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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

Hart, Jane and Kirk Martinez. Environmental Sensor Networks. Earth-Science Reviews. 78/3-4, 2006. Largely unawares, the biosphere is proceeding to instrument itself through the human phenomenon so that vital metabolic functions such as temperature, moisture content, wind velocity, snowmass, and so on can be monitored, quantified and sustainablely maintained.

Helbing, Dirk, et al. Modelling the Evolution of Human Trail Systems. Nature. 388/47, 2003. The paths people take in walking are found to trace a complex, mathematical topology.

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)

Helbing, Dirk, et al. Saving Human Lives: What Complexity Science and Information Systems can Contribute. Journal of Statistical Physics. Online June, 2014. Eleven researchers from Switzerland, Germany, UK, and Slovenia, including Olivia Woolley-Meza, Jens Krause and Matjaz Perc, generally with ETH Zurich and FuturICT, suggest how theoretical perceptions of intense social phenomena as dynamic self-organizations can provide a heretofore absent palliative basis. By such insights, a novel way to manage, and prevent, catastrophic events, disease epidemics, and so on, may be availed. To reflect, a worldwide noosphere might be seen to feedback the knowledge it has gained to begin to heal body, brain, and behavior of the fraught peoples from whom it arose. And a further aspect is implied. Here is a quantification unto discovery that our daily lives in every sense spring from and hold to an underlying, implicate, mathematical domain. If we can altogether figure out what this is, get it under respectful control, a better world could result.

We discuss models and data of crowd disasters, crime, terrorism, war and disease spreading to show that conventional recipes, such as deterrence strategies, are often not effective and sufficient to contain them. Many common approaches do not provide a good picture of the actual system behavior, because they neglect feedback loops, instabilities and cascade effects. The complex and often counter-intuitive behavior of social systems and their macro-level collective dynamics can be better understood by means of complexity science. We highlight that a suitable system design and management can help to stop undesirable cascade effects and to enable favorable kinds of self-organization in the system. In such a way, complexity science can help to save human lives. (Abstract)

Heppenstall, Alison, et al, eds. Agent-Based Models of Geographical Systems.. Berlin: Springer, 2011. With British systems geographer coeditors Andrew Crooks, Linda See, and Michael Batty, a 750 page introduction to the kinds and employ of complex cellular systems to describe aspects from land cover change and geographic information to demographics, epidemics, crime, pedestrians, housing, and urban growth such as Gold Coast City, Australia.

Heylighen, Francis. The Global Superorganism. Social Evolution and History. 6/1, 2007. An extensive article by the Belgian systems scientist which makes good use of James G. Miller's Living Systems Theory, along with network and cybernetic inputs, to outline an emerging planetary person with its own nascent planetary metabolism and cerebral faculty.

Hillier, Bill. The Genetic Code for Cities. Portugali, Juval, et al, eds. Complexity Theories of Cities Have Come of Age. Berlin: Springer, 2012. The University of London architect is a leading theorist of the mathematics and geometries of “urban morphologies” in a real sense as organically emergent entities. As the quotes allude, a further import from this paper and work, and the volume, ought to be availed. Human habitations of all shapes and sizes can be seen as an evolutionary exemplar of nature’s universally repetitive, self-organizing, complex adaptive network systems. In this regard, Hillier’s perception that such dynamical, nested invariances can accordingly take on a genetic guise is one of the first admissions of its kind. And this is a huge and vital step. By such double duty of manifest embodiments and establishments and their apparent, common implicate source, the creative presence of a cosmos to civilization genotype and phenotype can become increasingly evident.

Here I show three things. First I show how statistical and other numerical characterisations of cities can be turned into structural characterisations. Second, I show that with this capability we can find a universal characterisation of certain deep or universal structures common to the spatial form of all cities. Third, I outline the ‘genetic’ process that gives rise to these universal structures in two phases: a spatial process through which simple spatial laws govern the emergence of characteristically urban patterns of space from aggregations of buildings; and a functional process through which equally simple spatio-functional laws govern the way in which aggregates of buildings becomes living cities. This dual process is suggested to be akin to a ‘genetic’ code for cities. (Abstract, 129)

On the basis of these structures we propose a new universal definition of a city as a network of linked centres at all scales set into a background network of residential space. We then show that this universal pattern comes about in tow interlinked but conceptually separable phases: a spatial process through which simple spatial laws govern the emergence of characteristically urban patterns of space from the aggregations of buildings; and a functional process through which equally simple spatio-functional laws govern the way in which aggregates of buildings become living cities. It is this dual process that is suggested can lead us in the direction of a ‘genetic’ code for cities. (130)

The title of Hillier’s paper—“The genetic code for cities . . .”— indicates the explicit task of the paper: to explore the possibility of, and identify, a universal “genetic code” for cities and thus to develop “a theory of a universal city underlying cities in general, [. . .] using space syntax as a formal basis for the analysis.” Hillier’s space syntax, as developed by him in the last decades, refers specifically to the functional and spatial structures of cities and the relation between them. (Editors, 64) He further shows that, in line with space syntax, the above “universal pattern comes about in two interlinked but conceptually separable phases: a spatial process through which simple spatial laws govern the emergence of characteristically urban patterns of space from the aggregations of buildings; and a functional process through which equally simple spatio-functional laws govern the way in which aggregates of buildings become living cities.” This dual process, he suggests, “can lead us in the direction of a ‘genetic’ code for cities.” (Editors, 65)

Huang, J. P. Experimental Econophysics: Complexity, Self-Organization, and Emergent Properties. Physics Reports. Online December, 2014. A Fudan University physicist contributes across a wide span to this union of “traditional statistical physics” with human commercial society. Once again a universally repetitive “complex adaptive system” of agent entities in dynamic informed interaction is found to be present everywhere.

Experimental econophysics is concerned with statistical physics of humans in the laboratory, and it is based on controlled human experiments developed by physicists to study some problems related to economics or finance. It relies on controlled human experiments in the laboratory together with agent-based modelling (for computer simulations and/or analytical theory), with an attempt to reveal the general cause–effect relationship between specific conditions and emergent properties of real economic/financial markets (a kind of complex adaptive systems). Here I review the latest progress in the field, namely, stylized facts, herd behavior, contrarian behavior, spontaneous cooperation, partial information, and risk management. Also, I highlight the connections between such progress and other topics of traditional statistical physics. The main theme of the review is to show diverse emergent properties of the laboratory markets, originating from self-organization due to the nonlinear interactions among heterogeneous humans or agents (complexity). (Abstract)

Hynes, William, et al. Systemic Resilience in Economics. Nature Physics. 18/4, 2022. In search of better natural guidance for our flawed financial commerce, five senior scholars in the USA, France and the UK cast their studies all the way to substantial condensed matter to propose that the latest understandings of non-equilibrium phenomena could be a vital resource. Akin to Evolutionary Dynamics, Forces, and Robustness: A Nonequilibrium Statistical Mechanics Perspective by Riccardo Rao and Stanislas Leibler (PNAS 119/13, 2022) a recurrent continuity and cohesion becomes lately apparent. As the quotes cite, once again an organic milieu of an independent, genotype-like source code is ever in independent effect as it gives self-similar rise to ascendant phenotype scales and selves.


We describe a framework for understanding the factors that underpin economic resilience, and identify basic ways for implementing it. This task mainly involves examining resilience by design, which promotes endogenous reorganization in the commercial marketplace. We link these ideas to comparable notions from physics, such as the rich and non-trivial phenomenology that arises in circumstances when a system is dynamic and out of equilibrium. We contend that a more nuanced understanding of the underlying structure of our economic system could lead to enlightened policies decisions that promote and result in better outcomes in the long run. (Abstract)

Awarding the 2021 Nobel Prize for physics to two climatologists, Klaus Hasselmann and Syukuro Manabe, and a physicist, Giorgio Parisi, sent an important message to all those concerned about the overall complex system in which we live. We should see the socioeconomic system as one part of the whole planetary system in which the very different components interact with each other and generate aggregate phenomena that could not be predicted from even the most detailed knowledge of the millions of individual parts in isolation. (381)

How then can such an interdependent set of networks be made more resilient to endogenous upheavals resulting from the system’s tendency to self-organize into a critical state, as well as disruptions from those parts of the system over which we have only limited or no control? RBD and RBI must be undertaken simultaneously, using resilience analysis to drive implementation design and estimate the efficiency/resilience trade-offs. Resilience analysis can be used to stress test network and system intricacies, complexities and interdependencies to evaluate necessary corrective actions, regulations and policy to prevent degradation of critical function post-disruption. (383)

Ingegnoli, Vittorio. Landscape Bionomics: Biological-Integrated Landscape Ecology. Berlin: Springer, 2015. The University of Milan environmentalist draws on a lifetime of study and practice to achieve a volume at the frontiers of an ecological science based on dynamic, self-organizing complex adaptive systems. An initial Landscape Bionomics and the Theory of Living Systems chapter provides this natural guidance for an Earth community reconceived to have an organism-like functional physiology and structural anatomy. Further sections consider bioregion vitality, pathology, flora and fauna, appropriate human abide, health maintenance, and so on. A Landscape Environmental Ethic is then encouraged which would involve a spiritual “revolution in thought” to achieve a viable Gaia.

Isalgue, Antonio, et al. Scaling Laws and the Modern City. Physica A. 382/643, 2007. From the Barcelona School of Architecture, another breakthrough advance to situate and quantify human societies as a further emergent exemplar of life’s universal self-organizing form and dynamics.

Complex systems such as living organisms are known to follow approximate relationships as scaling laws between the variables that describe them. Some of these kinds of relationships are tested in relation to modern developed urban spaces, in which it is possible to find a reasonable continuity with the types of scales seen in living organisms… (643) Then, we should learn from phenomenological relations in existing complex systems that have evolved over hundreds of millennia. As living organisms represent one of these systems, which have been largely studied, and are a paradigm of complexity, studying general laws or general relationships in biology might give us an insight into our problem. In fact, it seems reasonable to conjecture that the coarse-grained behavior of living systems might obey quantifiable universal laws that capture the systems’ essential features. (643-644)

Jamtveit, Bjorn, et al. Scaling Properties of European Research Units. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. 106/13160, 2009. Norwegian scientists confirm results from U. S. studies that laboratory teams consistently express a nested, modular, repetitive structure, to an extent as to imply an independent principle at work.

On the basis of research and development expenditure and research output data from 719 United States Universities, Plerou et al. (2) concluded that the distribution of growth rates displays a ‘‘universal’’ form, independently of the size of the university. Although these authors did not address how research units actually grow and how the organizational infrastructure evolves, the observed similarities across scales hint at an underlying scale-independent ‘‘growth principle.’’ (13160)

Jencks, Charles. The Architecture of the Jumping Universe. London: Academy Editions, 1997. The British architect advocates a nature-based design approach which aligns with new understandings of a dynamic, self-organized fractal universe. An introduction to complexity science serves as a guide for innovative, friendly buildings and landscapes. By this reading and activity, the creative human role is most of all to learn what the universe is and might become.

The whole universe is trying to discover its own being, and we are at the forefront of this cosmic lust for knowledge. (51) What is the cosmogenic world view? It is the idea that the universe is a single, unfolding, self-organizing event, something more like an animal than machine, something radically interconnected and creative, an entity that jumps suddenly to higher level of organization and delights us as it does so. (125)

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