Diversity's Role in Complex Systems Parts 1 & 2

Reposted from my Linkedin:

I'm working on some larger pieces about issues and solutions to contemporary business norms in the US as well as larger questions of what sustainable societies could look like. One topic that keeps coming up is systemic and requisite diversity, so I'm going to first discuss that in a short series here, discussing a few case studies in nature before turning to humans. My thinking here is that diversity and inclusivity is usually treated as a "liberal priority" rather than a requirement for systemic functioning. It's not a luxury, it's a necessity.

Let’s start off by looking at bees and ants. Bees and ants are genetically identical sisters. However, differences in gene expression and individual behavior ("personality") are crucial to the well-ordered functioning of the superorganism. Temperature regulation of a beehive is very important. Too cold or too hot and the bees die. On a hot day, bees flap their wings to cool down the hive. Each bee has their own personal threshold for when to start flapping- some bees have a low tolerance for heat and start flapping almost immediately while others can endure higher temperatures before they act. The result is that without central command or control, the hive has a smooth, variable response to heating. If all the bees had the same temperature response, they'd all start and stop flapping at the same time which would lead to wild spikes in temperature. In ant colonies, researchers were stymied by large groups of "lazy" ants, who spent much of their time just sitting around the nest. After further research, they realized that the ants weren't lazy, they were a variable reserve labor force able to deploy to meet a surge in need. By not deploying all ants at full capacity at all times, the colony can adapt. (Varied preferences amongst individual ants also help keep all jobs filled.) It's like keeping a cash reserve rather than spending all your money on goods and investments; it's useless until you need it. In both cases, varied responses to the same stimuli maintain homeostasis and allow adaptation to novel inputs. If all the insects were the same, their complex societies simply would not be possible. While we could think about this purely in terms of specialization of labor, the different preferences are important. All of this reminds me of Early Chinese social and economic thought, which I will discuss in more depth elsewhere, where philosophers such as Mencius see the fundamental diversity of humanity as the necessary precondition for complex society. Diversity is not a problem, nor even is getting people to collaborate- they do that naturally. Instead, the challenge is ensuring that agents in complex and inherently asymmetrical relationships are treated fairly. That’s a hard problem, but we’ll come back to it in future posts.  In tomorrow’s example, we’ll examine agricultural practices, where we’ll pick up the theme of the utility of “uselessness” and the utility of diversity.

Part 2:

Today I’m going to discuss the role of diversity in systems through examples in agriculture. Factory farming and monocropping are intended to create a highly efficient agricultural process. By specializing in a specific set of plant and eliminating the “noise” of nature, the idea is to maximize crop yields. The thing is that as you cut out more and more variance and further attempt to isolate your system, you end up incurring various risks and destabilizing your system. In farming, two major issues are soil degradation and pest control. In the first case, growing the same crops over and over tends to deplete the soil of its nutrients, requiring farmers to compensate with fertilizers. Runoff brings these chemicals into the environment where the sudden influx of nutrients often disrupts the local ecosystem causing issues such as algae blooms. A solution for this sort of issue is crop rotation, which has a long history. One can also grow multiple crops together (companion planting), as with the Indigenous American Three Sisters- beans, corn, and squash. Nonetheless, the high efficiency ceiling monoculture allows through the use of specialized machinery and streamlined processes (harvesting, planting, etc) means that plants such as corn, soybeans, and wheat are often monocropped.

At the same time, these large fields of uniform crops create problems for pest control. A good example of this is the banana. The bananas we get now are a different variety from the one before 1950. Back then, the Big Mike banana was the dominant monocrop, but Panama Disease wiped out the plantations. Faced with the near collapse of the industry, what did the plantations do? They selected another cultivar, the cavendish, and have relied on that ever since. This means that the cavendish is susceptible to the same scenario as the Big Mike. Protecting monocrops requires extensive use of pesticides, which, in turn, have negative effects on the local biodiversity and human population. By trying to optimize production, we incur losses in efficiency elsewhere in our process (more pesticides, in this case). These solutions, in turn, have negative externalities beyond the farm.

Ironically, leaving areas uncultivated, as with silvopastures, can help with pest control. While this means caring for more, smaller fields, local wildlife will help in pest control by creating a more complex food network, making it harder for pest populations to boom. By placing farms in the environment rather than attempting to isolate them from it, they receive the benefits from the local biodiverse ecosystem. (I’ll save the discussion of Zhuangzi and “uselessness” for a later day.)

In both cases, diversity brings a more complex network of interactions which pass benefits to the intentional activity (farming), and by allowing non-intentional activity (natural environment), we sacrifice some of our efficiency ceiling for a more robust and sustainable process.