Krasilov, 1997. Metaecology-11. The Ladder (conclusion). Parallelism. Systemicity

Superhuman (conclusion). Dogmatism. Ladder. Chronicle.

V.A. Krasilov. Metaecology. Moscow: Palaeontological Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences, 1997. 208 p. Part 11.

Stairs (conclusion). Parallelism. Systemicity.

Organisms. Directionality. Diversity. Adaptability. Coherence.

When Ch. Darwin was developing his theory, intermediate forms between the higher apes and humans had not yet been discovered. In 1925, American schoolteacher Scopes was convicted (for teaching biology in the spirit of Darwinism) at what became known as the Monkey Trial. That same year, Dr. Dart discovered the skull of a creature with transitional characteristics, later assigned to the family Australopithecidae. Today such finds number in the dozens and are carefully dated. In Nairobi I had the opportunity to see the Leakey collection, remarkable for the completeness of its transitional forms. Australopithecus afarensis appeared approximately 4.5 million years ago; its probable descendant, Australopithecus africanus, appeared around 3.8-3.4 million years ago. Two groups of australopithecines are distinguished — the "gracile" and the "robust." The former may have been hunters or scavengers; the latter subsisted on plant matter. Among recent discoveries, mention should be made of the most ape-like Australopithecus ramidus from Ethiopia, dated to 4.4 million years ago (T.O. White et al.: Nature, 1994, 371, 306-312). The first humans — the "habilines" ("handy men"), judged carnivorous from tooth wear patterns, with relatively large brains — appeared 2 to 2.5 million years ago. At the same temporal horizon, anatomical changes are observed in the structure of the hand, associated with the capacity for precision grip (early australopithecines did not possess this ability; see R.L. Susman: Science, 1994, 265, 1570-1572), attesting to the development of tool-using behaviour. The "robust" australopithecines coexisted with early humans until approximately 1 million years ago and may have contributed their genes to the latter. In any case, the humans of the second evolutionary stage — the "upright walkers" (Homo erectus) — more closely resemble the "robust" in body build than the "gracile." When relatively few specimens of Homo erectus had been found, each was described as a distinct genus; today, however, anthropologists are more or less unanimous in assigning all of them to a single species. Its temporal range spans 1.8 to 0.6 million years ago, and to the long-known finds from Java, Africa, and China have now been added Plio-Pleistocene remains from the Transcaucasus dated to 1.8-1.6 million years ago (L. Gabunia, A.A. Vekua: Nature, 1995, 372, 87-88). Even at this level, the rudiments of the principal modern racial groups were already discernible. A complete skeleton of Homo erectus was discovered recently near Lake Turkana in Kenya. Its geological age is approximately 1.6 million years, while its biological age at death was around 12 years, and at so young an age it had already attained a height of 1.68 m. The near-simultaneous appearance of Homo erectus in widely separated regions of the world points to multiple centres of hominisation — the humanisation of intermediate forms. The transition between Homo erectus and its undoubted derivative, Homo sapiens, is regarded by some specialists as saltational and by others as gradual. In any case, the early sapients — the Neanderthals — still closely resemble Homo erectus. There are skulls that are difficult to classify. The boundary between Neanderthals and anatomically modern Homo sapiens is likewise blurred. It is most clearly defined on the basis of skeletal remains and artefacts found in Western Europe, where sapients displaced the Neanderthals roughly 35,000 years ago, and where a brief period of coexistence appears to have promoted character divergence. (Neanderthals were not the stooped, bent-kneed figures we are accustomed to seeing in old reconstructions; these powerfully built men and broad-hipped women — who gave birth with ease — with their large projecting teeth and on average a slightly larger cranial capacity than ours, appear during the brief period of coexistence with anatomically modern sapients to have left their genetic imprint on the populations of the latter, since their characteristic features manifest themselves to this day.) Alongside this, one may also posit a cultural contribution: Neanderthals painted themselves with ochre and brought flowers to the graves of their ancestors; their extinction was most probably connected with climatic change and the decline of large-animal populations. In human evolution, morphological changes were not significant (which is why only three species are distinguished, and even then not always with full confidence). For the last 30,000-40,000 years our species has been in a state of morphological stasis. At first glance this might seem unremarkable. Many animal and plant species persist for hundreds of thousands, even millions, of years without appreciable change. The paradox lies in the fact that, while remaining unchanged, we experience the sensation of continuous renewal. Darwin explained human uniqueness by our capacity for fabricating artefacts. The co-originator of the theory of natural selection, A.R. Wallace, however, was altogether unwilling to apply it to humans, finding no explanation for such attributes as "the capacity to conceive of ideas of space and time, of eternity and infinity, the capacity for deep aesthetic enjoyment of certain combinations of form and colour, and finally the capacity for abstract conceptions of form and number that gives rise to the mathematical sciences. How could any one of these capacities have begun to develop if they could have been of no use to man in his original barbarous condition?" He proposed that human evolution was guided by "a superior intelligent being, as we direct the development of domesticated animals and plants." Thus the "ladder," from its very foundation — the inexplicable gravitational pull of DNA toward aardvarks and humans (while unicellular organisms managed its replication no less effectively) — right up to its uppermost rungs, was erected by some commanding force that preferred not to advertise its intentions. Parallelism The palaeontological record provides extensive material for two fundamental evolutionary generalisations: the development of the organic world exhibits, first, directionality and, second, cyclicity; these properties are characteristic of all evolutionary processes operating at different organisational levels, from the biosphere to the cell. In addition, a similarity is revealed between parallel-running processes — evolutionary parallelism. If we can explain these properties of evolutionary processes (no satisfactory explanation yet exists), we may regard the general model of the evolution of the organic world as having been constructed in its essential outlines. It is held that only repeatable phenomena (or those reproduced experimentally) permit the detection of objective regularities. Singular events remain outside the domain of scientific generalisation. Since evolution occurs but once, can we speak of evolutionary regularities at all? Fortunately for evolutionists, there exist numerous parallel lines of development; analogous processes recur from epoch to epoch, at different levels of organisation of natural systems, and, finally, there exists — albeit limited — the possibility of starting afresh. In closely related species the same variants of characters arise, and the parallelism of variability manifests itself with such consistency that the existence of as yet undiscovered variants can be predicted. Consequently, the genetic system directs and constrains gene mutations. This is the essence of the law of homologous series discovered by N.I. Vavilov ("The Law of Homologous Series in Hereditary Variation," 1922). The less obvious parallelism of non-related organisms is expressed in the commonality of fundamental evolutionary tendencies. Thus mammals and flowering plants both evolved under the aegis of parental care of offspring. In both groups the principal evolutionary innovation — a specialised nutritive product, milk in the former and endosperm in the latter — strengthened the bond between the offspring and the maternal organism. Enhanced metabolic activity promoted the development of thermoregulation in one case and of an efficient conducting system in the other. Finally, the heightened plasticity (compared with their precursors — reptiles and gymnosperms) yielded broad spectra of life forms, including aquatic ones. Even before Darwin, a remarkable parallelism was detected among the sequence of life forms from lower to higher (the "ladder of nature"), the individual development of the embryo of higher animals — which passes through a series of stages reminiscent of more primitive forms — and the palaeontological record of changes in the organic world from older to younger strata. This phenomenon, termed the "threefold parallelism" by L. Agassiz, demonstrated the existence in nature of some universal principle, a common idea. The recapitulation of historical development in individual ontogeny was formulated as a distinct biogenetic law. In the ideal case, embryonic development would resemble an accelerated playback of a film reel on which one glimpses first some worms and molluscs, then fishes, amphibians, reptiles, and finally mammals of increasingly human-like aspect, though some frames have been cut, are indistinct, or even spliced in reverse order. The hereditary programme of development, like a computer, compresses and discards information. Frequently one observes the truncation of terminal stages, whereby the adult organism retains juvenile features that recapitulate more or less remote ancestors (simian features in the human). A fourth type of parallelism is now known — ecogenetic parallelism (see my book "Nature Conservation: Principles, Problems, Priorities," 1992). The development of a biotic community at the first — pioneer — stage is characterised by low diversity and small biomass at high productivity and substantial "waste" — accumulations of dead organic matter (mortmass). At subsequent stages of the cenosere, both diversity and the ratio of biomass to productivity and mortmass increase, and the community enters an equilibrium climax phase. In precisely the same manner, at the early stages of biosphere evolution, primitive microbial communities were characterised by exceptionally high productivity and the accumulation of enormous volumes of mortmass (iron-ore formations, bituminous shales, stromatolite structures) at relatively small biomass. The overarching trend from the origin of life to the present day has consisted in the increase of biomass — its areal distribution and thickness in vertical cross-section — and of biological diversity, while the ratio of productivity to biomass and the accumulation of mortmass have declined. In both cases, the dominant role passes from species with a pioneer strategy — active colonisers, rapidly reproducing at high mortality and with sharp fluctuations in numbers — to species more efficient in the utilisation of environmental resources, capable of stabilising numbers at an optimal level. In both cases there is no complete displacement of pioneer species, which in a mature community perform the function of an emergency service, restoring local disturbances. Although an overly direct comparison of the community to an organism has repeatedly been criticised, and the climax, unlike the definitive stage of an organism, appears in nature largely as a potential state rather than a realised one, the recurrence of historical regularities in the cenosere nonetheless permits a transition from evolutionary time (hundreds of thousands to millions of years) to ecological time (hundreds to thousands of years) and to ontogenetic time — the duration of individual existence. The parallelism is completed by the observation that both in individual development and in community development, truncation of terminal stages is possible — a kind of reversion to the past. Bundles of diverging evolutionary lineages, formed in successive geological epochs by groups of organisms that succeed one another, repeat one another. First the reptiles, and then the mammals, as they filled the available ecological space, divided into herbivores and carnivores, terrestrial, aquatic, and flying forms, acquiring thereby a notable resemblance to their predecessors (fishes, ichthyosaurs, cetaceans). All these types of parallelism share a common nature: they express the regularities of the evolution of open systems, and it is not surprising that the development of human society, in many respects analogous to biological evolution, fits within the framework of parallelism. Abandoning the illusion of our own exceptionalism, we shall see that the laws of evolution apply equally to the human species. Humans appeared at a late stage of biosphere evolution as an element of its biological diversity. Like other biological species, the human species in the early stages of its evolution interacted with its environment according to the principle of negative-feedback regulation, with the inevitable sharp oscillations in numbers that this entails. The density of human populations was regulated "from above" — by predators and parasites; "from the side" — by competing species; "from within" — by cannibalism and infanticide (traces of which survive in mythology); and "from below" — by the depletion of food resources. As the first three regulatory modes receded into the background, the last acquired ever greater importance. For many millennia the resource problem was resolved primarily through migration, which culminated in the "Great Migration of Peoples" of the 4th-8th centuries CE. Subsequently, the migratory strategy and the territorial conquest associated with it progressively lost their adaptive significance. In parallel, an alternative means of resolving the same problem gained ascendancy — the enhancement of resource-use efficiency. This is the main avenue of adaptation for all species, with the difference that in humans, alongside morphophysiological mechanisms, technological mechanisms of adaptation developed, which approximately 30,000 years ago (with the appearance of anatomically modern humans) assumed paramount importance. Technologies enabling the exploitation of new resources and the reduction of waste determine the progressive development of the economy, the level of which can be assessed by the diversity of production processes, the length of technological chains, and the closure of cycles. The analogy with biological diversity, length of food chains, and closure of biogeochemical cycling is evident. The constant introduction of new technologies increases the distance between resources and their consumption, superimposing an ever-taller technological pyramid which, in its essential outlines, resembles the natural pyramid of living beings. The evolution of the technological system may be likened to the development of a biotic community. At the pioneer stage, low-specialisation production predominates and resource-use efficiency is low. At intermediate stages, more efficient technologies are introduced. The climax stage is characterised by the predominance of highly specialised production. System stability is secured by the coexistence within it of different evolutionary (successional) stages. Least stable are configurations dominated by pioneer stages (developing countries) or by the climax stage alone (the Japanese model). The critical situation in the USSR (and to a lesser degree in other states of socialist orientation) arose from the omission of intermediate stages. The transition from raw-material industries directly to the most capital-intensive technologies of heavy industry generated a multitude of problems in the areas of labour productivity, resource use, waste processing, and ecological safety. Crisis processes, as in nature, lead to developmental arrest and the truncation of the climax stage of highly specialised production. In primitive organisms the survival strategy is based on numerical increase; in highly organised ones, on the maintenance of population equilibrium. For many generations of humans, progressive social development was firmly associated with population and economic growth — a tendency reinforced by constant military confrontation. Today the possibility opens of reconsidering the growth strategy in favour of equilibrium. The stabilisation of numbers becomes an urgent necessity. If humanity wishes to avoid regulation "from below" — through resource depletion — then regulation "from within" becomes indispensable, and preferably by methods other than cannibalism. Good news becomes more persuasive when attested four times in succession. Parallelism is the manifold testimony to the commonality of all open systems, to the law-governed directionality of their evolution. Systemicity Darwin proposed two tests for his theory — the simulation of saltational jumps by incompleteness of the geological record, and the incompatibility of altruistic behaviour with the mechanism of natural selection. The theory failed both tests. Saltational jumps do exist — the more complete the record, the more evident they become — and altruism in nature exists as well: it is the foundation of biosocial systems, which were very poorly understood in Darwin's time. These circumstances prompted some evolutionists to reject Darwin's theory outright, preferring instead evolution without natural selection — based on random genetic events (the so-called non-Darwinian theory) — or evolution resulting from random cosmic events (for example, the impact of large celestial bodies; in the 1980s the hypothesis of the catastrophic extinction of the dinosaurs as a consequence of an asteroid impact gained wide support and still has many adherents today, though interest in it is gradually declining) — or, finally, evolution as a manifestation of Platonic love, which moves the world without the aid of Heraclitean strife. (Among the proponents of the last view, the well-known revolutionary anarchist Prince P.A. Kropotkin was particularly prominent.) A fairer assessment of Darwin's theory (quite apart from his greatness as a scientist who established the evolutionary approach in biology and adjacent disciplines, with its subsequent extension to all of natural science) is, it seems, that it illuminates one aspect of the evolutionary process, but not the process as a whole. The questions that have remained open and neglected show that we — despite the efforts of the adherents of the so-called Synthetic Theory to present it as a comprehensive model in which only the details remain to be worked out — do not yet have a satisfactory theory of evolution and, moreover, have little hope of obtaining one by advancing in the direction already set. A different approach appears necessary for the construction of a genuinely synthetic, i.e., systemic, model. The first sketches of a systemic (ecosystemic) theory of evolution are contained in my books "Evolution and Biostratigraphy," "Unsolved Problems of the Theory of Evolution," "The Cretaceous Period," and others. According to this model, evolution proceeds in open systems under the influence of geological and cosmic processes that provide the impulse for the development of living systems. Evolutionary impulses propagate from higher systemic levels to lower ones: from the biosphere to ecosystems, communities, populations, organisms, and genomes; tracing causal connections "top-down," in contrast to the traditional "bottom-up" view (from gene mutations to population processes and communities), makes it possible to construct a causal model without recourse at every turn to chance. The character of evolution changes over time, itself evolving; the significance of certain factors declines, as has occurred with natural selection, or increases, as in the case of individual development and the role of the individual in the historical process. Natural selection in the traditional theory is treated as the aggregate result of selection operating in parallel at different levels — the individual and the group, between elements of a system (genes, organisms, populations, etc.) and between systems (species, communities, etc.). Multilevel selection explains the manifestation of altruism (it is "advantageous" to reduce one's personal genetic contribution to the next generation in order to increase the collective contribution of all bearers of shared genes — islands of love in an ocean of strife; however, without altruism no system can exist). The directionality of evolution is determined by systemic properties that define a goal and explain both progress and regress. Until recently, the notion of goal-directedness in nature was consigned to the realm of mysticism. However, the situation changed with the development of the theory of non-equilibrium processes, which in closed (isolated) systems develop in accordance with the law of entropy increase (the second law of thermodynamics), driving the system toward equilibrium. In open (living) systems, according to I. Prigogine's theorem (L. Prigogine, "From Being to Becoming," San Francisco, Freeman, 1980), the stationary state corresponds to minimum entropy production. All thermodynamic systems may therefore be regarded as teleological — striving toward a definite state, which constitutes the goal of their development. For example, a biotic community, passing through a series of intermediate stages in its development, tends toward the climax state, which serves as its goal. Analogously, the genetic system has as its goal the formation of an organism that reproduces parental characters and thereby is in turn capable of successful reproduction within a population. This circumstance was not properly appreciated by positivist philosophy, which excluded teleology from the domain of scientific cognition. Thermodynamics was developed in the same years as Darwin's theory of the evolution of the organic world, yet the concept of teleological systems found no reflection in the latter. In my previous works, the general directionality of biosphere evolution was interpreted, in accordance with the thermodynamics of open systems, as a process of reduction in entropy production. The physical meaning of entropy production in the case of living or living-component-containing systems consists in the dying of living matter in the form of the death of organisms, the necrosis of tissues, leaf fall, the extinction of genetic lineages and species. Analogously, the principal ecosystem parameters — biomass, productivity, mortmass, degree of overlap of trophic niches (competition), species diversity (an indicator of structural complexity) — can be correlated with thermodynamic parameters and potentials: volume, enthalpy, entropy, internal energy, and free energy. The application of the general laws of system development to ecosystems makes it possible to understand the nature of evolutionary processes and their directionality more clearly, and to explain why evolution did not arrest at the level of bacterial communities but advanced further along the path of adding ever new structural storeys, up to and including human civilisation. The systemic approach clarifies a number of cardinal evolutionary problems, which turn out to be particular manifestations of systemic properties.

The transition between upright-walking hominins and the undoubtedly derived 'wise' *Homo sapiens* is considered abrupt by some specialists and gradual by others. In any case, early wise hominins, Neanderthals, are still very similar to upright-walking hominins. There are skulls that are difficult to classify. The boundary between Neanderthals and 'sapiens' proper is also blurred. They are most clearly distinguished by skeletal remains and artifacts found in Western Europe, where *sapiens* displaced Neanderthals about 35,000 years ago and where their short period of coexistence seems to have contributed to the divergence of traits (Neanderthals were not stooped and bent at the knees as we used to see them in old reconstructions; these powerful men and broad-hipped, easily childbearing women, with large protruding teeth and, on average, a slightly larger cranial capacity, during the short period of coexistence with typical *sapiens*, apparently managed to leave their genetic mark in the populations of the latter, as their characteristic features are still evident today).

Along with this, a cultural contribution can also be assumed: Neanderthals painted themselves with ochre and brought flowers to the graves of their ancestors; their extinction is likely related to climate change and the reduction of large animal populations.

In human evolution, morphological changes have not been significant (hence only three species are distinguished, and not always confidently). For the last 30–40 thousand years, our species has been in a state of morphological stasis. There seems to be nothing strange about this. Many animal and plant species have existed for hundreds of thousands or even millions of years without noticeable changes. The paradox is that, without changing, we experience constant renewal.

Darwin explained the uniqueness of humans by their ability to make things. The second author of the theory of natural selection, A. R. Wallace, did not dare to apply it to humans at all, not finding an explanation for such properties as 'the ability to grasp ideas of space and time, eternity and infinity, the ability to deeply aesthetically enjoy certain combinations of forms and colors, finally, the ability to abstract concepts of forms and numbers, which gives rise to mathematical sciences. How could any of these abilities begin to develop if they could not bring any benefit to humans in their primitive savage state?'. He suggested that human evolution was guided by a 'higher intelligent subject, just as we guide the development of domestic animals and plants'.

Thus, the 'ladder' from its very foundation – the incomprehensible attraction of DNA to tubular teeth and humans (while simple organisms reproduced them no worse) – to its highest rungs was built by some dominant force that did not advertise its intentions.

Parallelism. The paleontological record provides extensive material for two fundamental evolutionary generalizations: in the development of the organic world, there is, firstly, directionality and, secondly, cyclicity; they are inherent in all evolutionary processes occurring at different organizational levels, from the biosphere to the cell. In this process, similarity of parallel developing processes is revealed – evolutionary parallelism. If we explain these properties of evolutionary processes (there is no satisfactory explanation to date), then the general model of the evolution of the organic world can be considered largely constructed.

It is believed that only repeating phenomena (or those repeated in an experiment) allow objective regularities to be revealed. An individual event remains outside the scope of scientific generalizations. Since evolution happens only once, can we speak of evolutionary regularities? Fortunately for evolutionists, there are numerous parallel lines of development, analogous processes repeat from epoch to epoch, at different levels of organization of natural systems, and finally, there is – albeit limited – the possibility to start over.

Less obvious parallelism in unrelated organisms is expressed in the commonality of basic evolutionary trends. For example, mammals and flowering plants evolved under the sign of care for offspring. In both, the main evolutionary innovation is a special food product, milk in one, endosperm in the other – which strengthens the offspring's connection with the maternal organism. Increased metabolic activity contributed to the development of thermoregulation in one case and an efficient vascular system in the other. Finally, increased plasticity (compared to ancestors – reptiles and gymnosperms) provided a wide range of life forms, including aquatic ones.

Even in the pre-Darwinian period, a remarkable parallelism was discovered in the sequence of life forms from lower to higher ('ladder of nature'), the individual development of the embryo of higher animals, which goes through a series of stages resembling more primitive forms, and the paleontological record of changes in the organic world from older strata to younger ones. This phenomenon, called 'triplicate parallelism' by L. Agassiz, demonstrated that some universality, a certain common idea, exists in nature.

The repetition of historical development in the individual was formulated as a special – biogenetic – law. Ideally, embryonic development should be something like an accelerated playback of a film reel, on which worms and mollusks first flash, then fish, amphibians, reptiles, and finally mammals, increasingly resembling humans, but some frames are cut out, blurry, or even edited in reverse order. The hereditary program of development, like a computer, compresses and discards information. Often, the final stages are truncated, where the adult organism retains juvenile features that repeat those of more or less distant ancestors (ape-like features in humans).

Similarly, in the early stages of biosphere evolution, primitive microbial communities were characterized by extremely high productivity and the accumulation of enormous volumes of mortmass (iron ore formations, bituminous shales, stromatolites) with relatively small biomass. The overarching trend from the origin of life to the present day has been an increase in biomass – its areal distribution, thickness in cross-section – and biological diversity, while the ratio of productivity to biomass and the accumulation of mortmass have decreased. In both cases, the leading role shifts from species with a pioneer strategy – active colonizers, rapidly reproducing with high mortality and sharp population fluctuations – to those more efficient in utilizing environmental resources, capable of stabilizing population size at an optimal level. In both cases, pioneer species are not completely displaced; in a mature community, they perform the function of an emergency service, restoring local disturbances.

Although the overly straightforward comparison of a community to an organism has been repeatedly criticized, and the climax, unlike the definitive stage of an organism, mostly appears as a potential state in nature, the repetition of historical patterns in a cenosis allows us to transition from evolutionary time (hundreds of thousands to millions of years) to ecological time (hundreds to thousands of years) and ontogenetic time – the duration of individual existence. Parallelism is trusted because in both individual development and community development, it is possible to skip the final stages, as if returning to the past.

Bundles of diverging evolutionary lines, formed in successive geological epochs by successive groups of organisms, repeat one after another. First reptiles, and then mammals, filling the life space, divided into herbivores and predators, terrestrial, aquatic, flying forms, acquiring in the process a noticeable similarity to their ancestors (fish, ichthyosaurs, cetaceans). All these types of parallelism have a common nature: they manifest the laws of evolution of open systems, and it is not surprising that the development of human society, similar in many aspects to biological evolution, fits into a system of parallelism.

Setting aside the illusion of our own uniqueness, we will see that the laws of evolution also apply to the human species. Humans appeared at a late stage of biosphere evolution as an element of its biodiversity. Like other biological species, humans in the early stages of their evolution interacted with the environment based on negative feedback control, with inevitable sharp fluctuations in numbers. Human population density was regulated "from above" by predators and parasites, "from the side" by competing species, "from within" by cannibalism, infanticide (the trace of which remains in myths), and "from below" by depletion of food resources. As the first three methods receded into the background, the latter gained increasing importance.

For many millennia, the resource problem was primarily solved through migration, culminating in the "Great Migration of Peoples" in the 4th-8th centuries AD. Subsequently, the migratory strategy and the associated conquest of territories increasingly lost their adaptive significance. In parallel, an alternative way of solving the same problem was established – increasing the efficiency of resource use. This is the main path of adaptation for all species, with the difference that in humans, along with morphophysiological mechanisms, technological adaptation mechanisms developed, which about 30 thousand years ago (the origin of modern humans) acquired primary importance.

Technologies that allow for the utilization of new resources and the reduction of waste determine the progressive development of the economy, the level of which can be assessed by the diversity of production processes, the length of technological chains, and the closure of cycles. The analogy with biodiversity, the length of food chains, and the closure of the biogenic cycle of substances is obvious. The constant introduction of new technologies increases the distance between resources and their consumption, building a technological pyramid that is broadly similar to the natural pyramid of living organisms.

The evolution of a technological system can be compared to the development of a biotic community. In the pioneer stage, low-specialized production prevails, and resource use efficiency is low. In the intermediate stages, more efficient technologies are introduced. The climax stage is characterized by the prevalence of highly specialized production. The stability of the system is ensured by the coexistence of different evolutionary (successional) stages within it. The least stable variants are those with a predominance of pioneer stages (developed countries) or climax stages (the Japanese model). A critical situation in the USSR (and to a lesser extent in other socialist-oriented countries) arose due to the loss of intermediate stages. The transition from raw material industries directly to the most capital-intensive technologies of heavy industry created numerous problems in labor productivity, resource utilization, waste processing, and environmental safety. Crisis processes, as in nature, lead to delays in development and the removal of the climax stage of highly specialized production.

In primitive organisms, the survival strategy is based on population growth; in highly organized ones, it is based on maintaining population equilibrium. For many generations, progressive social development has been strongly associated with population and economic growth. This was facilitated by constant military confrontation. Now, an opportunity is opening up to revise the growth strategy in favor of equilibrium. Stabilization of population size is becoming an urgent necessity. If humanity wants to avoid regulation "from below" – by resource depletion, regulation "from within" is needed, and, if possible, not by cannibalistic methods.

The good news becomes more convincing if it is confirmed four times in a row. Parallelism is a repeated testimony to the commonality of all open systems and the regular direction of their evolution.

Systemicity Darwin proposed two theses to test his theory: simulation of jumps by the incompleteness of the geological record and the inconsistency of altruistic behavior with the mechanism of natural selection. The theory did not withstand the test. Jumps do exist – the more complete the record, the more obvious they are, and altruism exists in nature – it is the basis of biosocial systems, which were very poorly studied in Darwin's time. These circumstances prompted some evolutionists to completely reject Darwin's theory, preferring evolution without natural selection, based on random genetic events (the so-called non-Darwinian theory) or as a result of random cosmic events (e.g., the fall of large celestial bodies; in the 1980s, the hypothesis of the catastrophic extinction of dinosaurs due to an asteroid impact gained wide support and still has many proponents, although interest in it is gradually declining) or, finally, as a manifestation of Platonic love that moves the world without the help of Heraclitean strife (among the proponents of the latter viewpoint, the famous anarchist revolutionary Prince P. A. Kropotkin stood out).

A more accurate assessment of Darwin's theory (not to mention his greatness as a scientist who established the evolutionary approach in biology and related disciplines with further spread to all natural sciences) is likely that it illuminates one aspect of the evolutionary process, not the entire process.

The questions left open and abandoned show that, despite the efforts of the proponents of the so-called synthetic theory to present it as an all-encompassing model, with only details remaining to be worked out, we still do not have a satisfactory theory of evolution and, moreover, have little hope of obtaining one by proceeding in the given direction. A different approach is likely needed to develop a truly synthetic, i.e., systemic, model.

The Superman (conclusion). Dogmatism. The Ladder. The Chronicle. V.A. Krasilov. Metaecology. Moscow: Palaeontological Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences, 1997. 208 p. Part 11. The Ladder (conclusion). Parallelism. Systemicity. Organisms. Directionality. Diversity. Fitness. Coherence.