Editor's Section




Complexity

These studies came about when scientists realized they could not reconcile entropy with biology. Entropy means that things get more complex. Energy dissipates. An example I heard came from a London astrophysicist. He has two young sons. He can set their toys in careful order on the shelves before the boys come in. In little time they dissipate the order. It takes only a little information to describe the positions of the toys when they are are neatly organized. But after the boys have finished playing it takes much more information to describe the toys' positions.

Energy generated by stars dissipates over time. It does not return and eventually the star dies, sometimes as a supernova.

However, in biology systems self-organize. The mechanisms of self-organization are not well understood but we can see it happening and we can describe it. From conception a single cell becomes two cells and continues to multiply according to 'instructions' in the genetic material contained in the first cell. We put the word instructions in quotation marks because it is our limited and metaphorical way of describing the influence of the genetic material on the process.

There is entropy even with these self-organizing biological systems. Ingesting, digesting, using and excreting food, oxygen and light all make for an increase in complexity outside the system.

For our purposes, we will use the concept of self-organization as a tool to help us advance our sociological perception.

Human organizations are self-organizing systems self-similar to biological self-organizing systems. All human organization from men's 'tree-house' clubs to individual church congregations are self-organizing systems. Also racial groups.

What we think matters and our thoughts are reified to become systems. In the case of organizations the ideology of the leading mould pressers is the information that generates bifurcations in the self-organization process. Take the example of China as an almost closed system which is self-similar on a large scale to a church. For many years China has forcibly aborted all unborn children which did not conform to the norm. This has almost eliminated from the population physically and learning disabled humans. They chop off the lower end of the Bell Curve. In Chairman Mao's day the chopped off the other end - the intellectuals, killing many and forcing others to leave the universities to do manual labour. If you think of almost any organization you will see this characteristic of tending towards the mean.

Schools do it with the learning disabled and the highly gifted. (Perhaps this is one reason that there are many gifted adults who work with the learning disabled) Schools and universities exist mostly for pretty mundane reasons. Career training for the middle classes with IQs barely above average and conducting research for business, industry and military are perhaps the two main reasons.

Churches do it as well. But in churches there is the filter of the front door which acts as a kind of turbocharger to the self-organizing process.