Towards a Bayesian Theory of Self-Organization, Societal Evolution, Creativity, and the Role of Randomizers in the Societal Evolution

Abstract

Social Darwinism, the well-known application of Darwin’s theory to explain societal evolution, became discredited because it restricted the complex societal, multicausal evolution exclusively to natural, external selection, adaptation, or, in the words of game theory: to solutions of competitive conflicts between individual interests. According to Dennett (Dennett 1991: 17–28, 520), there looms behind Darwin’s book The origin of species “Darwin’s cultural, most dangerous idea” of evolution as the only creative process we know so far. In this century, this idea received more and more attention; it has greatly enhanced our present understanding of societal evolution. The idea’s dangerous and revolutionary implications are that it proved scientifically and successfully that evolution is not only the creation or self-organization of species but of all physical and chemical forms of matter, of all forms of life, of the human brain, and of its enormous creativity within human societies, cultures, sciences. This idea returned the problem of evolution to the central issue that scientists have been avoiding for too long, to the problem of self-organization and creation. Self-organization begins with the self-organizational processes of physical, chemical-prebiontic, and genetic evolution; it ends with the creativity of the human brain during societal evolution. Especially the coevolution of the evolution of the human brain and of societal evolution in today’s democratic societies is taken seriously by evolutionists and brain physiologists. It will be the main topic of this article because it fostered an increase of human creativity in the twentieth century never known before. Some hypotheses on the dynamic of the sensory and cognitive processing in the brain put forth by the group around Basar will be used in this article.