ROYAL ROAD to complexity

Dear Bob & Morris, fisers--

Both the discussion between Bob and Morris about the emergence of social
complexity, and the other more general one about the underlying
consciousness problem look quite enticing.

About the first one, initially I disagree with Morris on the impact of
anisogamy in human societies. The evolutionary trend observed in "mating
preferences" is towards neoteny --both for males and females appearance.
There are quite exciting new ideas about that (see a recent Nature paper).
But I second the rest of Morris�s arguments. I believe it is a parsimonious
biological complement to Bob's own tenets on VEMS --that I second too.

However I would have referred, in the discussion, to a basic biological
term: FITNESS. Perhaps an interesting view on VEMS is that they represent
the "translation" or the reverberation of biological fitness into the
multiple interconnected layers of social life --even in "simpler" primate
and hunter gatherer bands. Then, VEMS would map ONLY the essentials of
human fitness in the variety of socio-cultural settings: family, relatives,
work acquaintances and alliances, tribal or state life (patriotism)...
every big change in social life, as Bob points out, will impact on and will
interact with existing VEMS.

The above goes for FITNESS maintenance. But complexification of societies
would stem out from a different path: knowledge accumulation. The history
of numbers and of writing shows how at the very beginning the priests were
the custodians of permanent records (always because of the limitation of
oral cultures--see Ifrah, 1985), and both VEMS and numbers (and writing)
shared a sacred character, with dedicated sacerdotal custodians. For
instance, the well known Summerian priests, also the incas had the
"quipucamayocs" or knot-keepers, priests in charge of the rope-knots where
the basic "accounting" of the village or the city was kept.

And then the basic thesis is that the accumulation of knowledge, involving
intercultural contacts, multiple trade-offs and the emergence of new trades
and professions, clearly beyond the original VEMS province, became the
ROYAL ROAD of social complexity. Further inventions allowed crossing
several complexity thresholds, economic takeoffs, etc.

Of course, VEMS always keep reverberating around any of these social
inventions (see the present ethical dilemmas around the genome
project)---but clearly the engine of social complexification is Knowledge
Accumulation (a curious variety of info!!!)...

Apart from Bob and Morris and the other discussant responses, perhaps it is
time for Andreas Goppold (historical costs of knowledge acumulation) and
Vicente Salas (information and economy) to enter into the fray too... This
was the original plan of the socioinfo conference--and then the closing
point will be "info revolution & global brain" by Tom Stonier and
Wolfang...

greetings from Zaragoza

Pedro

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Pedro C. Mariju�n. TEL 34 976 761927, FAX --761861 and -- 762111
Dept. Ingen. Electronica y Comunicaciones, CPS Universidad de Zaragoza,
Maria de Luna 3, Zaragoza 50015, SPAIN
email: marijuan@posta.unizar.es
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Received on Tue Oct 20 13:14:55 1998