C-121.The Evolution Of Development

What irony! What tragedy! What a risky neglect of the availability of “>1” as an elicited criterion to help us stop when we need to (VIII; C-120).

That Development – i.e., Realization (App. XIX; C-111) and all that Realization entails and promises– should depend on an evolution of particular developments!!!!

Yet that appears to be the way things are going by and for humanity. Consider the increasing ratio of Valuation to Realization (C-122: V/R >1) that we can see in “that other climate change” problem (C-98), of decision making increasing at the expense of problem solving.(It’s not as though we have solved so many of our problems that new solutions are not needed, that only decisions need be made!)

See, for example, the emphasis on the market concept of “supply” in Valuation’s pricing technology compared to seeing it with regard to Realization’s needed functionality. Will market technology’s “demand” (confounding want and need) give needed functionality its due? Is invention to be more a matter of evolution than of development?

Consider the place and coverage of “evolution” with respect to the course of body and step in CEM-history (App. XI, App. XVI):
Physics-Chemistry-Biology-Geology-Cog-CMU&Comp-*Community.

Evolution is a biological fact confirmed by the geological record, with conceptual utility and applicable theory within the biology realm. Consider, however, that with functionality comes needed functionality [C-115], and that this suggests evolution provides an incomplete history even of the biological realm … that there is more to the story of behavioral entity changes than given us by random variation in bodies and body adaptations to the environment.

This would seem to be why some biologists see a phenomenon of non-teleological purpose. If you are in the line of thinking has he going to lay eggs, for example, then nest (an R-word) of some kind to keep them from rolling away and assist in keeping chicks warm and together would seem needed — whatever the differences or changes in physical environment. If you are going to move about and need to get back, a source of orientation is needed (e.g., birds, bees, elephants and salmon). The F=>NF stimulus might also be indicated by the Burgess Shale anomaly re genus and species: convergence rather that divergence, noted by Gould.

If you been muddled (0:S-P; C-114) such that you focus on late-stage functional behavioral entities and their features (C-97), without attention to the SGN correction (C-104), to give behavior its due (C-38), then other CEM-history phenomena and principles will be neglected. There is a parallel story to be told here to “the grain of sand” in oyster shells: Steps grow as well as, and together with bodies (III: Life, the double crystal). And there is no shortage of initiating functionalities, from physics’ forces and light to chemistry’s valences to geology’s wind, currents and metamorphic heat and pressure… any or all able to have contributed a grain or grains to seed biology’s behavior re needed functionality.

As a concept re changes, addressed to particulars of contingent emergent materiality prior to and subsequent to biology in CEM-history … and as a universal theory of change, addressed to all such CEM changes, “evolution”seems weakly descriptive (C-19, C-20).

Development needs more emphasis, but as a theoretical construct more than as an overburdened concept (C-81). The future of CEM-history, and of humanity, depends on it. Developmental emphasis, via the capability capacity interdependency, could even be expected to account, after the fact, for some capacity changes that have been attributed solely to evolutionary processes.

* The gap here is large, for little of community – functionally speaking — has been achieved … for lack of union (C-112) and development of its (still) needed interdependent functionality - see App. II (Community) where a distinction is made between S-community and B-community. Union is that S-community. Because Union is what makes community as a behavioral entity possible, we might better see the forward end of the CEM-arc as Union rather than Community, with the latter understood as an instance of late-stage functionality (C-97) … not in accord with the Nature of Things and not a well Realized behavioral entity (e.g., a topological feature in a geography). Which is to say that “community” is more gratuitous than fortuitous.

(c) R.F. Carter
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