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A Sourcebook for the Worldwide Discovery of a Creative Organic Universe
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VII. Our Earthuman Ascent: A Major Evolutionary Transition in Individuality

3. Planetary Physiosphere: Anatomics, Economics, Urbanomics

Frasco, Gerald, et al. Spatially Distributed Social Complex Networks.. Physical Review X. 4/011008, 2014. Clarkson University and American Physical Society scientists find nature’s own independent, universally applicable, mathematical agencies to be similarly manifest across human communal habitations of every manner, locale and size.

We propose a bare-bones stochastic model that takes into account both the geographical distribution of people within a country and their complex network of connections. The model, which is designed to give rise to a scale-free network of social connections and to visually resemble the geographical spread seen in satellite pictures of the Earth at night, gives rise to a power-law distribution for the ranking of cities by population size and reflects the notion that highly connected individuals tend to live in highly populated areas. The model produces a nontrivial relation between city population and city population density and a superlinear relationship between social connectivity and city population, both of which seem quite in line with real data. (Abstract)

Frej, William and Ben Ramalingam. Foreign Policy and Complex Adaptive Systems: Exploring New Paradigms for Analysis and Action. Santa Fe Institute Working Papers. #11-06-22, June, 2011. A Diplomat in Residence at SFI and former USAID Mission Director in Afghanistan, and a Senior Research Associate at the Overseas Development Institute, London, are well-intentioned as they delve into new ways to deal with an increasingly chaotic, incoherent world from climate change and water usage to incendiary religious and ethnic clashes.

As Murray Gell-Mann, Nobel Laureate and one of the founders of the Santa Fe Institute noted recently: ‘it is not merely that we have got things wrong, but that we have got things diametrically opposed to right’. Gell-Mann should know. For several decades now he and colleagues at the Santa Fe Institute (SFI) have been at the forefront of the attempt to understand complex adaptive systems. These, broadly defined, are systems that display unpredictable emergent behavior resulting from the interactions between their components. They are characterised by interconnectedness, feedback processes, non-linear change and tipping points, and emergent properties at the macro-level that cannot be predicted by understanding the component parts. (3)

Fukang, Fang and Michele Sanglier, eds. Complexity and Self-organization in Social and Economic Systems. Berlin: Springer, 1997. Proceedings of a conference in Beijing, with a German publisher, a French coeditor and a Russian/American keynote speaker (Ilya Prigogine); surely an international discourse. True to its theme, the old “isms” are to be set aside by a generic science of organic complexity.

Gelfand, Michele. The Relationship Between Cultural Tightness - Looseness and COVID-19 Cases and Deaths: A Global Analysis. Lancet Planetary Health. January, 2021. Ten psychologists from across the USA onto the Netherlands and Jordan apply Gelfand’s behavioral spectrum (search) from control to freedom across national responses in this pandemic. Their composite findings of success or failure support the value of a population that can readily and rapidly adapt in appropriate ways. The upshot is that a better appreciation of fluid social flexibilities (not red no vaccine vs. blue get vaccinated in the USA) would serve going forward.

The Lancet Planetary Health seeks to be the pre-eminent open-access journal for enquiry into sustainable human civilisations in the Anthropocene. As such, we publish peer reviewed research and reviews as well as comment, correspondence, and reportage encompassing sustainable development and global environmental change. We particularly favour work that contributes to our understanding of, and transition into, a safe and just space for humanity, respecting planetary boundaries and the social and economic foundations of a healthy life and planetary future.

Goh, Kwang-Il, et al. The Human Disease Network. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. 104/8685, 2007. An international collaboration of Korea University, Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, University of Notre Dame (Albert-Laszlo Barabasi), Harvard Medical School, and Johns Hopkins School of Medicine finds that genetically based maladies can be modeled by scale-free networks of nodes and links. Such disease gene nets are then labeled the “diseasome.” Another insight to a global metabolism that joins people, and biosphere, into a common soma. A relevant portal is the Network Biology website, www.networkbiology.org.

A network of disorders and disease genes linked by known disorder-gene associations offers a platform to explore in a single graph-theoretic framework all known phenotype and disease gene associations, indicating the common genetic origin of many diseases. (8685)

Gomes, M. A. F. Geometrical Aspects in the Distribution of Languages and Urban Settlements. Physica A. 295/1, 2001. Humankind learns about the universality of self-similar complex creative systems.

The geometrical pattern of urban settlements, e.g. the distribution of cities, as well as the distribution of languages, is dependent on the growth and diffusion of human populations on the Earth’s fractal landscape. (9)

Gomez, Jose and Miguel Verdu. Network Theory May Explain the Vulnerability of Medieval Human Settlements to the Black Death Pandemic. Nature Scientific Reports. 7/43467, 2017. As the Abstract cites, from the 21st century Spanish ecologists can achieve a mathematical analysis as to why this bubonic plague was so virulent in the higher social densities than sparse rural areas. A further observation is that such universal, independent, mathematical lineaments do seem in effect everywhere.

Epidemics can spread across large regions becoming pandemics by flowing along transportation and social networks. Two network attributes, transitivity (when a node is connected to two other nodes that are also directly connected between them) and centrality (the number and intensity of connections with the other nodes in the network), are widely associated with the dynamics of transmission of pathogens. Here we investigate how network centrality and transitivity influence vulnerability to diseases of human populations by examining one of the most devastating pandemic in human history, the fourteenth century plague pandemic called Black Death. We found that, after controlling for the city spatial location and the disease arrival time, cities with higher values of both centrality and transitivity were more severely affected by the plague. (Abstract)

Gomez-Lievano, Andres, et al. Explaining the Prevalence, Scaling and Variance of Urban Phenomena. Nature Human Behavior. 1/1, 2017. As a Diverse Cities, Successful Cities commentary by Michael Batty notes, with Oscar Patterson-Lomba and Ricardo Hausmann, Harvard University scholars achieve a further sophisticated analysis of large human assemblies by way of complex systems science.

The prevalence of many urban phenomena changes systematically with population size. We propose a theory that unifies models of economic complexity and cultural evolution to derive urban scaling. The theory accounts for the difference in scaling exponents and average prevalence across phenomena, as well as the difference in the variance within phenomena across cities of similar size. The central ideas are that a number of necessary complementary factors must be simultaneously present for a phenomenon to occur, and that the diversity of factors is logarithmically related to population size. The model reveals that phenomena that require more factors will be less prevalent, scale more superlinearly and show larger variance across cities of similar size. The theory applies to data on education, employment, innovation, disease and crime, and it entails the ability to predict the prevalence of a phenomenon across cities, given information about the prevalence in a single city. (Abstract)

Gonzalez de Molina, Manuel and Victor Toledo. The Social Metabolism: A Social-Ecological Theory of Historical Change. Berlin: Springer, 2014. A Pablo de Olavide University, Spain geographer and philosopher, and an Autonomous University of Mexico ecologist survey human civilizations from settlements to megacities in the context of an anthropocene planet with a nascent organic physiology and anatomy. Initial chapters cover earlier attempts at its expression. Basic metabolic processes of material and energy inputs, circulation, consumption, transformation, dissipation, and so on are described next. The work then courses from localities to regions, nations onto rudiments of a viable global phase. These are considered from agrarian, industrial, urban, political, and cultural aspects as nonlinear thermodynamic, autopoietic, adaptive complex systems. The goal is scales of societies as graced and empowered by truly sustainable vitalities.

Over this last decade, the concept of Social Metabolism has gained prestige as a theoretical instrument for the required analysis, to such an extent that there are now dozens of researchers, hundreds of articles and several books that have adopted and use this concept. However, there is a great deal of variety in terms of definitions and interpretations, as well as different methodologies around this concept, which prevents the consolidation of a unified field of new knowledge. The fundamental aim of the book is to conduct a review of the past and present usage of the concept of social metabolism, its origins and history, as well as the main currents or schools that exist around this concept. At the same time, the reviews and discussions included are used by the authors as starting points to draw conclusions and propose a theory of socio-ecological transformations. (Springer)

Gonzalrz, Leonardo, et al. Modeling an Urban Highway: A Statistical Physics Point of View. arXiv:2208.13620. An entry by Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico complexity theorists of 2022 endeavors to progress onward to show how even far removed city phases can be rooted in and unified with the deepest natural substantial realms. See also Statistical Mechanics of Thermally Controlled Multi-Zone Buildings by Lucas Valenzuela, et al at 2208.13099 for a similar project in the USA and Local Multifractality in Urban Systems: Housing Prices in Paris by J. Lengyel, et al in the Journal of Physics: Complexity. (3/4, 2022). Here are examples at the frontiers of our Earthuman whole scale quantification.

Haldane, Andrew and Robert May. Systemic Risk in Banking Ecosystems. Nature. 469/351, 2011. A Bank of England economist and an Oxford University zoologist (once Royal Society president) find deep affinities between financial networks, fraught with dynamic instabilities, and natural ecologies. Both involve “representative agents” whose many interactions spin out their relative, fluid environments. But a pervasive modularity found across nature remains missing from our economies, which it is advised should be built in to add a similar robustness.

Harrison, Neil, ed. Complexity in World Politics. Albany: State University of New Press, 2006. A notable volume which begins to rethink national, regional and global governance, or lack thereof, in terms of self-organized, emergent, complex adaptive systems. We quote from the publisher’s website.

Despite one hundred years of theorizing, scholars and practitioners alike are constantly surprised by international and global political events. The collapse of communism in Europe, the 1997 Asian financial crisis, and 9/11 have demonstrated the inadequacy of current models that depict world politics as a simple, mechanical system. Complexity in World Politics shows how conventional theories oversimplify reality and illustrates how concepts drawn from complexity science can be adapted to increase our understanding of world politics and improve policy. In language free of jargon, the book’s distinguished contributors explain and illustrate a complexity paradigm of world politics and define its central concepts. They show how these concepts can improve conventional models as well as generate new ideas, hypotheses, and empirical approaches, and conclude by outlining an agenda of theoretical development and empirical research to create and test complex systems theories of issue-areas of world politics. Contributors include Robert Axelrod, Ravi Bhavnani, Walter Clemens, David Earnest, Neil Harrison, Matthew Hoffmann, James Rosenau, Dennis Sandole, Desmond Saunders-Newton, and J. David Singer.

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