Complexity science, ecology and evolution
Area. NK fitness landscapes and organisational search; firm mortality and scaling; resilience, panarchy and early-warning signals; self-organised criticality and its critics; major evolutionary transitions, cultural evolution and niche construction.
Introduction. Complexity science is the continuation of Beer’s question — what is the invariant organisation of systems that persist — with simulation, proofs and data. Rivkin, Siggelkow and Levinthal showed on NK landscapes that hierarchies get stuck at points that are not even local optima and that sequences of structures beat any fixed structure. Daepp, West and colleagues found a constant hazard rate for firms — half-life ten years regardless of age — which no VSM study has used as an outcome. Holling separated engineering from ecological resilience; panarchy gives persistence a release phase the VSM lacks; Scheffer’s early-warning signals are an alarm that arises from dynamics rather than design. Maynard Smith and Szathmáry showed that nesting removes independent viability — the opposite of Beer’s recursion axiom. Derex and Boyd showed that partial connectivity beats full connectivity for innovation.
Three names. Nicolaj Siggelkow (with Daniel Levinthal), Geoffrey West, C. S. Holling.
Importance for cybernetics / VSM. These results contradict the VSM’s fixed architecture, its monotonic “more coordination is better” reading of System Two, and its recursion axiom, using outcome variables the tradition has never measured.
Importance for the article. §2.1 (five senses of viability, the major-transitions objection), §3.3 and §10.5 (NK results, firm-survival cohort study, Perrow’s contradiction answered by alternation), §11.4 (architectural-universals framing endorsed but not adopted).
Start here.
- time-varying structure.
- the outcome variable.
- the two resiliences.
- chapter 1, the independent-replication criterion.
- the non-monotonic connectivity result.