Reshaping social theory from complexity and ecological perspectives

1. The processes of self-organization always display path dependency and are subject to the requirements of evolutionary/ecological robustness: self-organization is better understood as auto-eco-organization.

From the perspective of complexity theory, Durkheim must be seen as an allied thinker. His notion of social facts as sui generic phenomena coincides to a degree with the concept of self-organizing phenomena. Yet there are key differences. If Durkheim’s severed unity – [social facts] have a different substratum and evolve in a different milieu – is taken so radically that the relation to any psychological ‘ground’ is minimal, then the relationships between them approach conventionality, showing arbitrary or trivial resemblances. A well-worn example would be the distinction between sex and gender. But that also demonstrates a difficult equivocation: sex is genetically determined; gender (it is argued) is socially constructed. Where then do the uncomfortable yet desperately significant drives, processes, the whole psychology of sexuality/gender sit? In this model, nowhere. In more ‘consistently’ argued but less credible accounts, the psychology of sexual attraction and desire is wholly social, entirely learnt (see Pinker 2002 for this argument and his counter-argument). We are then forced to invoke the shades of ‘demons’ (powers) that enforce the routinely experienced (yet, in this model, extraordinary) normalization of social sexuality. Again, the radical position – wholly learned sexuality – does not stand up under empirical examination, but nor does the overwhelming silence that Durkheim’s severed unity glosses.

A complexity model would differ in two crucial respects. The first is the concept of path-dependency. This position asserts that however different the new milieu (in this case the social), it is path-dependent upon a preceding substratum. This would not simply be ‘human sexuality’ but sexuality as a generalized phenomenon, its causes, history and functions. The ‘ecology’, so to speak, is not a social event but an altogether more extensive series of phenomena. They evolve in a different milieu? No, in different milieux, in time frames far older. The demon, if it is one, is evolution as an all-embracing concept. Put more radically, social phenomena cannot be sui generic in the strict sense because nothing is ‘singularly’ sui generic. The concept of self-organization in complexity theory is radically ecological: self-organization with respect to others and with results compatible, robust, probable with respect to others.

Citing Morin (2002), this can be called auto-eco-organization. This is a qualitative matter: neither the ‘eco’ nor the ‘auto’ component can be indeterminate if ‘self’ organization is to emerge. Differently put, this is a fundamentally ecological concept: there is no place in that ecology for a ‘member’ of arbitrary constitution. There must be a ‘quality’ of sorts, a propensity, a direction, at least a positive or negative ‘charge’.

Take this back to the question of sexuality and we can see just how far-reaching the difference has become. Whatever ways we socially invent to manage sexuality, it is there entirely for the same genetic reasons that sexuality is present in the biosphere. It is a reproductive necessity, a ‘guarantee’ (so far as that is possible) in biosemiotic terms of better genetic information, a way of resisting descent into chaos. The social management of sexuality in this sense is very much a second-order or emergent phenomenon. Interesting nevertheless, but conceding second-order status is one of the ways that social theory can re-integrate itself with other rational disciplines. Otherwise it will perpetuate its isolation as a type of methodological idealism.

Second-order status should not be seen as a diminution but rather as an acceptance of the fundamentally ecological character of self-organization. Path dependency implies sets of ‘good reasons’ – that is, momenta towards ecologically stable outcomes that are, by definition, more likely than others, but not simply on the basis of human preference. In this sense, where ‘social constructs’ form part, or all, of these outcomes, their ‘probability’ (or robustness) stands in contradiction to the notion that they ‘could have been otherwise’. Path dependency, auto-eco-organization and conventionality are opposed principles. Consequently:

2. Auto-eco-organization and path dependency require different concepts of possibility and probability. Human ‘autonomy’ is better understood as a degree of post-natal plasticity

We can now emphasize that, unlike Durkheim (given our radical reading), and certainly unlike postmodern theory, complexity theory has a completely different concept of possibility and probability. For modern and postmodern, both humanist through and through, whatever the contrary protestation, probability is thought in terms of human invention, relatively free from previous constraint. Hence the enormous importance of both conventionality/normality and its discontents. But order of any kind, dynamic or fixed, normative or highly individualized, cannot arise from indeterminacy or the absence of propensity. There must be propensity or indeterminacy will endure! And we as humans are part of, inheritors of, that propensity. Certainly, we are resourceful, inventive, manipulative, but that is far from self-invention. The concept of probability in complexity theory is not one of authorship (given a blank slate) but rather a question of viability in a landscape that already precedes our ‘creativity’ and adaptation. True, the genius of our restless species lies in modifying that landscape – the lived-in environment – to suit our purposes, but only in so far as we recognize and manipulate its material character. It cannot be successfully managed as a phantasm, a fiction. And a crucial part of that lived-in environment is our fellow humans.

Where humanisms of the Cartesian, Durkheimian, modern or postmodern variety emphasize human autonomy, complexity theory has the much more modest notion of a degree of post-natal plasticity. This is derived from evolutionary psychology, in particular Tooby and Cosmides (1992). The suggestion that we are less free than we think – or, more radically, that our social structures, including those that constrain us, have more robust roots than the actions of privileged human ruling groups – is, we admit, disappointing to a (post)modern intellectual culture reared on two centuries of promised emancipation. The counterbalance, the ‘hope’, lies in a rather different concept of creativity. Echoing the idea that self-organization is not simply confined to the human and social, Kauffman (2008), cited above, suggests that creativity itself belongs to the general properties of self-organization: that dynamic phenomena through auto-catalytic processes are disposed to occupy, take up or ‘explore’ the ‘next adjacent possible’ form. This is clearly a form of dynamic path dependency. It is also an observed characteristic of one of our oldest enemies: influenza. It is a defining characteristic of all phenomena that are not strictly bounded but on the contrary are able to ground ‘new’ or emergent phenomena. Ecologies, human or not, are prime examples; so are markets, technologies, cultures, moral systems.

We propose then that:

3. The sui generic status of social phenomena is more accurately conceptualized as having a strong relation to evolution and ‘exaptation’

The problem that limits social theory by oversimplifying its phenomena is the assertion that they are uniquely, wholly and entirely ‘social’. The implication is that they create their own ground. Not only does this neglect the ecology of competing social dynamics but authors, as a matter of habit, the neglect of questions of ‘archaeology’ or evolution. This is so entrenched that the very mention of evolution invokes suspicions of far-right claims to fixed natures. This is a total misunderstanding.

The classic biological example of exaptation (sometimes called pre-adaptation) is the evolution of feathers. Fundamentally a form of insulation, they have been exapted to the functions of flight. A more subtle but contextually appropriate example is the exaptation of human mouthparts to generate verbal language. None of these is a limitation, for none of the developments are possible without their respective antecedents. Similarly, the ‘cultures’ of gender would have no point, no ground, no drive or pleasure, no mediating force without an antecedent biological sexuality. With this simple replacement of terms, we at once ally sociological with biological accounts of path-dependent evolutionary dynamics. Nothing is lost: the human social preserves its salience in exactly the same way that other species do. Nothing is lost in conceding the human animal, except prejudice.

We can take the point further. In each of the examples cited above, the original function of the antecedent is conserved, despite its ‘development’. The more neutral term is ‘emergence’. That term should be understood chronologically. No sense of improvement is intended. If we concede the functionality of the antecedent (feathers as insulation) there is no implication that the later exaptation (feathers for flight) is more or less functional. It is simply an ecological possibility – and we should conclude from the success of birds that it is an ecologically robust outcome. Similarly the exaptation of mouthparts for speech in humans presents an ecologically robust development. It may be (if we sufficiently pollute the planet) that our ‘success’ is short-lived. Short of our extinction, then, language represents an emergent increase in fitness or adaptation. This insight in no way limits the complexity of language; on that score, language can speak for itself. It does, however, place language-as-game(s), with the emphasis on conventionality and arbitrariness, in the wasteland. The ecology of language then moves in to the foreground.

But not only language – this prejudice has misled us for too long! Perhaps our period of relative prosperity and peace in the second half of the 20th century and the first decade of the 21st century has eroded our memories. Recall that great ‘invention’, London. In the middle of the 19th century it was an ecological calamity, gathering pace. What were the principal uninvented causes? Disease, overcrowding, pollution from the excrement of horses, humans and human corpses. The great ‘inventions’ – Bazalgette’s sewerage, Portland Cement, steam power, what was to become the District Line, arguably the internal combustion engine, the relocation of cemeteries and housing in the suburbs – owe as much to biological need as to social construction. Or rather, the two cannot be separated. The great challenge that faces us – the pollution of the planet through dependence on fossil fuels – underscores both our frightful inventiveness and that we are defined, like every other animal, by our relation to Earth. The disciplines of human geography have long since recognized this. Theoretical sociology, at least since Marx, pays scant notice.

However, this is not a simple materialism, nor an emphasis on the human animal simply as a physical being. The life sciences have long since conceded that life (including artificial life and AI) is dependent on information. This is a radically different epistemology rarely acknowledged by theoretical sociology.

The next proposal then is:

4. Epistemology should rethink its roots, not in the philosophy of Descartes or Kant, not in their sociological derivatives (post-structuralism), but in evolutionary psychology and cognitive biology. Every possibility of cognition from the simplest animal to the human should be re-conceptualized as auto-exo-reference

Cartesian doubt, as a systemic strategy, begins with demons that are capable of deceiving (Descartes 1975 [1968]; Smith and Jenks 2006: Ch. 2). The (post)modern version of this device is the radicalization of constructivist epistemology. Both stand on the same ground: the presupposition of a deep disjuncture between the world and the ways in which we conceive it. We do not think of animals in this way. We perceive them as ‘grounded’ – indeed in direct and effective touch with their environments, largely through adaptation. Perhaps we should begin to think of the human animal in a kindred manner.

It is clear that this argument does not lead us to the reassertion of a kind of positivism. Animals re-cognize the world for functional purposes, specified through evolution and ecology. The requirement is entirely functional and pragmatic. It requires no concept of truth, no ‘thing in itself’. Theoretical sociology has paid minimal attention to pragmatic philosophy. The same is not true of arguably parallel concerns in the philosophy of biology or ecology. The key texts here are Wimsatt (2007), Haak (2006), Ayala and Arp (2010), and Reiners and Lockwood (2010).

Again, the idea that we, as a unique species, are wholly ‘detached’ from the cognitive processes apparent in the biosphere does not bear empirical inspection. Contrary to the idea of our ‘imprisonment’ within linguistic, cultural or paradigmatic horizons, it is also true to say that we have penetrated our environment to the point of rape. Gray (2002) suggests that we deserve to be called a plague of humans. And plagues are not ‘detached’ phenomena. Put more optimistically, we are (like our animal relatives) cognitively highly adapted to our environments. Indeed, cognitive adaptation is our greatest evolutionary asset. This does not invoke the old postmodern saw of conceptual equality (before what?) but rather an urgent ethics of cognitive responsibility. Grounded cognition, then, does not consist simply of arbitrary choices but of moral choices with powerful consequences.

Cognitive detachment is not empirically supportable; neither is it theoretically coherent. Unless we (literally) invoke creationism, then the only possible theoretical resource, despite its many limitations, is evolutionary theory. That must be our moral starting-point, unless we propose to delude ourselves. Put differently, our perspective must now be post-humanist. This involves conceding, at last, that the old taboos against socio-biology, evolutionary psychology and to a lesser extent social psychology are just that. Is theoretical sociology at last able to concede Darwin’s placing our species unequivocally within the animal kingdom and the biosphere? Can we now recognize the routine shapes of sociology as more to do with the epistemic worldview of post-Cartesian-Kantian rationalism than an engagement with the evolution of human society?

Morin called this new conception of the possibility of re-cognition auto-exo-reference.

[Just] as auto-organisation is in fact auto-eco-organisation, self or auto-reference is really auto-exo-reference, which is to say that to refer to oneself is to refer to the outside world. (Morin 2002: 49; see also Smith and Jenks 2006: 42)

In contrast to paradigms that see humans ‘imprisoned’ within the horizons of language and culture and, if Kant is to be taken at face value, therefore completely excluded from the physical world and from anything but passing signals from the cultural world, we now see a picture of embeddedness, of local epistemology characterized by intimacy and expertise. This is no utopian vision. It is, rather, a characteristic picture of the networks of complexity theory: close physical and informational ties to immediate nodes, virtually no contact with distant ones. This is one of the characteristics through which complex systems remain far from equilibrium. It is as true of an ant colony and of real-world markets as it is of human communities, and explains some of our creativity, limits and prejudices.

What, then, of human imagination? Should we see this as a mark of our estrangement, our propensity for ‘self-delusion’? Any number of just-so stories, some of enormous cultural influence, could be cited to justify this claim. And yet: isn’t imagination an evolutionary adaptation in the face of the unexpected, the unintended, the uncertain? Further: do the elaborations of stories, myths, traditions refer to human psychological need and experience or are they simply arbitrary assertions? Are we rooted in the biosphere or uprooted and alienated by our imaginative capacities as a species? Is our relative freedom, our plasticity, paradoxically or not (we think not), an evolved rational adaptation?

Our next proposal is, then:

5. The discussion of semiotics should be broadened so that the human ‘glottocentric’ emphases of post-structuralism can be enriched by ‘biosemiotics’

We have space only for an outline of what is at stake. Its flavour can be best sampled in Deely (2003): Seboek found ‘abhorrent’ the ‘group of thinkers, vaguely semiological, certainly glottocentric with Jacques Derrida at their centre’ (Deely 2003: 30). The clue to his objections lies in the term ‘glottocentric’ and the failure to engage a ‘zoosemiotic’ perspective. In other words, to take human language as the paradigm for how signs must be understood is to mistake the part for the whole: ‘Semiosis is a pervasive fact of nature as well as culture’ (Deely 2003: 29). Further: ‘the representative contents of consciousness … are not self-representations (objects) but, precisely, themselves signs (other-representations) rooted in the being of relations which transcend the division between nature and culture, inner and outer, and so cannot be confined to either side of any such divide, real or imagined’ (Deely 2003: 31). In this sense we should remember the old association of sign with symptom: acute pain has at least as great a claim to be a sign, to ‘signify’, as a word or an icon.

Elsewhere Dennett (2003) has referred to ‘consciousness’ in this ‘loop’ or ‘smear’ of interaction. Maturana and Varela (1980, 1998) stress that organisms through ‘structural coupling’ are apt to ‘bring forth worlds’. These are by no means settled arguments, but in place of the ‘decision’ that we are (or are not) estranged from our social and physical environment, there is a live and kicking debate (in which we ought to participate) on such questions as ‘adaptation’ and/or ‘exaptation’. For our purposes the former may be seen as tight structural coupling to an environment, the latter merely as loose coupling ‘sufficient’ to serve a positive function (for a fuller discussion see Smith and Jenks 2006: 172–4).

Further, there is the question of how auto-exo-reference ‘works’ – how ‘information’ ‘flows’ ecologically. The post-Kantian tradition employs a formal model of the cognizing ‘subject’ mediated in 19th- and 20th-century thought by gross communal divisions: class, gender and ethnicity. Where our membership and access to ‘information’ is understood ecologically, the question of context is enormously heterogeneous. We are saturated with highly organized information about our immediate experience, family and community, expertise and pragmatic concerns. There are enormous physical and informational distances between those environments and communities that are not part of our direct experience. There is a huge difference between the familiar and the strange, though the permeation of the strange in the familiar presents significant epistemological and sociological problems.

This model resembles less the formal subject of Kant – less the marginally contexted, static ‘representative’ of a class or gender or ethnic group – and more the dynamics of an ant colony, a flock of starlings, investors in a stock exchange, prices in a market. In each of these latter cases it is not the ‘mind’ that processes information ‘in here’ but rather a form of information processing that manifests itself spread through an environment and its structures. We shall develop these points below.

The question of the human animal – amongst others – is further developed in those aspects of biosemiotics that look not at the generation of ‘information’ by organisms but rather at the generation of organisms by information. There are parallel questions in theoretical physics. The question for sociology is: do we want to be bound by an epistemology whose terms were set by Descartes, Kant, Derrida et al. – merely exploring the legacy – or do we want to enter this new zoosemiotic debate?

6. The radicalization of information theory through semantic biology and its consequences should be incorporated into sociological theory

Information is generally but insufficiently understood as information ‘about’, normally produced and transmitted by humans to other humans. This is the character of information so far as, for example, Shannon is concerned. Moreover, his primary concern is the amount or syntax of information, not its content. There is some concession in the social sciences that the biosphere, too, is information-saturated, as the discussion of Seboek et al. (above) makes clear. One could then make Seboek’s characteristic accusation that the simple view of information as a human ‘construct’ ‘mistakes the part for the whole’. Indeed, even humans ‘generate’, but do not only construct or transmit, in the ordinary sense, information that is crucial to their survival. For example, the autoimmune system is self-organizing at a level inaccessible to consciousness. The role of instinct as a concept also challenges the notion of ‘construction’, even though it subsists somewhere ‘below’ but accessible to consciousness. We propose to present this problem ‘serially’, though again, its true dimensions are recursive.

7. Information should be first understood not as derivative but as giving or making form

Luhmann (1989, 1995) argued that the system can see only what the system can see. Incorrigibly sociological in the narrow sense, he further proposed a ‘black box’ – i.e. nothing – and out of this absence of order, or the presence of noise, as two or more black boxes interacted, order and communication were held to be established through ‘contingency’ (double or not). This is not a theory but the absence of one. And ‘contingency’ without processes of propensity, momenta, or selection has no reason to spontaneously self-organize; there is nothing about randomness that requires it to supersede itself with an equally arbitrary order. Where, then, does self-organization spring from? For Luhmann (for sociology?), from nowhere, from self-creation. Crucially, self-creation and self-organization are not the same thing. The issue turns on randomness: if it cannot be the ground of order(s), then order is presupposed at the outset. We can then make a simple statement: the universe is law-governed to some degree. It is informed.

We are not digressing into cosmology, nor into a debate as to what those laws might be. No, the point is entirely logical: order (self-organization) follows from a previous degree of order; it is, and was, always auto-eco-organization. Chaos begets only chaos, randomness more randomness. Perhaps what Luhmann meant but neglected to say (as we all do) was that by contingency, especially double contingency, he meant determinate chaos – which of course is not chaos at all, but complexity. His black boxes were ‘grey’ to a degree. Black boxes are as much a Lockean device as blank slates: they are not even unformed humans; they are badly represented human children.

Then we can replace the crude axiom, ‘the system can see only what the system can see’, with a more sufficient formal statement: an organism (system) can only inform itself on the basis of being previously informed to do so. The former is information in the derivative sense. The latter is information as ‘instructing’ the organism (or system) to be this rather than that, to take note of this rather than that. Does this gainsay ‘self-organization’? Only in so far as it contradicts self-creation. But it is entirely consistent with auto-eco-organization or, as we put it earlier, post-natal plasticity.

Readers may argue that these considerations belong with the concepts of path dependency or our discussion of landscapes of ecological possibility. A fair point, but recursive arguments can only be made in a serial fashion.

The ‘prior’ information we are referring to here is of course genetic. And we fully expect the outrage that will follow. It is misguided. There are not enough genes in the human genome to determine behavioural outcomes. Genetic determination is mathematically impossible when set against the plasticity and connective possibilities of the human mind. It is rather a question of paradigm shift. Is it more plausible to persist with the notion of self-creation or with self-organized plasticity?

More fruitful explorations explore and debate a much more nuanced argument about how we inform ourselves (Tooby and Cosmides 1992; Burgess and MacDonald 2005; Somit and Peterson 2001). Social constructionists are apt to place nature and nurture in opposition. Everything is ‘learned’. The counter-argument applies: only that which we are adapted to learn will be learned. Where ‘social’ constructionists see this as limitation, evolutionary psychology understands this as our ‘groundedness’ – a basis in nature or need. The more nuanced argument is the contested relationship between, on the one hand, domain-specific mechanisms that are adapted to recurrent features of our evolutionary environment and, on the other, domain-general abilities that allow us (and other species) to ‘process’, or survive, environmental change, novelty, difference. Further, following Alexander (1989) we can say that the major co-operative and competitive factor in our environment has been, increasingly, other humans.

Where does this domain-general ‘creativity’ come from? The more orthodox theories of evolution that stress arbitrary mutation followed by natural selection are at a loss to explain this. It looks too ‘spontaneous’; it looks exactly like social constructivism. But such developments are not arbitrary. On the contrary, ‘sociology’ – especially in Durkheim’s sense – begins with the proposition that these developments are patterned, recurrent, ‘real’, emergent phenomena. We are then faced with a challenge to evolutionary orthodoxy, which we need to participate in. On the one hand we have a scenario in which the increasing complexity of the human environment ‘drives’ genetic development of domain-general faculties. This is not consistent with arbitrary mutation that is subsequently selected for. On the other hand there is an emerging, at times unacknowledged argument resembling ‘autocatalysis’ or self-organization of increasing complexity. Or perhaps our conception of domain-specific processing is too limited, lacking sufficient plasticity. Either way mutual dialogue is both possible and necessary across the ‘interested’ disciplines.

Flinn (2005: 88) sums up the challenge as follows:

Unlike static ecological challenges, the hominid social environment becomes an autocatalytic process, ratcheting up the importance of increased intelligence.

However, much of our information processing is directed toward the physical demands of the body – the immune, the circulatory, the digestive systems, respiration. For the most part these processes are not at all subject to conscious control. Yet they remain primary aspects of culture and huge consumers of social resources in the form of, for example, health, water and sewerage services. Given that we now manage such needs as nourishment and shelter primarily through the marketplace, those basic services must include such functions as transport and communication systems. Perhaps these matters have become the traditional concern of disciplines such as human geography. They are certainly not at the forefront of sociological theory (though there are specialisms such as the sociology of health). This is a central failing.

If theoretical sociology cannot or does not take proper account of physicality, whether as the body or as the physical environment that springs from it, then it will marginalize itself as a discourse about the unnecessary, the non-material, a form of idealism. For biology, this ‘physicality’ is the phenotype and the extended phenotype. Theoretical biology would be ridiculous without these domains. The same is true for theoretical sociology. Note that in this case the ‘physicality’ of the matter springs straight out of a consideration of information. Taking both in the broadest sense, they are mutual requirements.

Similarly, instincts and emotions in animals and humans are a key but neglected part of adaptation and survival. Human instincts and emotions are hardly topicalized in sociological theory, except perhaps as a discourse within feminism. This not only reflects a routine lack of interest in anything but the ‘conscious and voluntary’, i.e. the rational, but also a fundamental misunderstanding of the relationships between instinct, the emotions, and intelligent voluntary action. For our purposes the former reflect pre-natal disposition (which is domain specific) and the latter post-natal plasticity (which is domain general).

The cognitive sciences regard the brain as a complex structure, displaying regional anatomy and functions. Some of these regions are described as more primitive than others whilst humans are commonly referred to as having the most developed ‘advanced’ faculties. This is certainly humano-centric. But to reject this ‘evolved’ picture out of hand is to invoke not only ‘blank slate’ alternatives but also to imply that the brain is a unified field. On that basis, neither its parallel-processing activities nor the evidence of ‘centred’ electrical activity is explicable. Such a view is empirically unsustainable both from the perspective of evolved adaptation, sub-conscious processing and contemporary experimentation using brain imaging techniques. Social theory must, even if it has ‘objections’, join in this debate or isolate itself from the sciences. Much the same is argued by Dennett regarding the relations between neuroscience, evolutionary theory and philosophy.

The picture, stated simply (Cohen and Stewart 1995; Burgess and MacDonald 2005), operates as follows. Much of the brain’s processing operates below the level of consciousness and is not ‘learned’ in the overt sense. Even learned behaviours (e.g. walking) operate, once mastered, as expert routines that need not ‘trouble’ consciousness. Both are highly ‘economic’ in terms of processing requirements. Instincts are ‘hard-wired’ adaptations. They do not ‘deliberate’ whether (say) a fierce growl is a threat, nor whether to run for safety. They cause immediate, unreflective actions. They are predisposed actions – and a good thing too. Too much reflection in situations like these is not helpful. Speed of response is crucial. Predisposition, then, has its advantages in being ‘hard-wired’, but any predisposition lacks viability to the extent that the environment is variable.

At that point, conscious deliberation, whilst slower, sometimes painfully so, is able to adapt: it displays post-natal plasticity. It is important that instinct and deliberation interact to some extent, but also that they remain distinctive: over-reflective instinct and emotion are as much use as over-emotional calculation. Humans have evolved the highest level of post-natal plasticity and so have an unprecedented ability to moderate their own environment. But there is then the question of degree.

It does not follow that the primary or exclusive domain of social theory has to do with phenomena from the social or physical environment that humans have adapted to themselves – thereby ‘reversing’ the agency of evolution to self-authorship. This should be understood on several levels. First, adaptation to one’s environment is not exclusively human and inevitably refers to some concept of need, human or not. Second, the exercise of agency in the service of need is costly. There must then be a principle of ‘economy’ which balances the urgency of need with the costs of environmental adaptation. Third, ‘humans’ are not the only agents in the field; there may be others ranging from climate, competing species and disease, to other humans who identify themselves as ‘different’ or antagonistic. The upshot is that ‘self-authorship’, either of the physical or social environment, is highly driven and contested. The costs, therefore, or self-production point to a level of underlying need that is sufficient to justify the expenditure. Need and self-authorship are mutually implied.