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By Root 635 0

Many political scientists claim that not a single clear-cut exception to this regularity has happened since democracies emerged at the end of the eighteenth century. Even though any number of countries have been at war with each other in any year since 1776, not a single pair of democracies have actually been at war with each other during this period. Apparently, the trait of being a democracy and the trait of not going to war with a democracy are, for the moment at least, coadaptive. This probably helps explain several things, like why democracies do better economically than market-economy dictatorships (fewer wars) and why the number of democracies seems to be increasing. It has also guided foreign policy—the U.S. and European encouragement of new democracies to ensure stability and peace.

Nothing is forever. We can be confident that somewhere or sometime, one democracy is going to find a way to exploit this regularity by attacking some completely unsuspecting fellow democracy lulled into a false sense of the permanence of peace among democracies. How can we be so confident? Mother Nature is forever searching through biological design space, looking for new variations on an existing adaptation that do even better. Nature seeks variations that are cheaper to make or more efficient to use or that otherwise improve on a solution to the design problem the environment poses. There is no way to stop blind variation. This goes for variations in human cultural adaptations as well as in genetically encoded adaptations. But human social design space is greater than the biological space genes search through. It is changing more rapidly, too. There are two reasons why the rate of cultural variation is much faster and cultural environments are changed much quicker, too.

First, biological evolution has to wait the 20-year human reproductive generation for a new genetic variation to start changing traits. Once a genetically encoded trait appears in an organism, it’s stuck there for the organism’s whole life. The leopard’s lineage can change its spots by mutation and other tricks, but not the individual leopard itself. But cultural variations arrive continually, sometimes before the previous one has even had a chance to be selected for or against.

Second, once people and their traits become one another’s selective environment, high-speed trait variation is converted to equally fast changes in the filtering environments. Nothing illustrates this process better than the changes in information technology since the personal computer came on the scene. People linking computers to one another provides an environment in which Web browsers emerge and get selected for and against (remember Netscape?). Now on every computer screen in the world, Google is locked in an arms race with Bing. (Check out how Google Images changed to copy Bing images.) Browsers themselves become the environment in which social network sites compete (remember MySpace?); social network sites become environments in which advertising, self-promotion, and blogging compete. It’s nested Darwinian natural selection moving at ever-accelerating velocities, where rapidly changing filters select among relentlessly and randomly varying traits. This is why so much human cultural evolution looks more like fashion change than accumulating adaptation.

Here is another example: Only 50 years ago, economists thought that the Keynesian model of the economy captured the macroeconomic laws of the capitalist system. In most versions, the model consisted of three equations that showed how income, investment, and consumption were related, with implications for the interest rate, the money supply, and government taxing/spending policies. One reason the model looked right is that it seemed to enable economists of the third quarter of the twentieth century to fine-tune the macroeconomic variables of a nation’s economy. The pattern of relationships between investment and savings, consumption and gross national income, the interest rate and the money supply had been figured out. At this point,