Disruption
Full Title or Meme
The sudden process in the changing morphology of living entities in a natural ecosystem.
Context
Evolution and Disruption are the ying and yang of the process of change in any ecosystem. In the General Theory of Living Systems the case is made that an identity ecosystem has all of the characteristics of living ecosystems.
Schumpeter first described creative destruction[1] as an essential component of a financial ecosystem. If companies do not learn to cannibalize their own products, then some competitor will come along and do it to them. This is the way that a capitalist economy changes. So too with natural ecosystems. There are two types of disruptions that need to be considered which are distinguished by the event that sets them off:
- Disruption caused by evolutionary pressures within the ecosystem, called endogenous sources in the natural sciences, and
- Disruption caused by pressures exerted from outside the ecosystem, called exogenous sources in the natural sciences.
Brusatte has a couple of great examples in the two disruptions that resulted in the dinosaur morphogenesis into birds.[2] Once dinosaurs developed feathers and a gracile morphology, evolution speeded up and birds rapid evolved from the new found capabilities. When the Chicxulub asteroid hit Mexico about 66 million years ago, a mass extinction event changed the ecosystem in ways that are unimaginable compared to what we call climate change today. Rapid evolution was again able to create a set of animals that thrived in the new ecosystem, but most of the old life forms did not survive and the ecosystem that resulted was wildly different than that before the extinction event. We should be prepared for both sorts of disruption in the identity ecosystems, but planning for a mass extinction of the old order is probably not helpful and the changes are likely to be unimaginable. With that happy thought in mind, lets consider the sort of disruption that we can plan for, one that may be rapid, but is firmly based in changes that have already occurred, but for which the identity ecosystem is not yet fully accommodated.
Problems
There are a large number of identity disruptions already in process; our problem is to determine which have the sort of robust effect on the identity ecosystem that will survive evolutionary pressures.
Solutions
References
- ↑ Joseph A. Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy. London: Routledge. 1942 pp. 82–83. ISBN 978-0-415-10762-4
- ↑ Steve Brusatte, The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs. William Morrow 2018 p. 300ff ISBN 978-0-06-249042-1
