2012 Is A LEAP Year. - Democratic Underground

Dover

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Sat Feb-26-11 04:17 AM
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2012 Is A LEAP Year.

2012 Is A LEAP Year

Literally and figuratively.
And this has led to my recollection of a chapter in Alvin Toffler's book, Third Wave:

Copyright Kaylin Keith

Dr. Ilya Prigogine and his teams of co-workers at the Free University of Brussels and the University of Texas at Austin have struck directly at Second Wave (industrial era) assumptions by showing how chemical and other structures leap to higher stages of differentiation and complexity through a combination of chance and necessity. It is for this work that Prigogine was awarded the Nobel Prize.
Born in Moscow, brought to Belgium as a child, and fascinated since youth by the problems of time, Priogogine was puzzled by a seeming contradiction. On the one hand, there was the physicist's belief in entropy - that the universe is running down and that all organized patterns must eventually decay. On the other, there was the biologist's recognition that life itself is organization and that we are continually giving rise to higher and higher, more and more complex organization. Entropy pointed in one direction, evolution in another.

This led Prigogine to ask how higher forms of organization come into being, and to years of research in chemistry and physics inpursuit of the answer.

Today Prigogine points out that in any complex system, from the molecules in a liquid to the neurons in a brain or the traffic in a city, the parts of the system are always undergoing small-scale change: they are in constant flux. The interior of any system is quivering with fluctuation.

Sometimes, when negative feedback comes into play, these fluctuations are damped out or suppressed and the equilibrium of the system maintained. But, where amplifying or positive feedback is at work, some of these fluctuations may be tremendously magnified - to the point at which the equilibrium of the entire system is threatened. Fluctuations arising in the outside environment may hit at this moment and further amplify the mounting vibration - until the equilibrium of the whole is destroyed and the existing structure is smashed.**

Whether the result of runaway internal fluctuations or of external forces, or both, this breakup of the old equilibrium often results not in chaos or breakdown, but in the creation of a wholly new structure at a higher level. This new structure may be more differentiated, internally interactive, and complex than the old one, and needs more energy and matter (and perhaps information and other resources) to sustain itself. Speaking mainly about physical and chemical reactions, but occasionally calling attention to social analogues, Priogogine calls these new, more complex systems "dissipative structures".

He suggests that evolution itself may be seen as a process leading toward increasingly complex and diversified biolgoical and social organisms, through the emergence of new, higher-order dissipative structures.... "Order out of chaos". -- Alvin Toffler, The Third Wave p. 324-325

** It is illuminating to think of the economy in these terms. Supply and demand are maintained in equilibrium by various feedback processes. Unemployment, if intensified by positive feedback and not offset by negative feedback elsewhere in the system, can threaten the stability of the whole. Outside fluctuations - such as oil, price hikes - may converge to make the internal swings and fluctuations wilder, until the equilibrium of the whole system is shattered.