Evolution is a network.
To say that ‘evolution is a network’ is like saying that it is not a line or a branching tree. Evolution understood as a rhizomatic plot, an infinite vine like the Cordyceps from the wonderful TV series and video game The Last of Us. What evolution is a network? Just the biological evolution? Or the technological evolution? Both? Let’s talk about evolution(s).
Evolution is (not) a line
When we imagine the evolution of any type of human phenomenon over time, the first thing that comes to mind is a line. Whether we think of politics (a succession of kings or presidents), the economy (a succession of booms and crises, or, if you prefer, a series of “modes of production”) or technologies (a succession of increasingly complex devices), Homo sapiens tend to organize information in sequencial time series. In 2009 Umberto Eco published a wonderful illustrated book (Vertigine della lista) that has a lot to do with linear ways of organizing knowledge.
The list, Eco explained at a conference in Seville in 2010, “is not just a playful device, a literary game, but rather a form of knowledge, that is, of ignorance, a crisis of established knowledge. Consequently, it is a rhetorical form to be approached with the utmost respect.” The list, not necessarily temporary, is the sequential way we have to present objects or events of all kinds.
The first example of a list appears in Homer, in the Iliad (…) Homer dedicates part of the eighteenth song of the Iliad to describing the shield that Hephaestus forges for Achilles, and the neoclassical artists who later tried to reproduce that shield had trouble enclosing in that circular space everything that Hephaestus had introduced into it, representing the earth, the sea, the sky, the sun, the moon, the stars, two bustling cities, sieges and battles, work in the fields and festivals.
Eco proposes a distinction between a practical list and a poetic list. The practical list
manifests itself in the shopping list, in the list of guests at a party, in a library catalogue, in the inventory of the assets available in a will (…) How is, on the contrary, a poetic list? First of all, the objects it names don’t necessarily have to exist, so Homer’s catalog would still be fascinating even if all the chiefs he names were just mythical creatures. Secondly, as it has already been said, the list is born from the impossibility of expressing everything and thus suggests the vertigo of an ‘etcetera’.
Linear sequences, those lists that unfold along a time axis, surround us. The model of the long linear march is the favorite of Modernity. Technologists and entrepreneurs love linear sequences, especially if they are projected in Power Point and create the illusion of increasing returns. They appear to name the evolution of digital networks (web 1.0, web 2.0, web 3.0), digital devices (iPhone 11, iPhone 12, iPhone 13) or software (Photoshop 1.0, Photoshop 2.0, Photoshop 3.0). As Jerome Bruner and David Kahneman suggest, this diffusion of linear sequences may have to do with our cognitive system’s tendency to organize the world narratively, that is, as a series of events.
Linear models are a quick and cheap solution humans invented to deal with complexity. The lists compiled by Umberto Eco or the Power Points with timelines that Silicon Valley experts are so excited about present in a simple and easily understandable way processes that are not very linear. As soon as we go a little deeper into these processes, the lines begin to show derivations, side alleys and forks. If we investigate these linear sequences, we will see how little by little they become trees.
Evolution is (not) a tree
The model that Charles Darwin introduced in On the Origin of Species (1859) laid the foundations for a profound scientific and cultural revolution. Much of its success was due to its simplicity. Darwin achieved the impossible: explain through a very simple arborescent model -based on the couple variation / natural selection- the richness of the biological world:
It is interesting to contemplate an entangled bank, clothed with many plants of many kinds, with birds singing on the bushes, with various insects flitting about, and with worms crawling through the damp earth, and to reflect that these elaborately constructed forms, so different from each other, and dependent on each other in so complex a manner, have all been produced by laws acting around us.
Darwin’s model (also known as the Darwin Machine) was inmediately applied to technological evolution. For example, we can analyze the evolution of airplanes as if it were a tree that has branched off over the last 120 years. Let’s review that history. At the end of the 19th century, many prototypes were created that ended the same way: crashing into the earth.
But something happened at Kitty Hawk on December 17, 1903: Orville and Wilbur Wright made the first successful sustained powered flight of a heavy-than-air vehicle. The Wright brothers found the ideal configuration of actors (the best “interface”, I would say) that allowed an old aspiration of humanity to come true.
After an initial process of variation at the end of the 19th century, characterized by the appearance of many prototypes, one of them finally worked (the Wright brothers’ biplane) and was selected to open an evolutionary line that would mark aviation for the next century. In a few years, airplanes became increasingly sophisticated and fast machines. This evolution accelerated during World War II, for example when the first jet aircraft was developed in Germany: the Messerschmitt Me 262.
From here, the evolution of flying machines entered into a classic Darwinian bifurcation process: on the one hand, subsonic transport aircrafts that largely follow the model of the Wright brothers; on the other, delta-winged fighter planes that fly above the speed of sound.
Many processes of technological evolution can be explained by applying the Darwinian branched tree model. However, in the socio-technological sphere, strange things often happen. For example, the emergence of supersonic passenger transport planes …
If something characterizes technological evolution, it is promiscuity: a device that appears in the media sphere (for example, the radio) can end up inside a means of transport (a car), in the same way that a navigation device designed for a video game can be incorporated into a GPS navigator interface. The evolution of the media does not escape this dynamic. In my latest articles and books, this interpretation in terms of complexity of media and technological change processes has been a constant: the evolution of media and interfaces is not a line or a tree that branches (see the fourth, fifth, and sixth laws of the interface).
The most interesting thing is that in the last half century Darwin’s tree also began to become more complex. From Lynn Margulis’s pioneering studies of symbiosis to more recent research on lateral gene transfer between species, the Darwinian model has begun to show its connections. Let’s follow in the footsteps of David Quammen in The Tangled Tree (2019):
Evolution is trickier, far more intricate, than we had realized. The tree of life is more tangled. Genes don’t move just vertically. They can also pass laterally across species boundaries, across wider gaps, even between different kingdoms of life, and some have come sideways into our own lineage — the primate lineage — from unsuspected, nonprimate sources. It’s the genetic equivalent of a blood transfusion or (different metaphor, preferred by some scientists) an infection that transforms identity: “Infective heredity.”
This fascinating scientific story, very well told by David Quammen, leads us to also consider biological evolution as if it were something more complex than the classic branched representations outlined by Charles Darwin 160 years ago.
Evolution is a network
Leaving linear and even branched models behind is an intellectual imperative of our time. Although they can be useful when explaining a certain change -narratives, despite experiments like Netflix’s Bandersnacht, have been for centuries and will continue to be linear- or as a first attempt to describe a transformation process, the study of technological and biological mutations brings us closer to the network model.
In all the social disciplines and humanities, it is not hard to find researchers who opted for reticular models, from Bruno Latour and John Law’s actor-network theory to Manuel de Landa’s assemblage theory, passing through Yuri Lotman’s semiosphere or the infinite network of social semiosis by Eliseo Verón. We could say that the network model is the episteme -in the Foucauldian sense of the term- of the time we have to live. In the last pages of my next book (On the Evolution of Media, Routledge, 2023) I wrote the following:
It is clearly premature to speak of a confluence of biological and technological evolutionary models, especially since studies of technological evolution run with almost a century of theoretical and methodological disadvantage with respect to biological studies. Perhaps in the future some kind of integration will be feasible. The important thing is that the bridges and exchanges — for now almost only unidirectional — exist and can be improved in the coming years.
If Umberto Eco dedicated himself to looking for linear series in the form of lists and Charles Darwin identified the great ramifications in natural evolution (the so-called trees of life), now the networks emerge before our eyes and presente themselves as the most appropriate explanatory model to represent and understand both biological and technological change. We live in networks, we think in a network and only by interpreting their complexity we will be able to act without getting caught up in them.
Bonus tracks
Spanish version: “La evolución es una red”
