Informalisation and Evolution: Four Phases in the Development of Steering Codes

Abstract

A few years ago, I started to think of the evolution from mammals to hominoids and then Homo sapiens as an example of informalisation, albeit of a very different type. But the project of comparing the informalisation of social and psychic codes with evolutionary informalisation would not only have been a bigger undertaking than the Renaissance project, it would also require facing the difficulties of the ‘evolutionary emergence of social processes from biological processes’ (Quilley 2007: xiii). Nevertheless, in what follows, I will try to present an outline and a rough comparison of these two transitions in dominance from formalisation to informalisation, one at the evolutionary level of speciation and the other at the level of social and psychic developments since the advent of Homo sapiens.