Re: [PEN-L:8804] Re: punctuated equilibrium

["John M. Legge" <jlegge@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Gould is entertaining but not very rigorous.  For a serious evolutionary model you must turn to Stuart Kauffman (e.g. Origins of Order).  Kauffman introduces adaptive walks, the complexity catastrophe, and the evolutionary leap.  All are endogenous.  Paleontologically speaking, the dinosaurs' comet, if it was a comet, is an exception in the geological record; other, even larger, extinctions have no apparent cosmic link.

Michael P's idea that corporations get fat and lazy may describe a side-effect of an industry caught in the complexity catastrophe, where every small change has so many negative consequences that conservative behaviour is more rational than pursuing major innovation.  Attempts at major innovation usually fail, and it is relatively easy to demonstrate, using standard cash flow/NPV models, that smug and satisfied firms may be rationally managed within the bounds of their own vision.  Strategic breakthroughs usually come from smaller or startup organisations outside the old mainstream: Intel, not RCA, dominates the microprocessor industry.

Sometimes the strategic initiatives come from right outside the dominant nation: the BOC (Basic oxygen converter, the modern replacement for the open hearth primary steel making system)  was Austrian and the minimill Italian.  These innovations triggered the decay of the old US steel companies.  Nucor and the like were secondary innovators, importing, adapting and refining the technology; but they neither invented it nor carried out the initial commercialisation.  (I know that minimills don't use the BOC, but the BOC needed much less scrap than the open hearth, and when the integrated mills stopped buying scrap its price dropped to the point that the minimills could gain a decisive cost advantage.)

The "dominant design" paradigm provides another heuristic account of the growth and eventual consolidation of a technology, as consistent with the facts, and  Kauffman's theory, as Michael's executive dining rooms and on-call golf professionals.  Penrose and Prahalad offer another explanation as to why the traditional steel firms were slow to adopt the BOC and even slower to recognise the implications of the scrap mountain that the BOC created.

While perfect hindsight lays the steel executives' folly bare, by 1950 the blast furnace had been a dominant design for 3000 years and the open hearth for over sixty, or many executive generations.  It is not surprising that they came to believe that their technology was immune from any major challenge.

JML


----- Original Message -----
From: Peter Dorman <dormanp@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Saturday, 3 July 1999 8:06
>Subject: [PEN-L:8804] Re: punctuated equilibrium


> I am no paleobiologist, and so I just have to take the word of folks
> like Gould and Eldridge about radical discontinuities (punctuations) in
> the evolutionary record.  But I think they have muddied things a bit by
> identifying panglossian evolutionism with steady, incremental change,
> and then counterposing their change-through-major-shock model.
> Panglossian conclusions are driven not so much by the pace of evolution
> as by the assumption of single-peaked fitness functions (single
> equilibrium).  By recognizing that there are complex interactions
> between organisms' traits, and that there are multiple, locally-optimal
> physiological "solutions" to environmental challenges, biologists could
> escape from panglossian dogma with or without punctuation.  My hunch is
> that G & E are not on top of the mathematics here and have not been able
> to make the most cogent replies to their attackers.  In econ many of us
> have been through this same battle already, and we've identified the
> relevant formalism.
>
> Any thoughts?
>
> Peter
>