ilya_prigogine_isabelle_stengers_alvin_tofflerbookfi-org

ORDER OUT OF CHAOS
206
the regimes of stability? Since size or the system's density
may play the role of a bifurcation parameter, how may purely
quantitative growth lead to qualitatively new choices? Questions
such as these call for an ambitious program indeed. As
with the rand K strategies, they lead us to connect the choice
of a "good" model for social behavior and history. How does
the evolution of a population lead it to become more "mechanical"?
This question seems parallel to questions we have already
met in biology. How, for example, does the selection of
the genetic information governing the rates and regulations of
metabolic reactions favor certain paths to such an extent that
development seems to be purposive or appear as the translation
of a "message"?
We believe that models inspired by the concept of "order
through fluctuations" will help us with these questions and
even permit us in some circumstances to give a more precise
formulation to the complex interplay between individual and
collective aspects of behavior. From the physicist's point of
view, this involves a distinction between states of the system
in which all individual initiative is doomed to insignificance on
the one hand, and on the other, bifurcation regions in which an
individual, an idea, or a new behavior can upset the global
state. Even in those regions, amplification obviously does not
occur with just any individual, idea, or behavior, but only with
those that are "dangerous"-that is, those that can exploit to
their advantage the nonlinear relations guaranteeing the stability
of the preceding regime. Thus we are led to conclude
that the same nonlinearities may produce an order out of the
chaos of elementary processes and still, under different circumstances,
be responsible for the destruction of this same
order, eventually producing a new coherence beyond another
bifurcation.
"Order through fluctuations" models introduce an unstable
world where small causes can have large effects, but this world
is not arbitrary. On the contrary, the reasons for the amplification
of a small event are a legitimate matter for rational inquiry.
Fluctuations do not cause the transformation of a systefll 's activity.
Obviously, to use an image inspired by Maxwell, the
match is responsible for the forest fire, but reference to a
match does not suffice to understand the fire. Moreover, the
fact that a fluctuation evades control does not mean that we