Human Complex Systems

The Comment of Dwight Read also expresses much of my own view on this paper. I agree in particular with the views of Read, that "the formal properties of the analysis should have ethnographic validity". But there is something more from my point of view: Read says a good deal here about the problem with rewrite rules and their equivalent in the present paper. But what he does not make explicit is what I've written and said many times [cf.]. Namely, that "the structure" of the genealogical space cannot be given by the organization of kin-type strings! I shall not rehash the demonstration of this here. Genealogical space has a structure (not unrelated to the algebraic structure of kin terminologies in Read’s work [Lehman and Witz 1974, Lehman 2000] having to do with up/down, etc., namely ascent/descent, lineality/non-lineality (not identical with the usual sense of "collaterality "), generation and the like; and therewith, the way individual are placed into this structure necessarily imports into it the basic idea of sex and (noting also Read’s comments on Dravidian) relative age! The latter is left out by our author precisely because it cannot be made to follow from kin-type string organization