VII. Our Earthuman Ascent: A Major Evolutionary Transition in Individuality

3. Planetary Physiosphere: Anatomics, Economics, Urbanomics

Wohl, Sharon. Complex Adaptive Systems & Urban Morphogenesis. Delft: A+BE: Architecture and the Built Environment. Vol. 10, 2018. An Iowa State University College of Design professor of urban design is presently earning a doctorate from the Delft University of Technology. This 240 page posting is her thesis which is online in full at: journals.open.tudelft.nl/index.php/abe/article/view/2397. Google the author and/or TU Delft Architecture about their international program, they are the publisher noted above. By its breadth and depth, it explains how these dynamic topologies as they serve to form, vitalize, and become exemplified by human communities from towns to a metropolis. Circa 2018, as reports here and elsewhere confirm (Geoffrey West), another sense is gained of a universally iterated, self-similar source at creative effect everywhere. Her message is that a novel awareness and implementation of nature’s intrinsic design preferences can inform and guide to much benefit.

This thesis looks at how cities operate as Complex Adaptive Systems (CAS). It focuses on how certain characteristics of urban form can support an urban environment's capacity to self-organize, enabling emergent features to appear that, while unplanned, remain highly functional. The research is predicated on the notion that CAS processes operate across diverse domains: that they are ‘generalized' or ‘universal'. The goal of the dissertation is then to determine how such generalized principles might ‘play out' within the urban fabric. The main thrust of the work is to unpack how elements of the urban fabric might be considered as elements of a complex system and then identify how one might design these elements in a more deliberate manner, such that they hold a greater embedded capacity to respond to changing urban forces. The research is further predicated on the notion that, while such responses are both imbricated with, and stewarded by human actors, the specificities of the material characteristics themselves matter. (Abstract)

Yakovenko, Victor and J. Barkley Rosser. Colloquium: Statistical Mechanics of Money, Wealth, and Income. Reviews of Modern Physics. Accepted Papers, May, 2009. Respectively, a University of Maryland physicist and a James Madison University economist review efforts from Auguste Comte in the 19th century to 21st century frontiers to explain and understand human societies, especially commercial activities, by way of physical principles. An extensive bibliography is appended. Companion volumes noted herein, not yet seen by me, are Econophysics and Sociophysics edited by Bikas Chakrabarti, et al (Wiley-VCH, 2006) and Classical Econophysics, Paul Cockshott, et al, eds (Routledge, 2009). But the endeavor remains almost totally male, and seems couched in awkward, unwieldy terms.

The paper reviews statistical models for money, wealth, and income distributions developed in the econophysics literature since the late 1990s. By analogy with the Boltzmann-Gibbs distribution of energy in physics, it is shown that the probability distribution of money is exponential for certain classes of models with interacting economic agents. The majority of the population belongs to the lower class, characterized by the exponential ("thermal") distribution, whereas a small fraction of the population in the upper class is characterized by the power-law ("superthermal") distribution. The lower part is very stable, stationary in time, whereas the upper part is highly dynamical and out of equilibrium. "Money, it's a gas." Pink Floyd, Dark Side of the Moon. (Abstract)

It should be emphasized that econophysics does not literally apply the laws of physics such as Newton’s laws or quantum mechanics, to humans. It rather uses mathematical methods developed in statistical physics to study statistical properties of complex economic systems consisting of a large number of humans.

Yeung, Chi Ho, et al. From the Physics of Interacting Polymers to Optimizing Routes on the London Underground. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. 110/13717, 2013. Reviewed more in Universal Principles, Aston University, Birmingham, UK, and Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, physicists discern nature’s universal preference for metabolic movement from biochemicals to biocities, and then carry it forth to better design our human vitality.

Zambelli, Stefano and Donald A. R. George, eds. Nonlinearity, Complexity and Randomness in Economics. London: Wiley Blackwell, 2012. A collection originally published in Journal of Economic Surveys. (25/3, 2011), from a project initiated by the University of Trento computational economist Vela Velupillai, to recognize and foster “algorithmic foundations” for this field. Typical chapters are “Towards an Algorithmic Revolution” by Velupillai, “An Algrothmic Information-Theoretic Approach to Financial Markets,” Hector Zenil and Jean-Paul Delahaye, and “Emergent Complexity in Agent-Based Computational Economics” by Shu-Heng Chen and Shu Wang. The dynamical paradigm shift continues apace onto systems economics, nature’s nonlinear genotype are in similar effect everywhere.

Zeng, Guanwen, et al. Multiple Metastable Network States in Urban Traffic. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. 117/17528, 2020. After two decades of 21st century complexity studies, system theorists from China, the USA and Israel including Eugene Stanley and Shlomo Havlin are able to quantify a common nonlinear dynamics in formative effect even in the seeming chaos of city vehicular congestion. In regard, such exemplary evidence over a widest natural and social span now well implies the deep presence of an independent, universal mathematic source code.

While abrupt regime shifts between metastable states occur in natural systems from areas including ecology, biology, and climate, evidence for this vehicle transportation has rarely been observed. This absence might be due to a lack of methods to identify and analyze multiple states at scales of the entire traffic network. Here, using percolation approaches, we observe such a metastable regime in traffic systems. Based on high-res GPS datasets of urban traffic in Beijing and Shanghai, we find the existence of tipping points in three separate regimes: a global functional phase, a metastable hysteresis-like regime, and a global collapsed state. Our findings provide a better understanding of traffic resilience patterns and, potentially, other complex systems. (Abstract excerpt)

Zhang, Jiang and Tongkui Yu. Allometric Scaling of Countries. Physica A. 389/4887, 2010. “Allometric” means “the study of the change in proportion of various parts of an organism as a consequence of growth.” Beijing Normal University systems scientists continue the self-similarity now found from cells to cities onto entire national societies. Some sixty parameters such as area size, income, labor force, television stations, birth rate, and so on, neatly scale as a further extension of life’s sequential emergence. As a result, this property is seen to express a “universal quantitative law” as a nonlinear dynamical system.

Scientists always look for universal patterns of complex systems. As huge complex systems consisting of geographic regions, natural resources, people, and economic entities, countries also share some common features despite their different latitudes, climates, and cultures. (4887)

Zhang, Yan, et al. Analyses of Urban Ecosystem Based on Information Entropy. Ecological Modelling. 197/1, 2006. A paper from the State Key Joint Laboratory of Environmental Simulation and Pollution Control, Beijing Normal University, which conceives a city as a metabolic organism characterized by high energy and information (knowledge) flows. Its goal is then to minimize entropy production. A sophisticated indicator system is described to quantify the degree to which this is achieved in an urban setting.

Zhuge, Hai. Exploring an Epidemic in an E-Science Environment. Communications of the ACM. 48/9, 2005. Professor Zhuge is director of the Key Lab of Intelligent Information Processing at the Institute of Computing Technology at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing and also founder of the China Knowledge Grid Research Group. He kindly emailed this article. The 2003 Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) outbreak in Asia made clear a great need for identifying disease sources, vectors and preventions and for informing the general public. By applying dynamic small world network concepts aided by features such as content retrieval, filtering, and data mining of a semantically interconnected web, epidemic analysis and management can be much facilitated and quickly made known. Important, innovative work.

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