Interplay of Adaptive Selection and Synergistic Performance: As an Example of Natural Selection and Self-Organization

The purpose of this study is to elucidate the eect of self-organizing processes, in particular the synergistic increase in performance of individuals in diverse collectives, on the adaptive selection process (the engine of variation generation, selection and amplification). The systems under consid- eration include the more traditional systems undergoing adaptive selection as in biology and ecology, as well as more novel information and economic systems, in the presence and absence of scarcity of resources. Because the two processes, adaptive selection and synergistic collective processes, utilize individual diversity by selective versus additive means, adaptive selection systems with and without these self-organizing processes may exhibit fundamentally dierent dynamics. The three major obser- vations are 1) the performance increase from synergistic processes may reduce or eliminate selection pressure, 2) because diversity is required for synergistic performance, once synergistic performance starts and selection is reduced, the increase in diversity could increase the synergistic performance in a positive feedback cycle (coined the "synergistic performance-diversity bootstrapping"), 3) if the synergistic performance is present, even selection on the least fit may actually reduce individual performance due to the drop in diversity and could result in a positive feedback cycle of decreasing performance and selection, possibly leading to system-wide failure (coined "synergistic performance- diversity collapse"), and 4) in systems with little scarcity as in some Internet consumer markets with long-tail distributions, the generation of greater and greater diversity coupled with synergistic performance may result in a previously unrealized collective performance model, possibly greater than traditional systems with selective pressures. These conclusions are supportive of the summary by Batten, et al. in this volume that " Self-organization proposes what natural selection disposes".