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

2. Complex Local to Global Network Biosocieties

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.

Ingold, Tim. The Trouble with Evolutionary Biology. Anthropology Today. 23/2, 2007. The University of Aberdeen social anthropologist takes issue with the 2006 article by Alex Mesoudi, et al (search within) which seeks a “unified science of cultural evolution.” The problem for TI is not a project to join biology and society, but the employ of an antiquated Darwinism to do so, unaware that evolutionary theory is under radical expansion to include developmental and dynamical system influences.

By all means let us seek a way of embracing human history and culture within a wider concept of evolution: not, however, by reducing history to a reconstructed phylogeny of cultural traits but by releasing the concept of evolution itself from the stranglehold of neo-Darwinian thinking, allowing us to understand the self-organizing and transformational dynamics of fields of relationships among both human and non-human beings. (17)

Jenks, Chris and John Smith. Qualitative Complexity: Ecology, Cognitive Processes and the Re-Emergence of Structures in Post-Humanist Social Theory. London: Routledge, 2006. An impressive work, as its table of contents below attest, bent on reconceiving the field of sociology in terms of dynamic self-organizing social systems. This task is methodically pursued with an emphasis on autopoietic self-structuring, as Niklas Luhmann has earlier done, so as to provide a more appropriate understanding of real cultural phenomena. An academic postmodernism prevails to at once liberate the endeavor from linear modernity and to express an open, malleable fluidity. But this school precludes any imagination that underlying or encompassing the rush of events could be inherent natural commonalities.

Part One: The Interdisciplinary Field. Chapter 1. Complexity Theory: A Positioning Paper. 2. From Descartes’ Conjecture to Kant’s Subject & the Computer. 3. Autopoiesis in Cognitive Biology. 4. Emergentism, Evolutionary Psychology and Culture. 5. Prigogine’s Thermodynamics, Ontology and Sociology. Part Two: Critical Developments. 6. Modernism and Determinism: Linear Expectations and Qualitative Complexity Analyses. 7. Complexity Theory as a Critique of Postmodernism. 8. Cognition and the Renewal of Systems Theory. 9. The Evolution of Intelligence, Consciousness and Language. 10. Complexity, Language and Culture: social systems in qualitative, i.e. not formal terms. Part Three: The Fields of Complex Analysis: Contemporary Complexity Theory. 11. The Ethics of Pragmatism: Politics and post-structuralism in transition after the complexity turn. 12. The Topology of Complexity. 13. Re-interpreting Global Complexity as an Ontology: Human Ecology.

Juarrero, Alicia. Dynamics in Action: Intentional Behavior as a Complex System. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1999. New understandings of human activities are possible by means of the nonlinear sciences.

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