Science, Strategy and War The Strategic Theory of ... - Boekje Pienter

Organisms which are internally constructed such that they are in the solid regime but nearthe edge of chaos appear to be best able to performs complex tasks and to adapt. Coevolvingsystems whose members have tuned the structure of their fitness landscape and couplings toother members such that the entire ecosystem is poised at the edge of chaos appear tosustain the highest fitness 78 .There are several key elements determining the strength of an ecosystem which can also befound in Boyd’s work, in particular in his arguments concerning command and control.Boydian elements such as variety, harmony, trust, flexibility, the OODA loop, sharedexperience, organization in semi-autonomous units mirror the descriptors of an ecosystem:interdependence,feedback (and cyclical flow of resources),cooperation,partnership,flexibilityand diversity.The flexibility of an ecosystem is a consequence of its multiple feedback loops, which tend tobring the system back into balance whenever there is a deviation from the norm, due tochanging environmental conditions. Disturbances are ever-present because things in theenvironment change all the time. The net-result is continual fluctuation. All the variables wecan observe in an ecosystem - population densities, available nutrients, weather patterns, andso forth - always fluctuate. An ecosystem is an ever-fluctuating network. The more variablesare kept fluctuating, the more dynamic is the system; the greater is its flexibility; and thegreater is its ability to adapt to changing conditions. Lack of flexibility manifests itself asstress in the system. This will occur when one or more variables of the system are pushed totheir extreme values, which induces increased rigidity throughout the system.The role of diversity is closely connected with the network’s structure. A diverseecosystem will also be resilient, because it contains many species with overlapping ecologicalfunctions that can partially replace one another. A diverse community will be able to surviveand reorganize itself because a damaged link in the network can at least partially becompensated for by other links. In other words, the more complex the network is, the morecomplex its pattern of interconnections, the more resilient it will be. Repeating earlierobservations from systems theory, diversity means many different relationships, manydifferent approaches to the same problem 79 .Perpetual noveltyIndeed, change, novelty and mismatches are what keeps the evolutionary process going. Ifthe discovery of uncertainty was the start of the paradigm shift, the discovery of the essenceof perpetual novelty may be considered one of the key themes of the Prigoginian era.Bateson had already introduced the element of difference as the key to which we respond.And instead of chance and random mutations driving evolution, as classical Darwinist theoryasserts, it is the capacity to learn, to propagate successful traits and schemata, and torecombine in novel relationships that leads to the emergence of adaptation and evolution. As78 Kauffman (1993), pp.279-80.79 Capra (1996), pp.301-03.142