Micro/Macro Coevolution

Wilber's View

Wilber's target here is a specific, recurring error he finds in popular systems-theory and deep-ecology holarchies (he singles out Karl Popper's biospheric hierarchy as typical): drawing individual holons and their social/collective environment as the same kind of thing, stacked on the same ladder — atoms below cells, cells below populations of cells, populations below tissues, and so on, as if a population of cells and a tissue were just adjacent rungs of one scale. His diagnostic test for whether two things are really at different levels is destruction: if destroying A also destroys B but not vice versa, A is lower. Applied to "cells" and "populations of cells," neither survives without the other — you can't have a population of cells with no cells, and you can't have cells without an environment of other cells. They aren't two levels; they're the individual (micro) and social (macro) aspect of the same level, "the heads and tails of the same coin at every currency," not two different coins.

Drawing on Erich Jantsch, Wilber then makes the constructive claim: at every stage of evolution, a new type of individual holon and a new type of correlative social holon coemerge — heavy atoms and stars, molecules and planets, eukaryotic cells and ecosystems, complex animals and families. This isn't just correlation; it's built into his tenets (specifically tenet 11, "the micro is in relational exchange with the macro at all levels of its depth"): no holon exists as an isolated individual, so wherever depth increases, both a new individual pattern and a new environment for it must appear together. One further wrinkle he flags, and it's a genuinely useful corrective to naive "bigger is more evolved" pictures: as depth increases, individual holons get bigger (molecules are bigger than atoms) while social holons get smaller (there are fewer molecules than atoms, so collectives of them are smaller) — families are smaller than ecosystems, which are smaller than planets, which are smaller than stars. The weaker part of the argument is how much interpretive work Wilber does on Jantsch's own diagrams ("I am in substantial agreement… with the exceptions I will mention") — the coevolution pattern is clean for the physiosphere and biosphere, but by his own account it "becomes somewhat garbled" once Jantsch reaches the noosphere, which is precisely where Wilber most wants the pattern to hold.

In Sex, Ecology, Spirituality

…we notice immediately that there is a confusion and conflation of individual and social holons. That is, micro- and macroworlds are confused. The social holon is assumed to be of the same type and same nature as the compound individual holon, so that they can be arranged "above" or "below" each other.

— Sex, Ecology, Spirituality, ch. 3, "Individual and Social"

…the individual and social are not two different coins, one being of a higher currency than the other, but rather the heads and tails of the same coin at every currency. They are two aspects of the same thing, not two fundamentally different things (or levels).

— Sex, Ecology, Spirituality, ch. 3, "Individual and Social"

The lower portion of each diagram represents microevolution—the evolution of individual holons. The upper portion represents macroevolution—the correlative level of social or environmental relationships (relational exchanges) in which the individual holons are inextricably embedded… When molecules emerge, planets emerge (i.e., they coemerge, coevolve). When eukaryotes emerge, ecosystems emerge; when complex animals emerge, families emerge.

— Sex, Ecology, Spirituality, ch. 3, "Individual and Social"

…since evolution produces greater depth, less span, then the individual holons tend to get bigger (i.e., molecules are bigger than atoms, because they embrace and contain them), but social holons tend to get smaller. Because there are fewer holons at the greater depth… the collectives are smaller. Thus families are smaller than ecosystems, which are smaller than planets, which are smaller than stars.

— Sex, Ecology, Spirituality, ch. 3, "Individual and Social"

Notice in particular that both the micro and macro holarchies given by Jantsch (in both the physiosphere and the biosphere) constitute a genuine higher/lower relationship: destroy any lower (whether individual or social), and the levels above it are also destroyed, but not vice versa.

— Sex, Ecology, Spirituality, ch. 3, "Individual and Social"

Habermas begins with the observation that the same structures of consciousness (his phrase) can be found in the individual self (UL) and its cultural setting (LL), that is, in the micro and macro branch of the evolution of human consciousness.

— Sex, Ecology, Spirituality, ch. 4, "A View from Within"

See Also

• holons — the units whose "individual" and "social" aspects this page distinguishes
• holarchy — the nesting-into-levels claim this page corrects a common conflation of
• four-quadrants — the mature version of this distinction, crossed with interior/exterior into four quadrants rather than two
• Interiority (the "Within" of holons) — the companion move on the interior/exterior axis, made in the very next chapter
• Systems Theory and the Sciences of Complexity — the broader systems-theory literature this page's critique is aimed at
• waves-and-streams — Habermas's onto/phylogenetic parallels, the human-specific version of micro/macro correlation this page's last quote leads into