Research Area

Complex Systems, Evolution, and Self-Organization

I went through a big complexity phase when I came back from my dissertation research. I read Prigogine and Stengers book, Order out of Chaos. I took Buzz Holling’s class on Resilience and Adaptive Cycles. I was introduced to other complex systems researchers in the edited volume by Weber, Depew, and Smith (Schneider, Wicken, Wiley & Brooks, Depew & Weber, and others). They all show up in my 1998 paper, “Complex Adaptive Systems, Evolutionism, and Ecology within Anthropology”, which is also in my dissertation. I was looking for something. I was looking for a way to generalize all the fascinating ideas that I was getting from Odum at that time. I assumed there must be others out there doing similar things. And I was kind of trying to avoid the label of ‘Odumite’, that I had heard. I was especially excited by all the interest in Prigogine’s approach, which many people were comparing to Odum’s. And Holling’s adaptive cycle that Odum had compared to pulsing. A few years later, I was excited again by research into ‘positive interactions’ and ‘ecosystems engineers’, which sounded much like the cooperative self-organized ecosystem that Odum envisioned. All of that I bundled into my graduate class on Culture and Evolution.

Papers

  • 1998 "Complex Adaptive Systems, Evolutionism, and Ecology within Anthropology: Interdisciplinary Research for Understanding Cultural and Ecological Dynamics", Georgia Journal of Ecological Anthropology (2):6-29. [online] URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.5038/2162-4593.2.1.1

    • This paper was written for Buzz Holling’s resilience and adaptive cycles class. It became an introductory chapter in my dissertation. It is a very good paper, IMO, and probably belonged in a better journal than a student-run journal at Georgia. My inexperience in publishing showing, I suppose. The paper is included in my dissertation, Chapter 15.

  • 1998 “Two Simulations of Culture Change”, Paper presented at the 97th Annual Meeting of the American Anthropological Association, Philadelphia, Dec. 2-6, 1998.

    • This is one of only two papers of mine that features simulation. I worked very hard on teaching myself simulation when I was writing my dissertation. I even developed my own visual basic simulation environment. This paper includes two simulations of culture change, one that modelled the cultural evolution transition from foragers to modern states, with 5 scales of subsistence types: Foragers, Agricultural Societies, Agricultural Societies that use Metals, Coal Societies, and Oil and Gas Societies. It produced some beautiful curves in three scenarios, each with different initial conditions. The second was a world systems simulation. With three world systems it begins like a competitive exclusion result that over time becomes a cooperating model. This paper is included in my dissertation as part of Chapter 16.

  • 2000 Ecosystems, Sociocultural Systems, and Ecological Economics for Understanding Development: The Case of Ecotourism on the Island of Bonaire, Netherlands Antilles. Ph.D. Dissertation, University of Florida. [online] URL: https://ufdc.ufl.edu/uf00100747/00001.

    • I discussed my dissertation in the Ecotourism research topic. What I will add here is that I included the simulations from my 1998 paper as part of my discussion of cultural evolution in Chapter 16, beginning on p397, and my other 1998 paper in Chapter 15.

  • 2002 “Cultural Evolution Is Not an Evolutionary Dead End: Complex Systems and Multi-Scaled Self-Organization.” Paper presented at the 101st Annual Meetings of the American Anthropological Association, New Orleans, Nov. 19-23, 2002.

    • I cannot find this paper. But from the title, I can see that I was beginning my work that would eventually become the 2008 paper below.

  • 2003 “Understanding Complex Human Ecosystems: The Case of Ecotourism on Bonaire.” Conservation Ecology 7(3):10. [online] URL: http://www.consecol.org/vol7/iss3/art10.

  • 2003 “A New Ecosystems Ecology for Anthropology.” (with John R. Stepp) Conservation Ecology 7(3):12. [online] URL: http://www.consecol.org/vol7/iss3/art12

  • 2007 “A Systems Modeling Software Environment for Teaching and Research.” Poster presented at the 5th Biennial emergy Research Conference, January, 2007

    • With this poster, I was sharing my custom software for emergy simulation. I had originally designed a visual basic environment while working on my dissertation. I was able to get some funding to pay student programmers to re-do it in C#, adding a beautiful graphic diagramming app. On the poster I criticize the Stella and Extend approaches. “The greatest shortcoming, however, is the loss of pedagogical value in the systems modeling exercise. By using predefined objects, the student is not required to write the relatively simple difference equations that are the heart of the systems modeling exercise.” If interested, I still have the software to share for free.

  • 2007 “Pulsing and Cultural Evolution in China” Proceedings from the 4th Biennial Emergy Research Conference, January 12-21, 2006, Center for Environmental Policy, Gainesville, FL, Chapter 2.

    • This paper is my second paper that features simulation (the first is above 1998). The paper tries to re-tell the emergence of the great states (dynasties) of China, but with a focus on the limits of slow-renewable natural resources (topsoil and forests). See more of Asian and Pacific prehistory in Taiwan Prehistory.

  • 2008 “Getting Here from There: Tribute to Robert Carneiro”, Paper presented at the 4th Annual Meeting of Society for Anthropological Sciences (SASci), New Orleans, LA, Feb 20-23, 2008.

    • I joined this SASci meeting in order to present the next paper, “The New Synthesis Hardens”. I convinced myself that maybe my ideas about self-organization from Odum, non-equilibrium thermodynamics from Prigogine, positive interactions from a new breed of ecologists, second stream science from Buzz Holling, and more could belong among the Society for Anthropological Sciences. I learned when I arrived, however, that the society was dominated by cognitive anthropologists who were also looking for a home.

      I believe it was maybe a SASci officer Eric Jones, a great guy that I knew from the Georgia crowd, that told me there would be a session honoring Bob Carneiro. I was very interested and asked if I could possibly get squeezed into the session. I had read Carneiro’s new book, Evolutionism in Cultural Anthropology (2003), and loved it. I focused my paper on showing my admiration for it, while simultaneously taking gentle stabs at the ‘new cultural evolution’ crowd of DI, HBE, and EP. The title asks, can we get here from there, by which I meant, could evolutionary anthropology get from the earliest human societies of foragers (there) to the incredible complexity of today (here)? My answer was, yes, if we chose the evolutionism of Carneiro, Odum, Prigogine, etc, but it was, no, if we followed only the new cultural evolution, which is too micro scaled and not explanatory in any macro functional terms.

      When I re-read this paper, I think it is quite good. I was hoping that someone on the panel would propose an edited volume in honor of Carneiro. Too bad, that didn’t happen. I have the list of panelists, Robert Carneiro, Ted Cloak, Frank Elwell, William Irons, Paul Roscoe, and Matt Rossano. I wish they had, and I wish this paper had gone in it. I don’t believe I looked elsewhere for a place to publish it, but should have.

  • 2008 “The New Synthesis Hardens: Is there Another Path to a Science of the Social?”, Paper presented at the 4th Annual Meeting of the Society for Anthropological Sciences (SASci), New Orleans, LA, Feb 20-23, 2008. Presentation: SASci Presentation.

    • This paper was a BIG deal for me. I was attempting to pull together all of the threads mentioned above from complexity science and the expanded evolutionary synthesis into a form that could be useful for anthropologists. I thought it should be a counterpoint to the new cultural evolution that I had been teaching myself for the prior 5 years. I was aiming to publish it in the American Anthropologist, arguably anthropology’s premier journal.

    • I submitted the paper that November and got the response in mid January, 2009. It was amazingly done, extremely professional. It was also pretty rough. The editor was in favor of the paper, but wanted me to do a lot of work. Some of the reviews were pretty harsh. Being new at this, it probably knocked me backwards more than it should have. The recommended revision time of 2 months seemed impossible. With the new semester starting after Chinese New Year, I was swamped.

    • I have now re-read the paper and the review. That was really foolish to let it drop. The editor wanted the paper. The reviewers and editor wanted a case study of some kind. I had something ready to go that had been part of my original draft but had been removed for length. It might have satisfied them. The editor offered me extra space for my response, but I would still need to cut it all down by 1500 words. That would probably have been possible. Unfortunately, one of the reviewers especially bothered me. He recommended that I look at metabolic theory from Jim Brown at New Mexico and the Santa Fe Institute(!), and a hunter-gatherer paper by colleagues of his. That paper by Brown, et al (2004) was new to me and especially intimidating. It was the MacArthur Award Lecture paper in the journal Ecology, complete with a photo of Brown. I thought I must be missing something big.

    • The other thing about this process was that I had done most of the work sometime before 2007. Now 2009, I was very much into doing something different, which was attempting to understand and apply Odum’s ‘information cycle’. I had written my first attempt at an ‘information cycles’ paper for the July, 2009 Brisbane ISSS conference, and I was writing an emergy version for the 2010 emergy conference (both in Culture in Cycles). I was shifting gears. All that being said, and looking at the paper today, I should have definitely resubmitted it. It was radically different from what everyone else was doing. It would have made a big splash.

    • What about now? I think I should consider revising/rewriting it. The work would be reading and updated the references, and absorbing anything new of importance. I have now read several papers from Brown’s group. They are sophisticated, but they are basically attempting to adapt energy theory to micro-scaled neo-Darwinian evolution. Great but it still has the same problems of the other neo-Darwinists, smaller scale and it cannot address human inputs or information. My paper really deserves to be published somewhere, IMO, if nobody else has published something similar, I need to look. Another minor criticism was an absence of reference to Leslie White and Roy Rappaport. Now that I am working on the new paper below, “Energy as Explanation”, I should be able to incorporate some of that. The paper that is linked here includes the requested ‘case study’ on ‘soap’ that was written at the time. Also, I cleaned up some of the text in the opening paragraph that made me cringe. Otherwise it is the original AA submission paper. If anyone bothers to read that paper and has any suggestions, please write.

    • Last comment, the SASci session in 2008 called the Evolution of Culture was the first session on the first day, organized by William Irons. It was small, only Irons, me, Chris Boehm, and Matt Rossano. What I remember was that after the session that day I expected some of the other panelists to approach me, the new guy, as a buddy or colleague at least. A fellow evolutionist. That didn’t happen. That was a bit disappointing. Nowadays I would have pursued them, but at that time I was too timid in conference settings.

  • 2025 “Howard T. Odum’s Contributions to Evolutionary Theory”, Ecological Modelling 509:111263. [online] URL: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ecolmodel.2025.111263

    • This is a new BIG paper for me. Obviously it has taken me a while to get back to the topic of evolution. In recent years I have been digging deeply into all the works of Odum in order to learn something about the roots of his ideas. All of the papers listed as Recent Publications, plus my 2014 paper on information cycles, are somehow responding to his work. For this paper I asked the simple question, how did Odum understand evolution. He had never written a paper or book that focused directly on that topic. His ideas were spread all around his writings. Since I was reading everything he had written, I was seeing it, and getting the picture. This paper attempted to lay out the themes of his view of evolution, or as I said, his ‘evolutionary theory’.

    • In 2024, Mark Brown announced that he wanted a session for the 2025 Emergy Conference in honor of Odum’s 100th Birthday. The papers should be titled “HT Odum’s Contributions to (something).” That was perfect timing for me, I was already working on the paper, and renamed it to fit the initiative. That was a great session, I’ll attach my presentation, it is very close to the paper and could help anyone with reading. Afterwards, we were all directed to submit our papers to a special issue of Ecological Modelling. That special issue is now out, titled “The legacy of H.T. Odum…his contributions to the sciences.” You will see it at the link to my paper.

    • And here is the correct reference list. References. I spotted the problem during proofing, but unfortunately the website software would not allow me to make the reference corrections. I was instructed to email them, but the administrators for some reason did not apply them. Disappointing but not a catastrophe.

    • I said about my 2023 paper in Culture in Cycles that when I was writing that paper, I started reading broadly, but focused to any papers/books that dealt with information. That was very educational for me, and it began my deep reading of basically everything written by Odum that I am continuing today, and that resulted in this paper, and in my current paper, “Energy as Explanation: HT Odum cf. Rappaport, Adams, and Smil”, below.

  • TBD “Energy as Explanation: HT Odum cf. Rappaport, Adams, and Smil”

    • This seems like a good way for me to reach anthropologists with the ideas of Odum. I am putting his work in terms of the energy approaches applied by three famous anthropologists plus Smil, the current superstar of energy writing. This also gives me a chance to distinguish his ideas from the ‘food chain’ anthropologists like Rappaport, and the ‘dissipative structures’ approach of Adams. In work.