The transformation of uncertainty into risk and then into certainty occurs in the process of activity—that is learning and imitation, trial and error. During socio-cultural evolution, a “double adaptation” occurs: men adapt to the environment by changing meanings, and meanings adapt to the environment by changing men. The quality of this mutual adaptation is determined by the effectiveness of feedback. People learn when they receive rapid and frequent feedback on their actions—be it making things, keeping promises, or discovering new laws of nature. Learning occurs through the repetition of events and actions, the formation of stable meanings—norms or routines. The efficiency of adaptation depends on the norms that regulate the activities of the culture-society, that is, on the socio-cultural order:
“Adaptive efficiency, on the other hand, is concerned with the kinds of rules that shape the way an economy evolves through time. It is also concerned with the willingness of a society to acquire knowledge and learning, to induce innovation, to undertake risk and creative activity of all sorts, as well as to resolve problems and bottlenecks of the society through time. We are far from knowing all the aspects of what makes for adaptive efficiency, but clearly the overall institutional structure plays the key role in the degree that the society and the economy will encourage the trials, experiments, and innovations that we can characterize as adaptively efficient” (North 1990, pp. 80-1).
Culture and meanings emerged as a means of overcoming the uncertainty of the natural environment, the mutual inadaptation of habitat and protohumans. As an adaptation process, cultural evolution reduced natural uncertainty, leading to the emergence of an agrarian culture-society with its traditional order, possession and political ownership. However, the same cultural evolution has led to an increase in the uncertainty of the domus, the culture itself. The more complex the culture, the more variable it is. The more information, the higher the uncertainty: the random grows faster than the probable:
“On the other hand, a string is random if there is no short way to describe it. Of course, you can always describe a binary string just by listing it: the program that says “Print