Consider a system that is constantly changing

I have been working lately on materials addressing the puzzle of development - why do some people and some countries seem to do a better job over time of accumulating the wealth that allows them to make the decisions they wish to make? This passage from Melvin Konner in The Tangled Wing: Biological Constraints of the Human Spirit, page 408, addresses some aspects of the complexity. Here he is speaking of the effort to understand and forecast the influences on a person, their personality, and their decision making process but he could as easily be speaking of individuals from a life development or countries from an economic development perspective.

Consider a system that is constantly changing, according to laws both known and unknown, from causes both internal and external, in a manner both cyclical and progressive, by processes both reversible and irreversible. Allow it to pass through an inconceivable number of states, and to come to rest for varying times in any of them. Give it many potential reactions to a given input, including changing, ignoring, and terminating that input. Enable it to reproduce itself through functions that have entered the design exclusively because they serve that purpose, though often indirectly and at the cost of other purposes. Endow it further with a trajectory of fixed maximum length (say, ninety years), which carries the system, predictably, through a series of potential or actual states from nonexistence to final cessation of function, with a possible termination of function at any earlier time. Finally, build in a sensor that can detect where the system is in the trajectory, assess the chance of continued functioning, and react, as far as possible, to change that chance for the better, except - and this is a crucial but - where that conflicts with the goal of reproduction. We now have something approaching, at least in its outlines, the complexity of the human behavorial system. We must add, of course, the potential for malfunction that is common to all systems, whether because of design flaws or unpredicted stresses.