Ecologizing change: an actionable evolutionary theory of empowering participatory sociotechnical systems

• Organic conceptions of irreducible complexity offer inferential advantages over mechanical conceptions reducing wholes to sums of their parts. • Caring for our technologies as we do our children closely attends to their conception, gestation, midwifing, and nurturing. • Irreducible complexity integrates discontinuous nonlinearities across operational, collective, and constitutional levels. • The Caliper STEM instrument and reports seamlessly and holistically situate measurement as a medium of STEM ecosystem stakeholder empowerment. • Caliper applies Edison’s lesson that innovation lies not in inventions but in nurturing social ecologies of infrastructural standards. Metrology extends everyday language’s organic ecosystem capacities for virally contagious and communicable expressions of meaning. Ecologized education implies a key role for metrological standards by similarly seeking to systematically extend learning out of classrooms and into the environments in which knowledge is put to use. Metrological concepts could inform the culturing of STEM learning ecosystems by suggesting how to better coordinate and align the activities of teachers, students, employers, government offices, informal educators, philanthropists, and others involved at differing micro, meso, and macro levels. A metrologically-oriented mathematical measurement model of hierarchically complex relations of mutable individual operational level data, phenotypic collective level measurements and instruments, and genotypic constitutional level theory is proposed. The model facilitates orchestration of opportunities for natural selection to amplify adaptive integrations of innovations and their environments in the same manner that Edison capitalized on the insight that innovation lies in the integration of the invention with its network environment. The proposed model structures STEM ecosystem success measurements metrologically as a common language simultaneously replicating and translating the focal construct across organizational levels and boundaries. New forms of sociotechnical life might then be adaptively integrated with their environments in a manner analogous to Edison’s culturing of the evolutionary potentials of electrical forms of life transformed from the telegraph to the telephone to radio and television to the Internet and wi-fi. A metrology of this kind may enable the maximization of evolutionary potentials for successfully addressing today’s urgent needs for solutions to problems of human suffering, social discontent, and environmental degradation.