Dear FISers,
I agree with Loet's views (for once! :-) ). The energy flow supporting
the biosphere and society as a whole have not much explanatory power
regarding the bonding complexity of contemporary societies. Of course,
it is an interesting exercise, particularly concerning the limits of
sustainability, but we have had so much thermodynamic inflation that it
is very difficult adding anything relevant. Irrespective of its
sophistication, the energetic realm can hardly substitute for the
informational realm.
About the intriguing interrelationship between kinship and nonkinsip
modalities of human bonding, a very interesting view was drafted by
Francis Fukuyama (1995), centered on "trust". He was distinguishing
between "familial" centered societies and "high trust" societies. In
European terms (exaggerating), it is the dichotomy between the
Mediterranean societal culture and the Anglosaxon culture. It is not a
black and white narrative, as each polarity has advantages and
disadvantages (think on wine & Mediterranean food!), and actually today
each country and each culture has some terrible mix of everything, but
it is interesting just to see how the two kinds of bonding may interact
within a complex society. I also penned a few ideas about the matter in
my recent "How the Living is in the world" (DOI information:
10.1016/j.pbiomolbio.2015.07.002.) I am copying below a paragraph (maybe
a little bit long--excuses). /
This coarse reflection on the dynamics of successive “informational
entities” helps us make sense of fundamentals of social evolution. The
transition to a new social order, more or less ‘revolutionary’, tends to
be produced by new information channels and communication practices that
support the emergence of new ways to organize the structures of social
self-production. Thus, the development of social complexity appears as
irreversibly linked to a chain of historical inventions for
communication and knowledge generation: numbers, writing, alphabet,
codices, universities, printing press, books, steam engines, means of
communication, computers, Internet, etc. (Stonier, 1990; Hobart and
Schiffman, 1998). This succession of fundamental inventions has
dramatically altered the “infostructure” of modern societies, and
subsequently the informational formula for being in the world has been
applied with multiple variants along that complexity runaway: with
plenty of room generated by the new information tools, not at the bottom
but at the supra-individual top. We should not forget that the momentous
Scientific Revolution was preceded by what has been called the silent
“corporate revolution” (Huff, 2011), which opened the way for collective
organizations legally autonomous in European cities during XIII and XIV
centuries: universities, parliaments, counsels, municipalities,
professional colleges, guilds, mercantile associations, charities,
schools, etc. It was this Medieval awakening in the cities of Western
Europe what made possible the later hyperinflation of autonomous
collective organizations, –“information based”– growing exponentially
and propelling all the further complexity of modern societies./
All the best--Pedro
Loet Leydesdorff wrote:
Dear colleagues,
I don’t consider it as fruitful to recycle the argument that society
were to be modeled as a meta-biology. The biological explanation can
perhaps explain behavior of individuals and institutions; but social
coordination more generally involves also the dynamics of
expectations. These are much more abstract although conditioned by the
historical layer. For example, one cannot expect to explain the /trias
politica/ or the rule of law biologically. These cultural constructs
regulate our behavior from above, whereas the biological supports
existence and living from below. The historical follows the axis of
time, whereas the codification (albeit historical in the
instantiations) also restructures and potentially intervenes and
reorganizes social relations from the perspective of hindsight.
In analogy to codifications such as the juridical ones, scientific
knowledge provides the code for technological intervention. This type
of knowledge is human-specific; perhaps, we are also able to build
machines that mimick it. This technological evolution is going on for
centuries. If I look up from my screen, I look into the gardens which
have a typical Dutch polder vegetation. The polder was made in the
17^th century and replaced the natural ecology of marsh land and
lakes. The order of the explanation was thus inverted: the constructed
structures (instead of the constructing agencies) increasingly carry
the system. The constructs don’t have to be material; see my example
of the rule of law. It is not a religion, but a dynamics of
expectations. Replacing it with a biology misses the point.
Best,
Loet
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Loet Leydesdorff
Professor, University of Amsterdam
Amsterdam School of Communication Research (ASCoR)
l...@leydesdorff.net <mailto:l...@leydesdorff.net>;
http://www.leydesdorff.net/
Honorary Professor, SPRU, <http://www.sussex.ac.uk/spru/>University of
Sussex;
Guest Professor Zhejiang Univ. <http://www.zju.edu.cn/english/>,
Hangzhou; Visiting Professor, ISTIC,
<http://www.istic.ac.cn/Eng/brief_en.html>Beijing;
Visiting Professor, Birkbeck <http://www.bbk.ac.uk/>, University of
London;
http://scholar.google.com/citations?user=ych9gNYAAAAJ&hl=en
<http://scholar.google.com/citations?user=ych9gNYAAAAJ&hl=en>
*From:* Fis [mailto:fis-boun...@listas.unizar.es] *On Behalf Of
*Nikhil Joshi
*Sent:* Friday, December 11, 2015 9:47 AM
*To:* FIS Group
*Cc:* Nikhil Joshi
*Subject:* Re: [Fis] Sustainability through multilevel research: The
Lifel, Deep Society Build-A-Thon - 1
Dear Guy and FIS colleagues,
Thank you for your comments and the copy of your article. Your views
on the roots of biological systems and their evolution in dissipate
systems are very interesting. Your paper reminds me of a paper by
Virgo and Froese on how simple dissipative structures can demonstrate
many of the characteristics associated with living systems, and the
work of Jeremy England at MIT.
Given your research focus and expertise in looking at living systems
as dissipative systems, I would appreciate your views and assistance
in understanding the energetics involved in the common multilevel
organisational pattern (CMOP) (presented in the paper II of the
kick-off mail).
At first glance, it appears that different levels in self-organization
in living systems a core dynamic in living systems is comprised of a
cycle between a class of more-stable species (coupled-composite
species) and a class of less-stable species (decoupled-composite
species), see paper II in the kick-off mail.
hence:
Level 1: Molecular self-organization, involves a cycle
between oxidised molecules (more stable) and reduced molecules (less
stable) in molecular self-organization in photosynthesis and cellular
metabolism [Morowitz and smith].
Level 2: Cellular self-orgnaization, involves a cycle between
autotrophic species (more stable) and heterotrophic species (less
stable) in ecosystems [Stability of species types as defined
by- Yodzis and Innes Yodzis, P.; Innes, S. Body Size and
Consumer-Resource Dynamics. /Am. Nat./ 1992, /139/, 1151].
Level 3: Social self-self-organization, involves a cycle between
kinship-based social groups (more stable) and non-kinship-based social
groups (less stable) [Stability of species types as suggested in Paper
II, based on an extension of work of Robin Dunbar and others].
At level 1 (molecular self-organiztion)- solar energy is stored in the
high-energy reduced molecules. Do you see a possibility that
living systems could store energy in cycles involving less stable
species at the two other levels (level 2, and 3) as well? (When I
speak of stored energy, I am referring to stored-energy as introduced
by Mclare, and discussed by Ulanowicz and Ho [Sustainable Systems as
Organisms?, BioSystems 82 (2005) 39–51].
These are early thoughts and your views are much appreciated.
Many Thanks,
Warm regards,
Nikhil Joshi
On 01-Dec-2015, at 10:27 pm, Guy A Hoelzer <hoel...@unr.edu
<mailto:hoel...@unr.edu>> wrote:
Hi All,
I have been following this thread with interest as much as time
permits. I think multilevel approaches to understanding
information flow is an important one. I also think the structure
of natural systems exhibits both hierarchical and heterarchical
features. The hierarchies we formally recognize can be extremely
useful, but they are rarely exclusive of alternatives. Here is a
link to a paper Mark Tessera and I published a couple of years ago
arguing for one particular hierarchy of multilevel emergence in
physical systems connecting lower level physical systems to
biological systems:
Tessara, M., and G. A. Hoelzer. 2013. On the thermodynamics of
multilevel evolution. Biosystems 113: 140–143.
Regards,
Guy
Guy Hoelzer, Associate Professor
Department of Biology
University of Nevada Reno
Phone: 775-784-4860
Fax: 775-784-1302
hoel...@unr.edu <mailto:hoel...@unr.edu>
--
-------------------------------------------------
Pedro C. Marijuán
Grupo de Bioinformación / Bioinformation Group
Instituto Aragonés de Ciencias de la Salud
Centro de Investigación Biomédica de Aragón (CIBA)
Avda. San Juan Bosco, 13, planta X
50009 Zaragoza, Spain
Tfno. +34 976 71 3526 (& 6818)
pcmarijuan.i...@aragon.es
http://sites.google.com/site/pedrocmarijuan/
-------------------------------------------------
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