UC Davis

Complexity science promises to aid our understanding of nonlinear social and ecological processes, and its methods—such as simulation—can invigorate longstanding philosophical debates about modeling in geography.

Computer simulation/modeling may prove an indispensable supplement to interpretive methods such as ethnography and historical studies for understanding social processes as complex systems. Chapter One uses agent-based modeling (ABM) as a supplement to ethnography of an indigenous group that lost their common property system to capitalist enclosure. It also surveys the philosophical context of critical/quantitative dualism, shows how “critical GIS” literature has intervened, and proposes “critical ABM” as an extension to help bridge that dualism.

Chapter Two explores how the recognition of complexity in the discipline of biology has overthrown genetic determinism in favor of a comprehension of causality that propagates over many scales from the molecular to the environmental, and this, in turn, has provoked new possibilities for social theory. A myriad of developments in biology are encompassed in this recognition, from genomics and epigenomics to niche-construction, as well as Eldredge’s evolutionary hierarchy theory and lively debates about the biological context of human sociality. Gene-culture coevolution is spawning a new transdisciplinary “behavioral sciences” paradigm; punctuated equilibria has overturned gradualism in evolutionary biology, which is spurring a “dissipative social systems evolution” paradigm which integrates chaos theory and ideas from Marx. I argue these latter paradigms can be seen as antipodes of complexity science which are ultimately complementary.