The End of the Adolescent World Part Two

Systemic Evolution and Selectively Advantageous Instability

In Part One I suggested that what we call “polycrisis” looks less like a single ending and more like the end of a stage. An adolescent civilization, organized around extraction, control and permanent expansion, is now colliding with the consequences of its own pattern.

Here I want to ask a narrower question:

By what mechanism does a civilization actually change phase?

Once you look through the lens of systems, the pattern we are living through starts to resemble something that biology and ecology already describe. Cells, forests and societies all move through cycles of growth, rigidity, breakdown and reorganization. Collapse is not only failure. It is part of systemic evolution.

Life does not simply seek stability

Intro biology puts a lot of weight on homeostasis. Feedback loops maintain temperature, pH and blood sugar within narrow ranges. The system corrects deviations and returns to equilibrium.

Inside the cell, the picture is less calm.

In 2024, biologist John Tower proposed what he calls a new “rule of biology” centered on selectively advantageous instability (Tower 2024). He points out that many key components of the cell are surprisingly short lived. Regulatory proteins and RNAs are synthesized, used briefly and then degraded, even when they still function. This continuous turnover uses energy and resources and appears wasteful if we assume that living systems always minimize cost.

Tower’s argument is that this volatility is not an error. It is an adaptation.

When one component in a replicating structure has a shorter life than its partner, the cell can move rapidly between distinct states. The system gains flexibility at the cost of extra work and noise. Over evolutionary time, this instability can be selectively advantageous, because it increases the variety of configurations the system can explore and improves its capacity to respond to changing conditions (Tower 2024). He also notes the cost. Continuous manufacturing and breakdown generate mistakes. The same pattern that improves adaptability also allows harmful mutations and damaged molecules to accumulate, which contributes to aging (Tower 2024).

Life is not a simple energy saving device. It trades local efficiency for global possibility. It accepts a measure of chaos in order to avoid rigidity and extinction.

The adaptive cycle and the role of disturbance

Ecologists have been working with a similar pattern for decades. C S Holling and others describe the adaptive cycle as a recurring sequence of four phases: rapid growth, conservation, release and reorganization (Holling 2001). The model has been applied to forests, fisheries, rangelands and also to social ecological systems such as rural economies and coastal communities (Gunderson and Holling 2002).

In the growth and conservation phases, a system accumulates structure and connections. Biomass, capital or infrastructure build up. The system becomes efficient and tightly coupled. Over time, that very efficiency creates fragility. When a disturbance arrives, such as a fire, storm, pest or market shock, the structure can no longer adjust easily. Stored energy and organization are released quickly. That is the breakdown phase. What follows is a period of reorganization, where the pieces recombine into a new pattern.

In this framework disturbance is not only an external accident. It is part of the cycle. When a system accumulates too much rigidity and connectivity, small shocks can no longer be absorbed. At the same time, many smaller disturbances, such as low intensity fires, frequent but non catastrophic floods and periodic institutional reforms, act as a kind of selective instability at the landscape and social scale. They clear out dead material, reduce the risk of catastrophic events and allow new structures to appear (Holling 2001; Gunderson and Holling 2002).

If we remove those small disturbances in the name of control, we do not remove risk. We concentrate it.

Purpose, agency and evolution from above as well as below

For much of the twentieth century, popular accounts of evolution treated genes as the main actors. Random mutation produced variation. Environments filtered that variation. Organisms were often described as passive vehicles for their DNA.

Physiologists Raymond and Denis Noble argue that this picture is incomplete. Organisms have purposes, and those purposes shape evolution (Noble and Noble 2023). In physiology, function always implies some kind of goal: maintain viability, repair damage, reproduce, adapt. Whole systems such as cells, organs and bodies regulate their own behavior in order to continue existing.

In a 2023 paper, the Nobles describe life as “purposefully creative in a continuous process of maintaining integrity” (Noble and Noble 2023). Purpose here is not a mystical script from outside. It is teleonomy, internal evolved purposiveness.

An edited volume from MIT Press, Evolution “On Purpose”, gathers work from systems biologists and evolutionary theorists who argue that teleonomy is not just an appearance. It is a real property of living systems, and it plays a causal role in evolution (Müller et al 2023). Organisms construct niches, modify their environments and alter which variations are even available to be selected.

When you put Tower and Noble together, the picture looks like this: evolution uses instability inside organized systems as a resource, and organized systems have goals and agency that shape which patterns survive.

That gives us a language for thinking about civilizations as more than random sequences of events. A civilization has structures, feedback loops and purposes. It can resist change, and it can also participate in its own reorganization.

Civilizations, complexity and the cost of holding everything together

Research on collapse circles the same logic at the level of societies.

In The Collapse of Complex Societies, Joseph Tainter argues that societies solve problems by adding layers of complexity: new institutions, new technologies and new administrative structures (Tainter 1988). Each layer initially provides benefits, but over time the marginal return on complexity declines. The cost of maintaining the structure grows faster than the benefit it delivers. When external or internal stresses appear, an over complex society can no longer respond without prohibitive cost.

Peter Turchin’s structural demographic theory adds a dynamic account of internal pressure. As populations grow and more people seek elite positions than the social order can support, competition within the elite intensifies, wages stagnate and political conflict rises (Turchin 2016). These feedbacks produce recurring waves of instability and crisis across centuries.

This work does not describe collapse as a clean cliff. It describes cycles of integration and disintegration, with periods of stress that open the way for new orders.

That is very close to an adaptive cycle for social systems. There is growth and conservation, then release, then some form of reorganization. Whether the new form is more equitable and adaptive, or more extractive and brittle, depends on how power and imagination are distributed during the unstable phase.

When instability becomes an opening

In the fourteenth century, the Black Death killed an enormous share of the population in Europe. Many estimates place mortality between one third and one half of the people in affected regions (Routt n d). It was a brutal release phase in demographic and economic terms.

The long term consequences were not uniform. In much of Western Europe, labor scarcity increased wages and undermined older feudal arrangements. Serfdom weakened and peasants gained bargaining power (Routt n d). In parts of Eastern Europe, by contrast, landowners responded by tightening control and expanding serfdom in a process sometimes called “second serfdom” (Routt n d). The plague itself was not beneficial. What mattered was how different societies moved in the unstable space it created.

The Great Fire of London in 1666 is a smaller and more bounded example. The fire destroyed most of the medieval city. In its wake, Parliament passed the Rebuilding of London Act and subsequent measures that required new buildings to be constructed in brick or stone, banned projecting timber upper stories and widened some streets (The National Archives n d). Again, the fire was a disaster. But it also forced a structural change in urban form and building practice that reduced the risk of similar fires in the future.

In the early 1990s, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, Cuba lost most of its imports of fuel, fertilizer and food. The “Special Period” brought severe scarcity and shrinking caloric intake (Enns and Sia 2022). Out of that crisis, Cuba embarked on a large experiment in agroecology and urban agriculture. Organopónicos, intensive urban gardens using organic methods, expanded in and around Havana and other cities. By the early 2000s, a significant portion of the city’s fruit and vegetables came from these systems (Enns and Sia 2022). The shift was not romantic. It was a hard response to necessity. Yet it stands as one of the clearest recent examples of a national food system reorganizing in a more ecological direction under stress.

Each case illustrates the same structure we saw in biology and ecology: instability that becomes a substrate for reorganization. The disturbance is not good. It is simply a clearing. What grows in that clearing depends on structure, power and choice.

Covid as a global stress test

The Covid 19 pandemic is the most recent and most global instance of this logic.

The World Health Organization declared Covid 19 a pandemic on 11 March 2020 (World Health Organization 2020). Within weeks, travel, schooling, workplaces and daily routines were disrupted on a scale no one under a certain age had experienced.

The immediate effects were deadly and unequal. At the same time, the pandemic revealed how tightly coupled and low margin many of our systems had become.

On the physical side, a study in Nature Climate Change found that daily global carbon dioxide emissions fell by about 17 percent in early April 2020 compared to mean 2019 levels, largely due to reductions in transport and industrial activity (Le Quéré et al 2020). The drop was temporary and emissions later rebounded, but it demonstrated that the emissions trajectory is not physically fixed. Behavior and structure can alter it quickly.

On the social side, Covid triggered a huge involuntary experiment in remote and hybrid work. Before 2020, only a small fraction of work days in advanced economies were performed from home. During the first wave of lockdowns, that fraction rose dramatically. In the United States, Barrero, Bloom and Davis estimate that around 60 percent of work days in May 2020 were home based (Barrero et al 2021). By 2023, the share had settled to a lower but still much higher level than before, with roughly a quarter to a third of work days done from home and hybrid arrangements becoming a stable norm in many sectors (Barrero et al 2021).

There were also shifts in trust and political mood. Surveys from organizations like Pew Research Center show that public trust in government in the United States, already strained, declined further through the pandemic era, with significant gaps between demographic and partisan groups (Pew Research Center 2025).

Covid did not teach one clear lesson. It acted as selectively advantageous instability at planetary scale. It exposed fragility in hospital systems, supply chains and governance. It forced rapid experiments in new patterns of work, education and mutual aid. Some of those experiments have persisted. Others have been abandoned.

From the perspective of systemic evolution, Covid looks like a release phase in several overlapping adaptive cycles. It was not chosen. It was not fair. But it revealed where the system can bend, where it breaks and where we actually have room to act.

Systemic evolution and the end of adolescence

Across these scales, the same pattern appears.

At the cellular level, selectively advantageous instability allows life to explore more possibilities at the price of greater turnover and some damage (Tower 2024). At the ecological level, adaptive cycles and small disturbances prevent systems from becoming so rigid that a single shock destroys them (Holling 2001; Gunderson and Holling 2002). At the social level, complex societies grow, overshoot and reorganize under combined pressures from ecology, demography and their own internal structure (Tainter 1988; Turchin 2016).

Our current global order is a dense web of energy, food, finance and meaning systems that has pursued a narrow set of goals: continuous growth, extraction at planetary scale and a thin idea of stability that rests on externalizing damage. Now those goals collide with physical and social limits. Climate change, biodiversity loss, soil depletion, water stress, widening inequality and declining trust in institutions are not separate crises. They are different expressions of one pattern that has run past the range where it can sustain itself.

Seen through this lens, the “end of the adolescent world” is not only a moral judgment. It is an adaptive cycle entering its back loop. The system we built is in a phase of release and reorganization. Collapse is not a single cliff but a shift in the rules that govern our shared life.

The biology of teleonomy adds one more point. Living systems do not only experience evolution. They also participate in it. Organisms, and by extension societies, have purposes. Those purposes influence which instabilities they accept, which structures they conserve and which experiments they are willing to run (Noble and Noble 2023; Müller et al 2023).

The practical questions for a maturing civilization are not abstract. What forms of chosen instability are we willing to accept now in order to avoid worse instability later. Which patterns of land use, energy, finance and culture must be allowed to unwind, even at real cost, because they cannot continue without deeper harm. Which local experiments in more coherent ways of living deserve protection and attention while the larger system shakes.

Systemic evolution does not guarantee a wiser outcome. History is full of reorganizations that led to harsher and more unequal orders (Tainter 1988; Turchin 2016). But if the work in biology and systems theory is even partly correct, it does suggest that there is room to participate. Instability is coming either way. The choice is whether it remains only catastrophic and imposed, or whether some of it can be selective, deliberate and directed toward a different pattern of life.

That is the real edge between an adolescent world and a possible adult one. Not the absence of crisis, but the willingness to use crisis as material for transformation, rather than as an excuse to cling to an order that has already consumed its own future.

References

Barrero JM, Bloom N, Davis SJ. 2021. Why working from home will stick. NBER Working Paper No 28731. National Bureau of Economic Research.

Enns ML, Sia A. 2022. Cuba’s urban agriculture: Resilience in times of crisis. SAGE Business Cases.

Gunderson LH, Holling CS, editors. 2002. Panarchy: Understanding transformations in human and natural systems. Island Press.

Holling CS. 2001. Understanding the complexity of economic, ecological, and social systems. Ecosystems 4(5):390–405.

Le Quéré C, Jackson RB, Jones MW, Smith AJP, Abernethy S, Andrew RM, et al. 2020. Temporary reduction in daily global CO2 emissions during the COVID 19 forced confinement. Nature Climate Change 10:647–653.

Müller GB, Love AC, Wimsatt WC, editors. 2023. Evolution “On Purpose”: Teleonomy in living systems. MIT Press.

Noble R, Noble D. 2023. Physiology restores purpose to evolutionary biology. Biological Journal of the Linnean Society 139(4):357–369.

Pew Research Center. 2025. Public trust in government: 1958–2025.

Routt D. n d. The economic impact of the Black Death. EH Net Encyclopedia.

Tainter JA. 1988. The Collapse of Complex Societies. Cambridge University Press.

Tower J. 2024. Selectively advantageous instability in biotic and pre biotic systems and implications for evolution and aging. Frontiers in Aging 5:1376060.

Turchin P. 2016. Ages of Discord: A Structural Demographic Analysis of American History. Beresta Books.

World Health Organization. 2020. WHO Director General’s opening remarks at the media briefing on COVID 19 – 11 March 2020.