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

3. Planetary Physiosphere: Anatomics, Economics, Urbanomics

Lugo, Igor and Martha Alatriste-Contreras. Nonlinearity and Distance of Ancient Routes in the Aztec Empire. PLoS One. July 17, 2019. National Autonomous University of Mexico system scientists cast back some 500 years to reconstruct these mobile activities with 21st century complexity theories. By this vista, an intrinsic mathematical dimension is newly evident even in the topologies of these trodden highways and byways. From our late vantage, might we ask whomever is this sapiensphere persona over the continental mantle which is just now altogether able to discern, learn, and maybe mediate?

This study explores the way in which traveling paths in ancient cultures are characterized by the relationship between nonlinear shapes and path lengths in terms of distances. In particular, we analyze the case of trade routes that connected Aztec settlements around 1521 CE in central Mexico. Based on the complex systems perspective, we used the least cost path approximation to reconstruct a large-scale map of routes reproducing physical connections among ancient places. Thus, the simple pattern of traveling in the Aztec region is fairly unlikely to be straight and short. (Abstract excerpts)

Mantegna, Rosario and Janos Kertesz. Focus on Statistical Physics Modeling in Economics and Finance. New Journal of Physics. 13/025011, 2011. University of Palermo and Budapest University of Technology and Economics theorists introduce an on-going collection on this effective integration of fysics and phinance. Typical papers are “Schumpeterian Economic Dynamics as a Quantifiable Model of Evolution” By Stefan Thurner, et al, and “The Statistical Laws of Popularity: Universal Properties of the Box-Office Dynamics of Motion Pictures” by Raj Pan and Sitabhra Sinha.

This focus issue presents a collection of papers on recent results in statistical physics modeling in economics and finance, commonly known as econophysics. We touch briefly on the history of this relatively new multi-disciplinary field, summarize the motivations behind its emergence and try to characterize its specific features. We point out some research aspects that must be improved and briefly discuss the topics the research field is moving toward. Finally, we give a short account of the papers collected in this issue.

Marshall, Stephen. Cities, Design, and Evolution. London: Routledge, 2009. A University College London urban planner proposes to “Learn from Science and Nature” as a way to reinvent, reorient and vitalize human habitations. By gathering many recent studies, he achieves a deft employ of evolutionary themes together with emergent, self-organizing, multifractal complexities. A deep mathematical viability can thus be discerned whereof cities are most like an ecosystem.

May, Robert, et al. Ecology for Bankers. Nature. 451/893, 2008. With co-authors Simon Levin and George Sugihara, a common mathematical ground is identified for natural ecosystems and financial transactions. Both disparate realms are interlinked dynamical systems, which one might surmise suggests an incarnate universality is at work everywhere.

Melgarejo, Miguel and Nelson Obregon. Information Dynamics in Urban Crime. Entropy. 20/11, 2018. Universidad Distrital Francisco José de Caldas, and Pontifical Xaverian University, Bogota, Columbia scientists provide a novel systems analysis for this endemic scourge, particularly in their home country, and nations in both hemispheres. Our further interest is to recognize that by such studies, as long intimated, there exists a deeper, independent, mathematical fundament to our daily lives, which our chaotic personal and communal days and nights hold to and express. See also Netto, et al below, and Matjaz Perc elsewhere for similar views.

Information production in both space and time has been highlighted as a way to record the footprint of complexity in natural and socio-technical systems. However, its relation to urban crime has barely been studied. This work uses multifractal analysis to characterize the spatial information scaling in urban crime reports and nonlinear processing tools to study temporal behavior. Our results suggest that information scaling in urban crime exhibits dynamics that evolve in low-dimensional chaotic attractors, which can be observed in several spatio-temporal scales. (Abstract excerpt)

Netto, Vincius, et al. Cities, from Information to Interaction. Entropy. 20/11, 2018. By way of the latest complexity sciences, seven urban and ecosystem theorists from Brazil, Germany, and Switzerland scope out via a tandem synthesis of relative knowledge and social pattern and process. See also Melgarejo and Obregon above for another version whence a full contribution of scientific reason might so palliate and advise.

From physics to the social sciences, information is now seen as a fundamental component of reality. However, a form of information seems underestimated, that which is encoded in the very environment we live in. This paper addresses three related problems if we are to understand the role of environmental information: (1) the physical problem: how can we preserve information in the built environment? (2) The semantic problem: how do we make this information meaningful? and (3) the pragmatic problem: how do we use it in our daily lives? We introduce a three-layered model of information in cities, namely environmental information in physical space, in semantic space, and the information enacted by interacting agents. Our results suggest that ordered spatial structures and diverse land use patterns encode information, and that aspects of physical and semantic information coordinate interaction systems. (Abstract excerpt)

Pelikan, Peter. Evolutionary Developmental Economics: How to Generalize Darwinism Fruitfully to Help Comprehend Economic Change. Journal of Evolutionary Economics. 21/2, 2011. The Prague University of Economics theorist seeks to broaden attempts to rightly situate human commerce within life’s long course that it evolved from. This somewhat contentious effort could thus benefit from an integration of original self-organizing systems via many complex, interacting agents. To gloss its scope, “Figure 1” shows a dynamical “evo-devo” procession from the “Big Bang” on to programmable molecules, single cells, organisms, animal groupings, human societies and lately global economies. Along with competitive forces, the values of cooperation, altruism and group selection need be factored in.

Darwinism is shown possible to generalize fruitfully to help comprehend economic change by drawing on evolutionary developmental biology (“evo–devo”)—its recent version, less concerned with replication of genes than with genomic instructing of development of organisms. The result is a conceptual model with multilevel applications, generalizing development as instructed self-organizing with inputs from environments, and evolution as experimental search for instructions making the development successful. Its economic interpretation suggests to unite several existing fields into evolutionary developmental economics, where economic change can be studied comprehensively as development instructed by actual institutional rules, intertwined with the evolution of these rules. (Abstract)

Philippe, P. The Scale-invariant Spatial Clustering of Leukemia in San Francisco. Journal of Theoretical Biology. 199/371, 1999. Fractal complexity and parallel distribution likewise characterize disease epidemics. As humankind becomes able to model and comprehend such dynamics, it can help alleviate outbreaks.

Piepers, Ingo. Self-Organized Characteristics of the International System. www.arxiv.org/abs/0707.0348. The Amsterdam-based scholar is able to discern a common system dynamics at work even amongst the vagarities of national policies and conflicts, often held to be chaos defined. Check her other recent papers via arXiv such as The Structure, the Dynamics, and the Survivability of Social Systems. Might humankind through such luminations heal itself in time?

Various self-organized characteristics of the international system can be identified with the help of a complexity science perspective. The perspective discussed in this article is based on various complexity science concepts and theories, and concepts related to ecology and ecosystems. It can be argued that the Great Power war dynamics of the international system in Europe during the period 1480-1945, showed self-organized critical (SOC) characteristics, resulting in a punctuated equilibrium dynamic. It seems that the SOC-characteristics of the international system and the punctuated equilibrium dynamic were - in combination with chaotic war dynamics - functional in a process of social expansion in Europe. According to a model presented in this article, population growth was a component of the driving force of the international system during this time frame. The findings of this exploratory research project contradict with generally held opinions in International Relations theory. (Abstract)

Plerou, Vasiliki and Eugene Stanley. Tests of Scaling and Universality of the Distributions of Trade Size and Share Volume. Physical Review E. 76/046109, 2007. In our midst is being discovered a grand union across widely disparate domains from atomic structure and dynamics to their similar presence in human societal commerce. The endeavor is dubbed ‘econophysics,’ which could serve to reveal a ‘human universe’ distinguished by the same phenomena everywhere.

Understanding economic phenomena using concepts and methods of physics has attracted the research interest of physicists and practitioners alike. In particular, empirical evidence of scaling and long-range correlations in financial data is interesting because of the analogies it suggests with collective phenomena in complex physical systems. Moreover, it is possible that the statistical physics methods used to understand collective phenomena may provide new insights into understanding large economic fluctuations. (046109)

Portugali, Juval. Complexity, Cognition, and the City. Berlin: Springer, 2011. Ten years later, the Tel Aviv University systems geographer and social planner follows his Self-Organization and the City with an updated, much expanded, treatise for actual living, growing, learning, thinking, urban entity. The big idea is that just as every other domain and stage of nature is so graced, the same iterative phenomena recur for human habitations over nested scales from dwellings and blocks to a metropolis.

Complexity, Cognition and the City aims at a deeper understanding of urbanism, while invoking, on an equal footing, the contributions both the hard and soft sciences have made, and are still making, when grappling with the many issues and facets of regional planning and dynamics. In this work, the author goes beyond merely seeing the city as a self-organized, emerging pattern of some collective interaction between many stylized urban "agents" – he makes the crucial step of attributing cognition to his agents and thus raises, for the first time, the question on how to deal with a complex system composed of many interacting complex agents in clearly defined settings. (Publisher)

This chapter (14) …discusses several city planning paradoxes and suggests seeing their origin in the complexity of cities and in the role played by cognitive maps and information exchange in complex, self-organizing cities. (269) According to the quantitative message, (of this book) cities and systems of cities are similar to many other material and organic complex systems and as such “obey” similar quantitative regularities such as fractal structure, nonlinearity or power law distribution, and can thus be described by general simulation models such as agent based, cellular automata or graph theoretic network models. (383-384)

Portugali, Juval. Self-Organization and the City. New York: Springer, 1999. A study of how the synergetics approach to complex systems can facilitate a theoretical explanation of urban social dynamics.

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