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Old August 13th, 2006, 08:43 PM
James Brody James Brody is offline
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Join Date: Jun 2004
Location: Philadelphia area
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Default Life's a Gas but Organized in a Tinker Toy Way

ISHE Poster Presentation, Detroit, 2006.

As RA Fisher remarked in 1911, evolution tracks what we see in statistical physics and he probably would agree that we evolved on a platform supplied by emergent networks. That is, biochemicals, neurons, termites, dolphins, scientists, and vocabularies form scale-free, emergent networks. They resist jamming, include large numbers of participants, follow power laws rather than bell curves, and create small neighborhoods but next assemble them into large universes. Emergent networks and power laws apply to fitness, mate choice, group selection, psychopathology, animism, and the art on our wall.

Emergent networks can evolve in a manner described by Bose-Einstein formulas. That is, when resources diminish, so does variation in the behaviors that acquire them. R-selection leads to K-selection, one species dominates an ecosystem and one belief, a culture. John's Hardware folds into Wal-Mart, Weimar into the Third Reich, and lively republics become termite mounds. In just a few pages, Bose and Einstein capture Darwin, Fisher, Mayr, and Hamilton. Wilson's consilience may be far more channeled than even he imagined.

Copyright, 2006, James Brody, all rights reserved
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