The Road to High Complexity

Cocks, Doug

doi:10.1007/978-1-4614-6265-1_4

The Road to High Complexity

Doug Cocks²

Chapter
First Online: 01 January 2013

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Abstract

This chapter continues our selective cultural history of H. sapiens, the animal species which, more than any other, has influenced the quantity of energy flowing through the global ecosystem and the paths which those flows take (war, population growth, monument building etc.). The best single indicator of the complexity of any energy-degrading system is the rate at which it processes free energy—as more and more energy flows through a system, degrading and converting to other forms as it goes, additional pathways made up of flow and storage structures are created and, usually, existing pathways are restructured. In the case of the human ecosystem, such thermodynamic changes come to be seen as cultural change—cultural evolution.

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Notes

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Nils Bohr’s Principle of Complementarity says two descriptions of nature are complementary when they are both true but cannot both be seen in the same experiment. In quantum mechanics, the wave picture and the particle picture of an electron or photon are complementary. Similarly, one can have a picture of cultural evolution couched in thermodynamic terms or in behavioural terms. Both may be true but descriptions from one perspective leave no room for the other perspective. But, as seems useful, one can switch between perspectives; also each description constrains what the other can say.
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Cocks, D. (2013). The Road to High Complexity. In: Global Overshoot. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-6265-1_4

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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-6265-1_4
Published: 05 February 2013
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