Is natural history bound by deterministic laws of physics and biology, or could things have worked out differently? Nature has a form of choice, "what I call 'bifurcation,'" wrote the late Ilya Prigogine, father of "chaos theory," in the Winter 2004 issue of New Perspectives Quarterly:
In complex natural systems, just as in society, the future is not given. Within bounds, it can go this way or that. Events in nature correspond to novelties that we find at all levels from cosmology to microbiology. We may thus speak of the "creativity" of nature" . . .
Though the past may now seem to have been determined, it is actually one realization among many possibilities that could have occurred. Similarly, the future is not determined because there will be events, the outcome of which we cannot predict . . .
In large societies, we see collective motions. Accordingly, the role of individual activity is drastically reduced. Human societies could face the same evolution when tied together by networks.
Years ago I studied traffic flows. I found that when the flow of traffic was light, each driver behaved more or less as he wanted. I called that an "individual regime." But when the flow becomes more and more dense, the characteristics of a "collective regime" take over in which everybody is pushing the other and is pushed by the other . . .
The future is not given. Especially in this time of globalization and the network revolution, behavior at the individual level will be the key factor in shaping the evolution of the entire human species. Just as one particle can alter macroscopic organization in nature, so the role of individuals is more important now than ever in society.
The power of an individual to start a meme in the blogosphere comes to mind. Have you heard the one about John Kerry and a "statuestque blonde" twentysomething at the Beacon Hill townhouse while Teresa Heinz was out of town? Of course you have. It started February 6 with a blogger who works for Wesley Clark, and yesterday it hit the bigtime on Drudge. Andrew Sullivan reports it's on the front page of the London Times this morning.
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