Relationship is an on-going interaction and transaction. Axelrod showed that expectation of a continued relationship (repeated interaction) is necessary for the evolution of cooperation.
A single interaction is an event, a point in space-time. A transaction, such as trade or mail flow, is a line in these four dimensions. Relationship is also a line, but it is a process, i.e. its very nature (its basic rules) may change in time.
Living systems are transacting processes, i.e. relationships. They use matter (materials) only as a sculptor or painter would, to express ideas and to weave patterns. Any artist must master the medium in which to create, and similarly biochemical processes are beautiful in illustrating how the natural properties of atoms and molecules can be utilized in the artistry of living patterns. But the material particles are not the work of art – the process and the relationship is.
Matter and energy must necessarily flow through an open system if it is to aspire to life (stay far away from equilibrium in a stable way), as Prigogine has shown. The matter comes and goes, but the pattern strives to persist, pinned down by negatice feedbacks and perpetuated by genetic mechanisms. However, only conditionally, for the larger transaction with the environment in the end determines its survivability.
A positive feedback (accelerated augmentation) is needed for further development or evolution (these are not the same), but the destabilization is usually destructive. Only risk-takers and radicals take this chance. The main life tasks are carried by conservative (conservationist) negative feedbacks.
In human cultural evolution, memes play a role similar to genes. Memes (ideas implanted in memory) also evolve socially by particular kinds of interaction among persons, called discourse or dialogue. G.B. Shaw called the process “the threshing machine”, the metaphor being the separation of wheat from chaff, valuable ideas from useless or harmful ones. Others have called it “the free market of ideas” and compared it to buyers and sellers trading in an Adam Smith type of competitive market. This would function like natural selection in Darwin’s scheme: valuable ideas survive the competition in the dialogue and bad ideas go extinct. The mechanism, in evolution, market, and dialogue, is guided “as if by an invisible hand” to a socially or biologically or economically or culturally beneficial result, even though the competing units are guided by egoistic motives.
The invisible hand is a virtuous cycle of feedbacks — but there is no guamlltee that vicious feedback cycles will not also creep in. In the economic market process, there is the beneficent short-range Adam Smith cycle which establishes the fair price by balancing supply and demand, but there are also some malignant longer-range cycles, such as big companies growing faster than small ones leading to giant corporations and eventually monopolies, which kill the market mechanism itself. Production is skewed toward luxuries rather than necessities, and boom-bust cycles are initiated in the macro-economy.
Vicious cycles also set in in biological systems, which is why death is almost a universal phenomenon, except in some unicells which divide instead. We generate our living energy by oxygen, but oxygen free radicals eventually poison our system. Renewal has to come from regulated reproduction, the succession of generations, as the germ plasm is shielded from the pernicious influences and forms a golden thread through the generations.
Attempted pseudo-renewal of some cells through neoplasm and immortalization is a disaster called cancer, because regulation is lacking. Another disaster called Alzheimer’s disease is caused by a pseudo-rejuvenation in a neuron-depleted old brain through dendrite growth that goes out of control.