What do economic growth, scientific progress, and morphogenesis all have in common?

Bodies grow, science grows, and economies grow. What is “growth”? The answer isn’t necessarily getting bigger in a physical sense. The shrinking frog gets smaller when it matures from a tadpole to a frog. And while science and economies both develop in a physical sense—science publishes ever-more papers; economies use more and more resources—the “increasing physical mass” facet of development in both science and the economy is not the primary thing we care about.

The development of a human infant into an adult is noteworthy partly because the infant gets bigger, but people reach their adult heights well before they’re done maturing in other ways. I reached my adult height around 16-18 years of age if I recall correctly, but I certainly didn’t reach my adult maturity then. Another reason the development of a human infant into an adult is noteworthy is that the human gets much more competent. From walking across the room to acing a job interview, people get better at controlling themselves and their environment to achieve their goals as they mature.

The same is true of science and the economy. Scientists don’t just assemble greater publication records and citation counts; they get better at understanding and controlling reality. Economies don’t just build bigger and bigger factories; they get more efficient at using resources, able to do more with less, and proving more robust to disruptions and obstacles.

This kind of growth isn’t a growth in physical size, it’s a growth in competency. If anything, this growth in competency is what allows for growth in size because it takes more competence to manage a bigger “body”.

When the economy grows and “gets more resources”, it’s interesting to ask what it means to add something to the economy. You can’t create matter or energy, so when you add, say, iron or wheat or lumber to the economy, you’re not creating it anew and dropping it into the system. Instead, what happens is that the economy has reorganized its environment in such a way that either more of the environment is under control than it was previously—a new iron mine set into operation, for example—or the existing level of control is refined or improved somehow via some reorganization of the system, such as the planting of seeds so that plants can grow and be harvested.

This kind of growth usually isn’t a strict increase in “size”. When the economy dedicates more labor to exploiting some new vein of iron, it has to dedicate less labor to something else. This may be a net gain from the economy’s perspective, but something is necessarily being given up. (Human infants lose their incredible language acquisition skills as they mature.)

Scientific progress works the same way. Science doesn’t grow by accumulating more and more facts, and it doesn’t grow by becoming strictly more true. There are no “new” facts; the facts already were, so science can’t grow by accumulating them. Instead, science grows by reorganizing: taking a given set of observations and changing how it models them. The result is that science grows in sudden leaps and bounds rather than in a steady, continuous process, just like a human child, who may show little sign of being ready to crawl for many months up until the infant’s progressive reorganization—its development—reaches a point where crawling is a viable and attractive state.

If you think of organisms, science, and the economy all as orders, or systems of organization, some kind of model that governs a collection such that the collection behaves in a coherent fashion, then “growth” is the expansion of the order. The order can grow in the sense that it governs more stuff, and it can grow in the sense that it is more internally consistent. An order that is as totalizing and coherent as it can be has reached some kind of maximum of its ability to control the environment to achieve its preferences.

When science does “add facts” to its corpus that weren’t previously observed in the environment, like facts about a manmade compound, or the economy does “add resources” that didn’t come out of the ground, like computer chips, it is reorganizing what it already has, not pulling new facts or resources out of the ether somehow. The organization grows—which can lead to physical growth, but doesn’t have to.

Economic growth is sometimes defined as an increase in the production of goods and services, but this is really a consequence of economic growth (albeit such a reliable one that it’s a useful way of measuring economic growth). The more an economy grows, the more it can rearrange the environment to get more useful stuff out of it, which is what we call the production of goods and services.

A concept of growth that extends across three entirely different domains—morphogenesis and development, economic growth, and scientific progress—suggests some kind of conceptual overlap, such that insights from one domain can be applied, with suitable transformations, to the others. A general science of the expansion and improvement of processes that exert coherent control over their surroundings may be the eventual outcome of relevant interdisciplinary work.