The evolution-institution framing is a useful one, and the metaphor, I think, extends further than that.
Not all evolutionary mechanisms are costly, in a certain sense—the major maintenance cost is informational. If an evolved mechanism doesn’t get used, it doesn’t necessarily get selected against, but it also doesn’t get selected for; the mechanism can be eroded by informational degradation / entropy. Or it can be repurposed for some new issue.
The same is true of institutions, and we can observe it happening; we should expect chemical disasters every so often, just because the regulatory apparatus that ensures that chemical disasters don’t occur, is renewed only when they do occur. Funding is one mechanism for this—maybe funding never decreases, it just doesn’t keep up, until a disaster occurs. But also institutional drift—without chemical disasters to keep the public eye on the regulatory institution, the institution’s purpose is gradually going to drift away from preventing chemical disasters, and drift towards the interests of the people running it (ensuring they have comfortable jobs, for instance), as one form of repurpose—but it could be repurposed to deal with some new issue as well.
Which is to say, the original adaptation—or the institution—could be serving another purpose entirely when it is needed again, and not actually be able to fulfill the requirements for which it was originally developed. More, the new purpose could be important enough that you can’t just switch back to the original purpose.
One ramification is that Chesterton’s Fence doesn’t necessarily apply, because the thing that was put in the war chest, by the time you need it again, may not even be in there anyways. More, there may be pieces that are maladaptive to the new purpose, since the structure was created to fulfill a different purpose.
So an institution for dealing with say, earthquakes, stays on track by repurposing itself* for a new/future earthquake, whenever one comes along, and that’s how it stays on track?
*More evolving than predicting the future, because predicting the future is hard.
The evolution-institution framing is a useful one, and the metaphor, I think, extends further than that.
Not all evolutionary mechanisms are costly, in a certain sense—the major maintenance cost is informational. If an evolved mechanism doesn’t get used, it doesn’t necessarily get selected against, but it also doesn’t get selected for; the mechanism can be eroded by informational degradation / entropy. Or it can be repurposed for some new issue.
The same is true of institutions, and we can observe it happening; we should expect chemical disasters every so often, just because the regulatory apparatus that ensures that chemical disasters don’t occur, is renewed only when they do occur. Funding is one mechanism for this—maybe funding never decreases, it just doesn’t keep up, until a disaster occurs. But also institutional drift—without chemical disasters to keep the public eye on the regulatory institution, the institution’s purpose is gradually going to drift away from preventing chemical disasters, and drift towards the interests of the people running it (ensuring they have comfortable jobs, for instance), as one form of repurpose—but it could be repurposed to deal with some new issue as well.
Which is to say, the original adaptation—or the institution—could be serving another purpose entirely when it is needed again, and not actually be able to fulfill the requirements for which it was originally developed. More, the new purpose could be important enough that you can’t just switch back to the original purpose.
One ramification is that Chesterton’s Fence doesn’t necessarily apply, because the thing that was put in the war chest, by the time you need it again, may not even be in there anyways. More, there may be pieces that are maladaptive to the new purpose, since the structure was created to fulfill a different purpose.
So an institution for dealing with say, earthquakes, stays on track by repurposing itself* for a new/future earthquake, whenever one comes along, and that’s how it stays on track?
*More evolving than predicting the future, because predicting the future is hard.