• home
• about
• new
• essays
• AI
• book

Dr. Joseph Dillard is a psychotherapist with over forty year's clinical experience treating individual, couple, and family issues. Dr. Dillard also has extensive experience with pain management and meditation training. The creator of Integral Deep Listening (IDL), Dr. Dillard is the author of over ten books on IDL, dreaming, nightmares, and meditation. He lives in Berlin, Germany. See: integraldeeplistening.com and his YouTube channel. He can be contacted at: joseph.dillard@gmail.com

SEE MORE ESSAYS WRITTEN BY JOSEPH DILLARD

Beyond Altitude

What If Development Isn't Evolution's Highest Value?

Joseph Dillard

Frank Visser's recent review of Brendan Graham Dempsey's Measuring Altitude performs an important service for the integral community as well as for all those seeking self-development. Rather than accepting “altitude," the assessment of superior development, at face value, Visser carefully distinguishes what Dempsey's research actually demonstrates from stronger conclusions that can be drawn from it. Visser's assessment is measured, fair, and methodologically sophisticated.

He concludes that Dempsey provides substantial evidence that several classic developmental models, including those of Piaget, Kohlberg, and Wilber, converge on a common measure of hierarchical complexity. What remains unproven, however, is Wilber's stronger claim that human beings possess a single, measurable developmental altitude or center of gravity encompassing the whole person.1 This is an important clarification.

Yet from the perspective of The Development Trap, a book by this author that examines common misconceptions of development, an even deeper question remains largely untouched.2 It is not whether altitude exists. It is whether altitude is the evolutionary variable that matters most.3 That question shifts the discussion from developmental psychology to evolutionary theory.

The Wrong Question?

Much of the debate surrounding Integral Theory has centered on whether developmental altitude is real. Can Kohlberg, Loevinger, Kegan, Fowler, and others be placed on a common developmental scale? Can hierarchical complexity be measured independently? Do different developmental traditions converge?

These are legitimate scientific questions, and Dempsey's work represents perhaps the strongest empirical effort yet to answer them.

But suppose the answer turns out to be yes. Suppose hierarchical complexity is indeed measurable across developmental domains. Suppose a reasonably coherent notion of altitude eventually receives broad empirical support.Would that establish that altitude is evolution's primary adaptive variable?

Not necessarily. Existence and evolutionary importance are different questions. Ego, IQ, strength, morality and memory exist, yet none alone predicts long-term adaptation.4 Similarly, altitude may exist without being evolution's principal criterion for success.

Complexity Is Not Adaptation

A subtle assumption runs through much developmental theory. Increasing hierarchical complexity is generally treated as evidence of increasing developmental maturity. Often this assumption proves useful.

Greater cognitive complexity frequently allows broader perspective-taking, more sophisticated reasoning, and more comprehensive integration, yet evolutionary history repeatedly demonstrates that increasing complexity and increasing adaptability are not identical. Indeed, they often diverge.

Highly sophisticated financial systems become increasingly vulnerable to systemic collapse. Highly organized bureaucracies become incapable of innovation.

For example, Kodak possessed some of the world's finest photographic scientists. Ironically, the company invented the first digital camera in 1975. Yet because Kodak's identity was tied to chemical film, it repeatedly minimized the significance of its own invention. The problem was not insufficient intelligence. It was an inability to suspend the identity that had previously made the company successful. By the time Kodak reorganized around digital photography, competitors had largely captured the market.5

In another example, Nokia dominated the mobile phone industry during the late 1990s and early 2000s. Its engineers recognized the coming smartphone revolution, but organizational identity and internal incentives favored incremental improvements to existing products. Apple's simpler but more adaptable organizational response rapidly displaced Nokia's developmental lead.6

Freud revolutionized psychology, yet evidence accumulated that many phenomena could not be reduced to libido or repression. Instead of suspending his theoretical identity, Freud increasingly defended psychoanalysis against revision. The result was that psychology fragmented.7

Piaget transformed developmental psychology, yet later work demonstrated infants possess many competencies Piaget thought impossible. His theory required revision because its developmental assumptions had become too rigid.8

Einstein provides the opposite example. For decades he resisted quantum mechanics because it violated his commitment to deterministic elegance. His famous objection was that “God does not play dice.” His extraordinary intelligence did not protect him from attachment to his own framework.9

Linus Pauling won not one but two Nobel Prizes. He was one of the twentieth century's greatest scientists, yet he spent decades defending megadose vitamin C despite mounting contradictory evidence. Intelligence is not the same as adaptability.10

Scientific paradigms eventually become resistant to contradictory evidence. Civilizations frequently collapse at the height of their organizational sophistication rather than during their infancy. Late Rome possessed the world's greatest roads, bureaucracy, engineering, army, law and administration, yet increasing complexity required increasing maintenance. Political identity became more important than adaptation. Eventually complexity became unsustainable burden.11

Qing China was highly organized with massive technological accomplishments and a highly educated bureaucracy, yet became increasingly resistant to industrial innovations developing elsewhere. Identity preservation outpaced adaptation.12

The Soviet Union generated enormous scientific achievement, including its space program and its mathematical and engineering accomplishments, yet institutional identity prevented adaptive economic reform. Collapse followed.13

Evolution offers no guarantee that greater complexity produces greater resilience. Quite the opposite.

Complexity frequently generates new forms of rigidity. The more elaborate a system becomes, the more energy must be devoted to preserving it. Eventually preservation competes with adaptation.

This pattern appears repeatedly throughout biological evolution, cultural evolution, institutional history, and individual psychology. From this perspective, complexity is not evolution's endpoint. It is one phase within an ongoing adaptive process.

Measuring Organization

The Lectical Assessment System, the instrument used by Dempsey in his research, measures something important. It measures increasing hierarchical organization of thought.

Individuals become progressively better able to coordinate multiple variables, integrate competing perspectives, construct abstract systems, and organize increasingly complex conceptual relationships. While these are valuable capacities, they represent only one side of adaptation.

Precipitation is a term taken from chemistry that applies to the movement of vapor into form. From the perspective of The Development Trap, the increasing hierarchical organization of thought, describes processes of that side of adaption: the consolidation of increasingly coherent identities, conceptual structures, and worldviews. These are manifestations of precipitation.

What remains largely unmeasured is a complementary evolutionary process that answers equally essential questions: “How readily can individuals and organizations move away from rigidity when reality requires revision?” “Can an individual suspend cherished assumptions when adaptation to changing circumstances and new information requires it?” “Are we capable of temporarily relinquishing our identity when beneficial or necessary?” “Can we genuinely inhabit unfamiliar perspectives rather than merely explaining them?” “Can we operationally test recommendations emerging from those perspectives to see if they are in fact superior to our previous beliefs or behaviors?” “Can we repeatedly reorganize ourselves in response to changing conditions?”

These capacities are not simply additional forms of complexity, nor are they fundamentally about development. They represent something qualitatively different.

IDL, the conceptual and methodological framework out of which The Development Trap is written, refers to this complementary process as sublimation—not in Freud's sense of defensive transformation, but in the older chemical sense of temporarily moving from solidification into greater freedom of movement before reorganizing into a different structure. Evolution appears to require both precipitation, as in the formation of our sense of self, and sublimation, as in its temporary dissolution in order to create space for adaptation to changing circumstances. Sublimation is built into the ongoing adaptive structure of reptiles, birds, and mammals in the form of dreaming.14

Vertical Development and Ecological Fitness

Developmental psychology naturally favors vertical metaphors. It uses terminology like “higher,” “lower,” “advanced,” “earlier,” and “later.” These metaphors work well for describing increasing structural complexity. Visser questions whether there is really one developmental mountain. The Development Trap asks whether evolution is organized around mountains at all. Evolution often operates differently.

It rewards organisms not for becoming highest but for remaining adaptive. Bacteria have survived for billions of years by staying very simple and not “developing.”

Sharks have persisted with relatively modest structural changes for hundreds of millions of years. They adapt to ecological niches and survive through maintaining stability, not through increasing complexification.

Meanwhile, countless extraordinarily sophisticated species have disappeared. Extinction is the opposite of development, and extinction is common in the geological and biological record, with extinction estimates as high as a 99%.15 This fact alone defies the common belief that evolution is fundamentally about development.

The evolutionary question therefore becomes less, “Who is highest?” and more, “Who remains capable of adapting?” These are not equivalent questions.

Navigation Rather Than Maps

Developmental theories often produce increasingly accurate maps, and we have quite a few of them, such as those provided by Piaget, Kohlberg, Lovinger, Kegan, Graves, and Wilber. Their accuracy is one of their great strengths. The Development Trap, and Integral Deep Listening (IDL), the framework behind it, suggests that evolution is ultimately less interested in maps than in navigation.

A magnificent map provides little advantage if its owner cannot revise it as the territory changes. A mediocre map, continually updated, often proves more adaptive than an elegant map treated as final.

Scientific history illustrates this repeatedly. The greatest advances often occur not because researchers possess the most comprehensive theories, but because they abandon inadequate theories more readily than their predecessors.

Thomas Kuhn described this process within scientific revolutions.16 IDL suggests that the same dynamic characterizes individual development, organizations, civilizations, and perhaps evolution itself.

The critical variable is not simply how elaborate one's conceptual organization becomes; it is how readily that organization reorganizes itself.

The Development Trap

Ironically, developmental systems themselves often illustrate this principle. As developmental models become increasingly sophisticated, practitioners naturally begin identifying with developmental attainment: Orange. Green. Integral. Second Tier. Teal. Turquoise. These categories may describe genuine differences in cognitive organization, yet they also become identities, and identities naturally seek preservation.

Development itself becomes another form of psychological geocentrism: The self remains at the center, only now it occupies a more sophisticated developmental location.17 From an IDL perspective, every identity, whether traditional, modern, postmodern, or integral, faces the same adaptive challenge. Can it repeatedly suspend itself?

A Different Research Program

None of this diminishes Dempsey's accomplishment. On the contrary, Measuring Altitude represents an important empirical contribution. It strengthens the evidence that hierarchical complexity constitutes a meaningful common dimension across several developmental traditions. While that finding deserves careful attention, yet it also suggests the next stage of research.

Rather than asking only how hierarchical complexity develops, we might investigate the complementary capacities that enable continual adaptation.

For example, “How rapidly does someone revise interpretations after contradictory evidence?” “How willingly do they suspend strongly held assumptions?” “Can they temporarily adopt unfamiliar perspectives without immediately assimilating them into existing frameworks?” “How consistently do they operationally test recommendations arising from those perspectives?” “Does increasing developmental sophistication correlate with greater flexibility or, on the contrary, result in greater attachment to increasingly elaborate worldviews?”

These questions shift the focus from organization alone toward adaptive reorganization. They may ultimately prove more predictive of long-term resilience.

Beyond Development

Perhaps the most significant implication is also the simplest. Development, complexity, and hierarchical integration matters. They are real and critical, particularly for the first third of our lives. IDL does not dispute any of these propositions. What it questions is whether they occupy the broadest and most inclusive explanatory position.

Evolution rewards status, intelligence, sophistication, and complexity only so long as they continue serving adaptation rather than replacing it. Time and again it preserves systems capable of continual reorganization while eliminating systems that become increasingly committed to preserving their own internal coherence.

If that is indeed the case, development may not represent evolution's destination. It may instead represent one recurring phase within a larger adaptive cycle.

The challenge, then, is no longer simply to measure altitude; it is to understand the relationship between organization and reorganization, between precipitation and sublimation, between coherence and flexibility.

The most adaptive individual, organization, or civilization may not be the one that reaches the greatest developmental height. The one that reaches the greatest developmental height may be the one that goes extinct. The most adaptive system may be the one that most readily relinquishes whatever height it has attained whenever changing circumstances require learning again.

That possibility does not diminish the importance of developmental theory. Instead, it places it within a broader evolutionary framework. That framework may ultimately prove more fundamental than altitude itself.

Development is not wrong; it is incomplete. The same adaptive process that creates complexity eventually demands its temporary dissolution. That is the oscillation between precipitation and sublimation.

Evolution does not eliminate maladaptation by preventing development; it eliminates maladaptation by eventually requiring every successful developmental achievement to relinquish itself.

Endnotes

1. Frank Visser, "Measuring Altitude: Has Integral Theory Finally Validated 'Altitude'?" Integral World (2026); Brendan Graham Dempsey, Measuring Altitude: Empirically Grounding Developmental Levels with the Lectical Scale, Institute of Applied Metatheory.

2. Joseph Dillard, (2026). “The Development Trap: Beyond Self-Improvement and Spiritual Narcissism. IDL Press, Berlin.

3. The distinction between developmental complexity and evolutionary adaptability is the central thesis of The Development Trap. It does not deny developmental growth but questions whether increasing complexity is evolution's highest adaptive criterion.

4. Evolutionary success depends on reproductive fitness and adaptive responsiveness rather than any single psychological or cognitive trait. See Richard Dawkins, The Extended Phenotype; Ernst Mayr, What Evolution Is.

5. Kodak engineer Steven Sasson invented the first digital camera in 1975. Despite pioneering the technology, Kodak's business model remained committed to photographic film, contributing to its later bankruptcy. See Steven Sasson interviews; Lucas & Goh, "Disruptive Technology: How Kodak Missed the Digital Photography Revolution," Journal of Strategic Information Systems (2009).

6. See Yves Doz and Keeley Wilson, Ringtone: Exploring the Rise and Fall of Nokia in Mobile Phones (2017).

7. Freud continually revised psychoanalytic theory, yet many historians note increasing defensiveness toward criticisms during his later years. See Frank Sulloway, Freud, Biologist of the Mind.

8. Research using habituation and violation-of-expectation paradigms has demonstrated infant competencies earlier than Piaget proposed. See Renée Baillargeon, Elizabeth Spelke, and Alison Gopnik.

9. Einstein's objections to quantum indeterminacy ("God does not play dice") are well documented in his correspondence with Max Born. See The Born-Einstein Letters.

10. Thomas Hager, Force of Nature: The Life of Linus Pauling.

11. See Joseph Tainter, The Collapse of Complex Societies. Tainter argues that increasing complexity eventually yields diminishing returns, requiring greater maintenance while producing progressively smaller adaptive benefits.

12. See Kenneth Pomeranz, The Great Divergence.

13. See Stephen Kotkin, Armageddon Averted.

14. Dreaming has been proposed to contribute to memory consolidation, emotional regulation, predictive simulation, creativity, and threat rehearsal. IDL extends these theories by proposing that dreaming also performs an adaptive function of temporarily suspending waking identity structures, increasing the organism's capacity for subsequent behavioral reorganization. See Ernest Hartmann, Antti Revonsuo, Matthew Walker, and Sidarta Ribeiro.

15. Current estimates suggest that over 99 percent of all species that have ever existed are extinct. See Douglas Futuyma, Evolution.

16. Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.

17. Psychological geocentrism is an original IDL construct referring to the tendency for identity—regardless of its developmental sophistication—to remain the implicit center around which experience is interpreted. Unlike Piagetian egocentrism, it persists throughout adulthood by continually reorganizing itself around increasingly sophisticated self-concepts.