Bull. 11. Feb. 17, 1998. Civilizational Theory From One Historian’s View and One Physicist’s – Homeokinetic – View. Take your Pick.
This review essay was an invited presentation at the 25th Annual Conference of the International Society for the Comparative Study of Civilizations at Cal State Pomona, June 1996.
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Review of Quigley, Chapter 6 and All That
A. S. Iberall, retired scholar, UCLAThe Problem for this Review
Within this society, quite a few members regard Quigley’s The Evolution of Civilization, 1961 as a significant contribution to civilizational systems’ theory, comparable with Spengler’s, Toynbee’s, Sorokin’s, and Kroeber’s. As an iconoclast and some sort of strange duck (a physical scientist-engineer – incidentally of a birth time comparable to Quigley’s – who wandered in to the society’s first organizing session at a 1972 AAAS national meeting), I suppose I was asked by Melko to review one part, Chapter 6, The Matrix of Early Civilizations, with my idiosyncracies in mind. I got to know Quigley, at that 1972 time, as a professor of history at Georgetown University.
Out of respect for what I have gained from this society, in particular from that platinum – golden – brassy trio of Hord, Hewes1, and the one who is regarded as my working colleague, Wilkinson, all led by the insatiable enthusiastic conductorial drive of Melko, I wanted to capture some heavenly music for the occasion. I have thrown away two sketches for solemn masses, and instead settled for an unending fugue with variations. It will be one of my Trumpeter Swan songs. I start out by enunciating Quigley’s themes.
1My friend Gordon Hewes, master anthropologist-master historian has just recently died. This piece automatically has to stand as one additional small tribute to his memory
In his preface, Quigley states that he is not trying to write a history, e.g., of the facts of history. Rather, he wishes to outline the analytic tools that will assist in understanding history. In Chapter 1, he states that when he studied science, particularly with important interests in the physical sciences [Boas makes a similar claim in anthropology], he found that its laws were idealizations, very approximate, rather than rigid, exact and invariable. Those methods of the natural sciences were simply not applicable to the social sciences [implying immediately that social sciences were not natural systems]. The ‘laws’ of natural science were only very approximately true, whereas social scientists are reluctant to accept any rule unless it had very few exceptions. So, he claims, after years of work in both areas of study, the social sciences are different from the natural sciences; both areas can use scientific methods, but the laws must be considered to result in idealized theories, based on observations, and derivations have to be explained by other unconsidered outside factors. The laws he will mention apply very well and are worthy of being used as – what he uses as a metaphor – scientific laws for the formation of crystals and the crystalline solid state.
At the books’s end (Conclusion), he asserts that the techniques he has developed for dealing with human social history, particularly civilizations, can be used to deal with the present or future, for example how some currently functioning country can be depicted. Such (social science) problems of a real world cannot be solved by the use of the natural sciences alone. The direction of attack and coordination of scientific activities on world problems requires guidance and supervision by persons with a wider perspective than provided by natural science specialization. Such perspective can best be found in the study of the past. “With such perspective the techniquesŠ can be used to guide natural scientists and other workers in dealing with the problems of the present or the future.”
Thus in some such confrontation of views, I see this confrontation as the narrowest problem that I have to deal with in reviewing Chapt. 6 (Incidentally, in Chapt. 5 not so incidentally, Quigley asserts that a civilization institutionalizes three key organizational processes which, if they exist, represent an [or the] instrument of expansion; if it has such an instrument of expansion, it is a civilization. He then also specifies the dynamics of that institutionalization and how it results in a rise and fall of civilizations).
My counterposition in a dialectic
My problem is the following: By 1960, I had 20 years of science-engineering experience in one of America’s great technical institutions the National Bureau of Standards. By that time 1960-1965, I began to develop the full content of a general systems’ science, one that meant to be fully applicable to what we called later on the study of ³nature, life humankind, mind, and society.² That was on my philosophic agenda from a very tender adolescent age in 1935, and ‘merely’ awaited 20-25 years of growth and education to begin to understand its scope. My career, from college days and beyond, was as an applied physicist in instrumentation, and what became systems science and engineering for both Government and industry in the form of doing and directing R and D. By 1960, I had already laid all sorts of foundations for systems problem solving in fluid mechanics, hydrodynamics, and irreversible thermodynamics. My professor in graduate studies, G. Gamow, had already done the Hot Big Bang model for the evolutionary beginning phase of this universe. That most global problem, stellar processes relevant to precision time keeping processes, solar system processes, geophysical processes, had all been fairly captured in my understanding and problem practice by precise physical law. To toss that understanding casually by the wayside is/was simply beyond my possible beliefs. There did remain a domain of what I referred to as stormy weather systems that required further investigation. Those were problems associated with the mixing meteorology and other Earth fields, turbulence, chaos, the problem of biophysical systems, and social systems. I and my colleagues tended to think of those problems as serious ones for us to study in or by a physics that we called homeokinetic physics, a physics of complex systems. We regarded that as the challenging outcome of the problems we were confronted by during World War II, and that seemed to have emerged from the end of World War I and II. So, for example within the 40’s, I began to work on turbulence, and on the biophysics of the human at high altitudes. Besides developing respiratory equipment and outlining the dynamics of respiration, investigating human body thermoregulation, showing that mammals obeyed the second law of thermodynamics with precision (required to deal, in the long run, with all the body exchanges with the environment, I also developed the foundation for space suits (in 1949). A summary of about 100 papers and studies that we did in applied biophysics is to be found in a 1972 report covering material back to 1940. Thus, if you average what we wrote in a first draft in about 1955, as a Philosophy for Mid-Twentieth Century Man (written as a counterthrust to a Marxian outline of science in the 30’s by Levy), and the result of a first contract research study Introduction to the Contents of a General Systems Science, U. S. Army, 1968 (to be referred to as Intro. ’68), you will grasp it was writing covering the epoch in which Quigley was writing. I did not sell my first social systems contract until 1972. It followed upon the publication of my edited general systems study in 1968, as Toward a General Science of Viable Systems, McGraw-Hill, 1972 (to be referred to as Toward a ’72). That book had about 30 reviewers for its acceptance by its publisher from almost all disciplines. It stretched the knowledge base of every such reader. Our 1955 effort (Philosophy ’55) was too premature. By mid-60’s we were more ready. Our book captured the technical world market in systems science. It, hopefully, ‘explains’ why we felt ready to tackle a general model of social systems by the 1970’s , and why I had gone cruising in AAAS for a general group attending to social processes rather than to take 20 years to ‘do’ history, social psychology, ethology, anthropology, sociology, economics, one at a time. Thus ISCSC. There I met Quigley and his material for the first time. My first impression, which I now find reinforced, was that Quigley’s view was antiphysical science. In reexamining the book now, I carry that along still, as a very strong impression.
My problem: from the beginning of Toward A General Science of Man-Systems, a Venture Into Social Physics, my 1973 contract study (Toward a ’73) was meant to be a physically hard model of social systems good enough for running societies. Why for the Army, and in 1973? Because, among other subtleties, they are the largest employer of man-power, they are institutionalized social groups at many levels, and their interests reached up to geopolitical levels. Besides which, they were in process of extending their old psychological science-oriented organization (the Behavioral Science group that did or began I.Q. testing during World War I) toward a more anthropologically oriented organization (Army Research Institute) and I was one of their first contractors. So the only difference between Quigley and me was that I was a practicing physical scientist, I was so competently trained and experienced, and I proposed in a fair test – to try to achieve what Quigley said physical science was not competent to do. So the challenge was out there openly. I will ask the question: did I find what Quigley did have any influence on me? No. Did I find any significant ideas in Quigley when I got around to read him and to begin to interact with him in ISCSC in perhaps in 1975 or so? Again, no. What I found in his book then, even more so now, is/was banality, a pedestrian quality, the sum total of almost all issues that I have been persistently challenging.
So I will put out before you the subject themes, the persons, the views that I found necessary, in fact essential, to get to the point that Quigley says we must reach, first to the point that influenced my effort from 1972 to 1976 (see DOT, TSC report DOT-TSC-1157) when and where I reached a first round of analytic tools; and then to 1993 when my colleagues and I published Iberall, White, Wilkinson, Foundations for Social and Biological Evolution. (Foundations ’93)
Let me tell you the persons who the literature and ISCSC tossed and welled out to engulf us in my effort. First, to lower the arrogance of my claims, I found L.White’s energy – oriented cultural model and began to correspond with him, I was thrilled by Toynbee’s modeling, particularly in Vol. 12, and by the “second’ ISCSC session devoted to his honor, and I began to correspond with him. I also found C. Arensberg’s Vol. 1, No. 1 opening issue of Current Trends in Anthropology (1972) and began to correspond with him. The most immediate telling act – to me – that he did was to put Chapple and Coon, 1941, Introduction to Anthropology in my hands (I had found Harris’ Rise of… myself when it came out). That humbled me delightfully. It was and still is a marvelous introduction to the human problem. What Arensberg and I (lberall, Soodak, Arensberg – a fourth author, H. Lasswell, died before we could finish the piece) published in 1980 in an invited chapter ³on Social Mechanics replete with formulas, etc., for graduate students in mechanics”), and what we have followed now with Arensberg’s student Alexander Moore, is still an intermediate elaboration, in a physicalist’s sense, of Chapple. His book appeared a mere six years after my youthful – child-like reaction to the problem in l935. I am honored, not in the least because A. Moore (Arensberg’s student) states that I have done a great deal in the footsteps and shadows of Chapple’s thinking.
In any case those beginnings, plus the beautiful sounds I have always found Hord, Hewes, and Wilkinson making in a factual sense, kept me secure in my developments.
Back to the issue of what I had to bring – as a physical scientist – to get started were the following: 1. A clear understanding of physical network theory, which was developed by Kelvin in mid-19th Century to make the mid-Atlantic Ocean cable possible. This, followed by thermodynamics, and Navier-Stokes flow processes, via Maxwell and Boltzmann and Gibbs and Rayleigh in late 19th-early 20th Century, made irreversible thermodynamic and acoustic and mechanical and electrical networks all describable on a par.
2. The fact that the lowest levels of atomic-like constituents were not clarified by observation and by missing force components, and in fact were needed to understand the physical basis for chemistry, which was not clarified, until the turn of this century with the discovery of radioactivity, did create a half century of confusion. That same physicist, Kelvin, who could clarify network and other problems, could not account for stellar energetics and its operational time scale until radioactivity was discovered, certainly due to the fact that the observational basis did not exist. Physics has always claimed that it is an experimental based science in which experiment and an extremely dense fabric of theory march hand in hand. Old theories are not casually thrown aside. They have almost all tended to be integrated with the new. The fact that the natural sciences of geology-geophysics, biology-biophysics, like astronomy-astrophysics long before, had no adequate basis for long term evolutionary processes was certainly a missing piece of the business of physics, but within a few years of the discovery of radioactivity, the physical sciences could run through those problems, e.g., create a quantum theory, come up with a theory for the operation of stars – in fact all of the processes including developing a viable nuclear energy industry (see Eiseley’s Darwin’s Century for most of the beginning of that story. I think it more than interesting that Eiseley was at the ISCSC’s organizing meeting, and it seems I am the only one who remembers that he was angling to try to become ISCSC’s first president, an ambition which got swept away as soon as the power players appeared. To me, it would have been an interesting society under Eiseley). So with a clue to atomic-nuclear processes, within a few years the Bohr model of the atom began and the size, nature, and physical forces involved in the atom became known and accounted for. Physics simply jumped in and produced theories of even greater precision than ever before. For example, in my NBS section, it became possible to increase the time keeping accuracy from the star and electromagnetic precision of thousandths of a second per day fluctuations of uncertainty and related small fractions of a second per year to very much greater accuracy of very small fractions of a second per year and century which had become needed and used in quite a few Government and industrial processes.
3. At the same time I worked on such problems, I was also working on the thermodynamics of the living organism, showing in the 50’s that such systems obeyed the second law of thermodynamics with precision, as well as the conservation of energetics of the first law (shown in the 1900’s). This implied that both the biophysics and biochemistry had related closure. My colleague H. Soodak’s mentor, F. London (who just died) was responsible with Heitler for the nature of the covalent chemical bond, the second basic bonding that makes biochemistry and its quantum mechanical explanation possible. I have been lightly attending aerospace medicine meetings since the 1940’s, and have been making fundamental contributions to physiological dynamics on the basis of our biophysics all the time since. It is largely, through so-called molecular biology, and its integration, from which much of the foundation of the applied so-called basic medical sciences has been developed (see our joint Engineering Regulation and Control conference meeting, with the international community of physiologists in 1973. In that volume you will find that our homeokinetic modeling was being taken seriously as a basis for general organismic modeling), If you look further at our products of the 1960’s, you would find that we had, also, to join our modeling with an information theoretic. That subject had been developed out of Bell Telephone Laboratory’s interests in the communicational aspects of electrical networks, e.g. telephony, from the 1920’s on. (See our Army study 1966, on information science. That little handbook study shows how large power network theory (for electrical networks) was joined to small power communication networks to make the modem communcational industry and systems possible.
Thus McCulloch and I (he was one of the three fathers of cybernetics – the other two were Wiener and J. von Neumann) laid a homeokinetic model for communication and behavioral dynamics in the mammal, including the human in 1967. In 1991, 1 showed that such a foundation was the basis for accounting for sensory and motor action in their cognitive machinery in mammals including the human. Von Neumann, in the 40’s and 50’s was responsible for the modem digital computer’s operational theory.
In writing these paragraphs, the triviality of Quigley’s notion of the physical and engineering physics sciences becomes increasingly evident. So there is no point in detailing the misconceptions put forth in Chapt. 1. It is hard not to fault the lack of understanding of “social” and other softer sciences held by the physical sciences since they do hold first rank of account in cosmology, galactic science, stellar science, planetary physics, even in the stormy weather systems of meteorology and hydrology and plasma processes, in geochemistry, and even in biochemistry. all through its genetic coding, and internal chemical organismic operation from the cell through the mammal. So that brings us up to social science where we started on the study subject in the 60’s-70’s. What did we have to learn past the subjects so far named?
Its real starting content was attempted in a Philosophy for Mid-20th Century Man. (Philosophy ’55). But it actually has to tie back to such things as my last exposure, via Lewis Feuer, to his course (which I sat in on) on Dialectic Materialism at CCNY in about 1938-39, in which every splintered student politically oriented view was represented, as well as many other courses I sat in on as a very early hippy). All this occurred before I started seriously on my scientific-technical working career. But its emergent themes can be found in Toward a General Science.… 1968 draft, 1972 publication). Besides having done a piece on information sciences for the Army, I also did a piece on technical forecasting in 1966, and on the problem of forecasting scientific-technological change, e.g., understanding of the atom as of 1900 (P. Duhem, W. Ostwald, others); the quantum theory and nonlinear problems in physics from the 1910 to 1950 era. In 1967, I did a study for the Army on advanced technological planning as a companion piece to the Army Research Plan. These problems literally tied physical science, physical technology, human command-control, as exercises in the field of automatic control and in my speciality problem of directing R & D within Government and in industry. I had no luxury of academic fuzziness. My ideas, as engineering physics ideas, had to work. We in the automatic control field, during and after World War II, had to develop automatic regulation and control and adaptive control schemes. Out of a number of friends and mentors in the regulation and control field, literally developing the hard nosed engineering schemes of automatic control (examples: C.E. Mason, Philbrick, Owen Fairchild – see Temperature, its Measurement and Control, 1941, for one of the most marvelous interdisciplinary conferences ever, Ziebolz, Buckingham, A. Sperry) assembling in the 20’s to 40’s, produced ‘us’ the next new generation from about 1940 to 1955, with the Gibson Island, later Gordon Research Conferences, as a forum and meeting place. ‘We’ were such names as N.Nichols, Kalman, Chestnut, myself, Beckmann, analogue control moving later on to the digital control, Zadeh, business machinery computer revolution. Warren McCulloch forced me from the biophysics- thermodynamics of the biological organism across the gap to neuro-physiological physical command control of the organism from a start up 1962 biophysics to our first 1967 modeling of behavioral thermodynamics of a chemical-electrical nature. (Condon pushed me into biophysics with his two marvellous edited journal issues of Rev. Modern Physics in 1952).If you want to know what this is now, see – purely as an illustration – APS News, June 1996, page 3, “Information Theory Provides Unified Framework for Neuroscience² (the P is Physical, not Physiological).
Before we examine the entire content of Quigley’s ideas and compare it with Toward a ’72 and look for the traces of startup of the problem of the social physics which you will find in that book (which you will find it in Part 3, Detour – the Line of ‘Man-Systems, particularly starting in Chapt. 12), we can dispose finally of both their introductory material with the remark that Quigley and I introduce methodological issues up front, he in Chapt. 1, 12 pages, I in an introduction replete with a summary and questions for the reader in 11 pages. It behooves the reader to compare those two introductions. One rejects physical science, the other offers a summary of its methodological philosophical foundations. I admit to adding four pages of metaphysical foundations at the end. Enough on that comparison of introductory material. We go to work on Chapt. 1, onward in Quigley.
Quigley Chapt.1, beginnings and beyond
Quigley’s use of the metaphor crystal and crystalline to introduce a depiction of civilizations is both silly and misleading (he refers to it in Chapt.1, pp. 1-2, Chapt. 3, pp. 35-36, Chapt. 4, p. 38, Chapt. 6, p. 94. Mercifully, it is not in the index). In contrast, I would point out in a physically defining metaphor, the most obvious – in a modem vernacular – is that the person, as a least unit, is the physical chemical atom (atomistic-like; atomism – in our language, used like organism to denote object and concept) in the interactive (possessing common actions – actions: the things that are done; in physics the energy-time measure products of a matter-energy unit’s behavior) collective of a human society. Rummaging about in the social science disciplines, the most obvious metaphor – in a physical defining sense – is that the human society forms the collective physical-chemical state (state of matter-energy) called a human culture, as the physical-chemical solvent for human societal interactions.
In preview, I have to dive deeply to find whether I finally do or do not agree with the title of Chapt. 6, the matrix of early civilizations. Does it have the same meaning for both of us? I say yes. The dictionary definition identifies matrix with or as what emerges from the womb, thereby acting as an ancillary source system which holds the system together. In my introduction, I define viable systems as an emergence of their operational unity as from a womb, laboratory, or factory environment in which the system has its startup.
Quigley reaches a point, in Chapt. 5 (historical change in civilizations) where he states that every civilization begins with a mixture of two cultures. That is a remarkable sentence. It took me and Wilkinson about twenty years from 1972 to when we finally use such an idea to define a civilization (actually, in deference to Wilkinson, we refer to startup as a pre-civilizational culture-civilization). This, I arrived at, after twenty years of listening to argument in ISCSC about what a civilization is. Differences between us, as expressed in our metaphor definition, is/was that a culture is a real physical-chemical solvent (a true state of matter, a fluid-like system involving real physical binding sources) for a societal collective and its complex internal interactions, so that the continued coexistence of such two or more cultures involved fitting their individual driving value potentials into a common acceptable chemical thermodynamic ‘cultural’ fit. There is nothing idealized crystalline about such collectives. Real solids exhibit process changes like dislocations, described in Zwikker. One can find there ’emergent’ properties beginning to appear in the liquid phase or liquid state – when one crosses the liquid-solid transition – in x-ray diffraction characteristics which ‘foreshadow’ their institutional forms in a plastic-elastic solid (this puts it within a physical metaphor).
So we really have to see what Quigley puts forth as his “structure” or form “framework” for his historical social science past the irrelevant crystal metaphor. Namely, we need minimally to extract those notions from Chapts. 1-5, not what he thinks about the physical sciences, or about “scientific method.”
1. Methodology for a theory of historical change, (p. 2 on). (a) gather all relevant evidence; (b) make a simple, but all embracive hypothetical theory; (c) test the theory. Any such construct will remain tentative [I learned the historian’s philosophic point of view to this question from Hooke,Philosophy and History, who indicated historians were split about the need for theory; Gershoy on one side in Hooke, and Nevins, The Gateway to History, on the other side. We obviously opted for a need for hypothesis formation and listed mentally Spengler, Toynbee, Kroeber, Sorokin, Quigley, Metko, and Naroll as supporters. See our book, Bridges in Science, From Physics to social Science, 1974, p. 16.
What we did, to start off the social sciences by a social physics in our 1968 draft was to try to sweep through the contents of a social history in terms of its subordinate disciplinary components – of human activities in physiology, ethology, psychobiology, anthropology, sociology, economics, and look for their overlap with our physical sciences. Thus we discovered the ethologists like Thorpe and others in animal, particularly mammalian, and then primate behavior. We could even examine a little the paleobiologists like Simpson and Dobzhansky, and others who could stretch to mammalian behavior. Our most remarkable find was H. Chandler Elliott, who as neuroanatomist, in The Shape of Intelligence, could stretch all the way; also not far behind was J.Z.Young’s textbook on physiology. From ethology, we could jump to psychology-psychiatry in Freud, Sullivan, Piaget, Gesell, and others in so-called psychological and physiological behavior. Jumping quickly, to name other of the social science fields, we found history, starting from its theoretics, in Hooke, historical-anthropological overview in Huntington, Darlington, Linton, Childe, Mellaart, and the UNESCO series starting from Hawkes as the prehistorians; the anthropologists such as Mead, Benedict, White, Harris, Arensberg, Chapple, Polanyi; the sociologists like Marx, Weber, Durkheim, Murdock, impenetrable Parsons, Gouldner; the economistis like Marks, Marshall, Schumpeter, Keynes. I believe this gives a sense of the kind of material we found.
In our standard fashion, it was not very difficult to find 20-30 such books that gave us a frame for these subdisciplines in a very brief time of weeks, and a reading list of a few hundred such books which we acquired within a few years by about 1972. Thus in writing our 1968 draft form of a General System Science, we offered about three hundred references, with one-third being from the social sciences.
Thus Hooke as a major philosophical source, past our 1955 Philosophy for Mid-20th Century Man, provided us with insight into the historian’s mind. It took some time until about mid-60’s before we found Huntington and McNeill, and de Coulanges (we skip a youth with van Loon, and H.G.Wells), and National Geographic Society’s Everyday Life in Ancient Times, later Barraclough and Braudel. But it was our first meeting, with Toynbee’s special paper and my beginning to correspond with Toynbee that led to my contributing to a Proceedings issue of Mainsprings “Towards Thermodynamic Theory of History”. After a year of nominal acceptance, the paper was rejected. I sent it off to General Systems where a much friendlier editor (Axelrod) and a highy respected physicist-philosopher (Margenau) reviewed it and published it belatedly in 1974. The very key question was raised on my meaning of determinism and causality. It provided me an opportunity – forced me, in fact – to offer the concept of circular causality in which A causes B and B causes A in a circular path, but not along the same connections between A and B. This was essential to establish a fundamental theory of causality, e.g., a macro-micro link in systems, why an atomistic theory and a collective theory are required to form operational systems. In similar fashion, in an argumentative debate between physicists at a Winter Annual Meeting on Brain Research, I and my colleague, H. Soodak, ‘forced’ the physicist-philosopher, M. Bunge, to define very carefully what the content of reductionism really amounted to. As a sharper synthesis than Ayala, Dobzhansky’s comments and studies in the Philosophy of Biology, 1975, Bunge offers “Levels of Reduction”,Am. J. Physiol., 1977. In that context, it is possible to compare Quigley’s “scientific method” and ours. Neither Quigley nor we can be held accountable for very deep philosophic discussions. Note that we always tossed it off onto ‘experts’. We do not broker technical philosophy (or mathematics) although we may refer to expert results and summarize their views. So we skip any of Quigley’s discussion until pages 11-12.(We skip his nonsense, like Popper-Eccles, of parapsychological influences being neglected in a natural science).
Quigley continued into Chapter 2, and further dialectic
2. Quigley’s notion of social lawfulness. In a science for human society, its phenomena – implying its laws – are affected by the human thought processes (pp. 11-12). In our opinion, the logical reduction involved in that thought of Quigley’s is that neither predictive nor retrodictive theoretical accounts can be developed in social science. At best it might have its own variable “mental” laws which ‘subjectively’ influence outcomes (both in the future as well as attempting to be reflected back into the past). While most physical scientists might take some such view, and thus regard a physics of society to be an impossibility (which would also follow, by us, if we took such a view), what we set out precisely was to investigate the absolute opposite, namely that human social phenomena could be deterministically cast, albeit as or by a statistical physics, statistical mechanics, statistical thermodynamics. And that is why we have always had a complete distaste for Quigley. Our keynote is the following: we went in the 50’s and 60’s from engineering physics regulation and control to adaptive control (see Kelley, Manual and Automatic Control, and the meetings we were running in the 50’s and 60’s). We challenged the control engineers by the statement that they had no theory for the factory, even if they did for the quickening responses of control devices. We thus turned to the biological organism as an object system to learn about a theory of the autonomous factory. That is what our power and communicational thermodynamics was about up to about the 1960’s. That is why in our work with McCulloch (by 1967, we concluded that the logic of the biological organism wasn’t an electrical network logic, but a chemical ‘network”- a chain of processes -within the organism. If you want to see the kind of person we would empathize with most in the social sciences it is/was/would be Elliott Chapple (see his 1980 paper). My anthropology friends should have introduced us anytime after 1960. I note – teasing – that he references Pavlides.
My 1962 review paper on biological regulation and control also starts from our 1950’s thermodynamic work and from such data sources as Pavlides. My reports, pursued with physiologists, pharmacologists, neuro types in those two fields, biochemists, all from a physical-chemical engineering thermodynamics (such as developed in time by the Katchalsky school) all laid forth the view that a complex of largely chemical thermodynamic engines with interactive behavior regulated the internal environment of the organism. As per Cannon’s homeostasis (and C. Bemard’s hundred years earlier statement in the 1850’s), independent of fluctuations – the ‘viscissitudes’ in the external environment – in which the close up part of that environment was also a part of that system, were regulated out in the interior. They had not supplied an internal mechanism. We showed them to be thermodynamic engine cycles in the interior. We called the theoretic homeokinetics or homeokinesis, the dynamic regulation by a large number of loosely coupled thermodynamic engines. By 1967, McCulloch and I were ready to extend the schema to the brain and its mind, and when he died I carried the process forward with Maturana’s and Eccles’ neurophysiology student, R. Llinas. But, recall, we had to recognize that these systems were stormy weather complex systems and we had to define and develop a rather full science for such homeokinetic complex systems. That is what we have done and are continuing to do in an ever increasingly precision fashion. We have extended it into every scientific field – cosmology, galactic processes, stellar processes, planetary – Earth – processes, biological, and – since the late 1960’s – into social physical processes. It is on that basis that we challenge the Quigley model. Continuing on his model.
Quigley, Chapter 2 continued, additional dialectic
3. Persona-Personality (Chapt. 2). The development of the human system is long time delayed – its persona-personality depends largely on nurture (p. 14). The patterns and objects in the social environment form its culture. Nothing relevant to human behavioral activity can be learned from comparative biological study (ethology – p.15). The potential range of human development is large, inhomogeneous, and variable, so that its breakdown into classes and phenomena is arbitrary and imaginary (p. 16).
We, in contrast, recognizing that there is only a chemical potential (physically defined) carried aboard in its genetic and coded developmental-evolutionary material, consider that what emerges is operationally a ‘product’, not a ‘sum’ of that chemical culture and the physical-chemical environment of exposure. They represent different hierarchical levels of chemistry. Thus we unify C. Bemard’s homeostatic regulation, Pasteur cell theory of specific chemistry, the epigenetic view of biology and psychology, chemical dynamics and its higher ordered hierarchical nature, within an irreversible thermodynamic foundation to create a general homeokinetic model, first of the chemical chain, then of the cellular and organismic chain, and then of its higher ordered social collective, all within a precisely coordinated chemical-morphological field. What can constitute its apparent ‘personality’ may or may not be so relevant to social operation. Thus, if Quigley decided that his historical analysis [a principle upon which selection of facts is based] lights upon six levels: military, political, economic, social, intellectual, religious among what could be otherwise 5, 7, 60, or even 600 levels so be it (p. 17).
I want to know and see if I can accept what was the principle of Quigley’s choice. The only answer I get is Quigely’s fancies [which perhaps are supplied by his teachers or other experts. I am willing to believe that it may have something to do with conventional political history, conventional and political economics, etc., but also with Spengler, Toynbee, and others as historians].
He then puts forth a theme that the ‘matrix’ (in a technical mathematical sense) of otherwise unconstrained variables making up the ‘personality’ potential function emerges from mysterious drives. This is meant in a teleological, purposeful sense (p. 17), e.g., Bergson’s elan vital.
The cultural ‘matrix’ (in Quigley’s sense) is not only occupied by the collective total of its personality potential functions, but also includes all materials and energies, as well as all of the bonding issues [An individual, he says, is a nexus, its totality of relations form a status]. Culture is thus subtle and complex with its complex mixture of short melodic forms. It is the chief subject of study in all the social sciences. It is adaptive and persistent (p. 20); it can be diagrammed in various ways, e.g., society = humans + culture (p. 23).
Pursuing our dialectic
[Recall that what I was suggesting was done in Towards A ’72 was to abstract from high quality expert sources their ideas on the components of social science, and to develop an interwoven physics with those themes. Without detailing, I prefer to jump to a list of some of the integrative great expositions that I used as sources. Such big picture sources that we found useful (skipping the physics and engineering physics sources), largely of an interdisciplinary nature, that served as our ‘nourishment’ to create a social physics (e.g., from perhaps 1955-1975), were about 70 sources that can be found listed in the book. In total, I had about 300 large-scale references in my 1968 draft.
Our standard research tactic, as I stated, all through my career is/was to sweep through the field topic we were supposed to do a detailed system study of for some specific applied results, quickly find 10-20 large general sources which illuminated the great expert thinking in a subject and which had some physical relations. This concentration, within a week or so, gave us some overall sense of a field in a month, and permitted us afterward to examine specialized periodical literature sources, and produce – if necessary – a competent professional review of the field. Commonly, in our contract work, we would either work with our expert but troubled client, or go out in the field and make connections with outside experts if confidentiality was not at stake, and our clients encouraged it. Those initial 10-20 sources we discovered are included in our book. For examples of our ‘pro bono’ public integrative giveaway work, see
Iberall, Cardon, Regulation and Control in Biological Systems, Ann. N. Y. Acad. Sci.,1964.
Or for longer time summaries, see
Iberall, Cardon, Regulation and Control, Tokyo, 1969
Iberall, BridgesŠ (covering 1960-1975), 1976
Iberall, On Nature, Life, Mind, and Society, 1976
Iberall, Pulsatile and Steady Arterial Flow (loosely 1945-1975), 1975
Iberall, Guyton (eds.), Regulation and Control in Physiological Systems, 1973
Iberall, Toward a General Science of Viable Systems, 1972
CP2: Commentaries, Physical and Philosophical, 1991-1992
Iberall, Wilkinson, White, FoundationsŠ, 1993
Quigley, Chapter. 3 and a dialectic continued
Returning to Quigley’s ‘formula’: Such a description tells me very little. Let me pose, instead, the methodology of the physical sciences and the way I connected them with the social sciences. The physics of systems tells us we have to discover the atomistic structure of the system we wish to study. The atomisms and their motions we study by kinetics: how forces – physical forces – act on those particulate units (we have only four forces to draw upon). Newton provided us both with the way to deal with the motion of each particle and the motion of the particles around their “center” of motion. He did the simplest of cases, the so-called rigid body collective. After him, others did spring-like collectives, fluid-like collectives, systems governed by their internal electrical forces, gases, liquid, solids, plastic solids, solids with memory storage, and the like. We pioneered in the physics of complex constellations of atomisms, e.g. those found in or as nature, life, humankind, mind, and society. But the methodology of analysis remains the same. We spent 25 years creating such a foundation for biophysics, bioengineering, mostly in the company of the specialist disciplines of biology. When we came to social science we did the same thing. We chose our favorite target persons in anthropology, sociology, ethology, psychology, and history. We read their literature and talked to them, attended their meetings until we were comfortable with their ideas (I am the only physical scientist who has attended ISCSC meetings for the past 25 years).
It was clear to us that we needed first to take on the detailed study of humans. This, we quickly concluded, lay in anthropology. We do not do the dynamic ‘history’ of a system until we first know its atomisms and how they link up to a collective. We quickly learned e.g., from Harris, Rise of…, about the bridging view of synchronic and diachronic descriptions of human societies. That was the bridge, for us, to the spatial and temporal spectrum of processes that one might find in humans. We found nothing to reject in Tyler and (AAAS president) Morgan, starting in mid-19th Century as an emergent counter product to the Enlightenment. We found a book like Linton, Tree of Culture, 1957 and Pigott, Dawn of Civilizations, 1961 to be useful kindergarten reads.
Once we understood that living societies e.g., human but not exclusively, were all collections of interacting memory-possessing organismic units engaged in repetitive performance cycles at generation time scales again and again, our physics was obligatory. Namely, regardless of the kinetics of the individual (but, notice, I said I had spent 25 years on the operation of the individual biological organism, so that I knew a great deal about its lower system’s dynamics and kinetics), I could then examine what might be the dynamics of the collective, ultimately to reach the historical dynamic trajectory of its diachronic modes. I did not have to invent a dissection of levels of description, I simply would begin to see how the simplest systems flushed out their fundamental intrinsic flow variables. That is what we spent the time doing – flushing out the simple system ‘conservational’ flows (Why do we use the term conservations? Because our physics is built on the process of pair by pair interactions in a collective. That comes from the kinetics, and all we have to do is identify those physical variables that are conserved during collisions).
The conservational flows start from matter, energy, and momentum. This follows from Newton’s laws of mechanics, and to that we also have to add the conservation of electric charge in electrically nonneutral exchange processes (that flow is fundamentally involved in matter-energy chemistry at all levels). In internally complex atomisms, ones that show a great deal of internal memory function and long time delay in their internal atomistic processes, we showed that the transport (the flow from within the complex atomisms and – external to themselves – between the atomisms) takes place by a higher complex of internalized action (activity is the common language term; the energy-time product is the physical term) as an integrative form of momentum (the actions emerge by adding up the detailed momentum movements). Chemistry is involved in the making, breaking, and exchanging of force bonds between fragments of those atomisms, and in the biochemistry of living systems, that chemistry is encoded in the genetic molecular components in cells at a lower level. This leads to the reproductive, procreative, demographic process among living systems as a fourth flow conservation. As a higher ordered chemistry, it is “pressed by Malthus’ law, the rate of change of population is proportional to the population (what that law means, and thereby becomes a thermodynamic law, is that everyone does it, namely all those who live are born and die. It simply means, as a law, that the conservation process is homogeneous above a certain scale, at which autonomy of an organismic atomism can emerge to form a breeding collective). And then we have developed the scheme that explains the most general form of all interactions in both simple and complex collectives. So our physics is almost completely obligatory. And we have worked very hard to introduce the concepts among anthropologists, and psychologists, and systems engineers, finally with some success. Note, also, that we have had almost negligible success, however hard we tried, in ISCSC.
Note that the drawings in Quigley on p.23 are meaningless. But we will grasp, p. 24, that Quigley states that in addition to internalized personality, culture lies outside of human beings in their network of relationships, artifacts, and communicational symbols. While we could accept some such sentence, we believe that it would take many pages of physical exposition to reduce it to operational content. Arensberg once said to us (Soodak and I), that he admired our understanding and devotion to our atomisms in physical study. We immediately responded with the nonrhetorical question “Do you mean that social scientists are not aware that their atomisms are persons?’ He replied in the negative, stating that they mixed up ideas and artifacts, and movements, and the like as all part of the atomism-containing cultural solvent. We were and are still shocked by that lack of discrimination. It reduces the descriptive problem to metaphor and arbitrariness of choice that we continue to complain about.
In Chapt. 3, Quigley points out that he is concerned with collectives of individual persons, whose behavior [as atomisms] is unpredictable [If that were true, as asserted, there would be almost no science possible. As per what Arensberg got from us, to know your atomism in at least a deterministic statistical physics is fundamental]. Some success may be achieved by a statistical physics or mechanics mechanics, perhaps based on group aggregates [His next statement, as is common, misstates the physical science problem. We always proceed very ‘law-like’ from the atomism to the collective, a process begun by Newton]. With person aggregates, we can state no law comparable to physical science, he says [Nonsense, we say. He misunderstands what the issue is in determining group statistics in a physical sense]. The rules of social tendencies, p. 26, depend upon either a collective, an organism, or an extra [Kroeber’s superorganic?] view of the social aggregate. He states that this question has involved millenia of debate. He elects, a ‘sufficient’ consensus and settles for some particular special characteristics [e.g., like Marx, or Weber, or x, y, or z did in the innumerable nooks and crannies of the social sciences – all of which we decry. It is the unique problem of physical science that makes such typological search an unnecessary ingredient. Our physics doctrine, in its most arrogant form, is whatever is not physically excluded, will take place]. Thus, for his view, he settles on social groups, societies, and civilizations, p.27. I do not feel compelled to deal with his details pp.27-32. Suffice it to jump to his remarks about civilization [not as crystals]. On p.31, he states that he will have to distinguish between producing societies and civilizations. In a paragraph before he states that there are parasitic societies and producing societies. By their ‘gleaning’ [may we say hunting, fishing, scavenging, and gathering], they survive. A second type, led by pastoral activities, are producing societies. “They seek to increase the amount of wealth in the world.” [I do not know what wealth, or wealth of the world means]. The distinction, he says, is of most fundamental importance. Man was parasitic for a million years earlier [I dispute this in the fact that life forms have drastically transformed the surface physics-chemistry of Earth]. Only with agriculture and domestication, less than ten thousand years ago, did Man become a possible producer mostly parasitic.
In that period, he points to simple producing societies and complex ones that he calls “civilizations”. As a temporary definition he says that a “civilization is a producing society that has writing and city life”. He then proceeds to identify sixteen civilizations.
I found that most of this is very pedestrian. You will find that Jane Jacobs and I have been arguing out these issues in very friendly fashion from a starting period not too long after her Birth and Life book came out in 1961 (or the next one). A latest round of our discourse, e.g. which came first, agriculture or urbanization, is to be found in Foundations ’93.
So I will skip his Chapt. 4 on Historical Analysis [one presumes a major purpose in writing the book] and its pursuit of the sixfold levels of culture, and pass quickly over his Chapt.5 on Historical Change in Civilization. Just as in physical systems, after we have defined the atomistic and the collective form and processes with flows and potentials, we have to write equations of state (e.g. gas, liquid, solid, glass-like, biochemical-like, or social-collective like, and beyond that, equations of condition and of change that permits us to get at diachronic processes as their historical trajectories. At that point, we are to begin ‘historical’ process study – of development, and of evolution.
Quigley Chapt. 5, and more dialectic
Thus we grasp Quigley’s opening sentence in Chapt. 5: “It is clear that every civilization comes into existence, passes through a long experience, and eventually goes out of existence. In Yates (ed.), Soodak and I highlight some such statement as one of the fundamental physical laws of all matter-energy systems in the universe. We do not do it by analogies or metaphors (e.g., p.66-69 – as a biological analogy, or Darwinian evolution, or Spenglerian idea, or Toynbean, etc.). Clearly, that set of ideas I have always opposed, as one or another sort of typology that I always found empowering critical thought in the ISCSC, and that I have tried to combat from the day I got there 25 years ago.
On p.69, Quigley states that the patterns of change [i.e., dynamic processes of change if it were true physics] consists of seven stages resulting from the fact that “each civilization has an instrument of expansion that becomes an institution² (involving incentive to invent, accumulate surplus, and the surplus accumulated has to serve the use of the new inventions). Taken together they represent an instrument of expansion. Let us take apart the metaphoric nature of those statements and all that follows up to Chapt. 6.
All complex systems in nature are instruments of expansion with their institutionalized forms. That is what our ten physical propositions in Yates are about in general. Note that (my professor) Gamow offered the operational definition of the cosmos as such an instrument of expansion (1950).
Such definitions have been sought and written for the hydrodynamic origin of galaxies.
Similarly, from the discovery of radioactive elements in 1903, the empowering of stars as instruments of expansion have emerged by the 1950’s within the scope of Gamow’s and Einstein’s theory of cosmology and general relativity.
Startup of Earth processes and how they evolved from geochemistry into the biochemistry of life had begun to be written from atomistic theory in the 1920’s and more fully in the 1940’s with the chemistry of the double helix. Some of the remaining details are outlined in our little 1993 book,Foundations, which social scientists have difficulty in reading.
Atoms-ions-molecules, down to lepton and quark systems have been considerably developed into one of the most precise and embracing physical theory ever since the 1920’s.
So what is missing? Commonly, many philosophers as well as casual students say that life and society are not on the physical agenda. This is nonsense. Since Oparin in the 30’s, the physics-chemistry of life has been on the agenda. Current molecular biology, if you will, perhaps only up to the worm at the moment, is worked out in great detail as physical achievements and now as engineering physical achievements [at an alarming rate]. You may still – per Popper and Eccles, or per the wisecracking stuff in Yates on biological self organization – sit on the sidelines and kibbitz, but the study is a foregone conclusion. It has gone physical.
So, you can still say that social science sits as a final isolated bastion. This is also nonsense. This is part of what McCulloch taught me is the overweening hubris of the human. As he put it to me, there are those great shocks (by the way these are real physical chemical shocks) that occur when you learn that humans are not the central drama of natural creation, that the Earth is not the center of the universe, and that your parents were involved in sexual activities to produce you.
Persons like me (see Stewart’s manifesto in a physics journal, Am. J. Phys., May 1951; or Foundations .., Chapt. 6 – I will state that I really started on the development of a formal social physics when Ben Nelson answered my query, whether ISCSC might accept a piece on such a subject, with the statement that it already had all been done; but after 2 years had passed and he could not furnish me with any significant evidence, I knew I had to do it myself. Finding Stewart and the few tentative essays of the Adams’ brothers was easy and trivial. From that point I really had to go to work. Chapt. 6 in Foundations … was not a trivial piece of historical research for me) and my group of colleagues have already put in 25 years of ground breaking. You may not want to grasp the issues, but they are spelled out in Foundations … .
Finally, Quigley, Chapter 6, and terminal dialectic
So we finally turn to Chapt. 6. Clearly, both as per Quigley and us, one has to put forth a startup, a beginning. We promised this in Intro ’68’ in which a startup, a life phase, and a deterioration phase was promised for systems, and I said that the book {e.g. Toward a …, ’72’) dealt first with the long life phase of systems. It took a long time 25 years, woven in with ISCSC history (e.g., Melko asking for comments on the deterioration phase of civilizations in 1980), to get to its present state of development. I have been involved in many Star War battles in this society and many other groups. This included the opposition of Nelson, and Quigley, and Prigogine, and a variety of prominent physicists, urban planners, and the like. I really thank them all for the proper goading, but we have done our job.
For example, when we started up on civilization, the most telling picture to us was Mellaart. Earliest Civilizations of the Near East, 1965 (and later, Sherratt’s Cambridge Encyclopedia of Archaeology, 1980), which – with the Life-Time picture book on The First Cities – stamped the picture of those earliest trading (and warring) civilizational collectives in my mind (a physical theory for such collectives we verified in a Collective Phenomena article in 1978 by Iberall and Soodak, and in an lberall-Wilkinson article in GeoJournal 1985 – see also Yates and Foundation….). Thus we knew that the startup for civilizations lay in the Mesolithic. That was likely clear from Childe’s Neolithic decomposition on. So we started our theory, as a dynamic stability transition from then.
That story has an earlier phase to it. There was a earlier presentation by Sahlins, prior to his 1972 Stone Age Economics, in a NY Academy of Science meeting in which he offered a Marxian argument for the transition from hunter-gatherer to agriculturist. His presentation, as a stability theory, did not satisfy me. So that transition problem went on my agenda. It appeared as soon as we began to work on a theory for civilization. All of those emergent forms I named before are physical transition problems. That was the essence of our Collective Phenomena article.
So we started our transition from a 10,000-12,000 year (ybp) transition toward settlement. I really wanted and tried to get Hord, Hewes, and finally my colleague Wilkinson to do the experimental test paper for such a transition into a more stable settled, urbanized form. They all found it convenient to suggest I do it. So I had no alternative. I did. That was our 500 year process paper. Melko needles me and asked how come I didn’t do it with Wilkinson. Because he always encouraged me to keep going by myself, (a), I got cooperation from one of our anthropologist colleages, D. White (who had been involved with Murdock in the large scale ethnographic files studies and is a large system network person) to help me add additional details. And of course, the inimitable Hord, whom I asked to look at our piece, immediately added the thesis of another A. Moore and dropped it in my lap. That ‘merely’ extended the Mesolithic startup from 12,000 ybp (years before present) to 18,000-20,000 ybp. Is/was this a big deal? Yes and no. I didn’t do or know the facts. I am, as often, indebted to Hord. But that 6,000 year or so earlier contribution clarifies the physics problem for me. When or why did a transition to civilizations take place? Our physical theory did not give that sort of absolute space-time answer. What it did was indicate what the changing space and time scale could be from a before process, hunter-gatherer to an after process, urbanized settled process, So, the problem of a transition to settlement, e.g., by settlement with plants via horticulture and agriculture, or nomadic pastoralism via transhumance, say, with animals, was on my agenda. The pictures and time scales that prove (test) out theory are found in The First Cities and in Mellaart. So one has to compare Quigley’s notion of startup in Chapt. 6, and ours e.g., in Foundations… , back in Bridges… to the Thermodynamics of History chapter and another companion article in Bridges… .
One: forget crystals and diamonds. Why should the problem be involved in 5 dimensions, as Quigley says. He says 4 space-time dimensions [in agreement with physics as independent variables, but these are not the dependent system variables that have to be derived] and a 5th dimension of abstraction. There are also the culture variables. He thus identifies seven stages of dynamic evolution in civilization among those 5 dimensions. The three space dimensions comprise the geographic environment. [They really do not. Whether humans were there or not the environment is a higher ordered process that has to be defined by equations of condition to give it is specific character. That is what we have to do to specify every one of the systems we mentioned before examining any ‘historical’ dynamic problem of change that we wish to study. If we don’t do that, as clearly emerges in Quigley’s presentation, you begin to assume and put in, no longer as an analytic modeling study, what you want to prove]. Pages 94-97 are meant to introduce that geography.
Quigley infers a sandwich pattern of language, physical type person, and type of social customs, pp.98-100 [e.g., as processes determined by the geography, or actually the ecology. This, good, bad or indifferent, is trying to build up an ecological determinism which really has nothing to do with the 4 space and time variables although they may be the resultant of such hidden variables on this Earth or some other laboratory. No connection has been made]. Why those patterns within the matrix of early civilizations? On pp.101through 102 is his patterned ‘explanation’. To get to an explanation for that, he has to find a deeper explanation for an earlier prehistory of the people, p. 102. He needs a ‘dynamic’ chronology (or base) and he elects climate [an ecology that includes now the meteorological system as well as the hydrological system as well as most other Earth science systems, all as variables of space and time. This is a very shoddy way to introduce stormy weather systems which Chamey and von Neumann introduced and which requires the use of the world’s largest supercomputers to handle. I have to refer you back to Foundations..., Chapt. 11 which while it may frighten you, at least shows you how Earth modeling has to be dealt with]. [To continue with our critique-criticism, Quigley is thus searching for an ecological model, e.g., of climate very minimally, rather than a value-in-exchange model like Marx or Sahlins was trying to offer to get things started, or an energy model of the Odums’, or a demographic model, or an engineering model of technological process and change, or a material flow model of the chemist]. His mode of choice is found on pp.102-108. He uses that section to discuss Neanderthalers versus ‘us’. On p. 107, he opts for a belief that Neanderthal, overstressed by glacial conditions, did not have sufficient mental flexibility to continue. [Obviously from Neanderthal’s success, all it did was to limit their range]. He continues the climatological modeling. pp. 110. tying these issues down to perhaps 2,000-3,000 B.C. as wave-like motions of peoples. From that point, p. 116, he then traces further movements, a climatically oriented story up to p. 123. At near the end p.123, he states that the events described in the chapter, performed on the three-zoned Earth’s Northwest Quadrant within (and driven by) a chronology based on climate changes, form the matrix in which the earliest civilizations evolved. After that, in successive chapters, he details various civilizations starting with the Mesopotamian.
I find that chapter to be the typology I abhor. It is simplistic, it is pedestrian, it is a just-so story, it is no scientific model. It is a picture sketch, nothing like the story of Darlington, or McNeill, or Braudel, or Barraclough. I would respond similarly, perhaps more analytically to a much more complete economic, or energy, or matter or technology driven model. Actually, I would consider all of these also simplistic, because all of the relevant variables, as in all other irreversible thermodynamic flow fields each with their clearly identified driving potentials, have to be identified. We put the outline of such a model in under 2,000 words in PNAS in 1985, and in lberall, Soodak, Arensberg at greater length. These other one variable models do not want to acknowledge that they are all matter-energy systems, with internally complex actions covering a long time scale, that have memory functions, and are language-using by virtue of a real ‘abstract’ internal potential function, and involve a physics-chemistry of a very restricted range with regard to the upper and lower hierarchical arrangement of systems that drive this space-time sandwiched system. Outside of a particular restricted level of chemistry, there isn’t anymore. The physical-chemical environment of potentials is quite circumscribed. Raise the temperature above, say, much above 200 C or so, all gone. Lower the temperature below -50 or -100 C, again all gone. Reduce the oxygen content much above a 12,000 foot equivalent, gone. Multiply the oxygen content of the surround tenfold, gone. Turn off the solar flux, gone. Turn off the internal heat from the Earth, gone. (See Foundations… for that story). The restrictions on condition are very severe.
What emerges, by continued development, evolutionarily is a certain class of chemical processes in organisms that develop hierarchically; each with limited species life spans. Within those domains, in a physical-time environment perhaps 2-1/2 dimensions high and with a broad Earth time scale, with basically a distribution of physical -chemical potentials, atomistic organisms can and do emerge. You can read that story in Foundations … and correlate it with Elliott. Much or most of that story is geochemically determined. The organisms and species all operate as social collectives at their atomistic levels. It isn’t until you have a physical-chemical story of all those processes in time and place (see our NASA study on Long Space Voyages, Contract NASW-3240 from 1979), that you can begin to tell any of the local and parochial history of more detailed events. Quigley’s book does not lay out such a methodological foundation; it helps leave the social scientist with his/her narrow horizon which is their typological substitute for science, and their sometimes beguiling grandmother/grandfather tales.
Coda: Another Pair to Consider
Since it would seem valuable to get some use out of historians, another pair of historians are here very briefly referenced for a contribution from a different direction, other than civilization theory, but a topic very relevant to a theory of civilizations, the status of the rich and poor.There is a review by the well-known English Marxist-historian, Eric Hobsbawm, in the LA Times Book Review Section of Sunday, March 15, 1998 of a new book by David Landes, entitled The Wealth and Poverty of Nations subtitled Why some are So Rich and Some are So Poor. Many remember and learned a great deal from Landes’ famous book on the history of technology, entitled The Unbound Prometheus.
In a nutshell, “There is no thinking adult … who has not wondered … ‘Why some are so rich and some so poor.’ … Landes, a veteran economic historian of great distinction, tries his hand at an answer. … a historian is needed for the job.
” … Landes has written something less than the history of the world’s economic development, which he is one of the few living historians qualified to write. All the same, there are few historians who would not be proud to be the author of this book.” We concur. This book may not have succeeded in doing the whole job, but it will certainly stir you up to what an economic history has to be willing to tackle. It certainly is a topic that we believe homeokinetics has to tackle, and we are working at it – already for three years – very assiduously.