
    
  • Conscientiousness-un-directedness - is a person careful or careless
    
  • Openness-non-openness - are they daring or conforming
    
  types. 
  

• The people voting, based on their feelings are subjective models: sad, glad, mad, scared, surprised, and compassionate; of the organism and its proximate environment, including ratings of situations signalled by broadly distributed chemicals and neural circuits.  These feelings become highly salient inputs, evolutionarily associated, to higher level emotions encoded in neural circuits: amygdala, and insula.  Deacon shows James' conception of feeling can build sentience.  Damasio, similarly, asserts feelings reveal to the conscious mind the subjective status of life: good, bad, in between; within a higher organism.  They especially indicate the affective situation within the old interior world of the viscera located in the abdomen, thorax and thick of the skin - so smiling makes one feel happy; but augmented with the reports from the situation of the new interior world of voluntary muscles.  Repeated experiences build intermediate narratives, in the mind, which reduce the salience.  Damasio concludes feelings relate closely and consistently with homeostasis, acting as its mental deputies once organisms developed 'nervous systems' about 600 million years ago, and building on the precursor regulatory devices supplied by evolution to social insects and prokaryotes and leveraging analogous dynamic constraints.  Damasio suggests feelings contribute to the development of culture:
  • As motives for intellectual creation: prompting detection and diagnosis of homeostatic deficiencies, identifying desirable states worthy of creative effort.
    
  • As monitors of the success and failure of cultural instruments and practices
  • As participants in the negotiation of adjustments required by the cultural process over time 
  regarding their situation, for their leaders now aims to develop plans and strategies which ensure effective coordination to improve the common good of the in-group.  Pinker notes the evolved pressure of social rivalry associating power with leadership.  Saposky observes the disconnect between power hierarchies and wisdom in apes.  John Adair developed a modern leadership methodology based on the three-circles model. 
  within a lower house - linking the emotions are low level fast unconscious agents distributed across the brain and body which associate, via the amygdala and rich club hubs, important environmental signals with encoded high speed sensors, and distributed programs of action to model: predict, prioritize guidance signals, select and respond effectively, coherently and rapidly to the initial signal.  The majority of emotion centered brain regions interface to the midbrain through the hypothalamus.  The cerebellum and basal ganglia support the integration of emotion and motor functions, rewarding rhythmic movement.  The most accessible signs of emotions are the hard to control and universal facial expressions.  Emotions provide prioritization for conscious access given that an animal has only one body, but possibly many cells, with which to achieve its highest level goals.  Because of this, base emotions clash with group goals and are disparaged by the powerful.  Pinker notes a set of group selected emotions which he classes as: other-condemning, other-praising, other-suffering and self-conscious emotions.  Evolutionary psychology argues evolution shaped human emotions during the long period of hunter-gatherer existence in the African savanna.  Human emotions are universal and include: Anger, Appreciation of natural beauty, Contempt, Disgust, Embarrassment, Fear, Gratitude, Grief, Guilt, Happiness, Honor, Jealousy, Liking, Love, Moral awe, Rage, Romantic love, Lust for revenge, Passion, Sadness, Self-control, Shame, Sympathy, Surprise; and the sham emotions and distrust induced by reciprocal altruism. 
  of the electorate to the choice of leaders, while
  
• The politically savvy wealthy is schematically useful information and its equivalent, schematically useful energy, to paraphrase Beinhocker.  It is useful because an agent has schematic strategies that can utilize the information or energy to extend or leverage control of the cognitive niche.    elite controlled the 'rational' upper house - introducing a strategic element to the decision making integrates situational context, state and signals to prioritize among strategies and respond in a timely manner.  It occurs in all animals, including us and our organizations: 
  
  • Individual human decision making includes conscious and unconscious aspects.  Situational context is highly influential: supplying meaning to our general mechanisms, & for robots too.  Emotions are important in providing a balanced judgement.  The adaptive unconscious interprets percepts quickly supporting 'fast' decision making.  Conscious decision making, supported by the: DLPFC, vmPFC and limbic system; can use slower autonomy.  The amygdala, during unsettling or uncertain social situations, signals the decision making regions of the frontal lobe, including the orbitofrontal cortex.  The BLA supports rejecting unacceptable offers.  Moral decisions are influenced by a moral decision switch.  Sleeping before making an important decision is useful in obtaining the support of the unconscious in developing a preference.  Word framing demonstrates the limitations of our fast intuitive decision making processes.  And prior positive associations detected by the hippocampus, can be reactivated with the support of the striatum linking it to the memory of a reward, inducing a bias into our choices.  Prior to the development of the PFC, the ventral striatum supports adolescent decision making.  Neurons involved in decision making in the association areas of the cortex are active for much longer than neurons participating in the sensory areas of the cortex.  This allows them to link perceptions with a provisional action plan.  Association neurons can track probabilities connected to a choice.  As evidence is accumulated and a threshold is reached a choice is made, making fast thinking highly adaptive.  Diseases including: schizophrenia and anorexia; highlight aspects of human decision making. 
    
  • Organisations often struggle to balance top down and distributed decision making: parliamentry government must use a process, health care is attempting to improve the process: checklists, end-to-end care; and include more participants, but has systemic issues, business leaders struggle with strategy. 
    
  ; an architecture analogous to the human brain's pairing of the rational dlPFC is dorsolateral prefrontal cortex which is:
  • At the heart of decision making - highly rational, unsentimental 
  • A major agent of working memory
    
  • The most recently evolved part of the prefrontal cortex.  
  • Mainly interconnected with other parts of the cortex. 
    
  • Must be inhibited or it constrains right brain creativity. 
    
  and emotional vmPFC is ventromedial prefrontal cortex which is:
  • Focused on the impact of emotion on decision making
    
  • A participant in limbic system operations 
  • Many human behaviors involve interactions between the vmPFC, the limbic system & the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex.  Part of decision making is for the limbic system to internally simulate (often with the help of the sympathetic nervous system) what alternative outcomes of a decision will feel like with the results of these somatic marker analyses being reported to the vmPFC.  
    
  • Damage to the vmPFC results in bad decision making: Poor judgement in choosing friends & partners, Failure to respond to negative feedback; because they can't feel the issues; and are overly controlled by the logical contribution of the DLPFC. 
    
  . 
  

• John Prescott reflected the views and emotions of the Labour Members of Parliament,
• Philip Gould talked to and modeled the opinions and feelings of the voters, 
• Alistair Campbell managed the press to provide a channel to signal the voters,
  
• Chancellor, Gordon Brown, held the spending urge in check and provided tactical are goals and actions which respond to the actions of the enemy in a combat, rather than focusing on ones own strategic direction. 
  views of the Conservative opposition,
  
• Peter Mandelson built the campaign organization, and provided a strategic view of each political campaign; integrated by Blair to advance the vision and current mission. 
  

• Chess is a model of a SuperOrganism is a wealthy autonomous entity needing and controlling the richest niches in the proximate environment, that emerges from the bundled cooperation of schematically aligned agents.   The term is based on the social insect model, used by: ants, termites, and bees; and identified by Holldobler & E.O. Wilson.  These genetically identical insect superorganisms cooperatively limit their reproduction to align with the resources available in the niche.  Wilson asserts these insects all developed nests to which they returned to raise their offspring, and when the nest sites were of limited capacity some family members responded by focusing on defending the nest and foraging while their mother became an egg laying queen, enabled by "a single genetic change which silenced the brain's program for dispersal and prevents the mother and her offspring from dispersing to create new nests," Wilson explains.  He adds climate control of the nest and disease resistance, just like the human immune system, demand individually focused diversity.  So the queen's genome consists of low variety alleles for the extended phenotypic 'robot' worker caste agents and their organization - queen and workers competing as one, with other colonies and individual insects - and other parts which are high where the genome includes significant diversity.  For humans it is an evolved cultural strategy used when the environment is supportive, but it is dependent on our imperfect cognitive assessment of kinship as well as group selection driven emotions: other-condemning, other-praising, other-suffering and self-conscious; and group oriented pressures to conform and remain: religions.  And the adjacent possible must be recreated and modeled culturally through the emergence of processes such as democracy.  It depends on inter-agent signalling.  In both insects and humans it allows specialization, and encourages operations and flows that are tightly controlled, limiting waste, leveraging parallel activity, supporting coherence.  Superorganisms reflect cliodynamic flows.  A superorganism has a development and operational phase.  As additional agents are coopted into the superorganism they align, participate in supply and demand activities and so contribute to the evolutionary amplification.  Damasio notes that prokaryotes, in rich environments, can similarly operate in a symbiotic fashion expressing cultural behaviors. 
  , all the pieces working in coordination to achieve a common goal.  Move order is significant ensuring a vast creative space.  The loss of pieces only lasts for the present game.  No piece is driven to act as an individual.  So the game is more like an ant collony than a human organization. 
  
• Chess masters deeply understand the regions of the chess games schema database where they play.  Competitions at all levels of play have provided a selection mechanism.  And developing players are able to learn, model and practice effectively through coaching from more experienced players.  
• Initially when the record of play around a particular region of chess is sparse, mistakes are common, but due to the rigorous recording of tournament games it becomes clear that some opening moves are superior.  This is the mechanism of
  Richard Dawkin's explores how nature has created implementations of designs, without any need for planning or design, through the accumulation of small advantageous changes. 
  
  natural selection in action.  It is used by life, and in the American legislative process and criminal legal systems, but not by most businesses.  The exception is Toyota, and acolytes such as
  Glenn Steele & David Feinberg review the development of the modern Geisinger healthcare business after its near collapse following the abandoned merger with Penn State AMC.  After an overview of the business, they describe how a calamity unfolding around them supported building a vision of a better US health care network.  And they explain:
  

  • How they planned out the transformation,
    
  • Leveraging an effective governance structure,
    
  • Using a strategy to gain buy in,
    
  • Enabling reengineering at the clinician patient interface. 
  • Implementing the reengineering for acute, chronic & hot spot care; to help the patients and help the physicians.  
  • Geisinger's leverage of biologics.  
  • Reengineering healing with ProvenExperience.  
  • Where Geisinger is headed next. 
    

  
  Following our summary of their arguments RSS comments on them.  We frame their ideas with complex adaptive system (CAS) theory. 
  
  
  Geisinger.  John Doerr
  John Doerr argues that company leaders and their organizations, hugely benefit from Andy Grove's OKRs. 
  
  He promotes strategies that help OKR success: Focus, Align, Track, Stretch; replaces yearly performance reviews, and provides illustrative success stories. 
  
  Doerr stresses Dov Seidman's view that employees are adaptive and will respond to what they see being measured.  He asserts culturally supported OKRs/CFR processes will be transformative. 
  
  Following our summary of his arguments, RSS comments on them framed by complex adaptive system (CAS) theory.  Doerr's architecture is tailored for the startups KPCB invests in.  It is a subset of the general case of schematic plans, genetic operators and Shewhart cycles that drive all CAS.  Doerr's approach limits support of learning and deemphasizes the association to planning. 
  
  
  promotes a light version for other businesses.  Without schematic agency, as a business grows complexity catastrophe is a dramatic breakdown in the operation of a CAS that results in general failure.  Dorner in the logic of failure, sees the Chernobyl nuclear disaster as illustrative: typical human strategies were incorrectly applied by experienced operators, because they were overconfident and incorrectly modeled the current and immediate future state of the reactor.  Beinhocker asserts positive effects generated in a large inter-connected network induce negative effects at other points in the network.  Booch argues that increasing system complexity can overwhelm human designers, inducing catastrophe in software development.  He recommends adopting object oriented hierarchy and modularity to limit complexity.  But many CAS networks include huge number of agents, responding to internal and external signals, and effectively executing evolved, distributed schematic plans.  Eventual loss of control, as in the case of cancers, is notable and highlights the effective agency of the more regular situation.  Human developed systems suffer from complexity catastrophe.  Democratic processes slowly search for representatives who will solve problems for the citizens, but Diamond in Collapse explains that democracy has struggled to cope with the tragedy of the commons.  Cliodynamic cycles operate over multiple lifetimes leaving humans prone to fall into the traps that caught their grandparents.  Evolved amplifiers support bubbles incenting dangerous deregulation, and encouraging broad participation, even though the rules ensure additional wealth accumulates to the legislative elite and aristocracy, who safely ignore moral hazard.  Parasites undermine the detection of problems.  RSS sees catastrophe enabled by a lack of rigorous schematic planning within most developed human systems. 
  results from increasing chaos, and learning from proximate history becomes difficult. 
  
• With a detailed schema of the opening of a game, and collected analytic models of what is happening, learned during development, masters can leverage their
  Computational theory of the mind and evolutionary psychology provide Steven Pinker with a framework on which to develop his psychological arguments about the mind and its relationship to the brain.  Humans captured a cognitive niche by natural selection 'building out' specialized aspects of their bodies and brains resulting in a system of mental organs we call the mind. 
  
  He garnishes and defends the framework with findings from psychology regarding: The visual system - an example of natural selections solutions to the sensory challenges of inverse modeling of our environment; Intensions - where he highlights the challenges of hunter-gatherers - making sense of the objects they perceive and predicting what they imply and natural selections powerful solutions; Emotions - which Pinker argues are essential to human prioritizing and decision making; Relationships - natural selection's strategies for coping with the most dangerous competitors, other people.  He helps us understand marriage, friendships and war. 
  
  These conclusions allow him to understand the development and maintenance of higher callings: Art, Music, Literature, Humor, Religion, & Philosophy; and develop a position on the meaning of life. 
  
  Complex adaptive system (CAS) modeling allows RSS to frame Pinker's arguments within humanity's current situation, induced by powerful evolved amplifiers: Globalization, Cliodynamics, The green revolution and resource bottlenecks; melding his powerful predictions of the drivers of human behavior with system wide constraints.  The implications are discussed. 
  
  
  mind's ability to chunk details so that the schemata can be
  Plans change in complex adaptive systems (CAS) due to the action of genetic operations such as mutation, splitting and recombination.  The nature of the operations is described. 
  
  operated on to create new strategies.  
• The success comes to those players who are emotionally are low level fast unconscious agents distributed across the brain and body which associate, via the amygdala and rich club hubs, important environmental signals with encoded high speed sensors, and distributed programs of action to model: predict, prioritize guidance signals, select and respond effectively, coherently and rapidly to the initial signal.  The majority of emotion centered brain regions interface to the midbrain through the hypothalamus.  The cerebellum and basal ganglia support the integration of emotion and motor functions, rewarding rhythmic movement.  The most accessible signs of emotions are the hard to control and universal facial expressions.  Emotions provide prioritization for conscious access given that an animal has only one body, but possibly many cells, with which to achieve its highest level goals.  Because of this, base emotions clash with group goals and are disparaged by the powerful.  Pinker notes a set of group selected emotions which he classes as: other-condemning, other-praising, other-suffering and self-conscious emotions.  Evolutionary psychology argues evolution shaped human emotions during the long period of hunter-gatherer existence in the African savanna.  Human emotions are universal and include: Anger, Appreciation of natural beauty, Contempt, Disgust, Embarrassment, Fear, Gratitude, Grief, Guilt, Happiness, Honor, Jealousy, Liking, Love, Moral awe, Rage, Romantic love, Lust for revenge, Passion, Sadness, Self-control, Shame, Sympathy, Surprise; and the sham emotions and distrust induced by reciprocal altruism. 
  interested in winning at chess, who dedicate time and focus on learning, practice and competing.  They use SWOT to analyze each position in the game, so they can leverage opportunities and limit introducing weaknesses.  And they plan; looking at their opponents games, study their approach: aggressive attackers, strong defensive position builders, use of rapid combinations; and their personality describes the operation of the mind from the perspective of psychological models and tests based on them.  Early 'Western' models of personality resulted in a simple segmentation noting the tension between: individual desires and group needs, and developing models and performing actions.  Dualistic 'Eastern' philosophies promote the legitimacy of an essence which Riso & Hudson argue is hidden within a shell of personality types and is only reached by developing presence.  The logic of a coherent essence is in conflict with the evolved nature of emotions outlined by Pinker.  Terman's studies of personality identified types which Friedman and Martin link to healthy and unhealthy pathways.  Current psychiatric models highlight at least five key aspects:
  • Extroversion-introversion - whether the person gains mental dynamism from socializing or retiring
    
  • Neuroticism-stability - does a person worry or are they calm and self-satisfied
    
  • Agreeableness-antagonism - is a person courteous & trusting or rude and suspicious
    
  • Conscientiousness-un-directedness - is a person careful or careless
    
  • Openness-non-openness - are they daring or conforming
    
  . 
  

• From the process of brain evolution it is clear that 'images' are tagged with feelings that
  Consciousness is no longer mysterious.  In this page we use complex adaptive system (CAS) theory to describe the high-level architecture of consciousness, linking sensory networks, low level feelings and genetically conserved and deployed neural structures into a high level scheduler.  Consciousness is evolution's solution to the complex problems of effective, emergent, multi-cellular perception based strategy.  Constrained by emergence and needing to avoid the epistemological problem of starting with a blank slate with every birth, evolution was limited in its options. 
  
  We explain how survival value allows evolution to leverage available tools: sensors, agent relative position, models, perception & representation; to solve the problem of mobile agents responding effectively to their own state and proximate environment.  Evolution did this by providing a genetically constructed framework that can develop into a conscious CAS. 
  
  And we discuss the implications with regard to artificial intelligence, sentient robots, augmented intelligence, and aspects of philosophy. 
  
  provide scheduling for our emotions are low level fast unconscious agents distributed across the brain and body which associate, via the amygdala and rich club hubs, important environmental signals with encoded high speed sensors, and distributed programs of action to model: predict, prioritize guidance signals, select and respond effectively, coherently and rapidly to the initial signal.  The majority of emotion centered brain regions interface to the midbrain through the hypothalamus.  The cerebellum and basal ganglia support the integration of emotion and motor functions, rewarding rhythmic movement.  The most accessible signs of emotions are the hard to control and universal facial expressions.  Emotions provide prioritization for conscious access given that an animal has only one body, but possibly many cells, with which to achieve its highest level goals.  Because of this, base emotions clash with group goals and are disparaged by the powerful.  Pinker notes a set of group selected emotions which he classes as: other-condemning, other-praising, other-suffering and self-conscious emotions.  Evolutionary psychology argues evolution shaped human emotions during the long period of hunter-gatherer existence in the African savanna.  Human emotions are universal and include: Anger, Appreciation of natural beauty, Contempt, Disgust, Embarrassment, Fear, Gratitude, Grief, Guilt, Happiness, Honor, Jealousy, Liking, Love, Moral awe, Rage, Romantic love, Lust for revenge, Passion, Sadness, Self-control, Shame, Sympathy, Surprise; and the sham emotions and distrust induced by reciprocal altruism. 
  to focus around.  Allowing individuals to recreate the emotional state where they were previously collecting ideas about the problem and other interests will help.  For some, such as
  Desmond & Moore paint a picture of Charles Darwin's life, expanded from his own highlights:
  

  • His naughty childhood, 
  • Wasted schooldays,
    
  • Apprenticeship with Grant,
    
  • His extramural activities at Cambridge, walks with Henslow, life with FitzRoy on the Beagle,
    
  • His growing love for science,
    
  • London: geology, journal and Lyell. 
    
  • Moving from Gower Street to Down and writing Origin and other books. 
    
  • He reviewed his position on religion: the long dispute with Emma, his slow collapse of belief - damnation for unbelievers like his father and brother, inward conviction being evolved and unreliable, regretting he had ignored his father's advice; while describing Emma's side of the argument.  He felt happy with his decision to dedicate his life to science.  He closed by asserting after Self & Cross-fertilization his strength will be exhausted.  

  Following our summary of their main points, RSS frames the details from the perspective of complex adaptive system (CAS) theory.  Darwin placed evolution within a CAS framework, and built a network of supporters whose complementary skills helped drive the innovation. 
   
  
  Darwin, that is quiet.  For
  Robert Coram highlights the noble life of John Boyd.  John spent a lot of time alone during his childhood.  He: excelled at swimming and was a lifeguard, enlisted in the Army Air Corp while at school which rejected him for pilot training, was part of the Japan occupation force where he swam; so the US paid for him to attend University of Iowa, where he: joined the Air Force Officers' training corps, was accepted to be an Air Force pilot, and got engaged to Mary Bruce. 
  
  Boyd trained at Nellis AFB to become a combat ready pilot in the Korean War. 
  
  While the US Air Force focused on Strategic bombing, Boyd loved dogfights.  His exceptional tactical ability was rewarded with becoming an instructor.  Boyd created new ways to think about dogfighting and beat all-comers by using them in the F-100.  He was noticed and enabled by Spradling.  As he trained, and defeated the top pilots from around the US and allied base network, his reputation spread.  But he needed to get nearer to the hot spring in Georgia, and when his move to Tyndall AFB was blocked he used the AFIT to train in engineering at Georgia tech.  While preparing to move he documented his FWS training and mentored Ronald Catton.  While there he first realized the link between energy and maneuverability.  At Eglin, in partnership with Tom Christie, he developed tools to model the link.  They developed comparisons of US and Soviet aircraft which showed the US aircraft performing poorly.  Eventually General Sweeney was briefed on the theory and issues with the F-105, F-4, and F-111. 
  
  Sent to the Pentagon to help save the F-X budget, Boyd joined forces with Pierre Sprey to pressure procurement into designing and building tactically exceptional aircraft: a CAS tank killer and a lightweight maneuverable fighter.  The navy aligned with Senators of states with navy bases, prepared to sink the F-X and force the F-14 on the Air Force.  Boyd saved the plane from the Navy and the budget from Congress, ensuring the Air Force executive and its career focused hierarchy had the freedom to compromise on a budget expanding over-stuffed F-X (F-15).  Boyd requested to retire, in disgust.  Amid mounting hostility from the organizational hierarchy Boyd and Sprey secretly developed specifications for building prototype lightweight fighters with General Dynamics: YF-16; and Northrop: YF-17; and enabled by Everest Riccioni.  
  
  David Packard announced a budget of $200 million for the services to spend on prototypes.  Pierre Sprey's friend Lyle Cameron picked a short takeoff and landing transport aircraft and Boyd's lightweight fighter to prototype. 
  
  Boyd was transferred to Thailand as Vice Commander of Task Force Alpha, inspector general and equal opportunity training officer; roles in which he excelled.  And he started working on his analysis of creativity: Destruction and Creation.  But on completion of the tour Boyd was apparently abandoned and sent to run a dead end office at the Pentagon. 
  
  The power hierarchy moved to protect the F-15, but: Boyd, Christie, Schlesinger, and the Air Force chief of staff; kept the lightweight fighter budgeted and aligned with Boyd's requirements in a covert campaign.  The Air Force threw a phalanx of developers at the F-16, distorting Boyd's concept.  He accepted he had lost the fight and retired from the Air Force. 
  
  Shifting to scholarship Boyd reflects on how rigidity must be destroyed to enable creative new assemblies.  He uses the idea to explain the operational success of the YF16 and F-86 fighters, and then highlights how the pilot can take advantage of their infrastructure advantage with rapid decision making he explains with the O-O-D-A Loop. 
  
  Boyd encouraged Chuck Spinney to expose the systemic cost overruns of the military procurement process.  The military hierarchy moved to undermine the Spinney Report and understand the nature of the reformers.  Boyd acted as a progressive mentor to Michael Wyly, who taught the Marine Corps about maneuver warfare, and Jim Burton. 
  
  Finally, after the military hierarchy appears to have beaten him, Boyd's ideas are tested during the First Gulf War. 
  
  Following our summary of his main points, RSS frames the details from the perspective of complex adaptive system (CAS) theory.  Boyd was Darwinesque, placing the art of air-to-air combat within a CAS framework. 
   
  
  Boyd it was loud opera.  Sleep facilitates salient memory formation and removal of non-salient memories.  The five different stages of the nightly sleep cycles support different aspects of memory formation.  The sleep stages follow Pre-sleep and include: Stage one characterized by light sleep and lasting 10 minutes, Stage two where theta waves and sleep spindles occur, Stage three and Stage four together represent deep slow-wave sleep (SWS) with delta waves, Stage five is REM sleep; sleep cycles last between 90-110 minutes each and as the night progresses SWS times reduce and REM times increase.   Sleep includes the operation of synapse synthesis and maintenance through DNA based activity including membrane trafficking, synaptic vesicle recycling, myelin structural protein formation and cholesterol and protein synthesis.  Sleep also controls inflammation (Jan 2019)  Sleep deprivation undermines the thalamus & nucleus accumbens management of pain. 
  is important although Boyd worked hard at night.  
• Limiting the centralized concentration of power helps enable adaptation and creativity.  Democracy provides one mechanism to do this, although it can be
  Charles Ferguson argues that the US power structure has become highly corrupt. 
  
  Ferguson identifies key events which contributed to the transformation:
  

  • Junk bonds, 
  • Derivative deregulation, 
  • CMOs, ABS and analyst fraud,
    
  • Financial network deregulation,
    
  • Financial network consolidation, 
  • Short term incentives
    

  Subsequently the George W. Bush administration used the situation to build a global bubble, which Wall Street leveraged.  The bursting of the bubble: managed by the Bush Administration and Bernanke Federal Reserve; was advantageous to some. 
  
  Ferguson concludes that the restructured and deregulated financial services industry is damaging to the American economy.  And it is supported by powerful, incentive aligned academics.   He sees the result being a rigged system. 
  
  Ferguson offers his proposals for change and offers hope that a charismatic young FDR will appear. 
  
  Following our summary of his arguments, RSS comments on them framed by complex adaptive system (CAS) theory.  Once the constraints are removed from CAS amplifiers, it becomes advantageous to leverage the increased flows.  And it is often relatively damaging not to participate.  Corruption and parasitism can become entrenched. 
  
  
  circumvented by parasitism is a long term relationship between the parasite and its host where the resources of the host are utilized by the parasite without reciprocity.  Often parasites include schematic adaptations allowing the parasite to use the hosts modeling and control systems to divert resources to them or improve their chance of reproduction: Toxoplasma gondii.  .  And competition between businesses will undermine constraints on adaptation.  Hence it is essential to enable and protect the competitive process with regulation of monopolies is a power relation within:
  
  • A state in which a group has enough power to enforce its will on other citizens.  If this is a central authority with a cohesive military, it can overpower other warlords and stabilize the society. 
    
  • An economy in which one business has enough share in a market segment to control margins to its advantage.  An economic monopoly can be broadly beneficial: AT&T monopoly, US patent monopoly rights;
    
  , trusts and cartels, and the redistribution of wealth is schematically useful information and its equivalent, schematically useful energy, to paraphrase Beinhocker.  It is useful because an agent has schematic strategies that can utilize the information or energy to extend or leverage control of the cognitive niche.    when it becomes trapped and its power is used primarily to constrain. 
  

• Robust: able to defend itself against attack by predators and parasites is a long term relationship between the parasite and its host where the resources of the host are utilized by the parasite without reciprocity.  Often parasites include schematic adaptations allowing the parasite to use the hosts modeling and control systems to divert resources to them or improve their chance of reproduction: Toxoplasma gondii.   - necessitating immunity has to support and protect an inventory of host cell types, detect and respond to invaders and maintain the symbiont equilibrium within the microbiome.  It detects microbes which have breached the secreted mucus barrier, driving them back and fortifying the barrier.  It culls species within the microbiome that are expanding beyond requirements.  It destroys invaders who make it into the internal transport networks.  As part of its initialization it has immune cells which suppress the main system to allow the microbiome to bootstrap.  The initial microbiome is tailored by the antibodies supplied from the mother's milk while breastfeeding.  The immune system consists of two main parts the older non-adaptive part and the newer adaptive part.  The adaptive part achieves this property by being schematically specified by DNA which is highly variable.  By rapid reproduction the system recombines the DNA variable regions in vast numbers of offspring cells which once they have been shown not to attack the host cell lines are used as templates for interacting with any foreign body (antigen).  When the immune cell's DNA hyper-variable regions are expressed as y-shaped antibody proteins they typically include some receptor like structures which match the surfaces of the typical antigen.  Once the antibody becomes bound to the antigen the immune system cells can destroy the invader. 
  , fault tolerant using multiple routes and
  This web page reviews opportunities to enhance computing theory and practice by using biological mechanisms and complex adaptive system (CAS) theory. 
  
  duplication of functionally equivalent hub autonomous entities are entities which:
  
  • Are far from equilibrium
  • Consume and save low entropy
    
  • Can use accessible low entropy to maintain themselves
    
  , and able to self-assemble when under threat. The supply chain must be developed conforming to these robustness requirements, or the whole economy may collapse when threatened.  AT&T's Shewhart promoted quality control including the
  Walter Shewhart's iterative development process is found in many complex adaptive systems (CAS).  The mechanism is reviewed and its value in coping with random events is explained. 
  
  PDCA cycle to build supply chain robustness.  Dorner describes the value of buffering.  Damasio
  Antonio Damasio argues that ancient & fundamental homeostatic processes, built into behaviors and updated by evolution have resulted in the emergence of  nervous systems and feelings.  These feelings, representing the state of the viscera, and represented with general systems supporting enteric operation, are later ubiquitously integrated into the 'images' built by the minds of higher animals including humans. 
  
  Damasio highlights the separate development of the body frame in the building of minds. 
  
  Damasio explains that this integration of feelings by minds supports the development of subjectivity and consciousness.  His chain of emergence suggests the 'order of things.'  He stresses the end-to-end integration of the organism which undermines dualism.  And he reviews Chalmers hard problem of consciousness. 
  
  Damasio reviews the emergence of cultures and sees feelings, integrated with reason, as the judges of the cultural creative process, linking culture to homeostasis.  He sees cultures as supporting the development of tools to improve our lives.  But the results of the creative process have added stresses to our lives. 
  
  Following our summary of his arguments RSS frames his arguments from the perspective of complex adaptive system (CAS) theory.  Each of the [super]organisms discussed is a CAS reflecting the theory of such systems:
  

  • Damasio's proposals about homeostasis routed signalling, aligns well with CAS theory. 
    
  • Damasio's ideas on cultural stresses are elaborated by CAS examples. 

  
  
  notes the
  This page reviews the implications of reproduction initially generating a single initialized child cell.  For multi-cellular organisms this 'cell' must contain all the germ-line schematic structures including for organelles and multi-generational epi-genetic state.  Any microbiome is subsequently integrated during the innovative deployment of this creative event.  Organisms with skeletal infrastructure cannot complete the process of creation of an associated adult mind, until the proximate environment has been sampled during development.  The mechanism and resulting strategic options are discussed. 
  
  organism is an integral whole, where episodic memory is the memory of conscious experiences.  The entorhinal cortex's place cells record both space AND time details so that the memory stream can be reconstructed episodically.  Damasio notes that feelings are indirect aspects of the recalled stream, and how positive or negative the memory is can alter over time. 
  includes feelings are subjective models: sad, glad, mad, scared, surprised, and compassionate; of the organism and its proximate environment, including ratings of situations signalled by broadly distributed chemicals and neural circuits.  These feelings become highly salient inputs, evolutionarily associated, to higher level emotions encoded in neural circuits: amygdala, and insula.  Deacon shows James' conception of feeling can build sentience.  Damasio, similarly, asserts feelings reveal to the conscious mind the subjective status of life: good, bad, in between; within a higher organism.  They especially indicate the affective situation within the old interior world of the viscera located in the abdomen, thorax and thick of the skin - so smiling makes one feel happy; but augmented with the reports from the situation of the new interior world of voluntary muscles.  Repeated experiences build intermediate narratives, in the mind, which reduce the salience.  Damasio concludes feelings relate closely and consistently with homeostasis, acting as its mental deputies once organisms developed 'nervous systems' about 600 million years ago, and building on the precursor regulatory devices supplied by evolution to social insects and prokaryotes and leveraging analogous dynamic constraints.  Damasio suggests feelings contribute to the development of culture:
  • As motives for intellectual creation: prompting detection and diagnosis of homeostatic deficiencies, identifying desirable states worthy of creative effort.
    
  • As monitors of the success and failure of cultural instruments and practices
  • As participants in the negotiation of adjustments required by the cultural process over time 
  which help make the 'images' robust.  And there are also robust symbiotic is a long term situation between two, or more, different agents where the resources of both are shared for mutual benefit.  Some of the relationships have built remarkable dependencies: Tremblaya's partnership with citrus mealybugs and bacterial DNA residing in the mealybug's genome, Aphids with species of secondary symbiont bacteria deployed sexually from a male aphid sperm reservoir and propagated asexually by female aphids only while their local diet induces a dependency.  If the power relations and opportunities change for the participants then they will adapt and the situation may transform into separation, predation or parasitism. 
  relationships.  Shah
  Sonia Shah reviews the millennia old (500,000 years) malarial arms race between Humanity, Anopheles mosquitoes and Plasmodium.  250 - 500 million people are infected each year with malaria and one million die. 
  
  highlights the
  This page reviews the implications of selection, variation and heredity in a complex adaptive system (CAS).  The mechanism and its emergence are discussed. 
  
  evolution of robust protective responses: Quinine, Artemisinin; by plants during the long
  Sonia Shah reviews the millennia old (500,000 years) malarial arms race between Humanity, Anopheles mosquitoes and Plasmodium.  250 - 500 million people are infected each year with malaria and one million die. 
  
  malarial arms race, in a war where both sides use the strategy of development and use of advanced weapon systems to gain an advantage, each advance induces the other side to respond with its own asymmetric advances.  Neither side will necessarily gain the upper hand in which case the weapon systems themselves advance rapidly with little direct benefit for the combatants.  . 
  
• Responsive to policy: Signals, is an emergent capability which is used by cooperating agents to support coordination & rival agents to support control and dominance.  In eukaryotic cells signalling is used extensively.  A signal interacts with the exposed region of a receptor molecule inducing it to change shape to an activated form.  Chains of enzymes interact with the activated receptor relaying, amplifying and responding to the signal to change the state of the cell.  Many of the signalling pathways pass through the nuclear membrane and interact with the DNA to change its state.  Enzymes sensitive to the changes induced in the DNA then start to operate generating actions including sending further signals.  Cell signalling is reviewed by Helmreich.  Signalling is a fundamental aspect of CAS theory and is discussed from the abstract CAS perspective in signals and sensors.  In AWF the eukaryotic signalling architecture has been abstracted in a codelet based implementation.  To be credible signals must be hard to fake.  To be effective they must be easily detected by the target recipient.  To be efficient they are low cost to produce and destroy. 
  to network
  Plans are interpreted and implemented by agents.  This page discusses the properties of agents in a complex adaptive system (CAS). 
  It then presents examples of agents in different CAS.  The examples include a computer program where modeling and actions are performed by software agents.  These software agents are aggregates. 
  The participation of agents in flows is introduced and some implications of this are outlined. 
  
  agents must generate the desired response, enable coordination and be actionable.  Strategies which don't fail when the signals are mangled should be available to be prioritized: Fair emerged during his modified Prisoner's Dilemma game.  It started out cooperating, but once the opponent defects, fair defects as well until the opponent resumes cooperating.  If Fair's signal is mistaken, due to induced errors, it will cooperate until the opponent starts cooperating again.  Fair is an advantage in noisy environments.   - in the modified Prisoner's Dilemma is a game theoretical scenario explored by mathematicians and evolutionary biologists.  Two prisoners are to be interrogated separately.  They will benefit if they cooperate with one another - serving one year each.  But if just one defects they will go free while the other will lose serving three years.  If they both defect they will both lose serving two years each.  If the game is played once it is best to defect.  But if the game is iterative, cooperation can be beneficial using a Tit for Tat strategy.  Bootstrapping cooperation can be induced:
  
  • When a small founder population first becomes isolated and kin-selection increases and then the group connect to the main population.  The group can then use cooperation to out compete the other members.  
  • Through green-beard signals, driving cooperation and forcing non green-beards to shift to cooperation to compete. 
    
  .  Gawande
  Atul Gawande writes about the opportunity for a thirty per cent improvement in quality in medicine by organizing to deploy as agent based teams using shared schematic plans and distributed signalling or as he puts it the use of checklists. 
  
  With vivid examples from a variety of situations including construction, air crew support and global health care Gawande illustrates the effects of complexity and how to organize to cope with it. 
  
  Following the short review RSS additionally relates Gawande's arguments to its models of complex adaptive systems (CAS) positioning his discussion within the network of US health care, contrasting our view of complexity, comparing the forces shaping his various examples and reviewing facets of complex failures. 
  
  describes how shared
  Plans emerge in complex adaptive systems (CAS) to provide the instructions that agents use to perform actions.  The component architecture and structure of the plans is reviewed. 
  
  plans, checklists are signals which remind the reader of highly significant aspects of a process.  They are designed to be consulted at a point in the process where forgetting about the aspect will have a significantly detrimental effect.  Often the processes are being used to respond to failures in the regular operation.  Atul Gawande argues that effective use of checklists is vital to coping with situations that are complex. 
  and autonomy provide such robustness, analogous to the DNA library distributed among a reproductive pool of emergent agents.  Khan
  Salman Khan argues that the evolved global education system is inefficient and organized around constraining and corralling students into accepting dubious ratings that lead to mundane roles.  He highlights a radical and already proven alternative which offers effective self-paced deep learning processes supported by technology and freed up attention of teams of teachers.  Building on his personal experience of helping overcome the unjustified failing grade of a relative, Khan:
  

  • Iteratively learns how to teach: Starting with Nadia, Leveraging short videos focused on content, Converging on mastery, With the help of neuroscience, and filling in dependent gaps; resulting in a different approach to the mainstream method. 
    
  • Assesses the broken US education system: Set in its ways, Designed for the 1800s, Inducing holes that are hidden by tests, Tests which ignore creativity.  The resulting teaching process is so inefficient it needs to be supplemented with homework.  Instead teachers were encouraging their pupils to use his tools at home so they could mentor them while they attended school, an inversion that significantly improves the economics. 
    
  • Enters the real world: Builds a scalable service, Working with a real classroom, Trying stealth learning, At Khan Academy full time,  In the curriculum at Los Altos, Supporting life-long learning. 
    
  • Develops The One World Schoolhouse: Back to the future with a one room school, a robust teaching team, and creativity enabled; so with some catalysis even the poorest can become educated and earn credentials for current jobs. 
    
  • Wishes he could also correct: Summer holidays, Transcript based assessments, College education;
  • Concludes it is now possible to provide the infrastructure for creativity to emerge and to support risk taking. 
    

  
  Following our summary of his arguments RSS frames them from the perspective of complex adaptive system (CAS) theory.  Disruption is a powerful force for change but if its force is used to support the current teachers to adopt new processes can it overcome the extended phenotypic alignment and evolutionary amplifiers sustaining the current educational network? 
  
  
  promotes team teaching.  Shannon, Claude Shannon was a key figure in information theory and computation.  He developed an electronic circuit using Boolean algebra which simplified the design and operation of a digital computer system enabling architectures such as Von Neumann's to become practical.  He also developed the mathematical models of information transfer which support information entropy. 
  detailed the information theory of signals and how they can be made robust. 
  

• Fun is important to certain creative personalities describes the operation of the mind from the perspective of psychological models and tests based on them.  Early 'Western' models of personality resulted in a simple segmentation noting the tension between: individual desires and group needs, and developing models and performing actions.  Dualistic 'Eastern' philosophies promote the legitimacy of an essence which Riso & Hudson argue is hidden within a shell of personality types and is only reached by developing presence.  The logic of a coherent essence is in conflict with the evolved nature of emotions outlined by Pinker.  Terman's studies of personality identified types which Friedman and Martin link to healthy and unhealthy pathways.  Current psychiatric models highlight at least five key aspects:
  • Extroversion-introversion - whether the person gains mental dynamism from socializing or retiring
    
  • Neuroticism-stability - does a person worry or are they calm and self-satisfied
    
  • Agreeableness-antagonism - is a person courteous & trusting or rude and suspicious
    
  • Conscientiousness-un-directedness - is a person careful or careless
    
  • Openness-non-openness - are they daring or conforming
    
  : Feynman was a Nobel laureate in physics, who developed methods to describe the behavior of electrons and photons, formalized as QED by Freeman Dyson, and formulated quantum mechanics in terms of Hugh Everett's histories.  His personality enneagram, is typed as an enthusiast, which aligns with his seeking fun, but with coaching in science from his father, a joking mother, and an early drive to read, understand and apply: engineering, science and mathematics; to have fun, he was able to slow down his thoughts and integrate into a creative, productive investigator. 
  , Shannon, Claude Shannon was a key figure in information theory and computation.  He developed an electronic circuit using Boolean algebra which simplified the design and operation of a digital computer system enabling architectures such as Von Neumann's to become practical.  He also developed the mathematical models of information transfer which support information entropy. 
  ; who mentally associate best and are most motivated in fun environments. Companies will benefit from working and playing hard. 
  
• Gardens suppress stressors is a multi-faceted condition reflecting high cortisol levels.  Dr. Robert Sapolsky's studies of baboons indicate that stress helps build readiness for fight or flight.  As these actions occur the levels of cortisol return to the baseline rate.  A stressor is anything that disrupts the regular homeostatic balance.  The stress response is the array of neural and endocrine changes that occur to respond effectively to the crisis and reestablish homeostasis. 
  
  • The short term response to the stressor
    
  • activates the amygdala which: Stimulates the brain stem resulting in inhibition of the parasympathetic nervous system and activation of the sympathetic nervous system with the hormones epinephrine and norepinephrine deployed around the body, Activates the PVN which generates a cascade resulting in glucocorticoid secretion to: get energy to the muscles with increased blood pressure for a powerful response.  The brain's acuity and cognition are stimulated.  The immune system is stimulated with beta-endorphin and repair activities curtail.  In order for the body to destroy bacteria in wounds, pro-inflammatory cytokines increase blood flow to the area.  The induced inflammation signals the brain to activate the insula and through it the ACC.  But when the stressor is
    
  • long term: loneliness, debt; and no action is necessary, or possible, long term damage ensues.  Damage from such stress may only occur in specific situations: Nuclear families coping with parents moving in.  Sustained stress provides an evolved amplifier of a position of dominance and status.  It is a strategy in female aggression used to limit reproductive competition.  Sustained stress:
    
  • Stops the frontal cortex from ensuring we do the harder thing, instead substituting amplification of the individual's propensity for risk-taking and impairing risk assessment! 
    
  • Activates the integration between the thalamus and amygdala. 
    
  • Acts differently on the amygdala in comparison to the frontal cortex and hippocampus: Stress strengthens the integration between the Amygdala and the hippocampus, making the hippocampus fearful. 
    
  • BLA & BNST respond with increased BDNF levels and expanded dendrites persistently increasing anxiety and fear conditioning. 
    
  • Makes it easier to learn a fear association and to consolidate it into long-term memory.  Sustained stress makes it harder to unlearn fear by making the prefrontal cortex inhibit the BLA from learning to break the fear association and weakening the prefrontal cortex's hold over the amygdala.  And glucocorticoids decrease activation of the medial prefrontal cortex during processing of emotional faces.  Accuracy of assessing emotions from faces suffers.  A terrified rat generating lots of glucocorticoids will cause dendrites in the hippocampus to atrophy but when it generates the same amount from excitement of running on a wheel the dendrites expand.  The activation of the amygdala seems to determine how the hippocampus responds. 
    
  • Depletes the nucleus accumbens of dopamine biasing rats toward social subordination and biasing humans toward depression. 
    
  • Disrupts working memory by amplifying norepinephrine signalling in the prefrontal cortex and amygdala to prefrontal cortex signalling until they become destructive.  It also desynchronizes activation in different frontal lobe regions impacting shifting of attention.  
  • Increases the risk of autoimmune disease (Jan 2017) 
  • During depression, stress inhibits dopamine signalling.  
  • Strategies for stress reduction include: Mindfulness. 
    
  and align our minds with the pleasure of the African savanna is the environment where hunter-gatherers primarily evolved.  Its grassland supported large herbivores that could be hunted easily across the plains.  Clumps of Acacia trees: with short trunks, and broad bows; & rocks supported places to hide from large carnivores.  Streams, especially important in times of drought, and paths add to the signals enabling orientation. 
  . 
  
• The quality, especially the reliability, of
  This presentation reviews just-in-time manufacturing with analysis based on complex adaptive system (CAS) theory. 
  
  lean manufactured products can remove fear is an emotion which prepares the body for time sensitive action: Blood is sent to the muscles from the gut and skin, Adrenalin is released stimulating: Fuel to be released from the liver, Blood is encouraged to clot, and Face is wide-eyed and fearful.  The short-term high priority goal, experienced as a sense of urgency, is to flee, fight or deflect the danger.  There are both 'innate' - really high priority learning - which are mediated by the central amygdala and learned fears which are mediated by the BLA which learns to fear a stimulus and then signals the central amygdala.  Tara Brach notes we experience fear as a painfully constricted throat, chest and belly, and racing heart.  The mind can build stories of the future which include fearful situations making us anxious about current ideas and actions that we associate with the potential future scenario.  And it can associate traumatic events from early childhood with our being at fault.  Consequent assumptions of our being unworthy can result in shame and fear of losing friendships.  The mechanism for human fear was significantly evolved to protect us in the African savanna.  This does not align perfectly with our needs in current environments: U.S. Grant was unusually un-afraid of the noise or risk of guns and trusted his horses' judgment, which mostly benefited his agency as a modern soldier. 
  and uncertainty is when a factor is hard to measure because it is dependent on many interconnected agents and may be affected by infrastructure and evolved amplifiers.  This is different from risk, although the two are deliberately conflated by ERISA.  Keynes argued that most aspects of the future are uncertain, at best represented by ordinal probabilities, and often only by capricious hope for future innovation, fear inducing expectations of limited confidence, which evolutionary psychology implies is based on the demands of our hunter gatherer past.  Deacon notes reduced uncertainty equates to information. 
  from the consumers' lives.  
• The SuperOrganism is a wealthy autonomous entity needing and controlling the richest niches in the proximate environment, that emerges from the bundled cooperation of schematically aligned agents.   The term is based on the social insect model, used by: ants, termites, and bees; and identified by Holldobler & E.O. Wilson.  These genetically identical insect superorganisms cooperatively limit their reproduction to align with the resources available in the niche.  Wilson asserts these insects all developed nests to which they returned to raise their offspring, and when the nest sites were of limited capacity some family members responded by focusing on defending the nest and foraging while their mother became an egg laying queen, enabled by "a single genetic change which silenced the brain's program for dispersal and prevents the mother and her offspring from dispersing to create new nests," Wilson explains.  He adds climate control of the nest and disease resistance, just like the human immune system, demand individually focused diversity.  So the queen's genome consists of low variety alleles for the extended phenotypic 'robot' worker caste agents and their organization - queen and workers competing as one, with other colonies and individual insects - and other parts which are high where the genome includes significant diversity.  For humans it is an evolved cultural strategy used when the environment is supportive, but it is dependent on our imperfect cognitive assessment of kinship as well as group selection driven emotions: other-condemning, other-praising, other-suffering and self-conscious; and group oriented pressures to conform and remain: religions.  And the adjacent possible must be recreated and modeled culturally through the emergence of processes such as democracy.  It depends on inter-agent signalling.  In both insects and humans it allows specialization, and encourages operations and flows that are tightly controlled, limiting waste, leveraging parallel activity, supporting coherence.  Superorganisms reflect cliodynamic flows.  A superorganism has a development and operational phase.  As additional agents are coopted into the superorganism they align, participate in supply and demand activities and so contribute to the evolutionary amplification.  Damasio notes that prokaryotes, in rich environments, can similarly operate in a symbiotic fashion expressing cultural behaviors. 
  strategy, implemented in post-World War 2 Japan, confronts Malthusian, Thomas Robert Malthus was an English cleric, East India Company economist and scholar.  He described the geometrical expansion of populations supported by sufficient resources and the population's subsequent collapse as the land used to grow the resources became fully deployed.  Initially concerned by England's leaders' fears of a French style revolution and disagreeing with William Godwin's visions of utopian progress and the idea of the Noble Savage, he argued for harsh treatment of the unemployed poor, denouncing charity.  Subsequently he softened his position accepting that emigration, education, and celibacy could constrain the impact of exponential population growth.  He socialized with the Wedgwood and Darwin families.  His ideas influenced Charles Darwin. 
  arguments for punishing the poor.  Birth rates can be managed through increasing education and cultural is how we do and think about things, transmitted by non-genetic means as defined by Frans de Waal.  CAS theory views cultures as operating via memetic schemata evolved by memetic operators to support a cultural superorganism.  Evolutionary psychology asserts that human culture reflects adaptations generated while hunting and gathering.  Dehaene views culture as essentially human, shaped by exaptations and reading, transmitted with support of the neuronal workspace and stabilized by neuronal recycling.  Damasio notes prokaryotes and social insects have developed cultural social behaviors.  Sapolsky argues that parents must show children how to transform their genetically derived capabilities into a culturally effective toolset.  He is interested in the broad differences across cultures of: Life expectancy, GDP, Death in childbirth, Violence, Chronic bullying, Gender equality, Happiness, Response to cheating, Individualist or collectivist, Enforcing honor, Approach to hierarchy; illustrating how different a person's life will be depending on the culture where they are raised.  Culture:
  • Is deployed during pregnancy & childhood, with parental mediation.  Nutrients, immune messages and hormones all affect the prenatal brain.  Hormones: Testosterone with anti-Mullerian hormone masculinizes the brain by entering target cells and after conversion to estrogen binding to intracellular estrogen receptors; have organizational effects producing lifelong changes.  Parenting style typically produces adults who adopt the same approach.  And mothering style can alter gene regulation in the fetus in ways that transfer epigenetically to future generations!  PMS symptoms vary by culture. 
    
  • Is also significantly transmitted to children by their peers during play.  So parents try to control their children's peer group.  
  • Is transmitted to children by their neighborhoods, tribes, nations etc. 
    
  • Influences the parenting style that is considered appropriate. 
    
  • Can transform dominance into honor.  There are ecological correlates of adopting honor cultures.  Parents in honor cultures are typically authoritarian. 
    
  • Is strongly adapted across a meta-ethnic frontier according to Turchin.  
  • Across Europe was shaped by the Carolingian empire. 
    
  • Can provide varying levels of support for innovation.  Damasio suggests culture is influenced by feelings: 
    
  • As motives for intellectual creation: prompting detection and diagnosis of homeostatic deficiencies, identifying desirable states worthy of creative effort.
    
  • As monitors of the success and failure of cultural instruments and practices
  • As participants in the negotiation of adjustments required by the cultural process over time 
  • Produces consciousness according to Dennet. 
    
  signals.  Downturns are inevitable, but do not need to induce fear of destitution.  The emergence of new and or different niches will alter which strategy is optimal.  Production of rice initially demanded intense cooperation across the community.  It supported a cooperative culture that recently found the Toyota production system easy to accept.  Where wheat could be grown by individual families it enabled emergence of a culture that allowed Elon Musk to capture enormous wealth is schematically useful information and its equivalent, schematically useful energy, to paraphrase Beinhocker.  It is useful because an agent has schematic strategies that can utilize the information or energy to extend or leverage control of the cognitive niche.    and focus it on Tesla within an economic network that lacks robustness. 
  
• Social media enables emotional alignment of groups of individuals.  But the architecture of the services must be improved to beneficially take account of man's Paleolithic emotions and mediaeval institutions.  When personal travel was enhanced by the automobile, society applied
  Terrence Deacon explores how constraints on dynamic flows can induce emergent phenomena which can do real work.  He shows how these phenomena are sustained.  The mechanism enables the development of Darwinian competition. 
  
  constraints to how we could use and abuse the technology.  But when interaction was extended with the Internet, legislation and regulation lagged.  We can: shout loudly and bully is a complex childhood adversity.  Sapolsky explains that targets of bullying aren't selected at random.  And bullies often come from families with single mothers or younger parents with low educational and economic prospects.  Sapolsky notes that someone who bullies and is also bullied is likely to be a real mess as an adult. 
  , gang-up on others, signal with attention grabbing but misleading details; to influence and gain power and status is a publically accepted, signal that one possesses assets: wealth, beauty, talent, expertise, access & trust of powerful people; to be able to help others. 
  .  Emotions support creativity, along with education about the problems to be solved, and networking.  So the focus of creativity will be shifted by the architecture of social media and the constraints that help define the adjacent possible.  With automobiles, driving licenses and traffic police support society's constraints.  Similar capabilities can and should be architected and applied to social media. 
  

• Poly genes promote pleasure is the outcome of the dopamine reward system, argues UCSF professor Robert Lustig.  He, like the early Christians, contrasts [addiction oriented] pleasure with serotonin driven happiness & contentment. 
  in both the display & observation of signals, is an emergent capability which is used by cooperating agents to support coordination & rival agents to support control and dominance.  In eukaryotic cells signalling is used extensively.  A signal interacts with the exposed region of a receptor molecule inducing it to change shape to an activated form.  Chains of enzymes interact with the activated receptor relaying, amplifying and responding to the signal to change the state of the cell.  Many of the signalling pathways pass through the nuclear membrane and interact with the DNA to change its state.  Enzymes sensitive to the changes induced in the DNA then start to operate generating actions including sending further signals.  Cell signalling is reviewed by Helmreich.  Signalling is a fundamental aspect of CAS theory and is discussed from the abstract CAS perspective in signals and sensors.  In AWF the eukaryotic signalling architecture has been abstracted in a codelet based implementation.  To be credible signals must be hard to fake.  To be effective they must be easily detected by the target recipient.  To be efficient they are low cost to produce and destroy. 
  that are associated with the genes.  Creativity appears to coopt those signals.  
• The use of sexual selection will develop positive returns, W. Brian Arthur's conception of how high tech products have positive economic feedback as they deploy.  Classical products such as foods have negative returns to scale since they take increasing amounts of land, and distribution infrastructure to support getting them to market.  High tech products typically become easier to produce or gain from platform and network effects of being connected together overcoming the negative effects of scale. 
  .  If the selection mechanism is tightly associated with expression then selections will feedback with positive returns, since females are essentially selecting for copies of themselves.  Expression resulting in even a hint of possession will allow sexual selection, which will select for increased expression of the indicator
  Agents use sensors to detect events in their environment.  This page reviews how these events become signals associated with beneficial responses in a complex adaptive system (CAS).  CAS signals emerge from the Darwinian information model.  Signals can indicate decision summaries and level of uncertainty. 
  
  signal. 
  
• Eventually the force of positive returns will be offset by natural selection pressure.  Any phenotypic distortion of a feature supporting a competitive advantage will be limited by natural selection pressure to obtain the utilitarian optimum.  But in contrast males who express the utilitarian optimum will have a harder time finding and attracting mates, so equilibrium will result.  

• Thomas Edison was a prolific inventor contributing to the emergence of electric power generation, mass communications, sound recording and movies.  He invented the electric light bulb, phonograph, and motion picture camera.  Born in Milan, Ohio, in 1847, Thomas was the seventh child of Samuel Edison and Nancy Elliot.  He contracted scarlet fever as a child which is attributed with causing his deafness from the age of 12.  His mother was a school teacher who taught Thomas to read, write and do arithmetic.  He had almost no formal education, until he was 28, but taught himself by reading about anything that made him curious.  He was interested in technology and did experiments at home.  At 28, Thomas enrolled in a four year chemistry course at The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art.  Edison was entrepreurial from age 13 when he sold candy, newspapers and vegetables on the trains flowing from Port Huron to Detroit, to finance his electricity and chemistry experiments.  After saving a three year old boy from being hit by a train he was rewarded by the boy's father with training as a telegraph operator.  By working night shifts he used this time to read and experiment, which got him fired.  He teamed up with Franklin Pope another inventor and telegrapher and developed a multiplex telegraphic system, which he sold financing his further business ventures.  He used the funds to setup the first industrial research lab at Menlo Park, New Jersey.  This allowed Edison to gather together materials and leverage other employees: mathematicians, engineers; to work together on analysis, inventions and technological innovations: telephone, phonograph, electric railway, iron ore separator, electric lighting; which Edison patented.  He founded a large number of companies including: G.E.; enabling innovation. 
  setup the first industrial research lab at GE, demonstrating the benefit of the structure.  The company also developed an effective
  Walter Shewhart's iterative development process is found in many complex adaptive systems (CAS).  The mechanism is reviewed and its value in coping with random events is explained. 
  
  PDCA process, which encouraged adoption of
  John Doerr argues that company leaders and their organizations, hugely benefit from Andy Grove's OKRs. 
  
  He promotes strategies that help OKR success: Focus, Align, Track, Stretch; replaces yearly performance reviews, and provides illustrative success stories. 
  
  Doerr stresses Dov Seidman's view that employees are adaptive and will respond to what they see being measured.  He asserts culturally supported OKRs/CFR processes will be transformative. 
  
  Following our summary of his arguments, RSS comments on them framed by complex adaptive system (CAS) theory.  Doerr's architecture is tailored for the startups KPCB invests in.  It is a subset of the general case of schematic plans, genetic operators and Shewhart cycles that drive all CAS.  Doerr's approach limits support of learning and deemphasizes the association to planning. 
  
  
  similar processes at Intel.  
• Mervin Kelly while managing
  A government sanctioned monopoly supported the construction of a superorganism American Telephone and Telegraph (AT&T).  Within this Bell Labs was at the center of three networks:
  

  1. The evolving global scientific network. 
     
  2. The Bell telephone network.  And
     
  3. The military industrial network deploying 'fire and missile control' systems. 

  Bell Labs strategically leveraged each network to create an innovation engine. 
  They monitored the opportunities to leverage the developing ideas, reorganizing to replace incumbent opposition and enable the creation and growth of new ideas. 
  Once the monopoly was dismantled, AT&T disrupted. 
  Complex adaptive system (CAS) models of the innovation mechanisms are discussed. 
  
  
  ATT's Bell Labs, setup the building infrastructure so that it supported creative networking:
• Reflecting a university setting rather than a factory.  And all aspects were connected so as to inhibit departments becoming silos.  Kelly aimed for a structure that would
  E O. Wilson argues that campfire gatherings on the savanna supported the emergence of human creativity.  This resulted in man building cultures and later exploring them, and their creator, through the humanities.  Wilson identifies the transformative events, but he notes many of these are presently ignored by the humanities.  So he calls for a change of approach. 
  
  He:
  

  • Explores creativity: how it emerged from the benefits of becoming an omnivore hunter-gatherer, enabled by language & its catalysis of invention, through stories told in the evening around the campfire. He notes the power of fine art, but suggests music provides the most revealing signature of aesthetic surprise. 
    
  • Looks at the current limitations of the humanities, as they have suffered through years of neglect.  
  • Reviews the evolutionary processes of heredity and culture:
    
  • Ultimate causes viewed through art, & music
    
  • The bedrock of:
    
  • Ape senses and emotions,
    
  • Creative arts, language, dance, song typically studied by humanities, & 
  • Exponential change in science and technology.  
  • How the breakthrough from our primate past occurred, powered by eating meat, supporting: a bigger brain, expanded memory & language. 
    
  • Accelerating changes now driven by genetic cultural coevolution.  
  • The impact on human nature.  
  • Considers our emotional attachment to the natural world: hunting, gardens; we are destroying. 
    
  • Reviews our love of metaphor, archetypes, exploration, irony, and considers the potential for a third enlightenment, supported by cooperative action of humanities and science
    

  
  Following our summary of his arguments RSS frames these from the perspective of complex adaptive system (CAS) theory:
  

  • The humanities are seen to be a functionalist framework for representing the cultural CAS while 
    
  • Wilson's desire to integrate the humanities and science gains support from viewing the endeavor as a network of layered CAS. 

  
  
  encourage free interchange of ideas.  So he put the scientists' labs and offices on different floors.  There were 700 foot long corridors.  Offices had modular reconfigurable walls. 
• Bill Hewlett & Dave Packard setup a research lab at Hewlett-Packard.  It was initially run by Barney Oliver, and then Joel Birnbaum who commented on its value to the innovation process:
  
• They support documented failure, which should reduce the occurrence of the far more expensive investment by a product division in the failing venture. 
  
• They easily integrate diverse viewpoints, skills and disciplines, parts of the company, and long-term ideas, when product divisions must be focused and limited in their mission's scope.  
• Solutions from one field can be applied to another; with
  Brynjolfsson and McAfee explore the effects of Moore's law on the economy.  They argue it has generated exponential growth.  This has been due to innovation.  It has created a huge bounty of additional wealth.  But the wealth is spread unevenly across society.  They look at the short and long term implications of the innovation bounty and spread and the possible future of technology. 
  
  Following our summary of their arguments RSS comments from the perspective of CAS theory. 
  
  
  vast numbers of new technologies, valuable new combinations can be enabled at a research lab.  

• At the height of its power IBM was a computer systems developer which leased its products and services to customers in markets where it aimed to capture the majority of the revenue.  The customers were attracted by the modularity of the IBM solution, which was sustained by an
  This page reviews the strategy of architecting an end-to-end solution in a complex adaptive system (CAS).  The mechanism and its costs and benefits are discussed. 
  
  end-to-end system architecture, and
  This page discusses the strategy of modularity in a complex adaptive system (CAS).  The benefits, mechanism and its emergence are discussed. 
  
  modular components.  This demanded compromises, where the pace of product development was slow enough to allow the architecture to evolve appropriately.  Innovations in the technologies which transformed the components were hard to leverage.  Pricing power was protected by
  This page reviews the strategy of bundling multiple products within a single offer in a complex adaptive system (CAS).  The mechanism is discussed with examples from biology and business. 
  
  bundling and limiting the ability of third parties to integrate with the systems.  The sales channel focused on the top of the hierarchy of the customer's organization leaving the IBM development process disconnected from the end users' activities and needs.  It is an archetype for Google's cloud business and Amazon web services (AWS).  
• Hewlett-Packard (HP) was formed with the opposite approach: lots of discrete product, and profit, focused businesses were loosely coupled together by central initial funding, mission allocation and oversight.  Reinvestment of profits within each business limited the need for external bank finance which the founders had seen destroy effective businesses during the banking collapse of the great depression.  But HP's engineering customers, interested in the test and measurement tools, expected to deal with a single well briefed sales organization and products that integrated.  The profit orientation and iterative addition of features means the businesses can suffer from
  This page reviews Christensen's disruption of a complex adaptive system (CAS).  The mechanism is discussed with examples from biology and business. 
  
  disruption, unless protected by the innovator's solution.  Overtime HP added structures to align sales channels and subsets of businesses and to align the architectures of products to improve integration. 
  This page reviews the inhibiting effect of the value delivery system on the expression of new phenotypic effects within an agent. 
  
  Extended phenotypic alignment and other constraints highlighted the impact of these compromises.  The sales forces were careful to protect 'their' customers from the product divisions limiting the alignment of product goals and customer needs. 
  
• HP general manager, Tom Perkins, liked the discrete product focus of the early HP businesses and developed a VC is venture capital, venture companies invest in startups with intangable assets
  framework that virtualized the HP organizational model.  It linked free capital to innovative creations, but integrated the resulting businesses to stock market quarterly measures, and selected for businesses with the potential for rapid exponential growth through positive returns, W. Brian Arthur's conception of how high tech products have positive economic feedback as they deploy.  Classical products such as foods have negative returns to scale since they take increasing amounts of land, and distribution infrastructure to support getting them to market.  High tech products typically become easier to produce or gain from platform and network effects of being connected together overcoming the negative effects of scale. 
  .  This drives companies like Facebook and Alphabet to avoid architectural constraints to growth: accurate identity management; and to the
  This page reviews the strategy of setting up an arms race.  At its core this strategy depends on being able to alter, or take advantage of an alteration in, the genome or equivalent.  The situation is illustrated with examples from biology, high tech and politics. 
  
  evolved amplifier of advertising revenue capture.  For the winners, massive revenues and profits support a period of expansion before the share of the business within the market and through market extensions, makes additional growth incremental in scope disappointing investors who seek cost reductions. 
  
• A government sanctioned monopoly supported the construction of a superorganism American Telephone and Telegraph (AT&T).  Within this Bell Labs was at the center of three networks:
  

  1. The evolving global scientific network. 
     
  2. The Bell telephone network.  And
     
  3. The military industrial network deploying 'fire and missile control' systems. 

  Bell Labs strategically leveraged each network to create an innovation engine. 
  They monitored the opportunities to leverage the developing ideas, reorganizing to replace incumbent opposition and enable the creation and growth of new ideas. 
  Once the monopoly was dismantled, AT&T disrupted. 
  Complex adaptive system (CAS) models of the innovation mechanisms are discussed. 
  
  
  AT&T illustrates the network focused product strategy and business model, now leveraged by
  In this page we use CAS theory to review the asymmetric challenges of the retailer Amazon. 
  
  
  Amazon.  The tight focus on the "network," close access to its problems, and the conversion of monopoly is a power relation within:
  
  • A state in which a group has enough power to enforce its will on other citizens.  If this is a central authority with a cohesive military, it can overpower other warlords and stabilize the society. 
    
  • An economy in which one business has enough share in a market segment to control margins to its advantage.  An economic monopoly can be broadly beneficial: AT&T monopoly, US patent monopoly rights;
    
  profits into creative engineering, supports innovation across the network.  But it increasingly monopolizes its markets unless constrained by regulation.  
• IBM developed an ecosystem of 3rd party value added businesses leveraging its IBM PC platform is agent generated infrastructure that supports emergence of an entity through: leverage of an abundant energy source, reusable resources; attracting a phenotypically aligned network of agents. 
  .  Microsoft maintained and supported this ecosystem and extended it to original equipment manufacturers (OEMS) building compatable PC hardware.  Apple developed a similar platform business and ecosystem for the iPhone.  But previously 
• Apple's products and business organization developed and sold integrated systems, allowing Apple the flexibility to repeatedly transform its product line with new cascades of technologies. 
  

• Defense Secretary Schlesinger's desire to leave a legacy, his association with Pierre Sprey was a McNamara Whiz Kid, who, according to Robert Coram, entered Yale at fifteen graduating with a double major in French literature and mechanical engineering, then studied statistics and operational research at Cornell before running the statistical consulting shop at Grumman Aviation, before working for McNamara under Alain Enthoven.  Sprey became an expert on the history of warfare and tactical aviation.  He developed a report on interdiction bombing which asserted it would not deter Soviet forces from invading Western Europe and that the US Air Force should focus on CAS and providing tactical air cover.  He was asked to manage the program to develop the A-10, where he leveraged John Boyd's E-M theory and data.  Sprey was a vocal critic of the Pentagon's expensive, complex procurement process, and especially the computer model based vulnerability testing of tanks and armored vehicles, since the models weren't validated by field testing.  He helped Jim Burton to develop a live-fire test program to provide the validation. 
  's mentor, Colonel Richard Hallock who proposed the F-16 and A-10 Warthog CAS aircraft.  It was promoted and developed by Pierre Sprey who ensured it matched the requirements of Vietnam war US CAS pilots and reflected the observations of top German Stuka pilot Hans Rudel. 
  in response, 
• Pierre Sprey &
  Robert Coram highlights the noble life of John Boyd.  John spent a lot of time alone during his childhood.  He: excelled at swimming and was a lifeguard, enlisted in the Army Air Corp while at school which rejected him for pilot training, was part of the Japan occupation force where he swam; so the US paid for him to attend University of Iowa, where he: joined the Air Force Officers' training corps, was accepted to be an Air Force pilot, and got engaged to Mary Bruce. 
  
  Boyd trained at Nellis AFB to become a combat ready pilot in the Korean War. 
  
  While the US Air Force focused on Strategic bombing, Boyd loved dogfights.  His exceptional tactical ability was rewarded with becoming an instructor.  Boyd created new ways to think about dogfighting and beat all-comers by using them in the F-100.  He was noticed and enabled by Spradling.  As he trained, and defeated the top pilots from around the US and allied base network, his reputation spread.  But he needed to get nearer to the hot spring in Georgia, and when his move to Tyndall AFB was blocked he used the AFIT to train in engineering at Georgia tech.  While preparing to move he documented his FWS training and mentored Ronald Catton.  While there he first realized the link between energy and maneuverability.  At Eglin, in partnership with Tom Christie, he developed tools to model the link.  They developed comparisons of US and Soviet aircraft which showed the US aircraft performing poorly.  Eventually General Sweeney was briefed on the theory and issues with the F-105, F-4, and F-111. 
  
  Sent to the Pentagon to help save the F-X budget, Boyd joined forces with Pierre Sprey to pressure procurement into designing and building tactically exceptional aircraft: a CAS tank killer and a lightweight maneuverable fighter.  The navy aligned with Senators of states with navy bases, prepared to sink the F-X and force the F-14 on the Air Force.  Boyd saved the plane from the Navy and the budget from Congress, ensuring the Air Force executive and its career focused hierarchy had the freedom to compromise on a budget expanding over-stuffed F-X (F-15).  Boyd requested to retire, in disgust.  Amid mounting hostility from the organizational hierarchy Boyd and Sprey secretly developed specifications for building prototype lightweight fighters with General Dynamics: YF-16; and Northrop: YF-17; and enabled by Everest Riccioni.  
  
  David Packard announced a budget of $200 million for the services to spend on prototypes.  Pierre Sprey's friend Lyle Cameron picked a short takeoff and landing transport aircraft and Boyd's lightweight fighter to prototype. 
  
  Boyd was transferred to Thailand as Vice Commander of Task Force Alpha, inspector general and equal opportunity training officer; roles in which he excelled.  And he started working on his analysis of creativity: Destruction and Creation.  But on completion of the tour Boyd was apparently abandoned and sent to run a dead end office at the Pentagon. 
  
  The power hierarchy moved to protect the F-15, but: Boyd, Christie, Schlesinger, and the Air Force chief of staff; kept the lightweight fighter budgeted and aligned with Boyd's requirements in a covert campaign.  The Air Force threw a phalanx of developers at the F-16, distorting Boyd's concept.  He accepted he had lost the fight and retired from the Air Force. 
  
  Shifting to scholarship Boyd reflects on how rigidity must be destroyed to enable creative new assemblies.  He uses the idea to explain the operational success of the YF16 and F-86 fighters, and then highlights how the pilot can take advantage of their infrastructure advantage with rapid decision making he explains with the O-O-D-A Loop. 
  
  Boyd encouraged Chuck Spinney to expose the systemic cost overruns of the military procurement process.  The military hierarchy moved to undermine the Spinney Report and understand the nature of the reformers.  Boyd acted as a progressive mentor to Michael Wyly, who taught the Marine Corps about maneuver warfare, and Jim Burton. 
  
  Finally, after the military hierarchy appears to have beaten him, Boyd's ideas are tested during the First Gulf War. 
  
  Following our summary of his main points, RSS frames the details from the perspective of complex adaptive system (CAS) theory.  Boyd was Darwinesque, placing the art of air-to-air combat within a CAS framework. 
   
  
  John Boyd who initiated and drove the creation of the CAS is:
  • Close Air Support by the Air Force of ground troops.  CAS aircraft: US A-1, A-10 , Cheyenne helicopter, Stuka; target tanks, bridges etc. to limit the operations of the enemy ground forces and enable movement by friendly forces. 
    
  • Complex Adaptive System is an emergent, complex system which leverages evolution to iteratively plan and execute activites by agents. 
    
  This page uses an example to illustrate how:
  

  • A business can gain focus from targeting key customers,
    
  • Business planning activities performed by the whole organization can build awareness, empowerment and coherence. 
  • A program approach can ensure strategic alignment. 
    
  program which conceived the A-10, and the light weight single engine fighter,
  
• Deputy Defense Secretary Packard to incent prototyping, against the objections of the large incumbent defense contractors and the military hierarchy, which allowed the YF-16 prototype to demonstrate its superiority over the defense establishment's preferred F-15 is a US Air Force fighter, built as the F-X program, and re-designated F-15 after it was forced to become a fixed wing aircraft.  Robert Coram explains that for John Boyd it epitomized the multi-role, master of none, 'addiction' of the Air Force bureaucracy and its aligned defense contractors.  This extended phenotype's need to add features: tail hook, nose wheel steering, maintenance ladder, huge radar; expanded its weight, making it impossible to maneuver in a dogfight while retaining usable energy. 
  
• Christie was born in Pensacola on the 28th May 1935, the first of five children of a wife beating, gambler, drunkard, and womanizer, according to Robert Coram.  When Tom tried to defend his mother he was beaten too.  Tom learned to survive, coping with his father in a poor family, by avoiding the notice of those who could harm him.  He enjoyed his education, excelling academically and at baseball.  He studied mathematics at Jesuit Spring Hill College, graduating in 1955 and got a civilian job at Eglin AFB.  Unusually, the US Air Force financed his graduate degree studies in applied mathematics at New York University.  Back in Eglin by 1962 he was assigned to the Air Force Armament Center's Ballistics Division, tasked with quantifying the bombing tables.  Christie's quiet, self-effacing personality helped him achieve his goals within the military bureaucracy, staying undetected by those who would block his projects.  He was keen to make a difference to science and the Air Force which he did through an informal partnership, adding his complementary skills to John Boyd's, so together they would systematize aircraft maneuverability, with Boyd's E-M Theory.  Christie's success as a leader led to his running the Tactical Air Program at the Pentagon in the OSD.  While there he protected Boyd and Spinney, helped keep the Light Weight Fighter project in the Air Force budget, pushed the readiness issue within the DOD budget process, and helped bring the F-111D revelations to the Secretary of Defense.  When Boyd retired Christie remained in communication.  Christie became one of the top non-appointed civilians at the Pentagon, where he was able to provide Boyd with: a consulting role at Tac Air, an office and infrastructure; after Boyd retired.  But Christie's salary was still never sufficient to cope with his daughter's medical expenses.   to help Schlesinger protect the F-16 budget
  
• Boyd to reveal to US allies that the F-16 would have a longer range than any other fighter operated by the Air Force; and even then the Air Force leadership now aims to develop plans and strategies which ensure effective coordination to improve the common good of the in-group.  Pinker notes the evolved pressure of social rivalry associating power with leadership.  Saposky observes the disconnect between power hierarchies and wisdom in apes.  John Adair developed a modern leadership methodology based on the three-circles model. 
  transformed it from a light weight fighter to a bomber to protect the budgets and careers associated with the F-15! 
  

• An external threat from an adjacent, feared is an emotion which prepares the body for time sensitive action: Blood is sent to the muscles from the gut and skin, Adrenalin is released stimulating: Fuel to be released from the liver, Blood is encouraged to clot, and Face is wide-eyed and fearful.  The short-term high priority goal, experienced as a sense of urgency, is to flee, fight or deflect the danger.  There are both 'innate' - really high priority learning - which are mediated by the central amygdala and learned fears which are mediated by the BLA which learns to fear a stimulus and then signals the central amygdala.  Tara Brach notes we experience fear as a painfully constricted throat, chest and belly, and racing heart.  The mind can build stories of the future which include fearful situations making us anxious about current ideas and actions that we associate with the potential future scenario.  And it can associate traumatic events from early childhood with our being at fault.  Consequent assumptions of our being unworthy can result in shame and fear of losing friendships.  The mechanism for human fear was significantly evolved to protect us in the African savanna.  This does not align perfectly with our needs in current environments: U.S. Grant was unusually un-afraid of the noise or risk of guns and trusted his horses' judgment, which mostly benefited his agency as a modern soldier. 
  , superorganism encourages the leadership's focus on progress.  When this is removed: for America, by the fall of the Soviet Union, for ancient Rome in the subjugation of Carthage; this focus is lost and leaders may encourage constraints that consolidate and reinforce the hierarchy and their place in it. 
  
• In the F-16 example, when the threat from the parallel civilian hierarchy: Schlesinger, Sprey; is removed, the Air Force leadership adjusts: a phalanx is focused on transforming the fighter to a multi-purpose bomber, and training entry points: Air Force Academy, Air Command and Staff College; allow the leadership's relatives, and 'water-walkers,' accelerated access to executive positions. 
  
• The effective understanding of the proximate environment is enabled by creation of applicable
  This page introduces the complex adaptive system (CAS) theory frame.  The theory provides an organizing framework that is used by 'life.'  It can be used to evaluate and rank models that claim to describe our perceived reality.  It catalogs the laws and strategies which underpin the operation of systems that are based on the interaction of emergent agents.  It highlights the constraints that shape CAS and so predicts their form.  A proposal that does not conform is wrong. 
  
  John Holland's framework for representing complexity is outlined.  Links to other key aspects of CAS theory discussed at the site are presented. 
  
  CAS theories, which are then introduced to future leaders, and or their strategic advisors, during their adolescent in humans supports the transition from a juvenile configuration, dependent on parents and structured to learn & logistically transform, to adult optimized to the proximate environment.  And it is staged, encouraging male adolescents to escape the hierarchy they grew up in and enter other groups where they may bring in: fresh ideas, risk taking; and alter the existing hierarchy: Steve Jobs & Steve Wozniak, Bill Gates & Paul Allen; while females become highly focused on friendships and communications.  It marks the beginning of Piaget's formal operational stage of cognitive development.  The limbic, autonomic and hormone networks are already deployed and functioning effectively.  The frontal cortex has to be pruned: winning neurons move to their final highly connected positions, and are myelinated over time.  The rest dissolve.  So the frontal lobe does not obtain its adult configuration and networked integration until the mid-twenties when prefrontal cortex control becomes optimal.  The evolutionarily oldest areas of the frontal cortex mature first.  The PFC must be iteratively customized by experience to do the right thing as an adult.  Adolescents:
  • Don't detect irony effectively.  They depend on the DMPFC to do this, unlike adults who leverage the fusiform face area.  
  • Regulate emotions with the ventral striatum while the prefrontal cortex is still being setup.  Dopamine projection density and signalling increase from the ventral tegmentum catalyzing increased interest in dopamine based rewards.  Novelty seeking allows for creative exploration which was necessary to move beyond the familial pack.  Criticisms do not get incorporated into learning models by adolescents leaving their risk assessments very poor.  The target of the dopamine networks, the adolescent accumbens, responds to rewards like a gyrating top - hugely to large rewards, and negatively to small rewards.  Eventually as the frontal regions increase in contribution there are steady improvements in: working memory, flexible rule use, executive organization and task shifting.  And adolescents start to see other people's perspective. 
    
  • Drive the cellular transformations with post-pubescent high levels of testosterone in males, and high but fluctuating estrogen & progesterone levels in females.  Blood flow to the frontal cortex is also diverted on occasion to the groin.  
  • Peer pressure is exceptionally influential in adolescents.  Admired peer comments reduce vmPFC activity and enhance ventral striatal activity.  Adults modulate the mental impact of socially mean treatment: the initial activation of the PAG, anterior cingulate, amygdala, insula cortex; which generate feelings of pain, anger, and disgust, with the VLPFC but that does not occur in adolescents.  
  • Feel empathy intensely, supported by their rampant emotions, interest in novelty, ego.  But feeling the pain of others can induce self-oriented avoidance of the situations. 
    
  development is a phase during the operation of a CAS agent.  It allows for schematic strategies to be iteratively blended with environmental signals to solve the logistical issues of migrating newly built and transformed sub-agents.  That is needed to achieve the adult configuration of the agent and optimize it for the proximate environment.  Smiley includes examples of the developmental phase agents required in an emergent CAS.  In situations where parents invest in the growth and memetic learning of their offspring the schematic grab bag can support optimizations to develop models, structures and actions to construct an adept adult.  In humans, adolescence leverages neural plasticity, elder sibling advice and adult coaching to help prepare the deploying neuronal network and body to successfully compete. 
  ; but the leadership's support for creativity is also limited by the nature of future uncertainty is when a factor is hard to measure because it is dependent on many interconnected agents and may be affected by infrastructure and evolved amplifiers.  This is different from risk, although the two are deliberately conflated by ERISA.  Keynes argued that most aspects of the future are uncertain, at best represented by ordinal probabilities, and often only by capricious hope for future innovation, fear inducing expectations of limited confidence, which evolutionary psychology implies is based on the demands of our hunter gatherer past.  Deacon notes reduced uncertainty equates to information. 
  . 

• The
  Sven Beckert describes the historic transformation of the growing, spinning, weaving, manufacture of cotton goods and their trade over time.  He describes the rise of a first global commodity, its dependence on increasing: military power, returns for the control points in the value delivery system(VDS), availability of land and labor to work it including slaves. 
  
  He explains how cotton offered the opportunity for industrialization further amplifying the productive capacity of the VDS and the power of the control points.  This VDS was quickly copied.  The increased capacity of the industrialized cotton complex adaptive system (CAS) required more labor to operate the machines.  Beckert describes the innovative introduction of wages and the ways found to mobilize industrial labor. 
  
  Beckert describes the characteristics of the industrial cotton CAS which made it flexible enough to become globally interconnected.  Slavery made the production system so cost effective that all prior structures collapsed as they interconnected.  So when the US civil war blocked access to the major production nodes in the American Deep South the CAS began adapting. 
  
  Beckert describes the global reconstruction that occurred and the resulting destruction of the traditional ways of life in the global countryside.  This colonial expansion further enriched and empowered the 'western' nation states.  Beckert explains how other countries responded by copying the colonial strategies and creating the opportunities for future armed conflict among the original colonialists and the new upstarts. 
  
  Completing the adaptive shifts, Beckert describes the advocates for industrialization in the colonized global south and how over time they joined the global cotton CAS disrupting the early western manufacturing nodes and creating the current global CAS dominated by merchants like Wal-Mart pulling goods through a network of clothing manufacturers, spinning and weaving factories, and growers competing with each other on cost. 
  
  Following our summary of Beckert's book, RSS comments from the perspective of CAS theory.  The transformation of disconnected peasant farmers, pastoral warriors and their lands into a supply chain for a highly profitable industrial CAS required the development over time: of military force, global transportation and communication networks, perception and representation control networks, capital stores and flows, models, rules, standards and markets; along with the support at key points of: barriers, disruption, and infrastructure and evolved amplifiers.  The emergent system demonstrates the powerful constraining influence of extended phenotypic alignment. 
  
  
  global cotton network, which expanded into the global economy is a human SuperOrganism complex adaptive system (CAS) which operates and controls trade flows within a rich niche.  Economics models economies.  Robert Gordon has described the evolution of the American economy.  Like other CAS, economic flows are maintained far from equilibrium by: demand, financial flows and constraints, supply infrastructure constraints, political and military constraints; ensuring wealth, legislative control, legal contracts and power have significant leverage through evolved amplifiers. 
  , benefited from creativity and supported innovation, driving the results into the networked home.  But as the wealth has
  Charles Ferguson argues that the US power structure has become highly corrupt. 
  
  Ferguson identifies key events which contributed to the transformation:
  

  • Junk bonds, 
  • Derivative deregulation, 
  • CMOs, ABS and analyst fraud,
    
  • Financial network deregulation,
    
  • Financial network consolidation, 
  • Short term incentives
    

  Subsequently the George W. Bush administration used the situation to build a global bubble, which Wall Street leveraged.  The bursting of the bubble: managed by the Bush Administration and Bernanke Federal Reserve; was advantageous to some. 
  
  Ferguson concludes that the restructured and deregulated financial services industry is damaging to the American economy.  And it is supported by powerful, incentive aligned academics.   He sees the result being a rigged system. 
  
  Ferguson offers his proposals for change and offers hope that a charismatic young FDR will appear. 
  
  Following our summary of his arguments, RSS comments on them framed by complex adaptive system (CAS) theory.  Once the constraints are removed from CAS amplifiers, it becomes advantageous to leverage the increased flows.  And it is often relatively damaging not to participate.  Corruption and parasitism can become entrenched. 
  
  
  shifted to financial services the current network is disintermediating is the shift of operations from one network provider to another lower cost connected network provider.  The first network provider leverages the cost benefits of the shift to increase its profitability but becomes disrupted.  The lower cost network provider gains revenue flows, expertise and increases its active agents.  Over time this disruptive shift will leave the higher cost network as a highly profitable shell, but the agents that performed the operations that migrated to the low cost network will be ejected from the network.  For a company that may imply the costs of layoffs.  For a state the ejected workers imply increased cost impacts and reduced revenue potential which the state are trading off for improved operating efficiency. 
  , pushing the potential to innovate towards the Chinese manufacturing hubs. 
  
• VC is venture capital, venture companies invest in startups with intangable assets
  operations provide this facility but tend to be driven towards positive return, W. Brian Arthur's conception of how high tech products have positive economic feedback as they deploy.  Classical products such as foods have negative returns to scale since they take increasing amounts of land, and distribution infrastructure to support getting them to market.  High tech products typically become easier to produce or gain from platform and network effects of being connected together overcoming the negative effects of scale. 
  situations, which can become distorted through maximizing investor returns to generate sub-optimal, monopolies is a power relation within:
  
  • A state in which a group has enough power to enforce its will on other citizens.  If this is a central authority with a cohesive military, it can overpower other warlords and stabilize the society. 
    
  • An economy in which one business has enough share in a market segment to control margins to its advantage.  An economic monopoly can be broadly beneficial: AT&T monopoly, US patent monopoly rights;
    
  .  
• Company research labs, an innovation of Thomas Edison was a prolific inventor contributing to the emergence of electric power generation, mass communications, sound recording and movies.  He invented the electric light bulb, phonograph, and motion picture camera.  Born in Milan, Ohio, in 1847, Thomas was the seventh child of Samuel Edison and Nancy Elliot.  He contracted scarlet fever as a child which is attributed with causing his deafness from the age of 12.  His mother was a school teacher who taught Thomas to read, write and do arithmetic.  He had almost no formal education, until he was 28, but taught himself by reading about anything that made him curious.  He was interested in technology and did experiments at home.  At 28, Thomas enrolled in a four year chemistry course at The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art.  Edison was entrepreurial from age 13 when he sold candy, newspapers and vegetables on the trains flowing from Port Huron to Detroit, to finance his electricity and chemistry experiments.  After saving a three year old boy from being hit by a train he was rewarded by the boy's father with training as a telegraph operator.  By working night shifts he used this time to read and experiment, which got him fired.  He teamed up with Franklin Pope another inventor and telegrapher and developed a multiplex telegraphic system, which he sold financing his further business ventures.  He used the funds to setup the first industrial research lab at Menlo Park, New Jersey.  This allowed Edison to gather together materials and leverage other employees: mathematicians, engineers; to work together on analysis, inventions and technological innovations: telephone, phonograph, electric railway, iron ore separator, electric lighting; which Edison patented.  He founded a large number of companies including: G.E.; enabling innovation. 
  , can be focused on problems with a
  This page discusses the effect of the network on the agents participating in a complex adaptive system (CAS).  Small world and scale free networks are considered. 
  
  network oriented niche encouraging a drive for progress and supporting creativity and some innovation.  
• University research explores the universe detailing its solutions to the problems of complexity.  But humanity is
  E. O. Wilson reviews the effect of man on the natural world to date and explains how the two systems can coexist most effectively. 
  
  rapidly destroying eco-nets that have taken millions of years to construct through
  This page reviews the implications of selection, variation and heredity in a complex adaptive system (CAS).  The mechanism and its emergence are discussed. 
  
  evolution and the funding process used to incent and constrain the direction of research has been coopted by the incentives of the predatory financial network.  
• Education can
  Salman Khan argues that the evolved global education system is inefficient and organized around constraining and corralling students into accepting dubious ratings that lead to mundane roles.  He highlights a radical and already proven alternative which offers effective self-paced deep learning processes supported by technology and freed up attention of teams of teachers.  Building on his personal experience of helping overcome the unjustified failing grade of a relative, Khan:
  

  • Iteratively learns how to teach: Starting with Nadia, Leveraging short videos focused on content, Converging on mastery, With the help of neuroscience, and filling in dependent gaps; resulting in a different approach to the mainstream method. 
    
  • Assesses the broken US education system: Set in its ways, Designed for the 1800s, Inducing holes that are hidden by tests, Tests which ignore creativity.  The resulting teaching process is so inefficient it needs to be supplemented with homework.  Instead teachers were encouraging their pupils to use his tools at home so they could mentor them while they attended school, an inversion that significantly improves the economics. 
    
  • Enters the real world: Builds a scalable service, Working with a real classroom, Trying stealth learning, At Khan Academy full time,  In the curriculum at Los Altos, Supporting life-long learning. 
    
  • Develops The One World Schoolhouse: Back to the future with a one room school, a robust teaching team, and creativity enabled; so with some catalysis even the poorest can become educated and earn credentials for current jobs. 
    
  • Wishes he could also correct: Summer holidays, Transcript based assessments, College education;
  • Concludes it is now possible to provide the infrastructure for creativity to emerge and to support risk taking. 
    

  
  Following our summary of his arguments RSS frames them from the perspective of complex adaptive system (CAS) theory.  Disruption is a powerful force for change but if its force is used to support the current teachers to adopt new processes can it overcome the extended phenotypic alignment and evolutionary amplifiers sustaining the current educational network? 
  
  
  support the developing brain's creative strategies and integrate the brain with the network of knowledge and expertise; but
  This page discusses the impact of random events which once they occur encourage a particular direction forward for a complex adaptive system (CAS). 
  
  frozen accidents are difficult to manage.  Pandemic disease and wars repeatedly occur but their timing, scope and impact are hard to predict.  Instead impacts are often minimized and responses are delayed in all the planning scenarios. 
  

• Analyze the proximate situation, formulating
  Consciousness is no longer mysterious.  In this page we use complex adaptive system (CAS) theory to describe the high-level architecture of consciousness, linking sensory networks, low level feelings and genetically conserved and deployed neural structures into a high level scheduler.  Consciousness is evolution's solution to the complex problems of effective, emergent, multi-cellular perception based strategy.  Constrained by emergence and needing to avoid the epistemological problem of starting with a blank slate with every birth, evolution was limited in its options. 
  
  We explain how survival value allows evolution to leverage available tools: sensors, agent relative position, models, perception & representation; to solve the problem of mobile agents responding effectively to their own state and proximate environment.  Evolution did this by providing a genetically constructed framework that can develop into a conscious CAS. 
  
  And we discuss the implications with regard to artificial intelligence, sentient robots, augmented intelligence, and aspects of philosophy. 
  
  plans, making decisions integrates situational context, state and signals to prioritize among strategies and respond in a timely manner.  It occurs in all animals, including us and our organizations: 
  
  • Individual human decision making includes conscious and unconscious aspects.  Situational context is highly influential: supplying meaning to our general mechanisms, & for robots too.  Emotions are important in providing a balanced judgement.  The adaptive unconscious interprets percepts quickly supporting 'fast' decision making.  Conscious decision making, supported by the: DLPFC, vmPFC and limbic system; can use slower autonomy.  The amygdala, during unsettling or uncertain social situations, signals the decision making regions of the frontal lobe, including the orbitofrontal cortex.  The BLA supports rejecting unacceptable offers.  Moral decisions are influenced by a moral decision switch.  Sleeping before making an important decision is useful in obtaining the support of the unconscious in developing a preference.  Word framing demonstrates the limitations of our fast intuitive decision making processes.  And prior positive associations detected by the hippocampus, can be reactivated with the support of the striatum linking it to the memory of a reward, inducing a bias into our choices.  Prior to the development of the PFC, the ventral striatum supports adolescent decision making.  Neurons involved in decision making in the association areas of the cortex are active for much longer than neurons participating in the sensory areas of the cortex.  This allows them to link perceptions with a provisional action plan.  Association neurons can track probabilities connected to a choice.  As evidence is accumulated and a threshold is reached a choice is made, making fast thinking highly adaptive.  Diseases including: schizophrenia and anorexia; highlight aspects of human decision making. 
    
  • Organisations often struggle to balance top down and distributed decision making: parliamentry government must use a process, health care is attempting to improve the process: checklists, end-to-end care; and include more participants, but has systemic issues, business leaders struggle with strategy. 
    
  and acting on them. 
  
• Represent and perform creative
  Plans change in complex adaptive systems (CAS) due to the action of genetic operations such as mutation, splitting and recombination.  The nature of the operations is described. 
  
  operations on its ideas, including plans. 
  
• Introduce
  The influence of childhood on behavior is significant.  Enneagrams define personality types: Reformer, Helper, Achiever, Individualist, Investigator, Loyalist, Enthusiast, Challenger and Peacemaker; based on the impact of childhood driven wounds. 
  
  The Enneagram becomes a tool to enable interested people to transform from the emotionally wounded base, hidden within the armor of the type, to the liberated underlying essence. 
  
  Childhood leaves each of us with some environmentally specific Basic Fear.  In response each of us adopts an induced Basic Desire of the type.  But as we develop the inner observer, it will support presence and undermine the identification that supports the armor of the type. 
  
  The Enneagram reveals three sets of relations about our type armor:
  

  1. Triadic self revealing: Instinctive, feeling, thinking; childhood needs that became significant wounds
     
  2. Social style groupings: Assertive, compliant, withdrawn; strategies for managing inner conflict
     
  3. Coping styles: Positive outlook, competency, reactive; strategies for defending childhood wounds
     

  Riso and Hudson augment the Enneagram with instinctual distortions reflected in the interests of the variants. 
  
  The Enneagram also offers tools for understanding a person's level of development: unhealthy, average, healthy, liberation; including their current center of gravity, steriotypical social role, wake-up call, leaden rule, red flag, and direction of integration and disintegration. 
  
  Complex adaptive system (CAS) theory associates the models presented by the Enneagram with evolved behaviors and structures in the mind: feelings, emotions, social behaviors, ideas; driven by genetic and cultural evolution and the constraints of family and social life.  Emergent evolved amplifers can be constrained by Riso and Hudson's awareness strategies. 
  
  
  personality typing, induced by the strengths and weaknesses of the parents actions as they struggle to cope with their proximate environment, ensures diversity in the creative approach of their children. 
  

Politics, Economics & Evolutionary Psychology

Business Physics Nature and nurture drive the business eco-system Human nature Emerging structure and dynamic forces of adaptation

integrating quality appropriate for each market

Copyright ©2012 - 2021 •  Rob Lingley