Abstract
Classes of evolutionary strategy are rarely explored, as such strategies are thought to be either highly species-specific or clearly resulting from competitive selection. But are we missing the lessons a deeper theory of evolutionary strategy provides – lessons that could help solve the global problems facing humanity? We discuss the means to such solutions through a neural-derived network approach to modeling highly detailed species-ecosystem interactions (Gremillion and Brown, An ecosystem network model for human ecological interactions. Ecological Society of America Abstracts, 86th Meeting: ID=28381, 2001) including Homo sapiens and its impacts, into ecocircuitry networks. This model identifies a set of underlying evolutionary meta-strategies that govern intrinsic strategic drivers in all organisms and potentially systems from tribes to corporations.
This approach also yields a methodology for analyzing higher-order network impacts, providing a path to address unintended consequences, and high-order network costs/benefits.
Ecocircuitry network models incorporate flows of energy, material, services, and information through many classes of inputs and outputs both biotic (living) and abiotic. We posit that the population size of any species varies with the convergence of its network interactions. To be sustainable over evolutionary time, a species or population must be relatively balanced in its positive (beneficial) and negative (detrimental) connections, or risk extinction.
Species actively manipulate their ecosystem’s circuitry through a clearly defined set of evolutionary meta-strategies, in which all species differentially alter the (1) number and (2) magnitude of both beneficial and detrimental flows while seeking to (3) decrease the variance of all flows, for stability and predictability are stabilizing. Taken together these strategies alone can change the balance of positive and negative network connections and thus population/success rates. But indirect “meta-strategies” are even more powerful and include externalizing costs, physical and other tool- and infrastructure-building, and novel strategy combinations.
We illustrate these classes of evolutionary strategies with examples from many species, as well as innovative human meta-strategies that have led to unintended consequences both beneficial and problematic. We further examine how a more encompassing ecocircuitry approach, which includes impacts of humans and their institutions, illuminates useful meta-strategies for solutions in a rapidly changing world.
Support: No institutional support or grant was used for this work
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
References
Andrewartha, H.G. and L.C. Birch. (1984) The Ecological Web. University of Chicago Press, Chicago.
Baccarelli & V. Bollati. (2009) Epigenetics and environmental chemicals. Curr Opin Pediatr. 21: 243–251.
Bratsberg, B. & O. Rogeberg. (2018) Flynn effect and its reversal are both environmentally caused. PNAS 201718793; published ahead of print June 11, 2018. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1718793115
Brown, J.H. (1995) Macroecology. The University of Chicago Press, Chicago.
Brown, P. and K. Caldeira. (2017) Greater future global warming inferred from Earth’s recent energy budget. Nature 552:45–50. doi:https://doi.org/10.1038/nature2467
Ceballos, G., P. Ehrlich and R. Dirzo. (2017) Biological annihilation via the ongoing sixth mass extinction signaled by vertebrate population losses and declines. PNAS 114:E6089–E6096.
Cohen, J. E. (1978) Food webs and niche space. Monographs in Population Biology. Princeton University Press, Princeton.
Cribb, J. (2017) Surviving the 21st Century: Humanity’s Ten Great Challenges and How We Can Overcome Them. NY: Springer International Publishing.
Darwin, C. (1859) The Origin of Species; And, the Descent of Man. Modern Library.
Dunne, J.A., Williams, R.J. and Martinez, N.D. (2002) Network structure and biodiversity loss in food webs: robustness increases with connectance. Ecology letters, 5:.558–567.
Evans, J.D., Aronstein, K., Chen, Y.P., Hetru, C., Imler, J.L., Jiang, H., Kanost, M., Thompson, G.J., Zou, Z. and Hultmark, D. (2006) Immune pathways and defense mechanisms in honey bees Apis mellifera. Insect molecular biology 15:645–656.
Gould, J. L., & Gould, C. G. (1988) The honey bee. Scientific American Library.
Graham, L. (2008) Reparations, Self-Determination, and the Seventh Generation. 21 Harv. Hum. Rts. J. 47.
Gremillion, MAV. and J. Brown. (2001) An ecosystem network model for human ecological interactions. Ecological Society of America Abstracts, 86th Meeting: ID=28381.
Hattab, T. et al. (2017) A unified framework to model the potential and realized distributions of invasive species within the invaded range. Diversity and Distributions 23:806–819.
Hodgkin, A. and Huxley, A. (1952) A quantitative description of membrane current and its Application to conduction and excitation in nerve. J Physiol. 117: 500–544.
Hublin, Jean-Jacques, et al. (2017) “New fossils from Jebel Irhoud, Morocco and the pan-African origin of Homo sapiens. Nature 546: 289.
Ives, A.R., S.R. Carpenter, and B. Dennis. (1999) Community interaction webs and zooplankton responses to planktivory manipulations. Ecology 80:1405–1421.
Jordano, P. (1987) Patterns of mutualistic interactions in pollination and seed dispersal: connectance, dependence asymmetries, and coevolution. The American Naturalist, 129: 657–677.
Kaiser-Bunbury, C., S. Muff, J. Memmot, C. Muller, A. Caflisch. (2010) The robustness of pollination networks to the loss of species and interactions: a quantitative approach incorporating pollinator behavior. Ecology Letters 13: 442–452
Kaiser-Bunbury, C and N Blüthgen. (2015) Integrating network ecology with applied conservation: a synthesis and guide to implementation. AoB PLANTS, v7:lv076. https://doi.org/10.1093/aobpla/plv076
Kolbert, E. (2015) The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History. NY: Picador.
Levins, R. (1975) Quantitave analysis – loop analysis. In M.L. Cody ad J.L. Diamond, eds. Ecology and Evolution of Communities. Cambridge, Mass. Belknap Press.
McRae, B., B. Dickson, T. Keitt, V. Shah. (2008) Using circuit theory to model connectivity in ecology, evolution, and conservation. Ecology 89:2712–2724. https://doi.org/10.1890/07-1861.1
Mora, C. et al. (2017) Global risk of deadly heat. Nature Climate Change 7:501–506.
Moss, M. (2016) How the Colt Single Action Army Revolver Won the West. Popular Mechanics retrieved 5-31-18. https://www.popularmechanics.com/military/weapons/a23685/colt-single-action/
Mueller, U., S. Rehner, T. Schultz. (1998) Evolution of Agriculture in Ants. Science 281:2034.
Nabhan, G. P., & Buchmann, S. L. (1997) Services provided by pollinators. Nature’s Services: societal dependence on natural ecosystems, 133–150.
Odum, H. (1983) Systems Ecology: An Introduction, Wiley-Interscience.
Paine, R.T. (1966) Food web complexity and species diversity. American Naturalist 100:65–75.
Paine, R.T. (1980) Food webs: linkage, interaction strength and community infrastructure. Journal of Animal Ecology 49:667–685.
Proulx, S. D. Promislow, and P. Phillips. (2005) Network thinking in ecology and evolution. TREE, v20:345–353. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tree.2005.04.004
Schmid-Hempel, P. (1998) Parasites in social insects. Princeton University Press.
Seeley, T. D. (1997) Honey bee colonies are group-level adaptive units. The American Naturalist, 150(S1), s22–S41.
Raftery, A., A. Zimmer, D. Frierson, R. Startz, & P. Liu. (2017) Less than 2 °C warming by 2100 unlikely. Nature Climate Change 7:637–641.
Shachak, M. and C.G. Jones. (1995) Ecological flow chains and ecological systems: concepts for linking species and ecosystem perspectives. In Linking Species and Ecosystems, C.G. Jones and J.H. Lawton, eds. Chapman and Hall, New York, New York.
Shipley, B. (1997) Exploratory path analysis with applications in ecology and evolution. American Naturalist 149:1113–1138.
Salthe, S. (2003) Development and Evolution. MIT Press.
Steinhauer, N. K. Kulhanek, K. Antunez, H. Human, P. Chantawannakul, M-P Chauzat, D. VanEngelsdorp. (2018) Drivers of colony losses. Curr Op in Insect Sci 26:142–148.
Stone, G., B. Gyawali, J. Sandifer. (2017). Honeybee Colony Collapse Disorder in the USA. http://digitalcommons.murraystate.edu/postersatthecapitol/2018/KSU/6/
Taylor-Robinson, A.W. (2000) Vaccination against malaria: targets, strategies and potentiation of immunity to blood stage parasites. Frontiers in Bioscience 5:E16–29.
Ulanowicz, R.E. (1997) Ecology: The Ascendant Perspective. Columbia, New York, New York.
Van Valen, L. (1973) A new evolutionary law. Evolutionary Theory 1:1–30.
Whorf, B. L. (1956) Language, thought and reality. Selected Writings of Benjamin Lee Whorf. J. B. Caroll (Ed). New York and London. MI T. Press and Wiley.
Williams, R.J. and N.D. Martinez. (2000) Simple rules yield complex food webs. Nature 404:180–183.
Wilson, E. O. (1971) The insect societies. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Wilson, E. O. (1975) Slavery in ants. Scientific American, 232:32–40.
Acknowledgments
The author would like to thank E. Todd Hochman for his interdisciplinary brainstorming and assistance in graphics design; Professor James H. Brown for his in-depth collaboration on the initial model; Professor Astrid Kodric-Brown for her valuable collaboration on information flows and honeybee systems; John Smart, for his beneficial comments; the Hitchings-Elion Fellowship that funded some of the initial neuroscience thinking that led to this model; and the Department of Biology, UNM, ABQ for their essential support.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2019 Springer Nature Switzerland AG
About this paper
Cite this paper
Gremillion, V. (2019). Applying Evolutionary Meta-Strategies to Human Problems. In: Georgiev, G., Smart, J., Flores Martinez, C., Price, M. (eds) Evolution, Development and Complexity. Springer Proceedings in Complexity. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-00075-2_17
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-00075-2_17
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-00074-5
Online ISBN: 978-3-030-00075-2
eBook Packages: Physics and AstronomyPhysics and Astronomy (R0)