Steve Kurtz wrote:
> I argue...that hierarchies...have always existed and will most likely
> continue to do so despite any structural changes invented & applied.
To which Victor Milne replied:
> I don't see animal behaviour as being such a simple matter of
> dominance and hierarchy as people are supposing.
and Steve wrote again:
> Who ever said anything about "simple" or "model"?
Forget "simple". I think the issue is whether or not hierarchy is
some kind of underlying principle that structures things as they are,
more or less in the way that, say, electromagnetism is such a
principle.
I don't think it is. Hierarchy is a way in which we structure
artifacts -- things, such as computer programs or navies, that we
create in order to simplify the management of them. It's also a way
in which we structure or ideas about things, our intuitive or formal
models, because it makes things easier to keep track of.
There's an interesting 1945 paper by Warren McCulloch entitled "A
Heterarchy of Values Determined by the Topology of Nervous Nets." It
notes that there are experimental observations along this line:
given A, B and C, if these are presented pairwise -- A&B, B&C, C&A --
a subject will often choose A over B, B over C and C over A.
McCulloch, a polymath whose main interest was in trying to figure out
how it is that a few pounds of neurons can engender mind, described
how such heterarchical preference was immanent or implicit in neural
structure.
As our social world begins to approach the complexity of, say, the
brain of a chicken or a shrew, it gets harder and harder to make
a hierarchical model fit except by brute force. We're going to have
to begin to understand and use more reticular -- net-like -- notions
to cope constructively. Of course, a problem with this for many
people is that, when all the elments are connected in a network
instead of a hierarchy, it becomes difficult or impossible to say
which is chief among them, who's in charge here, who gets preferential
treatment or exactly who can be blamed for a failure.
I think there's a small but growing awareness of this. Some people
are trying to ensure that the emerging structures embody the essential
of human dignity, environmentals integrity and so on. Others are
frantically trying to understand the concepts well enough to, so to
speak, outsmart the system and ensure that they or their employers can
remain "in charge here."
Hierarchy is a fine analytical tool, like geometry. But it isn't a
structuring principle of the biological world and is one for the
social world only to the extent that we have chosen and continue to
choose to make it so. I'm no more an ethologist than Victor and I
can't argue in detail just how we should treat things like dominance
relations in wolf packs but I can argue that the wolf pack is neither
the most basic nor the best model for building human affairs.
- Mike
--
"What is a number, that a man may know it, and a man, that he may know
a number?" -- Warren S. McCulloch
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Michael Spencer Nova Scotia, Canada
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
URL: http://www.mit.edu:8001/people/mspencer/home.html
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