Ok. I'm going to discuss biological evolution, and if you follow along, I will eventually get to discussing its applicability to social structures. Just hang on.

There was this book released recently called, "The Edge of Evolution: The Search for the Limits of Darwinism" by Michael Behe. Michael Behe is a professor of biology at LeHigh University in Pennsylvania. He is also the lead scientific proponent of intelligent design, although you won't learn that until you are 3/4 of the way through his book. In it, Behe claims to have conclusive proof that the mechanisms we ascribe to evolution can't work. He acknowledges common descent - that apes and humans for example have a common ancestor, but he sets out mathematical arguments that random mutation can't prodcue complex positive evolutionary change. His arguments are based upon recent observations of the effects of random mutation in very simple organisms, and the apparent complexity of flagella (those whip like tails found on some cells).

There are some problems with his reasoning that others have gone over in more detail than I have. Without researching his numbers and facts in depth more myself, I spotted a couple I think. First, if his facts and figures about the difficulty in developing a protein binding site are correct, then I can't see how the human immune system would work. In the immune system, antibodies are randomly altered at 4 binding sites to create a multitude of different types that then bind to foreign objects within the body. When an antibody binds to an object, this becomes a signal to the cell that produced it to make more of itself. If Behe's figures on the difficulty of producing a bonding site were right, then I don't think the number of antibodies we produce would be sufficient to create a bond with a random invader.

With respect to flagella, he claims that these cellular tails couldn't be built using a piece meal evolutionary system. Each part, he claims, has to fit in with every other part, and they would have all had to have appeared at the same time. Similar arguments were made about the eye a century ago, and researchers have found intermediaries. With the flagella, Behe has picked a better target, because this organelle would have first existed in the Precambrian, over a billion years ago. The intermediaries may no longer exist, and since there is no fossil record for objects that small, there might be no record of them. The Precambrian was a very long period of time too. Life has existed for 4 billion years, and 3 billion of that was the Precambrian, when life was almost exclusively one celled. That's a heck of a lot of time and a heck of a lot of organisms reproducing to produce a complex structure like flagella.

According to Behe though, all this means it wasn't random chance. He thinks the numbers don't add up and the the only way it could have worked was God and pre-destination. The dice must be rigged. Even though the odds of flagella arising are extremely rare, they happened anyway. Not through any mystical intervention, or any ongoing creation event, but through God pre-arranging for the dice to fall so that mutations appear at the right time and the right place.

Even if Behe's number are flawed, he is correct in one sense. It is rigged. Life didn't evolve through a series of point mutations, changing one base to another an A to a T, or a G to a C, or point deletions. Life is probably too complex to have gotten to where it is that way. Instead large swathes of DNA are duplicated and patched into different locations.

Why is this important? Well, lets work with a simple example. Suppose we want to find a particular combination of the words "HOT" "AM" "I". We can go through the permutations fairly quickly there is our starter "HOT AM I", plus other combinations of "HOT I AM", "AM HOT I", "AM I HOT", "I HOT AM" and "I AM HOT", for a total of six possibilities. Searching through six possibilities goes pretty quick. Suppose instead though that instead of shuffling words, we shuffle letters. Leaving the spaces out and working with various combinations of the letters "A", "H", "I", "M", "O", and "T" we have a total of number of combinations like "HIOMTA" and "AIMOHT" of 720. So having recognizable subunits to randomize makes the process much easier. We could go even further and not just randomize the letters, but the structure of the letters, changing the structure letter "A" by adding or a subtracting a line, and we would have a number of combinations in the billions.

So, it makes sense to shuffle words instead of letters, and where there are functional structures, to shuffle those structures around instead of reinventing the wheel each time. And in fact this is what we find in biological evolution. All those genetic engineering tools that we use are actually found in living organisms. There are proteins that cut out sections of DNA and shuffle them around. It's still random, but it's structured randomness. And it got that way because it evolved that way. Organisms that could evolve in response to changes in the environment survived, and those that couldn't keep up in the race lost out.

(Incidently, this is why computer viruses aren't out there evolving. They reproduce and there can be mistakes made in the copies, but the changes that happen are at the bit level, not the functional programing sentence level. They can't evolve any more than Behe's conception of biological evolution. It takes too much random chance for useful variations to appear.)

So here's the part where I make the switch to societies. Modern societies have also evolved to evolve. I'm not talking about the old social Darwinism, naive eugenics view point. I'm talking about societal structures themselves, not people. I can point at three societal structures, and I am sure there are more, that spur the evolution of thoughts, the scientific method, Democracy, and the entrepreneurial system, that all spur the evolution of ideas.

Consider the elements of an evolving system and how they can be found in each of these systems. For a system to evolve it must have reproduction with variation, and selection. In the scientific method we have the generation of hypothesis (reproduction with variation), and the testing of hypothesis (selection). In democracy we have the generation of new ideas about government (reproduction with variation) and voting (selection). In the entrepreneurial system we have the creation of new products (reproduction with variation) and consumer choice (selection).

Each of these structures thrives on the production of new ideas and their selection. Each of these structures has evolved over time because their existence is favored by selection itself. Societies have evolved to evolve, and societies that maximize their evolution of their own social structures are the ones that sit on top of the heap now.