Systems engineering as cultural group selection

DS Wilson interviews Guru Madhaven on the topic. The blurb set up follows:

"The reason that I have become intrigued by systems engineering is because it can be seen as a form of artificial cultural group selection. Group selection concerns the evolution of traits due to the differential survival and reproduction of groups, as opposed to the differential survival and reproduction of individuals within groups. Group selection can take place for culturally derived traits in addition to genetically derived traits. Indeed, cultural group selection is an exceptionally strong force in our own species.

"The distinction between “natural” and “artificial” selection is relatively clear-cut for genetic evolution. The environment is the selective agent for natural selection (e.g., the evolution of cryptic coloration in moths) and humans are the selective agents for artificial selection (e.g., the evolution of domestic flower varieties). These two forms of selection are not mutually exclusive, however. For example, the domestication of wolves might well have begun with natural selection for individuals that remained close to human habitations, before artificial selection could get started.


"Natural and artificial selection are even more intermingled for human cultural evolution. To some extent, our current groups are the result of many unplanned social experiments, a few that hung together compared to many that fell apart. These groups work well without having been consciously designed by anyone, like the aerodynamic design of a bird’s wing. Yet, humans are inveterate intentional planners, so some aspects of our groups are consciously designed, like the constitution of the United States.

"Against this background, systems engineering can be seen as an exceptionally pure form of artificial cultural group selection, which explicitly treats a physical or a social system as the unit of selection and employs highly refined processes for evolving the system’s component parts. My use of the word “evolving” in the previous sentence goes beyond its colloquial meaning. The toolkit of the system engineer probably requires a process of “blind variation and selective retention” which is the substrate-free definition of an evolutionary process.

"Currently, there is very little overlap between the systems engineering community and the growing interdisciplinary community of scientists thinking about cultural group selection."