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

2. Complex Local to Global Network Biosocieties

Hamilton, Marcus, et al. The Complex Structure of Hunter-Gather Social Networks. Proceedings of the Royal Society B. 274/2195, 2007. Researchers from the Universities of New Mexico and Chicago, and Santa Fe Institute, report that after many years of nonlinear studies, living systems from cells to cities can be known to spring from and be distinguished by the self-organizing dynamics of interactive entities. These propensities then proceed to create a nested, iterative societal scale. As the authors cite, this same phenomena occurs everywhere from physical and chemical phases to continental civilizations.

Science itself, via its male practitioners, is much about hunting and gathering. If to add some reflection (feminine right brain?), a greater reality just being revealed to human inquiry is not an alien morbidity but rather, as tradition teaches, graced by a stratified correspondence of microcosm and macrocosm, now found to be arrayed in a temporal genesis. A universality of animate form and dynamics, a 21st century theory of everywhere, would then imply an implicate, independent source. Our collaborative, bicameral work going forward is to brace and evoke such a life, person, and earth-affirming cosmology in the brief window we have to do so.

In nature, many different types of complex system form hierarchical, self-similar or fractal-like structures that have evolved to maximize internal efficiency. In this paper, we ask whether hunter-gatherer societies show similar structural properties. We use fractal network theory to analyze the statistical structure of 1189 social groups in 339 hunter-gatherer societies from a published compilation of ethnographies. We show that population structure is indeed self-similar or fractal-like… this remarkable self-similarity holds both within and across cultures and continents. We show that the branching ratio is related to density-dependent reproduction in complex environments and hypothesize that the general pattern of hierarchical organization reflects the self-similar properties of the networks and the underlying cohesive and disruptive forces that govern the flow of material resources, genes and non-genetic information within and between social groups. Our results offer insight into the energetics of human sociality and suggest that human social networks self-organize in response to similar optimization principles found behind the formation of many complex systems in nature. (2195)

Complex systems composed of multiple interacting parts tend to self-organize or evolve structures that maximize whole-system performance by optimizing the interactions among components. (2195) Our analyses show that not only are these societies internally self-similar, but also that this self-similarity is found across societies that differ widely in ecological, historical and genetic backgrounds. (2198)

Hamilton, Marcus, et al. The Ecological and Evolutionary Energetics of Hunter-Gather Residential Mobility. Evolutionary Anthropology. 25/3, 2016. . In an issue on Evolution of Human Mobility, a southwest, Santa Fe Institute, team of MH, Jose Lobo, Eric Ripley, Hyejin Youn, and Geoffrey West proceed to reconstruct this early phase by way of these qualitative aspects. See also by this group Nonlinear Scaling of Space Use in Human Hunter-Gatherers (PNAS 104/4765, 2007) and The Complex Structure of Hunter-Gatherer Social Networks (Proceedings of the Royal Society B 274/2195, 2007). And we wonder Whom is worldwise Anthropo/Cosmo Sapiens to retrospectively do this, what does it mean to realize that our daily, communal lives are moved and constrained by a mathematical independence?

Residential mobility is a key aspect of hunter-gatherer foraging economies and therefore is an issue of central importance in hunter-gatherer studies. Hunter-gatherers vary widely in annual rates of residential mobility. Understanding the sources of this variation has long been of interest to anthropologists and archeologists. The vast majority of hunter-gatherers who are dependent on terrestrial plants and animals move camp multiple times a year because local foraging patches become depleted and food, material, and social resources are heterogeneously distributed through time and space. In some environments, particularly along coasts, where resources are abundant and predictable, hunter-gatherers often become effectively sedentary. But even in these special cases, a central question is how these societies have maintained viable foraging economies while reducing residential mobility to near zero. (Abstract)

Hammerstein, Peter and Edward Hagen. The Second Wave of Evolutionary Economics in Biology. Trends in Ecology and Evolution. 20/11, 2005. In the 1970’s and 1980’s, biologists and economists borrowed concepts from each other such as optimal foraging theory, game theory, and analogies between adaptation by natural selection and rational decision making. But the two disciplines had little interaction. Recently a new phase of joint exploration has commenced which this article documents. One result is an appreciation of “a desire for prosocial outcomes that value the welfare of others.”

Hanson, F. Allan. The New Superorganic. Current Anthropology. 45/4, 2004. Prior concepts of “methodological individualism” or the old “superorganic” as a collective group are updated in terms of an “extended agency.” This revised view which draws on artificial intelligence to characterize human assemblies as fluid, variable, information processing activities, akin to neural networks.

Haven, Emmanuel and Andrei Khrennikov. Quantum Social Science. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013. In the past few years it has become evident, and acceptable to profess, that micro “quantum” phenomena, properly understood, exercise a creative effect for every macro, emergent phase. A University of Leicester economist and a Linnaeus University physicist broach how such a synthesis might proceed. An initial review of the physics and mathematics of quantum mechanics,, vector calculus, Bohmian theories, and more, sets up a tour of probabilistic interference in psychology, econophysics, social decision making, financial markets, and neuroscience. For another example see Quantum Effects in Biology by Masoud Mohseni, et al, due September 2014.

Written by world experts in the foundations of quantum mechanics and its applications to social science, this book shows how elementary quantum mechanical principles can be applied to decision-making paradoxes in psychology and used in modelling information in finance and economics. The book starts with a thorough overview of some of the salient differences between classical, statistical and quantum mechanics. It presents arguments on why quantum mechanics can be applied outside of physics and defines quantum social science. The issue of the existence of quantum probabilistic effects in psychology, economics and finance is addressed and basic questions and answers are provided. Aimed at researchers in economics and psychology, as well as physics, basic mathematical preliminaries and elementary concepts from quantum mechanics are defined in a self-contained way. (Publisher)

Hemelrijk, Charlotte and Hanspeter Kunz. Introduction to Special Issue on Collective Effects of Human Behavior. Artificial Life. 9/4, 2003. Select papers from the “Self-Organization and Evolution of Social Behavior” conference held in October 2002 at Monte Verita, Switzerland. The ways that individual, rule-based activities result in overall patterns are considered in theory and experiment for market stabilities, language learning, mating choices and population dynamics.

Henrich, Joseph. Cultural Group Selection, Coevolutionary Processes and Large-scale Cooperation. Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization. 53/1, 2004. From an issue on Evolution and Altruism, the Emory University anthropologist clarifies how genetic and cultural transmission can theoretically explain an innate tendency to such a group “prosociality.”

Henrich, Joseph. The Secret of Our Success: How Culture Is Driving Human Evolution, Domesticating Our Species, and Making Us Smarter. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015. The University of British Columbia anthropologist and Canada Research Chair in Culture, Cognition, and Coevolution draws on his years of field and research studies to say that more than a larger brain, it is our societal preserves of common, accumulating knowledge that empower local and global civilizations. By this retrospect, an historic proclivity to form effective groupings and communities which attain semblances of a “collective brain” and viable know-how is the main source. In a summary, it is noted that if this constant trend is sighted forward, human beings seem in the midst, of a further, huge major evolutionary transition. See also Innovation in the Collective Brain by Michael Muthukrishna and Joseph Henrich in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B (Vol.371/Iss.1690, 2016).

The secret of our species’ success resides not in the power of our individual minds, but in the collective brains of our communities. Our collective brains arise from the synthesis of our cultural and social natures – from the fact that we readily learn from others (are cultural) and can, with the right norms, live in large and widely interconnected groups (are social). The striking technologies that characterize our species, from kayaks and compound bows used by hunter-gathers to the antibiotics and airplanes of the modern world, emerge not from singular geniuses but from the flow and recombination of ideas, practices, lucky errors, and chance insights among interconnected minds and across generations. (6-7)

Henrickson, L. and B. McKelvey. Foundations of “New” Social Science: Institutional Legitimacy from Philosophy, Complexity Science, Postmodernism, and Agent-Based Modeling. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. 99/7288, 2002. A paper from the “Adaptive Agents, Intelligence, and Emergent Human Organization” colloquium of the National Academy of Sciences, October 2001. If dynamical theories are applied to human societies, they allow their features of many active agents, local interactions, and far-from-equilibrium self-organization to gain theoretical roots in a nonlinear nature. This situation is seen to align with the constructivist mode of postmodern philosophy as it tries to articulate a fluid yet consistent, knowable reality.

Hodgson, Geoffrey and Thorbjorn Knudsen. Darwin’s Conjecture: The Search for General Principles of Social and Economic Evolution. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010. A University of Hertfordshire economist and University of South Denmark management specialist consider, extend and affirm, a century and a half on, Charles’ musings that the biological lineaments he found ought to similarly apply to human societies. In so doing, the authors today complement survival of the fittest with self-organizing dynamics, group selection, levels of replicators and interactors, and notably go on to expand the major transitions scale into cultural realms.

Hu, Chin-Kun. Universality and Scaling in Human and Social Systems. arXiv:1808.04675. We record still another 2018 sign of convergent scientific stage as worldwide studies clarify and close on an organic genesis universe. A senior Academia Sinica and National Dong Hwa University, Taiwan physicist casts this late revolution back to Maxwell and Newton as a singular historic project. The paper again conveys a universal recurrence in kind over a nested scale of beings and becomings to our local and global civilization. By way of equations and graphic displays, financial stock markets, literary writings in English and Chinese, and political cultures each seen to exemplify nature’s vivifying code. As the quotes say, a trace and track can be made in similar form and activity from the physical universe to our regnant, curious humanity.

The objective of statistical physics is to understand macroscopic behavior of a many-body system from the interactions of the constituents of that system. When many-body systems reach critical states, simple universal and scaling behaviors appear. In this talk, I first introduce the concepts of universality and scaling in critical physical systems, I then briefly review some examples of universal and scaling behaviors in human and social systems, e.g. universal crossover behavior of stock returns, universality and scaling in the statistical data of literary works, universal trend in the evolution of states or countries etc. (Abstract)

”Universality” means applicable in different content, ”scaling” means physical quantities from different system sizes as functions of the parameter. A good example of scaling is Russian doll, which contains a set of self-similar dolls of different length scales. One of the objectives of scientific research is to use a small number of concepts, or functions, or laws to describe a large numbers of natural or laboratory phenomena. (1) Universality is the key idea in the search for fundamental interactions of matter. Isaac Newton discovered that falling apples, the motion of the moon around the earth and the earth around the sun are governed by the same physical laws. James Clerk Maxwell proposed equations to describe electric and magnetic interactions. Besides basic interactions, the idea of universality also applies to many-body interacting systems, especially the critical systems. The quantitative and systematic researches on critical physical systems started in the later 19th century in the study of liquid-gas critical systems, and made tremendous progress in the 20th century via ideas and methods from statistical physics. (1)

Hughes-Jones, N. Intergroup Aggression: Multi-individual Organisms and the Survival Instinct. Interdisciplinary Science Reviews. 25/2, 2000. The degree to which human groups, whether tribe, clan, or nation, are driven to exclude and exterminate foreigners can only be understood if they are seen as true social organisms which must fight to defend their collective self-identity.

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