Adaptation, acclimation,addiction, remedy, etc.

Gregory Bateson(Edited by Nora Bateson)

Abstract

Purpose – This piece seeks to reflect upon the nature of adaptation and our usage of it with relationto design, addiction, and final cause.

Design/methodology/approach – This previously unpublished document was found amongst themanuscript papers for Mind and Nature in the Bateson Archives at the University of Santa CruzLibrary Special Collections.

Findings – It appears that “adaptation” was a concept generated by lineal thinking and that as wemove forward into a world of causal circuits, i.e. of mental process as that notion is here defined, wediscover that “adaptation” is only another face of addiction.

Originality/value – It reflects on the issue of adaptation from a very different angle than in theusual scientific discourse.

Keywords Cybernetics, Evolution, Design, Adaptability, Addiction

Paper type Conceptual paper

Like all abstractions these words are human creations. They stand for ways in whichmen have divided up the world of classes of human experience. Cutting up the cake isnot necessarily the only, or best way of dissecting the particular phenomena. Suchdissection is, notably, done differently in every culture and even science has nomonopoly on the “right” way of doing it.

From epoch to epoch, great thinkers and religious leaders have seen the problems ofpurpose, adaptation, and design in different ways. Is it even possible for both men andwomen to have precisely similar views of human or biological purpose? I doubt it. . .

In recognizing this diversity and ambiguity of the concepts which lie behind suchwords as adaptation, addiction, etc. as used in Occidental daily life, we shall do well tolook carefully at the history of how the same words came to be used as landmarks inevolutionary theory.

It seems that these notions and especially the idea of design in nature were broughtinto the field of modern science rather late.

Aristotle had wrestled with problems of “final” cause and had suggested thatteleological explanation surely permeated the phenomenal world. But there was, Ithink, no locking of horns between science and purpose till the eighteenth century. Theteleology of the Greeks was seen by them as a sort of necessity, not as an expression ofthe ingenuity of a creator.

This latter view was however the chosen battle cry of Christian theology in theeighteenth century and its protagonist in England was William Paley, who was

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0368-492XDOI 10.1108/03684920710777379

defending Christian theology from evolutionary ideas almost a century before theOrigin of Species. Paley‘s Natural Theology was published in 1802 but he had beenlecturing in Cambridge in defense of the Biblical story of the creation 20 years beforethat, defending Genesis from the encyclopedists.

His argument was very simple. He told his readers to examine a watch and note thatit was designed to tell the time of day in a cycle of 24 h. This instance of purpose was tobe explained by the fact that the watch was indeed designed by a human designer. Thereader was then invited to consider such biological phenomena as a crab’s claw or ahuman hand and to note that these too were designed to fulfill a purpose, and this wasto be explained – could be explained only – by the fact that they were created by adivine designer.

Thus, it happened that Lamarck (Philosophie Zoologique 1809), Chambers (Vestigesof Creation of the Natural History 1844), and Darwin (Origin of Species 1859) eachsuccessively fell into the assumption that the problem par excellence which a theory ofevolution must solve was the problem of design in nature. This conflict itself was, inmodern jargon, a product of “co-evolution”. “Design” was or became a problem bybeing a focus of controversy.

Today it behooves us to be a little more careful. So we ask precisely what it is that iscalled “adaptation” and whether there is really a problem of adaptation which demandsan explanation. Above all, as the nature of what is called “adaptation” begins toemerge, we shall ask about related phenomena – “acclimation” “addiction” “remedy”“learning” and so on.

We start by the classical approach to relate “adaptation” to time. It was thetemporal sequence of events which characterized Greek teleology, and it is thissequence that gives a name to this species of explanations. The Greek word “t1́lo6”means “end” and the notion of teleology was that the end of some sequence ofevents would be the exemplification of a pattern or form or immanent Idea. It wasthis final production that in some sense explained, for Greek thought; the sequencewhich had preceded it. This type of explanation was regarded as totally invalid byEuropean scientists, at least from the Renaissance onward. It was asserted thatnever could a later event be regarded as cause of some earlier event. (It was not, ofcourse, at all clear that the Greeks had thought that “t1́lo6” could be a “cause” inany modern sense of that word!)

In the 1930s this taboo on teleological explanation was still compelling and my firstbook, Naven was written within the premises of that taboo. It was a rather vigorousattempt to find out how adaptation could occur in the norms of a New Guinea culture.I had been trained as a zoologist and therefore accepted the taboo on teleology in itsstrongest form as a taboo on invoking mind even in the explanation of humanbehavior. For me, even Paley’s watch was not to be explained by invocation of“design”. The writing of that book was a valuable discipline and the book itself is anexample of the creative use of William Blake’s “contraries” he says “WithoutContraries is no Progression” (Blake, 1795), and, chafing against the limitations, I drovemyself to the very edge of what later became “cybernetics”.

Back in the eighteenth century, however, the philosophic denial of final causes setthe stage for Paley’s argument – and for Darwin’s rebuttal of it. If the observedphenomena looked as if they were determined by some “final cause” and if immanent“final cause” was disallowed; then appeal to a supernatural designer was expectable.

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The structure of the logical trap was precisely what I have called a “double bind”.It looks like this:

The men of science had learned at a deep epistemological level:. that “explanation” was necessary; and. that the world was characterized by “adaptation”; and. that “adaptation” was produced by “final” causes (i.e. by causation working

backwards); and finally; and. that to invoke final cause in the explanation of phenomena was invalid and

heretical.

Under such circumstances people skip to a higher logical type. In order to retain “a” “b”and “d” above the forbidden premise, “c” “c” is simply pushed out of the rational world,(but still retained by endowing some supernatural entity with the characteristic whichis disallowed at the worldly level).

The maneuver is itself “adaptive” in the limited sense that it saves the thinker fromthe pains of any thought which might disrupt deeply held opinion.

The “double binds” which characterize the history of scientific thought about“adaptation” are reflected in dilemmas which necessarily plague the evolvingorganism – a gain illustrating the parallelism between mental process and evolution.For the thinker, there is a continual danger, and an attraction, latent in extendingconclusions beyond the limits of their immediate relevance; either what is true in somelimited moment gets extended to all time, past and future, or what is true of some itemgets extended to the class of similar items.

These are errors in logical typing and I have set the word “addiction” alongside theword “adaptation” [in the title of this chapter] to remind the reader that all “adaptation”is double faced.

Tennyson tells us:

The old order changed, yielding place to newAnd God fulfills himself in many waysLest one good custom should corrupt the world . . . (Tennyson, n.d.).

In this case, the double bind is heroic. King Arthur is wounded and dying; a gloriousepoch is over, and Sir Bedevere must take the sword, Excalibur, the symbol of thatglorious epoch, and throw it away into the lake. The remedy too is painful and heroic.

In the fields of evolution, the double binds are masked as “specialization” and it iseasy to forget that every “adaptive” step which makes the creature fit more preciselyinto some given niche carries with it the price of lessened capability to fit some otherand perhaps more general context.

“What is good for general motors” may be bad for the larger context of the nation.The tactical advantage of one nation in the armaments race may be lethal for all thenations in the war. And so on. At any given moment – from moment to moment – itwas “common sense” for the evolving dinosaurs to generate more armor . . . There arevalues (i.e. survival values) in immediate adaptation but against these must bereckoned, the values of flexibility.

It appears that “adaptation” was a concept generated by lineal thinking andthat as we move forward into a world of causal circuits, i.e. of mental process as thatnotion is here defined, we discover that “adaptation” is only another face of addiction.

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In the circuitry of a cybernetic world, the self-corrective characteristic – thehomoeostasis – is always limited, can only function within the limits of certain valuesof its parameters. Beyond those values, there is a change in “logical typing” and withthat change a corresponding change in the sign (plus or minus, “good” or “bad”survival-promoting or lethal) of the value of the formerly adaptive feature. . .

References

Blake, W. (1795), Marriage of Heaven and Hell.

Tennyson, A. (n.d.), Idylls of the King.

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