Nick, hi, I can't really summon the energy to be part of the emergence thread, but for this particular post, you may wish to keep an eye on publications coming out from Flack, deWaal, Krakauer, and collaborators including Ay and deDeo, on primate interactions. They have some very strong analysis showing that a very large component of group power structure and the functions associated with it, such as policing, is mediated by the response of individuals to dyadic interactions between others, and very explicitly _not_ to merely the members who participate in the dyads. They have tested a variety of p-to-q responses, and find a very strongly significant signal in the 1-to-2 response (i.e. individual responds to dyad), with higher-order interactions apparently well explained by the composition of 1-to-2, and an equally strong absence of signal for any of the other elementary levels, or for any single strong explanatory excess of any higher-order p-to-q above its dependence on the 1-to-2.
What I have said here is an oversimplification of a longer and more complicated story involving several forms of interactions (fights, subordination signals, etc.) with inter-related but distinct dynamics and timescales, so I haven't done most of it justice. I don't know how much of the new 1-to-2 work is currently published or on the SFI working paper list. Some of the earlier papers explaining what quantitative definitions they attach to the notion of power, and its relation to policing and other group-coherence attributes, is out in Nature and several behavior journals, and probably mostly available from the authors' webpages. All of this work is in various stages of development, write-up, or submission, and some of it may be presented in talks as the year wears out. So one way or another it should be available either now or soon. Just a topic of interest as a bit of science. All best, and I do find much of the larger argument interesting and thoughtful, Eric ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
